Lauren FitzHugh

Secrets I learned from working with payment processors... Turns out we’ve been lied to. #1 Most people think they’re getting paid fairly, but it turns out most merchants have hidden fees, tiered fees, OR none-transparent structures Secret insight: request a breakdown of every fee and compare it to their contract #2 Most sales teams are incentivized to upsell not SERVE the customer… GOOD modern-day sales people find solutions to real problems. Secret insight: If you’re getting pitched RUN, make sure they’re understanding your business #3 Automation isn’t enough Without human oversight, there will be fraud, errors in invoices, and payments. Secret insight: Make sure automation is combined with a customer-first mindset This is a universal business lesson.. Make sure to dig deeper, hold your partners accountable, and ask better questions If you’d like recommendations on trusted processors shoot me a DM!

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So true! Figuring out clear definition of marketing to your team is crucial part of successful strategy

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I’ve seen marketing agencies onboard 5+ new clients a month, hit $80K+ in revenue, and still feel like they’re drowning. Why? 1️⃣ Capacity is maxed out, and the team is overworked. 2️⃣ Client scope creep is eating away at time and profitability. 3️⃣ Deliverables are rushed, and quality starts to slip. 4️⃣ High-caliber clients aren’t staying long-term, and the churn cycle never stops. Sound familiar? Going into 2025, you don’t just need a revenue goal—you need an operational strategy that protects your team, your time, and your deliverables while scaling sustainably. This is where we come in at SCOPE 🎉 Here’s how we help marketing agencies regain control: ✅ Proactive capacity planning to avoid burnout. ✅ Systems to set boundaries with scope creep while still delivering excellence. ✅ Clarity on attracting and retaining high-caliber clients. ✅ Strategies to streamline operations and protect your profit margins. ✅ Real data to help you make informed decisions for growth. If you’re ready to build a business that thrives along side operationally—not just financially—let’s talk.

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Too often, I see product and tech teams operating in silos, leaving untapped opportunities on the table. Can you relate? It’s a common challenge I’ve helped countless clients overcome, and now I’m excited to announce ARCH Collective, Inc.’s newest offering: Product-Technology Alignment Coaching, in partnership with Ready Steady. This isn’t JUST about streamlining workflows. It’s about unlocking your team’s full potential. Here’s how we’re helping tech leaders level up: 🔮 Embrace Uncertainty: Navigate ambiguity confidently and turn real-time insights into action. 🛠 Everything is a Draft: Foster a culture of adaptability by seeing goals and projects as dynamic and ever-evolving. 🤝 Collaborative Leadership: Lead with curiosity and inclusivity, empowering teams to solve problems. The payoff? More clarity, stronger collaboration, and faster product success. If you’re ready to align your teams and take your product strategy to the next level, let’s talk. Like this post and visit our website to learn how ARCH's coaching program can drive innovation in your business. https://buff.ly/49nMZc3 #LeadershipCoaching #InnovationStrategy #TechAlignment

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🔥 HOT 🔥 new playbook for ya: Customer Love Escalation The legend of all Customer Marketer legends, Christina Garnett, EMBA, dropped some heat in this week's episode - "Fanning the Flames." If we have escalation process for when things go wrong, why don't we have escalation processes for when things go RIGHT? Your fans, evangelists, & your customers are the NOS to your connected brand engine. They'll take your efforts from 0 to 60 in less than 60 seconds. So we should absolutely be finding ways to celebrate, hype, uplift, and party with our customers. If you're looking for more ways to boost your connection to your customers, you're gonna want to catch week's episode of Connected Brand. Christina drops so much knowledge, you're gonna need a rent fork lift to carry away all of these insights. Wanna catch the full episode? 🎧 Listen: https://hubs.li/Q02tMGTj0 📹 Watch: https://hubs.li/Q02tMDd70

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Part 3: How To Launch, Manage, & Grow An Affiliate Program Step-By-Step https://ow.ly/jKuJ50T3Zuy

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There's been a lot of knocks of late on intent data, generally, and - as one of the biggest players in the space - 6sense, specifically. Here, Scott Martinis does a deep dive on what he's learned. The whole thing is good, but here are two major a-ha's for me as it relates to sales teams I've worked with: 1.) You need really strong data as it relates to opportunity qualification. 2.) Ideally, you've got data sets of 200+ opportunities won in the past two years. Truth is, many of these new solutions rely on an algorithm, and the algo is only as good as the training data. 200+ opportunities won in the past 2 years isn't a small number for many businesses. Not at all uncommon for firms to close 1/3 of all opps, which means you'd need to generate 600 opps in 2 years, or approximately 1 per day. That's opps - not leads. Whenever we evaluate solutions, there's a natural tendency to ask questions about scaling up: How will it work if we add more seats, more APIs, more industries? This is a great reminder that in some cases you need to understand how well the solution scales down. Because sometimes the answer is, "Not well." #digitalmarketing #marketing #intentmarketing

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One of the most controversial marketing experiments we ran at Ditto Insurance this year - Both the paid & organic teams had one agenda. "Fulfill 100% of demand requirements from just your department" Now, this might seem odd. Why would you assign both teams such an unachievable target? Paid should never take up 100% of the traffic. And organic can never grow so fast, to match high demand needs. ...Is what you'd think. But the interesting thing is when you give teams a stretch challenge, something amazing happens. People surpass all targets they've previously met. - The social media team achieved 4X traffic in a single month. - The video team figured out ways to better streamline processes to reduce video TATs - The branding team planned all activities well in advance, unlike ever done previously And when organic catches up, you can always tell paid to slow down. And this is what happened to us this year. As someone succinctly said, "Aim for the sky and you'll reach the ceiling. Aim for the ceiling and you'll stay on the floor." #marketing #india

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👀 If you're in a fundraising round, BrightPulse Marketing put together a blog post to help you secure that funding, including actual pitch decks from brands like Yammer and Peloton. ✅ Check out How to Use Marketing Concepts in Your Fundraising Pitch: bit.ly/4ha0W0A #StartupMarketing #Entrepreneurs #BrightPulse #Startup #Solopreneur #Fundraising #Preseed #Seriesa #Funding

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If you're thinking Clay is "a cold email tool" or "a spreadsheet on steroids," take a look at their most recent case study. You can use Clay to improve damn near every aspect of your Go to Market operation. 1. Improve match rates in ad platforms 2. No code, super simple data scraping 3. Personalize assets (landing pages, emails, etc...) at scale - write the prompts for each column once, auto personalize for every company/lead added thereafter... https://lnkd.in/dK4nkk4B

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Launching ShowStop 🚀 Over the past six months, we've conducted hundreds of interviews and pilot tests with DTC brands, marketers, and SMB agencies. We've discovered that there's a super strong demand for managing and repurposing existing creative assets, like revisiting old footage (images or videos) to keep things fresh and trendy, rather than relying solely on net new AI video. In response, we're excited to introduce ShowStop—a dedicated MarTech SaaS designed to repurpose your best media into new, conversion-focused video ads automatically using AI. ShowStop generates multiple variations instantly, testing every element from the hook to the CTA, and puts creative control back in the hands of paid marketers. CreateIn will remain a separate innovation tool for AI video storytelling. We are soft launching ShowStop on Product Hunt today! Check it out at Product Hunt (https://lnkd.in/gSTkK-FX) and feel free to sign up for our waitlist at showstop.ai!

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Vertically-niche-focused marketing agencies can market and sell much more efficiently than the rest. On the Metrics & Chill podcast, I've interviewed a number of marketing agency owners who are focused on a market niche. One of the latest is Andi Graham, Managing Partner at Big Sea. They "empower mission-based organizations to amplify their purpose through impactful storytelling." During our podcast we compared her agency's own sales & marketing performance against a benchmark of 130+ other HubSpot partners. (Access the data here: https://lnkd.in/epN-QaHn) As I said on the podcast, with a relatively small team of 18 people, they are "punching above their weight class." As you can see on the video below, one area where they are outperforming is with their landing page submissions. When I asked her why she thinks they are doing so well vs the rest of the group, she revealed that she had one specific campaign that takes them about a month to execute that generates a large portion of their leads for the year. Yes, the YEAR!!! While I guess other agencies (who are not fully focused on working with non-profits) could duplicate it, this campaign works really well for them because they are. The best part? It's brilliant in its simplicity. What's the campaign? Every year they give away $30k worth of marketing services to one lucky mission-based organization. Why does this work for them? They get loads of non-profits completing the application form. They also get applicants all year round by simply changing the landing page call-to-action to say, "Notify me when applications open for next year." Plus, they have a blog post that ranks well in Google which lists out marketing grants available to non profits. Of course, they feature their own at the top. Add in what I would consider a modest, but purposeful effort towards marketing each month, they can nurture some of the rest of those applicants into paying clients. ----- For the last 9 months, I sorta stopped pushing my agency owner friends to go niche. When we developed our free course (https://lnkd.in/eGH_8qpR) that teaches professional services firms how to market and sell more effectively using KPI and business process benchmark data, we even went so far as to simply lay out the pros and cons of running a benchmark study for a niche vs a broader group of companies, instead of suggesting that everyone should build a niche one. Even though I wanted to push agencies to build a niche group, I was tired of people fighting us on it. But, then over the last few months, I've seen more agencies niche further. We've also observed that when niche agencies launch a benchmark study with our free benchmark software (https://lnkd.in/efK_5xKf), they're more successful. So, I'm back on this bandwagon again. PPS. You can hear the full podcast episode here: https://lnkd.in/e-TUEtNj PPPS. Big ups to Hatch (hatch.fm) on the podcast production.

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ATG Breaks it down… I decided to spend some time breaking this down for you… in my own ATG way. (Source: EMARKETER chart) Digital Media's Absolute Dominance: With a staggering $302.77 billion in ad spending, digital media isn't just leading; it's eclipsing traditional media, which lags far behind at $86.72 billion. This highlights a trend where digital channels are the primary battleground for advertisers. Mobile as the Powerhouse: Among digital devices, mobile emerges as the undeniable powerhouse, commanding $199.41 billion in ad spending. This figure underscores the critical importance of mobile-first strategies for brands aiming to capture consumer attention. Traditional Media's Diminishing Role: Traditional media, while still holding ground with $86.72 billion, is clearly in decline. Linear TV, the largest segment within traditional media at $58.99 billion, is overshadowed by the combined force of digital platforms. Radio, print, and directories, once staples of advertising, are now mere fractions of the total spend, signaling their waning influence. CTV's Strategic Ascent: Connected TV (CTV), with $28.75 billion in spending, represents a significant yet growing player. While still smaller than mobile and desktop/laptop, its presence shows a crucial opportunity for advertisers to reach audiences. The Decline of Legacy Media: Print and directories, with ad spends of $7.72 billion and $0.33 billion respectively, are relics of a bygone era. Their minimal contributions reflect their rapid descent as advertisers pivot toward more dynamic, measurable, and impactful channels.

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One of THE biggest pitfalls in a marketing approach (in fact, in all facets of business planning) is a focus on new revenue growth at the expense of client retention. We tend to overfocus on the funnel when most practitioners agree that the funnel is now an hourglass; i.e., it’s not just about filtering the market down to leads and then to closed sales, but it is about then engaging with those closed sales (aka “clients”) to get them excited, turn them into promoters, and then eventually to renew and not churn. More than once, I’ve come into a firm and heard, “Clients are leaving because they think we don’t have functionality XYZ, but we rolled it out 6 months ago”. Ok, how did you communicate that? Besides your one email blast or bullet point in the release notes, how did you engage your existing clients around it? Before you built it, were they included in the prioritization process through steering groups and user forums? Were you promoting the functionality pre-launch to get them excited? Did you invite them all to a virtual demo by your product leads (NOT your salespeople) where they can get their questions answered by the SME who built it? Did you get them to do a review of the new functionality through beta and production and let me know how that feedback is driving the next development cycle? No? Remember, your clients don’t actually want “functionality XYZ”; they want their business problem to be solved, so they have to think about it less and go about the rest of their day. Making them feel like you understand their business problem, are keeping them engaged as you solve it, and deliver an ongoing experience of solving it better is equally (or more) valuable than just making the promises in the sales cycle. Once they’re in, it’s even MORE important to stay engaged in their journey from “closed sale” to “raving fans”. (I left a comment on a #productmarketing thread about client retention, but due to character limitations, I couldn’t post this whole diatribe, so I made it its own post.) #b2bmarketing #clientretention #productrollout #communications

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Great agencies make it easy for a prospect to say yes. Great agencies make it easy for a prospect to visualize getting started. And, if it's hard to say yes -- you're almost always getting a no. I see a lotttttt of agency proposals/plans/RFP responses. The best one's check 2 huge boxes. 1) They are easy to understand. They take complex 'stuff' and dumb it down and make it super palatable. In reading it, a prospect can see that it's an easy button of sorts. It tells a story and makes them feel comfortable in their decision. Like a warm blanket of sorts. 2) They include some sort of 'project start'. The 'if you say yes, then this is how we get rollin' section. It demystifies the 'what next' question. There's a time for complexity and flexing the collective brainpower/muscle of the agency, but, regardless, when it gets to the end, I often see brands selecting agencies who make it easiest to get started. If you're not making it super easy for a client to say yes, and visualize getting started... ...by proxy, you're making it hard on them. And, that's not getting you hired.

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SaaS GTM has evolved rapidly. We just dropped a brand new blog on TACK Network (our media property) if you want to read the whole thing. Here’s how to adapt and thrive: 1. Team & People Alignment Start internally with your employees, culture, and purpose. • Define or refine your company's vision and mission • Establish or review your principles and values • Craft or update your brand story and point of view • Evaluate and restructure your team for optimal customer-centricity • Implement or revise your operating rituals and cadences • Set or realign your annual goals to prioritize customer needs • Conduct research to identify evolving customer problems 2. Strategic Planning Understand your ideal customer deeply. • Reassess your total and serviceable addressable markets • Redefine your account and buyer fit criteria • Update your account segment and buyer persona definitions • Revisit your segmentation strategy based on fit and intent data • Develop a compelling strategic narrative and thought leadership positioning 3. Revenue Drivers Revamp your revenue strategy. • Refine your category/solution and product messaging • Highlight value-based use cases and customer success stories • Evaluate and optimize your pricing and packaging models • Align your product roadmap with customer feedback and needs • Analyze your financial model, funnel metrics, and revenue assumptions • Map out the updated customer journey and sales methodology • Assess and enable your revenue teams with the right tools and training 4. Strategic Execution Execute integrated revenue campaigns. • Identify and cultivate strategic internal and external partnerships • Revisit your offer mix and channel activation across the customer lifecycle • Monitor results and revisit every 90 days Key Takeaways: • Put people at the core of each decision and interaction. • Adopt a holistic GTM approach: team alignment, strategic planning, revenue drivers, and execution. • Shift to a People-first GTM to foster connections, build trust, and achieve long-term success. Forget Company-first GTM. People-first is the Future. Drive sustainable growth by making people the heart of every decision and interaction. This checklist is everything you need to harness this transformative approach. Check it out for yourself. I will drop it in the comments below. PS: Anything you don't agree with or things you'd add? Would love to hear it.

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If I could give any advice to a marketer starting a new role, one piece would be to hit the road as early as possible. For me that was Week 2 and then later planned a little road show and spent a couple weeks on the road. When you have the ability to be eye-to-eye and shoulder-to-shoulder with your customers/audience, you can understand what matters to them in a depth that isn't otherwise possible. ☑ How can we better serve them? ☑ What's their perception of the brand? Marry that with data to inform strategy, because those are the anecdotes you'll never get from the quantitative numbers alone. -- For context: GTMnow is GTMfund's media brand, sharing advice from working with 100+ portfolio companies and the insight of 350+ GTM leader LPs behind the fund. Real expert insight and advice from the top 1% of executives who have been there, done that.

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Are you thinking of creating a new market category? Squash it! Too often, I see young companies with something a bit different from competitors jump straight into creating a whole new market category. Sounds exciting, right? But without significant revenue or deep-pocketed investors and a full marketing team, it’s pretty much mission impossible. Instead, choosing an existing, recognizable category where you can showcase what makes you unique is the strategic (and budget-friendly) way to go. So, are you Team New Category or Team Squash It? #MarketingMatters

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