Curveball: a type of pitch in baseball thrown with a characteristic grip and hand movement that imparts forward spin to the ball causing it to dive in a downward path as it approaches the plate. Its close relatives are the slider and the slurve.
Thank you Wikipedia.
We sent out an email that explained that with 8 Signal marketing services in El Paso, you get the benefits of a fully-staffed marketing department, yet a more affordable alternative to hiring one full-time marketing person.
Even though we’ve written about this before, I was still caught off guard by another type of curveball: something which is unexpected, surprising, or disruptive.
Her reply was, “You would be getting rid of my position here at the organization.”
Oh boy! Talk about a short circuit in my brain. I never expected a response like that, particularly because we work with other marketing managers, as you’ll see below in my response to this marketing manager. Tiffany helped me articulate our philosophy of doing business and how it relates to working with in-house marketing teams.
It’s great to have a full-time marketing person on your team.
There are 3 examples we shared in our reply to her. The following is an edited version of that email:
It’s awesome that the organization is lucky enough to have you as a full-time marketing position. Many local companies don’t have the resources for that. We love working with clients who have in-house marketing managers.
To clarify, we certainly don’t want to take over your position. In fact, we would love to support what you are doing!
Example #1: Alex from Forrest Tire
For example, we are currently working on a variety of marketing efforts with Alex at Forrest Tire. Alex is the marketing manager, but recognized that she needed a full marketing department to accomplish all of her marketing goals. That is where we came in.
Rather than hiring one company to do graphic design, another to help with online advertising, a third to do copy writing and editing, and so on, Alex brought us on board. Now she can streamline all of her marketing efforts with our help, and she becomes more valuable to the owners of the company.
Example #2: Morgan from Las Cruces Magazine
Another example is Morgan Switzer, the publisher for Las Cruces Magazine. She has a team of writers and designers, but she found that managing their website was a distraction from their main focus of producing a top quality magazine.
We partner with Morgan to make sure her website is as informative, appealing, and easy to use as her print magazine, and our next step is helping to manage and streamline the online publishing of her print articles, something she hasn’t been able to do with her current in-house resources.
We also love working with in-house marketing managers such as yourself because we spend significantly less time educating and a lot more time implementing strategies and marketing efforts.
Example #3: David from Mastex
In some cases, the best service we can provide to companies is to simply offer consulting services to help your business use the resources you already have more efficiently. That is what we have done for David Kaufmann, another one of our local clients. We simply helped him create some processes that his internal team can use to keep their marketing efforts on track.
Please know that we are never interested in putting anyone out of work
We were referred to this particular marketing manager because our clients believe her business could use the types of services we offer. That is why we decided to shoot her an email, to learn about any areas in her marketing that she is finding challenging and see if there’s an opportunity for 8 Signal to assist.
As it turns out, she’s not only in charge of the organization’s marketing, she has a long list of other responsibilities she must fulfill. Whether or not we have the opportunity to work with her is yet unknown, as we haven’t had our first meeting. But it’s been great to think through our business belief systems and articulate them in such a way that we can share them with you.
Business and life throw enough challenges and struggles at us. Rather than thinking of the world as a shrinking pie, why not watch it grow and expand before our very eyes? The world is a better place when we support each other and to treat others as we would like to be treated.
At the end of the day, life is better that way.