Letter from our Director: Why our new normal services

Dear community members,

As you may have noticed, in the last few months we’ve increased substantially our communications on a handful of matters. On the basis of head information sources – McKinsey, Gartner, Deloitte and the IESE being the most relevant –  we have been building our view on how the COVID-19 pandemic is changing the markets, the way we do business, and, ultimately (or should I say- primarily) the way we behave as human beings. We have then tried to provide value to you – our precious community – in order to help you navigate the pandemic, especially from a sales and marketing continuity and adaptation to the new normal standpoints.

The new normal is here to stay. There’s no doubt business relationships have changed and B2B managers and purchasers are behaving differently than they were prior to the pandemic. To some extends, trends have been dramatically accelerated – see remote work, or the whole digitalization journey – in other areas, new behaviors have taken shape – see B2B all digital purchasing / selling processes. There is little room to challenge the fact that business environments are rapidly becoming more competitive, more efficient, and, much faster than they were before the pandemic. 

I believe businesses – small and big – have a strong social role in progress, human welfare and making a better world. To our little extend, we must provide better, more relevant, more business-continuity-ensuring and more partnership-oriented services.

Gotoclient was born in 2009 with the scope of providing brands the choice of having an agency-that-did-not-seem-an-agency. The scope was to align our goals with our clients’ ones, being driven by the same agenda – that is making our clients’ business. We might or might not have succeeded, but clients such as Epson, Kärcher, Logitech, Netgear, Norton, Pioneer and TomTom have remained with us for very long periods of time, and in most cases are still remaining. We just cannot not be proud of that. 

But it’s time for our service portfolio to evolve again. In 2014 we launched RunRunPromos, our own promotional platform that can handle around 140 different promotion mechanics. In 2017 we became a HubSpot partner and learned – and still are learning – everything we could about Inbound.

This time we need to go further. We are extremely grateful we did not have to lay people off during the springtime. As some of you now and have been following, we undertook a big process of understanding how the next normal would be like and what our new role should be. We then quickly run new services proposals, trained ourselves and started testing them. We market-proved 2 aspects. On one side, we had services that were becoming commodities, something we had confirmation on. The market trend is pointing towards low prices, those services being more and more perceived as hygienic elements or cost of doing business. We’re just no fit for that. In fact, most of the time I wish we were, as that would allow more volume services, more scalability, more business, fewer headaches, but also probably, less challenges, less being in clients’ top of mind for difficult sales and marketing issues, less life, more death. So, we are discontinuing that kind of services. Branding, web development and event management are leaving our portfolio.

On the other side, the market sent a crystal-clear message on the facts that a) we should run more and more B2B activities, and b) that we should specifically run LinkedIn activities and more B2B lead generation campaigns.

So, I am glad to announce that our service portfolio is now composed by LinkedIn Ads, B2B lead generation, Inbound Marketing for B2B, Channel loyalty Programs, Promotions for B2B and B2C, along with a training and workshops service. Let me comment on those changes:

Today we are launching a communication campaign called New Normal = New Services. You might see it on LinkedIn, on our website, on our blog or receive email communications. It will integrate additional pieces of in-depth information about our services and, in general, open valuable information on the disciplines we work on. As a matter of fact, next week we will be launching what we think it’s the most complete and definitive guide on how to run LinkedIn Ads campaigns.

Many of you will have questions. I will be more than happy to meet you and explain personally all the changes we’re making. In the meantime, we have prepared this Q&A for you. 

Let me end this letter with the well-deserved credit to my team. Everyone has worked better, more effectively, more thoughtfully and has been more engaged than ever since the start of the pandemic. None of this could have been achieved without them. I am thankful and proud.

Jordi Marca
Managing Director
Gotoclient