business growth

Your Allies founder features in Scalewise ‘Pearls of Wisdom’

03/15/2022 by Kalon Nelson

Your Allies founder, Linsay Duncan, joins a host of other scale experts in what scale platform Scalewise is calling their ‘Pearls of Wisdom‘. Targeting an audience of founders and leaderships hungry to scale, this series of articles is packed full of advice and learnings from sales, marketing and customer success professionals.

Linsay joined Scalewise as one of their first scale coaches, joining them to help coach businesses on how to achieve growth and scale through marketing. Here her pearls of wisdom focus on:

Tip 1: The importance of aligning sales & marketing from the start.
Tip 2: The value that Sales Navigator can bring.
Tip 3: Why resourcing flexibly can be your smartest move.

Read Linsay’s advice and tap into other Scalewise expert tips here.

Your Allies named Most Outstanding Marketing Agency 2018 – UK

06/19/2018 by Linsay Duncan

The awards celebrate business leadership, women in business and more across all seven continents of the world. Your Allies was chosen after successfully beating off competitors throughout the far-reaching and intense selection process.

Our commitment to marketing excellence

Earlier this year we were named Marketing Agency of the Year by the Innovation & Excellence Awards 2018 so it’s a great honour to once again have our work – and approach – acknowledged.

Your Allies (formerly Marke2ing) has grown consistently over the past few years – proof that businesses need part-time experienced marketing director support. Commitment to marketing excellence for our clients has also been a key contributor to this growth. To once again receive recognition for this is something we’re incredibly proud of and highlights the value of our flexible business model.

We’re excited for what the rest of 2018 holds and look forward to continuing our work with our esteemed clients and brilliant partners.

Your Allies awarded Marketing Agency of the Year 2018

01/12/2018 by Linsay Duncan

Corporate LiveWire’s panel of judges nodded to our dedication to SMEs and to our ethos that growing businesses should have access to the same calibre of professional marketing as larger corporations.

Outsourcing marketing responsibilities can free SME business leaders free from the ties and restrictions that come with full-time employment, or often expensive contractors. It gives our clients to access proven strategic support and professionally executed plans – always with the freedom to dial support up or down, just as they need it.

Also highlighted was Your Allies’ (formerly Marke2ing) agile approach to maximising marketing investment through pragmatic budgeting. The judges saw this as a big plus for SMEs faced with industry, economic and social changes such as Brexit.

This SME-focus and agile approach were also acknowledged last year by the UK Business Awards when we were recognised for our Excellence for SME Marketing. We are looking forward to continuing to grow our support offering for SMEs throughout 2018 and if you are interested in learning more visit our services page.

Your Allies Co-Founder brings Marketing Mentor Skills to the Business Marketing Club

11/03/2017 by Linsay Duncan

Marketing Club’s prestigious line up of marketing professionals.

The club, which is exclusively for B2B marketers, offers a unique opportunity to grow professionally through networking with other senior marketing professionals – both agency and client-side. The club has also established a marketing mentoring scheme which is proving invaluable to its members. Having worked not only with B2B clients through Your Allies but also in-house in various marketing roles for over 18 years, becoming a mentor with the Business Marketing Club was an obvious choice for Linsay.

“It’s incredibly rewarding working with my mentee, helping them develop their strategic marketing skills and approach to working with senior stakeholders. No mean feat when you’re brand new to a demanding head of marketing role, with no other marketing expertise around to lean on.” Linsay says of her new role, “I would encourage all B2B marketers who feel they’re lacking guidance to consider the benefits of working with a mentor. I have seen first-hand the hugely positive impact it has had on my own career and of those I’ve supported.”

Read more about the Business Marketing Club’s mentoring programme and check out their mentors.

Curious about how business mentoring might help your career? You might also like this post: 5 Signs You Should Invest in a Business Marketing Mentor.

How a marketing mentor can boost your performance (and your career)

08/20/2017 by Linsay Duncan

I count myself one of the lucky ones. Over the 18 years I’ve worked in marketing, I’ve been lead and mentored by some incredible business leaders and one outstanding marketing mentor in particular. Their influence is still evident in how I deal with people, how I strategise and approach problems, and in the work I deliver now. Thank the lucky stars for those people (you know who you are).

Recently, off the back of a surge of pleas for marketing mentoring, I realise there’s a real need out there for good B2B marketing mentors. But there’s a lack of understanding as to:

when they might come in useful,
how they can support you and
the ways in which can benefit both a business and its marketers.

Read on for a few pointers on when a quality mentor could make a big difference to the performance of your marketing function and to the professional growth of senior marketing professionals.

When to consider a marketing mentor

Looking back there’s a few points over my professional career where outside mentoring would’ve helped me through a tough project. Or a time where my capabilities were being stretched by new demands from a business. When I add those scenarios to those of my clients, typically there are five situations where a business marketing mentor’s services can prove valuable:

Lone ranger – where a marketing individual or small team is fighting marketing’s corner in a business full of non-marketers (i.e. there’s limited senior marketing experience to support them and help them grow).
Off the back of a nice meaty promotion – promotions can call for new skills, dealing with more senior stakeholders, greater responsibility and accountability, and more plates to spin.
A growing team to nurture – taking on a new or larger team, particularly for a first-time manager, presents a whole host of new challenges to marketing leaders.
A change in business direction – examples ranging from entering new territories and building new products or services, to merging or acquiring and internal structural changes, bring challenging new demands on marketing.
A whacking great project to take on – new projects can prove taxing for many reasons and is often where outside expertise can ease the pressure.

Act like a soldier – bring in the cavalry to fast forward progress

It can be a smart move to pull in the cavalry. When weighing up your team’s or your own coaching needs it’s quite possible that you can get there yourself. But finding the time to study and read up on the subject matter, set out a training programme and checkpoints (and everything else that’s needed for successful mentoring) takes time. Mentoring also requires a skillset and approach that’s not inherent within every manager or leader.

The right mentor on-board and you can be fast-forwarding progress and saving significant time.

What results should I expect? I want ROI!

First, map out the areas you want to address (e.g. potential skills gaps, tasks/hurdles which seem unmanageable…). Next discuss these with your mentor-to-be. Their role will be to set out suitable milestones and KPIs (key performance indicators such as putting learnings into practice, tests or run-throughs to see what’s been learnt) and regular review points. These reviews are when results will come to the surface and you can assess success.

Consider whether it’s feasible to factor in measurements or goals which relate to the mentoring subject matter. For example, add them into Personal Development Programmes, for added incentivisation and visibility. Gathering feedback from relevant stakeholders can also be a valuable checkpoint to see whether progress is evident.

Learning from an experienced professional is good for your career

A marketing mentor’s job is to make you look good – to arm you with new skills, approaches, mindsets, tools… helping you towards your next professional milestone is what motivates them. Your growth is their success. This should be a serious consideration if you’re keen to climb the career ladder and reach new heights.

For more tips on getting in professional support check out The Guardian’s article, “How to find a professional mentor“. And here’s what not to do from Fast Company, “8 Successful People Share How Not To Find A Mentor“. You can find out more about Your Allies’s mentoring and coaching services here.

You’ve upgraded your marketing – now what?

07/19/2017 by Linsay Duncan

Your Allies guest blog from Jonathan Peachey, Metis

If you’re in the enviable position of already having marketing up and running, the leads starting to flow in, turning into new clients – then you may now be facing the challenge of how to deliver more work. How do you manage that growth? What processes do you need to take you from leads through to the delivery stage? Our colleagues at Metis have a few sound ideas about how to tackle this. Read on…

How’s your working life going? Are you finding that either you’re flat out delivering work or you’re desperately looking for more to do? We’ve seen feast and famine in many businesses. Getting the balance right is really tough. It’s because businesses don’t have enough information.

Under-8s soccer

Blaming feast and famine on lack of information seems a bit of a stretch. Especially when it looks like an under-8s soccer match, where everyone rushes around the pitch chasing the ball.

But we’ve seen this many times, including with the consultancies we serve at Metis, and we know that to get a steadier stream of leads and business through the door, you need to make the right decisions. And that depends critically on information.

Running hot and cold

For example:

To decide whether sales need to go faster or slower, you need a live view of the amount of work that will be delivered over the next, say, 3 months.
That information also affects resourcing – run too hot, and you’ll need to be planning ahead to bring in temporary or freelance staff. Lose sales momentum, and you may have people sitting around doing nothing.

And not all client work delivers the same profit. Let’s say that your marketing activities are bringing a constant stream of leads. If you know which projects and clients/customers are most profitable, you might decide to use the new business to replace less profitable accounts, rather than try to keep selling to them.

We usually find that the consultancies we serve actually do have all the information they need. The problem is it’s squirrelled away in spreadsheets and systems that don’t talk to each other and get out of sync.

We couldn’t find a ready-made solution for that when we ran our own businesses, so we built one. Metis’ award-winning cloud software brings together sales tracking, resource management, job financial control, timesheets and expenses. Because all the information is in one place and is up to date at all times, it can give you answers immediately, taking the drudge out of information-gathering and cutting the risk of taking decisions based on partial or conflicting data. It’s quick and easy to set up and use and comes with a high ROI.

Playing like champions

Now your people can play like the champions they are. You’ve picked the right formation, based on the team’s availability and what you know about the profitability of each customer. You can go out and market yourselves without feast and famine to contend with. The right software will be a foundation for growth and a means to get rid of the clutter of spreadsheets.

This, of course, is where marketing agencies like Your Allies come in. They can advise on all the different ways you can reach your target audience, and how to use each one to its best effect. And you can do lots for yourself, with services such as HubSpot.