Our Process to help you grow

At Nile, we don’t want to be just another service provider, just another inbound marketing agency. We want to be a strategic partner to help you develop your business. We position ourselves as a Growth Agency for industry, in other words we help industrial small and medium size industrial companies to grow their business. If we have to be called on to elaborate and implement an inbound marketing and sustainable sales strategy for you, we need to understand specifically how your company works and how your customers think. We have designed our proposal process accordingly. Here’s how it works.

Stage 1 : Exploratory Consultation

During an initial 30 to 45 minute phone call, we seek to answer these 3 questions:

1. Where are you starting off from? What marketing/sales problems are you trying to solve?
2. What are your objectives? What results are you looking to achieve?
3. Can we help you? Are we the right inbound marketing and sales agency?

In this first conversation, we focus on the big picture (possible solutions and tactics come later) and make sure we are aligned in terms of budget. You probably already have an idea of how much you can spend and we know what kind of budget it will take to get the results you expect. Our page on pricing for inbound marketing with Nile will give you a better idea. 

Who should be present?

Typically, marketing and sales managers are present for this first call, as well as the company management. It’s not an obligation and you can totally “trim down the subject” before inviting them, but we know from experience that the success of this type of project depends on an alignment between the different stakeholders as early as possible.

Your “homework” before the meeting

We’ll ask you to read our “Who do we help and how?” page before this discussion (3 minutes). This will give you an idea of who we are and what we do and the way we help our customers develop their company. Also, we’ll ask you to answer a few questions to help us prepare this meeting to the best of our ability (5 minutes). If you have a little time, think about reading one of our case studies to be able to visualise how we provide solutions and obtain results for companies like yours.

Stage 2: Objectives and plan definition

During this 75 to 90 minute meeting, we go into more detail regarding your objectives, challenges and plan. We’ll ask you a series of questions to understand your current marketing and sales situation, your markets and your organisation. Here are a few of the subjects we’ll cover:

• Your development objectives (what would make you say in a year’s time: “This marketing investment has been a huge success”).
• Your current and past sales efforts (team, process, sales objectives).
• Your current and past marketing efforts (what you've done and what you're currently doing, what worked and what didn't, how you measure ROI, what you want to accomplish).
• Your clientele (types of company and what are the needs and weak spots, purchasing processes and personas of the companies you deal with).
• Your competitive landscape (the big and small players of your space, what makes you stand out from them).

Who should be present ?

At this stage, the presence of management, marketing and sales managers is essential. Most of the time, it is difficult for any one of these stakeholders to have the answers to all our questions. This meeting is essential to align everyone with the challenges and objectives and to obtain a collective "buy-in" before going further in the process. 

For our part, our strategist will be part of the conversation and we’ll often call on an account manager who would be responsible for most of the daily implementation and monitoring if we were to work together.

Your "homework" before the meeting

We’ll have a lot to cover in this meeting and we want to remain focused on you. So if you haven’t done it yet, we’ll ask you to read the following pages before our meeting to save time and help you better understand who Nile is, not only an inbound marketing industry agency, and how we can help you:

• Who we help and how (three minutes reading).
• Our Services (10 minutes reading).

• Our pricing system (five minutes reading).
• At least one of our case studies (five minutes reading each).

If you want to delve deeper to better understand our methodology, we highly recommend reading our introductory guide to inbound marketing for the industry (45 to 60 minutes reading).

Stage 3: Reviewing the solution

During the two weeks between our discovery session and this solution review meeting, our strategist conducts a mini audit of your current marketing and sales situation. This includes:

• Reviewing and organising the ideas we’ve collected during our previous discussions
• Analysis of existing data from your website (we ask for access to your Google Analytics account or install it for you if it’s not yet operational).
• Investigating your competitors and their online strategy.
• A diagnosis of your strengths and weaknesses through the basic elements of your initiatives in terms of marketing and sales.
• The identification of opportunities and the challenges to take up.

During this meeting, we examine and confirm your marketing objectives, share what we’ve learned from our mini audit, present our recommendations and examine the associated costs and schedule. This presentation is very visual, so if we can’t meet in person, plan to be in front of a computer so we can share our screen.

Who should be present ?

We recommend the same group as the one that took part in the previous session. This includes you, a member of your sales and marketing teams and a member of management. For our part, you’ll continue the conversation with the same team you’ve already met.

Your "homework" before the meeting

Because we are a very results-oriented agency and we want the proposed solution to reflect that, we need to situate ourselves in relation to your current situation.Therefore, prior to this solution review meeting, we will ask you to provide us with access to your web analytics, whether it is via Google Analytics, HubSpot or other software.  If you don't have any, don't worry, we can help you install Google Analytics.

We’ll also ask you to fill in a few missing information after the discovery session to complete our understanding of your business. This can be done by email or by a short follow-up phone call.

What happens next ?

At this stage, you now understand what we can do for you and the investment required to move forward. Your next stage consists in confirming a final budget so we can translate what we’ve shared into a condensed written contract.