Alex Marchetti, President, CEO of Whitestone Marketing Group.

We had a very interesting case study which we’d like to present and the case study involved a printer which we worked with in the Atlanta area, had a very good relationship with them over a number of years.  And I received a call from one of the salespeople and he called me up and he said to me, “Alex,” he said, “I’ve got this opportunity, but I really don’t.”  And I said, “What does that mean?”  And he said, “Well,” he said, “I have a connection at this very large non-profit, one of the larger ones in Atlanta, and they have some print opportunities in there.”  He said, “However, they won’t let me bid on the print.”  I said, “Why won’t they let you bid on the print?”  And he said, “Because it is all part of an entire program that they want a proposal on.”  And he said, “I am not able to provide them with everything that they need.”  He said, “Would you go to this call with me?”  And I said, “Okay, John, I’ll go with you.”

So John set the meeting up and we went in and saw the people from this non-profit and through the course of our first hour of discussion, we determined that this was going to be an all-encompassing, multi-channel experience and program that they were going to initiate that they have not done before.  And the program included Perls, it included email campaigns, it included direct mail, it included print, it included creative, and it included the copy, developing the messaging, and tracking the results.  So we concluded that yes, we could do that as a team.  And we kind of worked out with each other, so, how will this work with us?  And I said, “Well, we’ll have to define the roles and what will happen with the roles is that I will be the strategic person, I will lay it all out, I will create the proposals and I’ll make the presentation if necessary.”  I said, “What you’ll do is you’ll do the regular daily contact, you’ll be the point of contact for most things and whenever necessary, I’ll go in and support you.”  Great.

So we agreed to do this and we went back and said, “We’re ready to make a proposal.”  And we sketched out what we were going to propose, and they said, “That’s fine, give us the proposal.”  I worked through the numbers to find out how much money they had available to us, it was about a half a million dollars, which was kind of exciting to all of us.

So we went back, we wrote the proposal and we filled in all of the components for all the different channels.  I got the printer partner to give me the proposal on all the print, all the mail, everything that they were able to do within their core competencies.  And our agreement was, tell me what is a reasonable price that you would charge me.  I want you to have a reasonably good margin, because I want you to enjoy this experience and we’ll do it again.  Great.  So they gave me the prices and I incorporated those into the proposal.  

We wrote the proposal, it was about 20 pages long, quite encompassing, and we delivered it.  We made the short list and there were two companies that made it.  The other company that was in the running for this project was a large agency.  And Whitestone Marketing Group is not an agency, it’s a direct marketing firm.  It got down to the two of us and they said, “We want you to make a presentation to our board.”  So of course, John, our print guy says, “I’m not doing that.”  I said, “John, that’s my job.”  I said, “Okay, we’re going to go together though, John, right?”  Okay, we’re going to go together.  So we actually went, we made a presentation to their entire board and we won the contract.

Okay, now that we’ve won the contract, you have more issues that you’ve got to resolve in order to understand, you know, how this will work seamlessly in the eyes of the client and how it will all work to our benefit so we don’t lose money in this whole process through our mismanagement.

So what we did was, we determined that the billing agent was going to be the printer because they had the original relationship.  And frankly, that was fine with us, because all we’re interested in doing is making the money that’s available to us.  So we agreed to let them be the billing agent.  And under that, what we did is we wrote the agreement for them, between the client and them, so that it was tightened up and it included all the services, because this was now into a very complex, multi-channel situation.

We also wrote a contract, or an agreement, between the printer and ourselves, and a non-disclosure agreement, which meant that none of us could go beyond this client, and we wrote the proposal and we had them sign the contract.

The interesting aspect about this that should be noted is, when we went back with the contract, the client said, “Everything’s great, however, you need to add a clause in here.”  We said, “What is the clause?”  And they said, “The clause is that Alex Marchetti will be in this contract and we will define what his role is within this contract and if he’s not operating in that role in this contract, we don’t have an agreement, because he’s going to develop the strategy that we don’t know how to do.”  Great.  Okay.  So, we put all that in, worked great, we had our initial meeting and we started running through databases and analytics and things.

We had a very successful campaign, we did the first email campaign that they had ever done, we had a 25% open rate, for the first time they ever did it, and the campaign actually won a **** star award from the Direct Marketing Association.  So everybody won, the printer got $100,000 worth of print and mail that they would not have been able to get under any other circumstances, so it became a win/win situation. 

What that created is such a confidence level with that relationship with that printer, there was trust, they then began to take me to more opportunities.  I am happy to say that we had 100% closure on all of the ones that we went to together, so was a very good experience.  I encourage every one to view what transpires and understand what individual roles are and by bringing together each of our core competencies and making them into a seamless offering to a client, that is the future, that is where it’s going to be.