Jamie Coffey has worked as a fractional CMO with a wide variety of clients to help them maximize results. In many cases, her work has allowed clients to achieve goals they had not been able to reach before by applying marketing strategies that align with sales objectives.

Recently, Joe Frost of yorCMO interviewed Coffey, where they discussed a client who had a critical need for an event marketing strategy.

Here is a link to the full Event Marketing Success Story: https://vimeo.com/358098993

The client had only two months to prepare a 20’ x 20’ booth experience at their largest customer show — doubling the booth space they had in the past. Coffey put together a delivery team with a highly ambitious schedule for production. The result: the client substantially exceeded goals for leads, number of demos given, and touchpoints through social media, and realized a significant increase in inbound traffic to the company’s websites. Another success for the client was closing their first tradeshow sale just 13 days after the event ended. (See specific achievements mentioned at 2:55 in the interview)

How was it accomplished? From previous experience, Coffey knew she needed to begin by building a foundation of alignment between marketing and sales. They held several meetings with the sales and marketing teams together, to understand the target audience, pain points and messaging needs to incorporate into the event strategy. The company’s marketing department previously had operated in a silo, insulated from sales objectives and tactics so this exercise was valued by all involved.

Once content was created, the marketing team involved the sales department in the review process to ensure messages were relevant to the audience. The sales team also provided qualifying questions the tradeshow team could use to determine what they should be looking for and listening for on the show floor.  

The value of a fractional CMO, short-term and long-term

Although the condensed timeframe precluded yorCMO’s normal process of doing a full audit before jumping into tactical work, Coffey’s experience allowed her to glean information from conversations with sales and marketing teams and get the information needed for the event at hand quickly. After the event, a foundational session was held with the team to fill in the blanks and determine next steps.

Coffey’s experience as a fractional CMO is one of the reasons this project was such a success. Frost explained: “A fractional marketer comes in and provides full value and expertise of the CMO at a fraction of the time and cost of hiring someone full-time. We are able to move quickly to focus on objectives and strategy, then bring in experts to help us execute.” In this case, Coffey brought on a graphic designer and copywriter to help create and execute the tradeshow booth plan. (See 17:37 in the interview for more about the role of yorCMO in this client’s operation)

Now Coffey and the team are helping the company turn this short-term success into a long-term direction over the next couple of years. Using both internal resources and external resources, Coffey will help take some of the workload from the company’s CEO, who previously had been performing marketing functions as one of his many roles.

Through this process, Coffey said, the team was able to accomplish three important changes for the client:

• Align sales & marketing teams to collaborate on campaign strategies
• Marketing is now a priority and team members attend weekly checkins to report progress
• Accountability and focus on process is helping move the needle forward

What comes next? Multiplying the benefits of a fractional CMO.

Coffey is leveraging the client’s new sales/marketing alignment to help them plan and execute additional events, change the company’s website platform and message, optimize the website, build a content strategy and content calendar, understand and measure digital marketing strategy effectiveness for improvements, and create customer success stories.

“We’re all about multiplying what we can do for our clients by using in-house resources or agency partners we’re aligned with to make sure were hitting those marks,” Coffey explained. “I’m a fan of empowering others to do their jobs and holding them accountable — and ultimately making sure we as a company are also hitting the mark for the good of our client.”

For more information about yorCMO and assistance with aligning sales and marketing, contact Jamie Coffey at (703) 755-5774 or at jamie@yorcmo.com 

About the Author:

Jamie is a results-driven marketing leader with 20+ years of success developing strategic plans and innovative multi-channel marketing programs. Over her career she has helped B2B organizations with all aspects of marketing, including branding, corporate communications, public relations, content strategy, web, marketing automation, social media, digital/SEO and event marketing.

Jamie is based in the Washington DC Metro area and has orchestrated go-to-market strategies for clients in the professional services, training, government, information technology and financial services sectors.