Our last blog post addressed the importance of strategic sourcing as a key imperative for CMOs in 2020 and highlighted reports that in-house partners are “increasingly favored by companies to maximize the speed and depth of brand, business, and culture assimilation and significantly streamline communications and coordination.” 1
Indeed, there are a variety of factors driving brands to work with in-housing partners, including some of the same reasons driving them to any digital agency, XD firm, or external marketing partner: to provide smart new strategies, engaging tactical approaches, and creative campaign or experience design solutions that improve business outcomes.
To these clients, the best IHPs will bring a proven record with leading brands, expert teams of highly-skilled digital specialists, and the executional horsepower to drive their key marketing and experience design initiatives.
The Need for a New Kind of Partner
However, in many circumstances, what stands between a client and better business outcomes is not a lack of good ideas or strategies. Instead, the key blockers to sustained success are organizational, operational, or both: an inability to execute on strategies at scale, to leverage customer data with speed and agility, to drive cost efficiency, to overcome business silos – or to tackle a myriad other challenges that can’t be overcome by simply outsourcing their work to more traditional outsourced or “collocated” partners like staffing firms, on-site agency teams, consultancies.
For these clients, in-housing partners have proven – again and again – that they can deliver business outcomes and advantages other outsourced/on-site solutions can’t match.
Embedded vs On-Site
These advantages are largely a result of the unique position in-housing partners hold within a client’s organization – tightly integrated with their own people and processes, often for ongoing, indeterminant engagements – and the organizational/operational expertise they bring to each engagement.
Being embedded within a client’s marketing or XD apparatus, immersed in its culture and directly familiar with its full range of business ambitions and hidden pain points, greatly expands the results an in-house partner can generate. This ‘inside perspective’ enables in-house partners to more clearly understand and evaluate how marketing operations function in context with the overall enterprise, including:
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- How workflows really operate, versus how they were designed. Such a partner can readily identify where subtle friction and pain points exist.
- How management structure, company culture, team dynamics, and other organizational modalities affect the work at hand.
- How information, processes, silos, and stakeholders from other parts of the enterprise might impact marketing or XD activities.
- How dynamic forces, such as seasonal demands, new business initiatives, corporate ambitions, and technology investments or constraints might affect the work of the marketing or XD organization.
That visibility and insight are the catalyst for in-house partners to deliver greater sustained impact and value for the client. Remember, IHPs not only bring world-class marketing and XD capabilities; they blend deep operational expertise into their work as well. As a result, their impact goes beyond accelerating and up-leveling the deliverables of any given engagement – and extends to continuous improvement of the client’s practices and processes for creating them.
Enduring Improvements
That improvement may start with the optimization of workflows, activities, cadence, team size/structure, and related parameters of the work at hand. These gains often lead to new opportunities up and downstream, where the initial process improvements can generate additional efficiencies.
Their inside position also enables IHPs to develop metrics, measurement, and KPI reporting tailored to the client’s specific needs and circumstances – in turn enabling more accurate attribution, accountability, and further optimization across the marketing or XD organization.
Lastly, the embedded, ongoing role of in-housing partners gives them a much stronger ability to optimize their engagement for maximum budget efficiency as well. Their holistic view of organizational and operational dynamics – including upstream and downstream of the core engagement area, and how the client works with other outside partners* – enables them to shape and structure scalable, bespoke solutions that either reduce overall costs or free up funding for other pressing initiatives.
Read the 2020
Marketing Imperatives
Partners in Transformation
By now it’s clear that working with an in-housing partner on a “hybrid approach” to strategic sourcing can be as much about organizational and operational transformation as it is the execution of campaigns, content, or experience design programs. As Merkle notes in its 2020 Marketing Imperatives E-book, “Because it’s a complicated process…not every company will take on this challenge. But the few who invest in the effort to optimize their marketing organization will also be building an advantage that will be difficult to replicate.”
Once again, in-housing partners are uniquely positioned to support clients in this process as well. Because IHP teams are closely integrated and actively collaborating with the client’s own FTEs, their best-practice expertise is more easily shared, knowledge is more seamlessly transferred, and process changes are managed with less distraction and disruption.
In addition, the best in-house partners bring a track record of helping other leading brands through change and transformation. Their teams bring a high EQ and a natural respect for the unique culture each client has worked hard to build and maintain.
Perhaps most importantly, the best in-house agency partners act with a truly collaborative spirit, eager to share expertise and insights before, during, and after any engagement. They can call upon a long track record with both enterprise companies and emerging brands to support clients in developing a hybrid approach that is effective for their own unique landscape. Good IHPs also leverage their inside position to help clients look beyond the constraints of their current digital maturity, organize toward the model that fits their aspirations, and build a development plan to fill the gaps.
Going Inside for Better Outcomes
In-housing partners may at first seem only slightly different than staff augmentation firms, workforce solutions, on-site agency teams or other collocated options. But the unique position and prowess of an IHP greatly magnifies its impact.
Their embedded, holistic approach and long term, ongoing commitment delivers enduring improvements—in productivity, efficiency, and digital proficiency where it’s needed most—both strategically and operationally. At the same time, with very little time and effort clients can accelerate their digital maturity, up-level their speed and quality of execution, and deliver more connected customer experiences at scale.
At the end of the day, these are the drivers of competitive advantage and better business outcomes: greater acquisition, higher conversion, stronger engagement, and lasting growth and customer loyalty. They are the reasons why forward-thinking CMOs and CXOs are leveraging in-housing partners in an exciting new “hybrid approach” to their resourcing strategy.
*Strategic sourcing requires CMOs to interweave capabilities and relationships across strategy, creative, digital marketing, media, and tech in a manner that most effectively leverages the strengths of each partner. Good IHPs “play well with others” and use their unique inside position to support clients in developing a hybrid approach that is effective for their particular landscape and ambitions.
1. The Marketing Imperatives, Merkle Inc., January 2020
