Services

We operate across all aspects of customer strategy and go-to-market but are not a traditional ‘growth agency’ that focuses on optimising paid media investment. While this is important, and we can assist in identifying untapped value, we’d rather ensure you’re leveraging data to its full extent, value propositions are perfected and you have internal capability and systems that result in less volatile revenue and happier customers.

  • We’re yet to find a mid sized business that has all its data sources connected in a single view. We’ll work with your staff to bring this together and set it in place to become your greatest asset.

  • We’ll review any existing research you’ve conducted and where needed employ surveys, customer and staff interviews to gain additional insights into market dynamics and customer needs. This research allows us to better understand and segment customers and set a customer-first mentality.

  • We’ll review your ideal customer profile(s) and build a winning customer strategy that provides a roadmap for sustained business growth. Importantly, it serves as a narrative to align your staff behind a common approach and remove siloed, opinion based thinking from your organisation.

  • Great strategy is useless if your team aren’t on board or your structure isn’t aligned. We can recommend a structure that fits, and help a Chief Customer Officer (or equivalent) communicate the plan and KPIs so that everyone is pulling in the same direction.

  • We’ll audit your existing situation and establish a go-to-market approach that prioritises capability build over short term campaigns. We also identify points of friction in buyer journeys and help develop integrated CRM flows and holistic marketing programs that continually manage customers through the funnel.

  • “The longer you wait to invest in brand, the more money you’ll pay in buying demand”. We can help pressure test your existing brand identity and value proposition to ensure it conveys your unique advantages, addressing the question, "Why choose us?"

  • Thought leadership is a key lever for B2B companies to gain credibility and connect with customers. We can help establish this if it’s new to you, or review your current approach.

  • When you understand customer goals, you can optimise the digital experience to help them achieve them without delay. Our approach to demand capture includes improving user interfaces, ad messaging and content via continuous A/B hypothesis tests on your website, landing pages and ad creative.

  • Our services extend to empowering your sales teams with training and compelling collateral. We’ll work with your team to streamline CRM Lead and Opportunity workflows and create standardized sales and marketing metrics so everyone understands the definition of ‘effectiveness’.

  • We design customer lifecycle marketing programs that effectively retain and grow existing customers and nurture your prospect pool. Email automation uses customer behaviour triggers and engagement likelihood models to enable low touch cross-sell, upsell and retention moments. By integrating this with sales and customer success efforts, we ensure a seamless customer journey.

  • For retainer agreements, we offer coaching and mentoring services. You get the benefit of our experience to build the capability of individuals within your sales and marketing team to ensure they can deliver the outcomes you need. This can include formal staff management that ensures general questions and weekly check ins are with someone who is best placed to assist.

Engagement options

Power Hour

Need some initial advice? Come armed with your questions and objectives and we’ll use a one hour video call to recommend a path forward with tangible actions.

Master Class

Elevate your team’s customer strategy capability in a one or two day interactive workshop led by Paul Argus. We’ll come to you and tailor the content to your needs.

Project

Perfect for short term requests with a fixed scope. Brief us on what you’re looking to achieve and we’ll provide a fixed-cost response, including a clear list of outputs and timings.

Retainer

Great for longer term flexible consulting. Book 30+ hours per month for a minimum of three months and consider us a team member, including staff management where needed.

Playbook

Our playbook for helping clients build brands and go to market is the result of many years of learning and adapting our approach.

We’re huge fans of Einstein’s 55:5 rule (55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes solving it) so please bear with us while we ask plenty of questions to make sure we understand your business objectives, brief and desired outputs. This also helps us understand exactly what part you’d like us to play in building the strategy and executing the solution.

Regardless of your needs, we centre everything on the voice of the customer and this can come from staff and customer interviews, surveys or CRM and usage data. With information in hand, we’ll create a plan that we can help put into action with a framework to monitor progress so you can make adjustments as needed.

But we're not just external C-suite advisors; we can manage and/or support your team with coaching and guidance in addition to offering general insight and opinion to your business. For retainer agreements, we’re a part of your internal team.

  • This is where we kick things off, gathering all the essential information about your business, goals, and challenges.

  • This could be an accelerator workshop to understand the business or us facilitating collaborative sessions to brainstorm ideas and develop strategies.

  • We engage with your customers to gain valuable insights, understand their needs, and gather feedback.

  • We use surveys to collect data from your customers and/or prospects, helping us spot trends, complaints and preferences.

  • We leverage data from your CRM, billing and (where relevant) product platforms to source ‘non-opinion based’ insight. We’re also able to audit how well your CRM data flow is set up and ensure data is being collected.

  • We meticulously map out strategies and design the framework for your marketing campaigns, programmes and sales methodology

  • Putting plans into action, we can execute campaigns, strategies, and initiatives in full or with your team. However, its inevitable we will need to leverage internal staff for some aspects of execution. For example, accessing your customer base for an email campaign.

  • We can help set up key performance metrics to track progress of any initiative. Additionally, we can help with more high level performance reporting on sales and marketing metrics via simplified dashboards.

  • For retainer agreements we can manage any existing marketing employees and provide coaching and development.

  • Our external perspective offers unbiased, fresh ideas to enhance your strategies and decision-making. Feel free to bring us into wider discussions and decision making as you see fit.

FAQs

What size companies are best suited to your service?

Our fractional offering puts our expertise within reach for companies of any size. However, we find most of our clients are mid stage companies that have established product market fit, but are struggling to continue their rate of growth. Having said that, we can help earlier stage companies and also consult with established brands that want an independent view, specific expertise or just another pair of hands to free permanent staff up. There are also examples of large international companies looking to localise and execute their marketing playbook in Australia or New Zealand without investment in full-time staff.

Tell me more about the 'Co' in 'Paul & Co'

Your point of contact will be Paul Argus and on most occasions, he will be able to deliver to your needs solo. However, while his experience is extensive there are specialists that add both scale and expertise to our offering. Examples of these experts include Digital Marketers, CRM Managers, Senior Sales Executives, Graphic Designers and Copywriters. These people are sourced via Paul’s network of contacts. It’s important to also clarify that we aren’t a traditional agency. In fact, we partner with agencies to help execute our strategies. Think of us more as your Chief Customer Officer.

What is the minimum commitment I need to make?

For our retainer services, it makes sense to commit to a minimum of three months. You can then choose to go month to month from there. Generally, it’s a minimum of a day a week and we can scale up for you as needed. For our project pricing, we can help with anything that requires a minimum of 20 hours of support. While we’ve never disappointed anyone, it’s important both parties are clear on the scope and expected outputs up front, especially when budgets are tight.

How do we engage you?

After an initial call, we organise a workshop to collect a detailed brief. Often this will start quite wide (e.g. high level business problems) and be narrowed down and/or broken up into a smaller initial task that has a closed-ended outcome. This enables us to come back to you with a proposal that has firm costings and clear expected outputs for you to sign off. While typically the project is completed and reviewed before discussing the next steps, we’ve had clients provide additional briefs and retainer requests before the first project has been delivered.

How does my fractional retainer work with other clients of Paul & Co?

One of our key value propositions is the fractional nature of our offering. By splitting our resources up into smaller pieces, we are able to make C-Suite level expertise affordable for a wide range of businesses. Naturally, this means we aren’t available to a single client all of the time. Rather than assign a specific day or days of the week, we find it’s better to assign hours each month. This means we are better set up to assist with urgent requests and attend meetings and generally be more flexible. However, where we are managing your staff and have weekly one on ones, we do assign the same time and day each week.

What countries do you service?

Right now we are focussing on Australia and New Zealand, but world domination is just around the corner.

What are common challenges clients bring you?

That’s a very open-ended question with infinite answers, but the common theme is they are all looking to access capability to help with growth challenges. Some clients are experiencing significant change, whether that be sourcing investment or restructuring. Others are in the early stages of building fundamental marketing foundations. It also depends on industry and B2B vs B2C. For example, many B2B brands struggle with lead conversion, even after marketing has qualified them (MQLs). Start ups are often very focused on metrics like CPL (Cost Per Lead) and CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) and this drives them to performance marketing at the expense of long term brand building. In the B2C space, there is often more focus on brand, but then it will also vary by industry. For example, services companies know how important customer retention is given the long lifetime value of customers (think of a home loan). Sometimes brands realise they need to strip everything back to ground zero and redefine their customer value proposition. Either way, Paul & Co can almost always assist.

Can you work from or travel to our office?

Paul & Co is a remote first company based in the Northern Beaches of Sydney and we do not generally work from client offices.

It is possible to meet on client premises, and this is particularly useful where workshops or presentations are required. On these occasions, only inter-state travel costs are charged as incidentals.

What about IP and Confidentiality?

Paul & Co retains its Intellectual Property, but all outputs are owned by the client following full payment of invoices. We’re very happy to sign confidentiality agreements and find it’s easier to use the client version given it’s already been approved by legal.