BL&T No. 200: H1 2024 Barrel Update

Borrowed, Learned, & Thought

Today marks 200 consecutive weeks of writing this newsletter. It's hard to believe it's been almost four years since I set out on this initiative.

I appreciate you taking the time to read each week. And special thanks to anyone who has reached out to say hello or share thoughts over the years. Hearing from you is always a treat.  

If you think a friend or colleague might find value in this newsletter, please forward it along. Thank you.

Alright! Let's dive into Edition #200...

I sent my first mid-year letter to the team via email last week as CEO, recapping our progress this year and what we're marching toward for the rest of the year.

Here are some of the initiatives I touched on:

Growing Our CPG Portfolio

CPG brands, specifically in food and beverage, have always been part of our portfolio. One of my first projects at Barrel was an e-commerce website redesign for KIND Snacks. I later led the team in taking over their email marketing efforts and other campaigns, such as their collaboration with pro basketball player Kevin Durant called STRONG & KIND, and their expansion into new markets like the UK.

Within the last year, we've leaned into our expertise in CPG food and beverage, and since January, we've signed on five new brands. We love these brands for two reasons: many of us are customers who appreciate their mission to provide better-for-you alternatives, and we often see clear opportunities to improve customer engagement across channels, ensuring the brand's mission and value resonate at every touchpoint—which brings me to our next initiative.

Expanding Services Across the Customer Journey

If you look at the services we provide across our client roster today, we’re continually supporting areas beyond their e-commerce websites—from Amazon creative services to SEO, loyalty programs, and POS implementation.

While we've provided some of these services for years, they intentionally haven't been a starting point for most clients. However, we continue to see value in helping clients connect the dots across channels and contribute to the full customer journey, especially in CPG.

In the coming months, we'll be launching more updates on how we're thinking about our services and client engagements.

Enhancing the Barrel Client Experience

In May, I shared some early thoughts on moving away from hourly engagements. This was the beginning of rethinking our client engagements to ensure we're providing a high level of service, strategic guidance, and ultimately, adding value.

Much of this thinking led to launching our All Access program—a one-year commitment engagement designed to intimately understand our clients' businesses and proactively help them grow with data-driven insights and initiatives.

I've been working with the team to roll out our new programs to current clients and restructure existing engagements to include All Access. On the new business front, we've received positive feedback. Like anything, though, we'll continue to gather inputs and evolve, but as it stands, the momentum feels good.

Q3 Outlook

From a new business perspective, we didn’t end the quarter where we would have liked, but a deal we'd been working on for four months closed on the last workday of June. Although we didn't hit our new business target, this was a big win that put us further ahead.

We've seen our sales cycle continue to slow down for new client engagements, especially for larger deals. This means our priority has to be to continue to fill our pipeline and move conversations along. I haven't gone back to get an accurate total, but the deal that closed at the end of June probably took over 10 separate calls, counting my one-on-one calls and those between our teams—not to mention other steps like TCO (total cost of ownership) and KPI outcomes modeling.

Deals like this have shown where my involvement in the sales process was critical; however, not all deals are the same! An exercise I'm excited to work on in the coming weeks with our Account Coordinator, Riley, is putting together a simple lead-scoring model aimed at more effectively qualifying and classifying leads as they come in.

For each classification, we'll map out the ideal sales funnel including call agendas and activities. The goal is two-fold: to identify which team members need to be involved when and where, ensuring we leverage everyone's time appropriately, and to create efficiency in how we spend our time. For instance, not every prospect needs a custom Barrel overview deck. Once we get this ironed out, I see us investing more in outbound marketing activities, perhaps later this quarter.

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All in all, this year has brought its share of highs and lows, and I'm not blind to the fact there will be more ahead. I’m of the mind that good things don’t come easy and it's how we handle challenges that make us stronger.

As Dusan Djukich says in Straight-Line Leadership, "A body needs a certain amount of stress and challenge in order to stay fit and thrive. So does your life! So when faced with a choice between two options, don’t forget to ask yourself, 'Which option would be most likely to grow me? Which option is most likely to just keep me safe?' A growth choice will empower you no matter what the outcome."

What's important to me is ensuring the team is on the same page as we embark on the inevitably winding road toward our goals. Starting this week, I'll be taking time to hear from the team and create space for them to hear from one another.

We used to do quarterly debriefs within each discipline, but tomorrow, we'll try an agency-wide version (let me know if you'd like to hear more about this). In the coming months, I'll also meet with each team member one-on-one to hear directly from them about any insights, ideas, and feedback.