Why Agility Is Your Secret Weapon For Growth

By Sam Crocker and Lisa Everett

Sam Crocker, Managing Partner, Bray Leino: In today’s dynamic B2B landscape, growth remains paramount. Geographical expansion is a key driver. But the winning formula for your home market doesn’t always resonate globally. In our experience, the reality is far more nuanced.

Lisa Everett, VP Client Services, MX: Growing globally is a matter of choosing the right balance between uniformity and freedom of execution across markets. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, as every brand and situation requires a unique approach. The level of internationalization can vary significantly based on your business goals, a clear understanding of required localized efforts and the resources needed, and your brand’s maturity.

Crocker: Absolutely! When B2B brands are aiming for global impact, it’s not enough to simply translate a message from one language to another. Global messages and campaigns that account for cultural differences, humor variations, and regional nuances consistently achieve better results. We’ve seen this first-hand. And getting there requires local market input during the development of the work. With the right inputs, the work can be anchored in a “human truth” that transcends cultures and resonates across multiple markets.

Everett: …And global resonance isn’t limited to messaging. While you might be a market leader in your home market, do you need to think and act like a challenger in others? Are there differences in regulatory considerations, sales and distribution channels, routes to market? This understanding should help prioritize the markets you want to grow. Higher-priority markets still utilize global work, but will require more freedom in execution. The challenge, however, lies in having local teams with the necessary knowledge, size, expertise and capabilities to execute this strategy quickly in a globally coordinated manner.

Crocker: This is where the right agency model becomes critical. Often, marketers leave their agency ecosystems to chance, leading to an unstructured, misaligned landscape with undefined roles. This often means the agency closest to the company headquarters takes the lead by default. It’s important to have clear roles and responsibilities — not only between your markets, but your agencies — to ensure coordinated efforts across your entire ecosystem.

As our clients expand into markets and gain a foothold, we see their needs and focus evolve. They may initially focus on strategy and brand building, but our focus may eventually need to shift to deliver things like demand programs, thought leadership, sales enablement, partner recruitment, employee retention, and more. This requires a broad range of resources that can be dialed up or down as needed, rather than a large, “always on” team that isn’t used in the same way over time. This collaborative, one-team approach is one of the reasons we’ve seen such success with our Bray and MX partnership for the past six years.

Everett: B2B marketing can be complex and, as marketers, our remit is broader now than it has ever been. The good news is that meticulously aligning your messaging, defining your strategy, and executing with global coordination is a proven formula for creating impactful work that builds strong B2B brands and fuels growth.

Learn more about our global capabilities and to partner with us, reach out!