Gil Gruber: Direct Objective Consulting Offers Small-medium Tech and Large Service Companies a Path Toward Acquiring New Prospective Business Clients

Direct Objective Consulting offers small-medium tech and large service companies a path toward acquiring new prospective BUSINESS clients.

We achieve that by a combined approach of demand and lead generation. We use A-to-Z marketing strategies (e.g., ABM, incoming and outgoing) and tactics (e.g., content, SEO, influencers, social, SEM, virtual events, PR, Ecommerce).

We believe that when our clients grow, we grow too and thus, we make sure that this growth happens.

Tell us about yourself?

Originally, a techie-nerdy guy that made the crossover to marketing. Coming from the technology space, I was initially very hesitant as marketing always seems to me a non-science domain.

I actually refused the offer to switch to marketing, as I felt it was an insult for a techie guy like me. The CEO and the VP Marketing of the hiring company were determined to hire me, while I had no marketing experience, nor did I had my MBA back then.

They sensed my resistance and offered me a proposal that I could not refuse: “Give us 3 months to train you from A-Z about marketing and after that period, you will have a milestone where you make your decision whether you stay in marketing or we allocate an R&D (Research and Development) team instead”.

After 3 months, I made a decision to cross over and to lead a brand new line of products that were developed based on my market research specifications, launched globally in over 50 countries, received rave reviews from technology analysts and within 2 years gained about 30% market share (from zero).

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Always think big. The sky is the limit and the bigger that you plan, the better results you achieve.

What problem does your business solve?

Everybody is looking for new clients. We assist in acquiring new prospective clients, while increasing the overall awareness of our clients in their target market. This way, we help our clients grow fast and reach their business targets.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

I have been working in many executive marketing, sales and business development roles for various business-to-business companies, mostly tech companies and it was evident that companies do not know how to enter new markets and attract new potential clients.

I felt that with my combined experience in technology and marketing, I can contribute to the success of companies out there. Thus, I formed Direct Objective Consulting agency, almost 20 years ago and build a team of professionals that can assist clients grow.

What is your magic sauce?

In order to allow growth for our clients, there are 3 critical pillars that must be met:

1. Extensive understanding of technology – Why? Our agency is able to grasp quickly what our clients offer to their clients, what are the hot button that will attract potential clients, and furthermore, how we can make use of sophisticated technology to assist them grow.

2. Customized approach based on vast business experience – As we come with heavy business experience, the agency is able to offer more than just a cookie-cutter approach. Every client’s go-to-market plan is different and we like to combine various growth marketing tactics whether they are hyped or not. The bottom-line is measurement and whatever they yield results. This is what would “make the cut”.

3. We care about our clients – Our client’s needs always comes first and we constantly adjust to meet the everchanging requirements. At the end of day, we want our clients to grow.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

The pandemic has shuffled the way companies acquire new prospective clients. We had to adjust throughout the pandemic and be agile enough to support our clients in tough times. Luckily, we managed to overcome the challenges that the pandemic introduced to us.

But one of the major lesson that we learned throughout this pandemic is that you should always be prepared for the next disruption. Our agency is always looking for more sophisticated solutions and ways that will allow us to innovate and improve the results that we offer to our clients.

We would like to be ready for the next disruption, so that we will have the appropriate “ammunition” to fight for the success of our clients and make them grow.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

As our agency was highly invested in the digital marketing world before we entered the pandemic and we work in a cloud-based format, digitalization was not an issue for us. But the major issue that we encountered during the pandemic was the perception of clients that in times of crisis they need to cease their marketing spending and save it to better days.

While there might be very little truth in that, it was hard to convince companies to avoid freezing marketing budgets. Let me explain, our agency is specializing in acquiring new prospective clients. In times of crisis, the acquisition of new prospective clients is much difficult than in regular times, still our agency was continuing deliver excellent result.

Thus, I was asking my clients: “why would you want to freeze your marketing budget if you continue receive a fresh flow of qualified prospective clients?”

The answer was not clear and it was evident that the decision was an emotional one and not a rational one. In fact, in retrospective most of our clients ultimately made a decision to continue spending the same marketing budget that they committed at the beginning of the year and they saw a major increase in their results during 2020 and 2021.

The big question is why. We can credit it to two major factors:

1. While our clients made the decision not to cease their marketing budgets, some of their competitors probably ceased their marketing, enabling our clients to have a bigger presence and higher reach to their target market, leading to improved results.

2. While our clients kept their marketing budget, we swiftly made drastic changes in our marketing campaigns to adjust to the new situation and be sensitive to the “new normal” and this change in strategy and tactics enabled us to address the new needs in the market and stay relevant for our clients and thus gain increased growth for our clients.

How do people get involved/buy into your vision?

We mostly work with small-medium tech and large service companies that are aspiring to grow fast. They need a constant flow of new qualified prospective clients to sustain their growth, but they do not have enough inhouse experienced marketing resources.

Instead, our team serves as an extension of our client’s team. They can outsource specific marketing tasks to us or in case they do not have an inhouse marketing function, they can outsource all their marketing activities.

The benefits are clear, instead of looking for a highly experienced marketer in their domain that has experience in various marketing tactics, they hire a marketing agency that comes with years of experience, vast knowledge and creativity.

Mastering A-to-Z marketing enables our clients to invest their budgets in an agile manner, spending their budgets in a customized manner where tactics are selected based on business goals and in a dynamic way.

Furthermore, if a company prefers to keep some marketing activities inhouse, but prefers to receive guidance or audit services, our team is happy to review marketing strategies, plans and campaigns before they are executed and suggest improvements to achieve better results.

At the end of the day, the goal is to assist B2B companies to achieve the growth that they are aiming to reach.