This winter, RedRover moved from its founding home in the Falls Building to 50 South B.B. King Blvd. The home office was structured to be able to provide services for sales and executive teams in seven other cities.
RedRover Sales & Marketing Strategy started in Memphis in heady, good economic times in 2006.
Two years later, when the bottom began falling out for many marketing agencies, RedRover sales were up, largely due to its DNA and the way it works.
In this now uncertain-business climate, RedRover is planning its first national expansion.
It expanded into Dallas last winter with two staffers. It also has an executive on the ground in Atlanta and intends to acquire specialty firms or build branches in Chicago, Houston, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and New York.
“We chose markets that had a really strong, growing middle market, companies with a revenue range of $15 million to $100 million,” Lori Turner-Wilson, founder and CEO, said. “That’s the lifeblood of most local business economies.”
In five to seven years, RedRover is expected to triple in size from 15 employees, now based at 50 South B.B. King Blvd., to more than 45.
“We’ll put an account manager and a national sales exec in each of these markets at a minimum and probably multiple account managers over time,” Turner-Wilson said.
“The shared services — everything we produce for clients: copy, design, website development, pay-per-click, search engine optimization — and all the internal services: technology, HR and recruiting — are all going to be Memphis- based.
”Each of the expansion cities also is a strong Vistage community, cities where executives and company owners have bought into the power of executive-level coaching delivered by Vistage. For more than 65 years, Vistage has been helping executives solve their most challenging issues by teaming them with like-minded people.
Turner-Wilson’s been an adherent for more than eight years, and she credits what she’s learned for where she’s headed now with expansion.
“Vistage tends to attract CEOs that are growth-minded, that are open to change, receptive to change, and that’s our target market,” she said. “So, if a market has a growing middle market, and they have a strong Vistage community, then we know that it’s going to be a good fit for us.”
RedRover’s niche is business-to-business firms, companies that sell goods and services to other companies. It promises clients targeted growth in key metrics, including sales and ROI. If they don’t see, say, 10% growth, RedRover refunds 10% of its fee.
That no-nonsense approach tends to turn heads, particularly in marketing divisions where connecting a campaign to the bottom line can be a nebulous business.
For at least seven years, Bently Goodwin, a CPA-turned-entrepreneur, was Turner-Wilson’s coach.
He was struck by her drive.
“As soon as Lori got something in her head that needed to be done — or should be done — she did it. She didn’t hem or haw. Part of what we do in our group is hold each other accountable, and when someone brings an issue or an opportunity to the group … the group gives them feedback.
“They say, ‘Well, what are you going to do? And when are you going to do it by?’ Lori would usually update us within a week or so. She wouldn’t wait till the next meeting.
“She’d usually send an email out sometime within the next week, saying, ‘I told you I was going to do this. I’ve done it. Here are the results.’”
People looked at each other in amazement, he said.
That level of accountability and intentionality was part of RedRover from the beginning, Turner-Wilson says.
She spent the first part of her career heading up marketing, sales and communications teams in Fortune 1000 companies (TCBY Enterprises, First Horizon are two) and always shook her head that marketing agencies courting the company’s business weren’t interested in sharing profit-and-loss accountability.
“It was disappointing to me that my external partners wouldn’t have the same skin in the game as the internal partners,” Turner-Wilson says.
That is the origin story, at least a strand of it, for how RedRover came to be, first in the Falls Building Downtown and now on the third floor of Prospero Place.
The other is the hustle and good-natured flow of her entrepreneurial father, who taught her both to rise early and run a fast race and be the kind of person who attracts relationships and tends to them.
On the front end, RedRover chooses a handful of companies it thinks it can help, and then begins the wooing process, a tailored campaign of sending the executives information it has turned up on their company and how it can help.
“It’s not cold-calling and mass-emailing and all of that,” Turner-Wilson says. “… We are picking up the phone and inviting them to events. We mail them packages. We believe in a kind of an omni-channel approach with a variety of touch points. Different decision-makers respond to different types of content and messaging.”
Prime candidates are companies having trouble predicting growth or not scaling at the rate their research suggests they could.
“They’re leaving opportunity on the table. And they probably don’t feel like they’re getting a strong return on investment, and maybe they don’t trust the data that even calculates that for them,” she said. “And the marketing feels like this black hole: ‘I dumped all this money in, and I don’t know where it’s going, and I don’t have confidence it’s actually producing for me.’
“We come in and offer that clarity,” Turner-Wilson says.
It’s a 75-day deep dive. The cost is based on the company specifics.
“If you hired us to be your chief marketing officer and your chief sales executive, what is everything we would uncover in our first few months on the job in order to develop the right strategy,” Turner-Wilson says.
Out of that comes a short-term strategy for the next 12 months and a longer-range strategy for three to five years out.
It includes the cost of the investments, where the plan will break even and what the projected ROI on it will be.
“That,” Turner-Wilson says, “is what we’re standing behind with our guarantee.
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