People ask me fairly often why we call Intention.ly a growth engine design firm.
Why not a marketing agency? We do marketing. Why not a growth agency? We certainly help companies grow. Why not a digital, creative, demand generation, or marketing technology firm? We have expertise across all of those areas too.
The answer goes all the way back to why I started Intention.ly in the first place.
Before founding this company, I sat in the CMO seat. And not just any CMO seat. I was fortunate enough to serve as CMO at two of the fastest-growing fintech companies in our industry. When you serve in that role during periods of tremendous growth, you learn something very quickly: growth is never the product of one great marketing tactic.
Your job isn’t to make one part work. Your job is to make everything work together.
At any given time, I had internal teams, agencies, specialist partners, technology partners, sales teams, leadership teams, budgets, revenue targets, campaigns, content, events, websites, CRM systems, data, and about a thousand other competing priorities. Any individual partner could be doing an excellent job and we could still have a growth problem.
My paid media team could show me fantastic campaign results. My creative partners could be producing exceptional work. My technology vendors could demonstrate all the valuable things their platforms were capable of doing. My internal team could be working incredibly hard.
But from my seat, I had to answer the bigger question:: Is all of this working together to grow the business?
That broader perspective set the foundation for Intention.ly.
I Didn’t Need Another Silo. I Needed Someone Who Could See the Whole Thing.
As CMO, nearly everyone around me was looking at the business through the lens of their particular responsibility, and that’s exactly what they should be doing.
The paid media team should obsess over paid performance. The creative team should care deeply about the quality of the brand. The demand generation partner should be focused on creating opportunities. The CRM provider should know its technology inside and out.
But CMOs don’t have the luxury of optimizing one piece at a time. If you’ve been in that role, you know your job is to sit above it all, trying to figure out how those pieces come together to produce business outcomes. I call that process growth engine design.
What Is Growth Engine Design?
Growth engine design is the process of designing, connecting, executing on, and continuously improving all of the components responsible for producing growth. It starts with the business outcome and works backward.
Simple to say, but a fundamental game-changer in practice.
Let’s say you’re behind your revenue goal. You could go to a marketing agency and say, “We need more leads.” And they may say, “Let’s put more money into paid media.” That isn’t a bad recommendation. More leads may be exactly what you need.
But if you came to Intention.ly, the question we ask would be different: “You have a $5 million revenue gap. What’s the fastest, smartest, most efficient way to close it?”
Maybe the answer is more leads. But what if you already have thousands of leads sitting in your database that nobody is effectively nurturing?
What if you’re generating plenty of opportunities, but your conversion rate is terrible?
What if the sales cycle is unnecessarily long?
What if your positioning isn’t resonating?
What if your sales team isn’t telling the story effectively?
What if your best growth opportunity is increasing share of wallet with the clients you already have?
What if referrals are your highest-converting source of business, but you’ve never built an intentional strategy around generating more of them?
Looking at the goal through a more holistic lens, “spend more on paid media” may turn out to be the slowest and most expensive answer.
That’s growth engine design. We don’t start with the tactic we’re capable of selling you. We start with the growth problem you’re trying to solve.
20 Different Ways to Solve the Pitch Deck Problem
Imagine you come to us and say, “Our pitch deck needs to be redesigned to match our new brand.”
We can absolutely do that. We have an incredible creative team. We build pitch decks all the time.
But I don’t want us to stop there. I want to know: Why aren’t you getting the outcome you want when you use this deck?
Maybe it is the design. Or maybe the messaging isn’t strong enough. Maybe the story takes 25 meandering slides to get to what your prospect cares about. Maybe your differentiation isn’t clear. Maybe the person delivering the presentation isn’t telling the story effectively. Maybe sales is using the deck inconsistently. Maybe prospects are receiving it after meetings and you have no idea whether they’re opening it, sharing it, or engaging with it.
The deliverable might still be a new pitch deck. But we’re solving a completely different problem. We’re not trying to make the deck prettier. We’re trying to make the sales process perform better. And because we understand the role that deck plays inside the larger growth engine, the work itself should be better.
The Same Thing Happens With Paid Media
You can ask a paid media partner, “How did the campaign perform?” That’s a perfectly reasonable question, and great paid media can be an incredibly powerful growth lever.
But from the CMO seat, I always had another set of questions. What happened after someone clicked? Did we attract the right people? Did they convert? What happened to the people who didn’t convert immediately? Did they enter an effective nurture journey? Did sales follow up? Did the message that generated the click carry through to the landing page and sales conversation? Did those leads ultimately become opportunities and revenue?
In other words: How did that campaign perform across the entire growth engine, not just inside the advertising platform?
That’s not a criticism of paid media specialists. A great specialist should be exceptional at what you’ve hired them to do. Our job is different. Our job is to make sure what they do connects to everything that comes before and after it.
Technology Isn’t the Answer on its Own
I feel the same way about marketing technology. I love technology. We use it extensively, implement it for clients, and partner with some fantastic technology companies.
But I’ve also seen firms spend extraordinary amounts of money building sophisticated tech stacks that aren’t producing anywhere near the value they should. Often, the technology works just fine. The system around it doesn’t.
Maybe nobody owns it. Maybe the data is bad. Maybe sales doesn’t use it. Maybe the right automation was never built. Maybe the strategy changed but the technology didn’t. Maybe the company bought five platforms that each solve a problem nobody had clearly defined in the first place.
A powerful marketing technology platform without the right strategy, processes, integrations, and people running it only causes more problems. So we don’t start by asking, “What tool should you buy?” We start by asking, “What does the growth engine need to do?” Then we determine the right combination of people, processes, technology, and execution to make that happen.
Agency Execution Is Still Part of the Growth Engine
I want to be very clear about this because calling ourselves a growth engine design firm does not mean we’ve somehow graduated beyond execution. Quite the opposite.
We run the campaigns. We create the content. We build the websites. We design the pitch decks. We create sales enablement materials. We develop messaging. We build automation. We execute digital strategies.
Because another thing I learned from sitting in the CMO seat is that strategy without execution is worthless.
Most firms are not sitting around with an abundance of time and people wondering what everyone should work on next. They’re short on hours in the day. They’re short on execution capacity. Their leaders and their marketing teams are stretched thin. Their salespeople need to sell. And there are always more good ideas than there are people available to execute them.
So yes, we absolutely do the agency work. The difference is that we’re doing it in the context of the broader system we’re building.
If we’re creating your content, we understand the demand strategy it supports. If we’re building your sales enablement collateral, we understand where conversion is breaking down. If we’re running your paid media, we understand what happens to prospects after they click. If we’re implementing your technology, we understand who needs to use it and what business process it is supposed to improve.
The execution isn’t separate from growth engine design. The execution is part of growth engine design.
So What Does Intention.ly Compete With?
Honestly, I don’t think our biggest competition is another agency. It’s fragmentation.
It’s the firm with seven smart partners, 14 pieces of technology, an internal marketing team, a sales organization, a long list of initiatives, and no one responsible for making the entire thing work as one system. It’s the company producing a tremendous amount of marketing activity but struggling to connect that activity to revenue. It’s the company that has a good strategy but can’t execute it, or great execution capabilities without a clear strategy.
It’s marketing handing a lead to sales and calling the job done. It’s tech that gets purchased but never operationalized. It’s the broken handoff process letting growth fall through the cracks.
That’s what we’re trying to fix.
What Should You Expect From a Growth Engine Design Firm?
Expect us to ask different questions. If you tell us you need more leads, we’re going to want to understand why. If you tell us you need a new website, we’re going to ask what the website needs to accomplish. If you tell us you need a campaign, we’re going to ask what business problem that campaign is supposed to solve. If you tell us your marketing isn’t working, we’re probably going to look beyond marketing.
You should also expect us to get our hands dirty. We’re not going to hand you a beautiful strategy deck and wish you luck. We can design the engine, help build the engine, and execute the work required to make the engine run.
And then we’re going to measure it, because the point isn’t to create more marketing. The point is to create more growth.
Why “Growth Engine Design”?
When I think back to my years as a CMO, the firm I needed wasn’t another company trying to sell me its particular hammer. I needed people who could look at the entire business with me. People who could understand the revenue goal, diagnose what was standing in the way, figure out which levers mattered most, connect the right people and technology, and then help execute the work.
That’s the company we’ve built.
That’s why “marketing agency” has never felt big enough to describe Intention.ly. We do marketing. We do strategy. We do technology. We do sales enablement. We do execution. But none of those things, individually, is the point.
The point is making them work together to create measurable, repeatable, scalable growth.
That’s growth engine design. And that’s why Intention.ly is a growth engine design firm.