<span data-metadata=""><span data-buffer="">A comprehensive guide on getting the best results with your vendor

  – “According to the contract between you and our agency, you have to pay a fine of 100 btc for a late brief”“No, we will not launch the traffic ourselves. We are a vision agency and you paid 100 btc just for our expertise”– “Yes, of course, we have SMM, lead generation, design and product strategy done by one person. What’s wrong with that?” Most likely, these words are either familiar to you or will be very soon. After all, this is a classic situation in communication between a project and an agency, when the first party does not fully understand what and how it works. And today we will try to take the client’s side and reveal some important points that will protect both your wallet and your nerves 🙂Only a short time ago, the crypto market experienced great hype. And this hype brought its changes to the market, and then evaporated, leaving behind a sweet aftertaste of BTC at a price of $40-60k+, which now does not cause any excitement on the market. In addition to the green market, hype brings a lot of fresh blood to the market. Hamsters, investors, traders and specialists of all fields. Hundreds of new projects grow on this hype, but there are many more those who want to make money on these projects. Contractors, marketers, agencies, etc. And if you are the founder of one of the crypto products, then these two skills are vital for you:Why so? It is very easy to make a lot of mistakes that will cost you and your contractors dearly.

Marketing Team: Insource or Outsource?

So, rule number one: never outsource C-level marketing.Very often in the blockchain space, founders are techies. Executives of such companies, as a rule, have only a development background. Therefore, when launching a project, they look primarily at the technological side. But what about marketing? ‘Wait and see’ tactics are quite common. When it comes to the understanding that a car won’t work without energy, no matter how innovative it is, people start looking for an all-in-one solution, trying to close ALL marketing with one agency.Let’s be honest – this is so wrong. There is no such agency that can solve your problems as your in-house CMO, who is completely involved in your project, who is aware of all the details and whose main motivation is the growth of the project.So, strategic marketing management should be insource. For example, a founder with marketing competence, CMO or marketing manager. But everything else can be outsourced to make the whole thing move faster. In blockchain startups without outsourcing, you will move slowly, while growth should be rapid. Besides that, it is quite difficult to gather a good team of professionals.Another important point – if the founder has some marketing experience, this is hell good. But it’s better not to mix roles, especially CMO and BDO. In this case, one of the roles will be consuming most of the time, while the second one will suffer significantly.

Hire Only People You Trust

It doesn’t matter if you are a CMO or founder with no marketing experience. You must understand that you are hiring an agency for the following purposes:Even if you consider yourself a cool marketer, it’s impossible to perfectly understand all the tools your project needs. And if your understanding of marketing is shallow, then your influence on the operational work of contractors should be reduced to zero.By and large, you hire contractors to work with traffic on Facebook so that they give you the result from this tool in the way that they can do it. Strategically and tactically, you will certainly guide them. But the operational processes and tactical decisions remain on their side. You don’t need to tell them how to make media plans, unban their accounts, and which influencers to pick. The same thing works for marketing. It’s impossible to become an expert in everything. If you hired people so they listen to you in questions of technical implementation of tools, then these are the wrong people and they just shift responsibility on you. That is, if you know their processes better than they do, look for other contractors or agencies.

Hire An Agency With An Understanding of Your Cooperation Purpose

As we said before, you can hire highly specialized contractors, or all-in-one specialists, that can help in processes scaling, assist in areas where you lack expertise, help with the operational processes, and perhaps close some part of the creative work. These are all different goals that can be combined, but not confused. You need to clearly understand what the contractor is offering, what he can do and what you want from him. Then everything will be smooth.For example, if you’ve hired a creative agency, then expect creativity from them, and not setting all the triggers in Google Analytics. If you’ve hired people focused on solving operational problems – working with traffic, media plans, etc. – no need to expect strategic decisions from them. It is you who must direct them.On the other hand, you can find some kind of multipurpose soldier who will deal with everything. But it has to be a large company with different departments, each of which works with its own direction. And it will cost decently. Especially if it’s a blockchain-focused team like b.Solus.agency. In most cases, especially when it comes to strategic work, this will be the right decision.At the same time, you can hire a team that doesn’t specialize in blockchain. But then be ready to spend time and money teaching them the nuances of your industry. These guys are unlikely to help you with strategy, but they can be useful in operational tasks. In this case, you will most likely pay less, but the risks are much higher here.These are all different scenarios. You cannot hire a team without an understanding of the cryptocurrency industry and expect them to be able to support your IDO. You can’t take target specialists and expect a product strategy from them. Clearly form your request and specify it at the very beginning of the negotiations.

Involvement of Contractors

Your project team should be involved in collaboration, especially when it comes to general strategy. The huge mistake many companies make is that they hire contractors and immediately forget about them. Why is that bad? You are a founder. This means that no one understands the project better than you do and no one knows what exactly you want to get. Yes, you’re not a marketer. But you carry the vision of the project, which means only you can push the contractors in the right direction and make them share your vision.

Predicted Interactions and Analytics

How to understand that cooperation with a contractor was a wrong choice?Blockchain is always about numbers. And if the contractor doesn’t tell you from the first day that you need to connect analytics to the website, fill in a million joint Excel files, launch a hypothesis tracking platform and put tracking tasks in Asana, then you most likely made a mistake when deciding to work with them.You must have predictable interactions. The contractor must give you enough information to understand his work and performance:What tools to use for tracking and communication? Here is our system, and you can use it as an example: