We’re not any agency.
Sounds like a bold statement for an agency to make right? Most agencies WANT to market themselves as experts. And they are. But is that what your business needs?
The idea of expertise, though, is limiting. “Experts” are usually neatly tucked into a box, or single marketing channel.
But that’s not how businesses work.
And we GET THAT.
At Seer, it’s in our DNA to set fire to assumptions. That’s why we prioritize being collaborators with you and your team. Not just experts. We focus on understanding your goals, together, and producing solutions that will drive your team forward and leave them capable of more.
When shopping for an agency you typically run into three buckets of consulting styles: experts, an extra pair of hands, and collaborative consulting. Understanding the different types of consultants is key to helping figure out what’s best for driving your business, yourself, and your team to hit your goals.
Types of Consulting Engagements
Before we dig into how we at Seer work with our clients it’s important to understand the three main types of consulting types you’ll run into at agencies.
Three Typical Agency Consulting Styles:
- Expert
- Pair of Hands
- Collaborative
Experts
In an expert engagement, Experts come in with a set of skills to solve a particular problem. They bring with them best practices from across the industry and experience working with many different clients.
Benefits of working with Experts
- Expert consultants provide you with highly specialized knowledge that you may not have in-house.
- Expert consultants are highly skilled and knowledgeable, they can quickly identify issues and develop solutions.
Downsides of Experts
- Experts are focused on solving problems they were hired to solve. They have a hammer and to them, everything is a nail.
- Experts are smart and they want to prove it to you. Want a 100-page slide deck with every piece of data they found? You got it.
- Want a longer to-do list? Hire an expert. They will give you a list of all the recommendations that you should do to solve the problem. Do you have the budget and resources to do all of them? Nope.
Overall, hiring an expert-type agency can be a practical approach to solving specific and well-defined problems. The consultant's specialized knowledge and expertise can help you to develop short-term solutions but the relationships are typically transactional so execution and the long-term impact are usually put back on you to deal with.
Pair of Hands
If you need some extra support for your team to hit a goal or wrap up a project you can hire a pair of hands consultant but that’s exactly what you’re getting. They can help complete projects for you but require direction and review.
Benefits of hiring a ‘Pair of Hands’
- An extra pair of hands can help to speed up the completion of tasks or projects.
- Pair of hands consulting can help to ensure that the solutions developed are tailored to your specific needs.
Downsides of Pair of Hands
- Despite not needing to be hands-on with the execution of the project you’ll still need to invest time in onboarding and overseeing the work of the consultant.
- Because each engagement is tailored to your team’s specific needs there may be more discovery, onboarding, and custom pricing needed to complete the contracting process.
Overall, pair-of-hands consulting can be an effective way to complete needed tasks in less time. Oftentimes the execution time that is saved is matched by the time needed to oversee and provide guidance. Once the task is done you’ll need the same level of resources to complete it in the future as no additional work was done in order to future-proof the process
Collaborators
When you work with a collaborative consulting agency they join their specialized knowledge with your institutional knowledge to create an impactful project. One that focuses on how they can support you, your team, and your business to ultimately work independently of them. Collaborative consultants don’t solve problems for organizations, they use their skills to help organizations solve their own problems.
Benefits of hiring a Collaborator
- Collaborative consulting can help ensure that everyone involved in the project understands the recommendations and is committed to implementing them.
- Collaborative consulting allows the consultant to gain a deep understanding of your unique situation and needs.
- By working together, consultants can share knowledge and expertise, which can help to build capacity and improve your team’s ability to tackle similar challenges in the future.
Downsides of a Collaborator
- Collaborative consulting can be complex, as it involves coordinating efforts and aligning goals between multiple parties.
Overall, collaborative consulting can lead to better processes and outcomes. By working together, you and your consultant can achieve a deeper understanding of the challenges at hand and develop solutions that are tailored to the unique needs of your business. Collaborative agencies are flexible and agile.
How We Work
At Seer, we’ve built an experienced team of problem-solving and data-driven consultants who can guide digital marketing teams through strategically tailored projects that grow your goal KPIs faster and higher than ever before.
We’re not looking for transactional engagements.
We’re in it for the long haul. In this world, very few things happen in a vacuum. We know that solving one problem isn’t a cure-all. Our solutions are designed to provide iterative insights and build toward a sustainable framework to move you along the data maturity continuum.
Seer has a big toolbox.
Before we think about cracking it open we spend time to figure out what your key business questions are and what KPIs should you be measuring. When we arrive at those answers together then we can figure out the right tool for the job.
Our team is action-oriented.
We want to see your analytics program mature so that means meeting you and your team where you are. We’ll offer you a list of focused recommendations with clear ROI tied to each so that you can prioritize the most impactful and build a roadmap to accomplish the others.
The deepest insights can’t make an impact if they’re buried among the mundane. We make sure you get the information you need when you need it and in a format designed for maximum impact. We’re not here to show you how smart we are. Our goal is to give you clear, concise answers that can easily spread through your organization.
Conclusion
When we start an engagement with you we’re not coming in as the experts - we’re coming in as partners. We pair our problem-solving, and decision-making experts with your team’s domain expertise to create sustainable solutions for your digital analytics programs. Our process aims to first understand where your business is in terms of your overall data maturity. After we know the ‘what is’ we can help facilitate the ‘what can be.’
