Summer of 2010, Kyiv. Guests of the All-Ukrainian Marketing Conference found bundles of handouts worth a dollar. The notes were enclosed in cards with the Netpeak logo and the text: "We're already bringing you the money." It was the idea of Andrii Chumachenko, co-founder of the Internet marketing agency. The move with dollars brought the company 32 applications, five clients and dozens of mentions in social networks.
Netpeak is known in the market as a system company. For 16 years, Andriy Chumachenko participated in setting up most of its processes and systems. He developed the departments of copywriting, SMM, incoming applications and the partner program, worked as the marketing director of the agency for more than seven years. Starting this spring, he helps other businesses set up marketing.
In a partner project MC.today asked Andrii what successes in marketing he is proud of, how he helps the business in the role of an involved marketing director, and why he is most interested in working with outsourced companies. More thoughts of Andrii Chumachenko about life and business are in his Telegram channels and podcasts.
Career successes and failures
You started as an SEO copywriter. Do you remember the moment when you felt like a marketer?
I remember that my first challenge as a marketer was to transform Netpeak in the eyes of clients from an Odesa town agency to an all-Ukrainian agency. It was 2010, I was not yet a marketing director, and the direction of marketing itself was somewhat unformed.
Now it seems ridiculous - work from wherever you want. But 12 years ago, clients actually told us in a telephone conversation: "Where is your office in Kyiv? No? Then you must have thrown something, we will not work with you." In order to stop being considered an "Odesa office", we had to open an office in Kyiv. But just opening the office did little. We created positioning messages, updated all our presentations, redesigned the site, began to be placed in various publications with expert comments and constantly speak at all available relevant conferences. As a result, in about a year, we achieved the fact that clients' perception of our agency has changed. The team coped with the task 100%.
What results are you proud of as a marketing director? And as a managing partner of the Netpeak agency?
I have such a professional case. In my first three years in marketing, from 2015 to 2018, my team increased the number of incoming leads from 85 to 500 per month, and that's not including paid traffic. At the same time, the conversion of customers fell slightly - from 8% to 5%, although it usually decreases more when applications increase.
My task as a manager is to increase the turnover and profit of the company, to scale it. It is difficult to single out personal achievements here, it is always hard teamwork. One example is the Netpeak Friends Day, which we held for the first time in 2016. At this closed event, our friends and clients - top managers and owners of the largest Ukrainian companies - received useful information at the official part, and after it they could chat in a relaxed friendly atmosphere. Thanks to this, we not only got to know many of our clients better, but also met new people who had not worked with us before.
Such a long journey is not without failures. What happened to you and what conclusions did you draw from them?
One of the facaps can be called the redesign of our media - Netpeak Journal. We developed it to half a million unique visits per month, and in 2016 we decided to completely redesign it. When I wrote the technical task, I did not take into account scaling - the media turned out to be cool, the design was convenient, but it remained a project of the Netpeak agency, and not the entire group of companies. There were strict bindings to CRM, ERP, the agency's incoming application collection system, which made it impossible to attach the CRM of other projects, such as Serpstat and Ringostat, to this media.
It was a large-scale internal project: design, layout and development cost about $20 in man-hours. If I had taken everything into account at once, other companies in our group would have been able to save this money. Since then, I have built some kind of "anti-fragility" into all my projects - resistance to potential problems and scaling.
"Setting up processes and teams is something I am very good at"
You mentioned the product companies Serpstat and Ringostat. You started marketing departments in them. What attracted you to these tasks?
Building a business, setting up processes and teams is something I am very good at. Building a department from scratch, already having experience in such "construction", is very interesting: everything turns out faster, better, and you can avoid mistakes and doubts. And two things drive me: a result that you can touch and a team that makes it a pleasure to go to work every day.
Did you have to intervene in the work of these departments after the launch?
Initially, we planned to build a single marketing department for the entire group of companies. At this stage, I hired and trained employees who were to do tasks for the products. Then we decided to divide the teams of different projects. After that, the responsibility for specialists went to the CEO of their companies, and I no longer influenced their work, except for consulting.
How did the war change your business? Was she the one who prompted you to switch to the consulting format?
Before the start of the war, Netpeak's marketing department was a well-coordinated, well-organized machine with cool professionals. The war canceled all plans, including the development of the marketing direction. When I made sure that everyone was safe and carried out the necessary optimizations within the team, I moved away from operational management - it was necessary to look for new areas of work.
Just at that moment, our client, a Ukrainian outsourcing company, came with a request. They wanted to understand what was going on inside their marketing and put together a strong team. This request came to me, we discussed possible solutions and agreed to cooperate - that's how the first client appeared.
Business mistakes in marketing
With your agency background, tell me what marketing teams are missing? What are the most common mistakes?
Oh, there are many, but I will try to highlight the first three:
- There are no clear goals.
A marketer has a lot of tasks with the general idea of "bringing more applications". But this cannot be the goal of marketing. The goal should be measurable and sound, for example, like this: "Increase the company's profit by X% for such a period." In addition to the goal, sub-goals, KPIs, tasks should be described. - There are no analytics and accounting.
No properly configured Google Analytics, CRM and analytics connections. There are no slices, cohort analysis of the results of advertising campaigns, analytics of the effectiveness of traffic sources, etc. - No understanding of basic metrics.
How many target customers do we get per month and what is the difference between target and non-target customers? How much are we willing to pay for one application? And for one client? Who is our client? ICP and Buying Person?
These mistakes sound pretty obvious. What prevents the team from fixing them?
Most companies in the early stages and during the period of rapid growth simply do not know what to look for and what to calculate - the lack of experience hinders.
I help to understand what is important now and what will be needed in the future. At the same time, I don't specifically limit anything to myself - I adjust the processes so that even in a year the team can collect and analyze information, build new hypotheses and goals.
The format in which I collaborate - something like a member of the board or a member of the board - allows me to directly influence processes, team recruitment and global goals. My current experience helps me quickly solve problems that took me years to find a solution for.
"The result of consulting is a system that works as an established mechanism"
Andriy, please tell us in more detail what the service is, in what format do you work?
With each client, the process is built in its own way. But for simplicity, I would divide it into three main stages:
- DiscoveryThis is an in-depth interview with the founders of the business and separately with the head of marketing. I analyze the results of interviews, the client's business, the market and competitors. As a result, I prepare a list of the main pains and problems that I managed to see and offer their solutions.
- Goals & KPIs
Here I help formulate and formalize the main goals for the company in a specific direction, KPIs and the incentive system for teams that will allow these goals to be achieved. - Work with the team and management
This is the stage of monitoring the performance of assigned tasks and compliance with KPIs from the first two points. Regular calls, consultations, discussions and brainstorming.
Who exactly on the client's side is involved in this work?
First of all, the business owner. He keeps all the knowledge about his business and he sets the main goals. In the second place - a person responsible for the area with which we work, for example, SMO.
How is the responsibility for the result distributed? What lies on you, and what remains on the client's side?
As an external consultant, I am not responsible for the work of the team, this is the task of the owner and the CMO. My responsibility is to inform that the work did not go according to plan, the results are not being achieved or that the employees/contractors are not professional enough. It's much easier to talk about it when you're on the outside.
What should be the result of cooperation?
The result is a system that works like an established mechanism.
There is a team, there are goals and tasks related to them, there are KPIs and an incentive system for achieving goals, there is a reporting system and a system for working on tasks: sprints, task statuses, deadlines.
My task is to teach the team to work. So that I could unlock at any moment, and the team continued to be efficient and produce results.
Share examples of what problems you have already helped clients solve as an involved marketing director?
Here, for example, is a case study of one of the outsourced companies. The request was as follows: "Traffic is increasing, applications are increasing, there are few customers. It is not clear what the matter is."
Analyzing the data from Google Analytics and CRM, I saw that the field "Reason for losing the deal" was filled in manually by salespeople. That is, there were about as many reasons for the loss as there were lost deals, and it was impossible to group/analyze them.
I manually went through all the applications, talked to sales and grouped the reasons for rejections from a hundred to a dozen. At the same time, each of the new reasons for refusal had an additional meaning - targeted or non-targeted application. In CRM, we replaced manual filling with a list from these groups, and in analytics, all applications for the past year were divided into targeted and non-targeted.
It turned out that traffic and the number of applications are really increasing. But there are fewer and fewer targets among them. It remains to divide the data by channel, find traffic sources that lead to non-targeted applications, cut them off and focus on those that lead to the most targeted ones.
"Helping to run processes until the team gets used to chaos"
You have a clear entry threshold for customers. Why is it like this: at least 20 hours a month and at least three months of work?
It's simple math. 20 hours per month, about one hour per working day is the minimum time needed to see how tasks are performed in the company.
The period of cooperation is at least three months, optimally six. During this time, you can see the first results. Tasks are taken to work a month after the start of cooperation, in the second or third month the first ones are completed and you can assess what they have led to.
The cost of an hour of consultation is $100. I took this amount through an integer. The vast majority of consultants charge much more, but my task now is to make cool cases, so I am ready to work for this amount.
In conclusion, please tell us which companies you are most interested in working with and why?
Ambitious outsourcing companies in the early stages of development drive me the most. We speak the same language with their owners. My experience is enough to plan the actions several months in advance, start the necessary processes and start building the system before the team had time to get used to the chaos.
More about how Andriy Chumachenko helps businesses as an engaged marketing director here.
