Team,

Marketing is about branding, positioning and staging for sale. We wanted to see if we were doing a great job in all three areas. So, we have been busy the last few months talking and listening to our existing customers (our Advertisers, not our retail agent base).

A few things were immediately evident -

1. We are perceived as the industry leader in specialty market search.
2. We have the most proactive support team.
3. Our customers think we have great automation and systems, best in class.

A pretty good scorecard, by any standard. Why then, should we be at all concerned?

Because of what a few of our customers said -

1. "You guys provide more than email marketing services? I had no idea!"
2. "I don't know for sure how much actual business we have written from your marketing efforts."
3. "While I see that you have provided us with hundreds of submissions, my underwriters tell me this is the first time they are seeing these leads, many of which are over 6 months old!"

Hmm, time for a huddle -

We have a 'positioning' problem.

If our customers and prospects think that all we do is 'email marketing' we have to do a better job of communicating our position. Let's begin now -

• CompleteMarkets is not an email-marketing vendor, a product directory or a digital ad agency.
• CompleteMarkets is a leading insurance marketing company that constantly innovates and evolves to the needs of the rapidly changing insurance industry.
• CompleteMarkets is in a "Category of ONE"

Rather than throw out a bunch of acronymns and jarjon, here is a supporting visual of our evolving strength wheel.

Establishing ROI for some clients seems to be an issue.

This is not a quick fix. And, in some ways is tied to the next issue - internal agency training and communications. However, we (at Completemarkets) can close one remaining gap - the missing phone call activity. We currently provide full reporting on submissions, leads, search results, views, clickthroughs, blog activity, group activity, press release activity, storefront and microsite analytics - but we do not currently provide phone call activity reporting. Well, that will change here in the next few weeks, as our CallTracking solution goes live to customers that participate.

Our customers have an internal communications issue.

New Agent Leads and Storefront submissions sourced from CompleteMarkets don't always find their way to the correct department. In fact, many underwriters don't understand at all what a CompleteMarkets lead is, sometimes they are not aware that the Agency has outsourced some or all of it's marketing to CompleteMarkets!

There are some surefire long term solutions we are working on currently, but in the near term, the solution is to orient the entire team at the beginning of the relationship and at least once a quarter. This is something our sales and support folks have already begun to implement with our existing customers.

In conclusion, we must continue to learn from our customers. Our customers also told us what their pain points are - and we have already quietly begun innovating to solve their issues. But, every single one of us MUST pay attention to what our clients are telling us and sometimes what they are NOT telling us. We exist to understand and solve our customers' problems and we must think about this every day.

Sincerely,

Adrian Holloway, CEO - CompleteMarkets.com.