Our Story

The average Gray Suit Marketing consultant has fifteen years of productive marketing experience. Aside from the stack of MBA’s, C-level job titles, and a highly tuned BS meter, each team member is on board to create wealth through doing the best work of their career for the client. Combine this team with a marketing process that produces great numbers, and a new dynamic in marketing is born.

Gray Suit Marketing started as a traditional marketing firm. Working project to project, Gray Suit Marketing created web sites & mail pieces, wrote marketing plans, and performed competitive analysis. Whatever a client desired, Gray Suit Marketing executed. Profit and revenue doubled every year for the first four years.

A business can’t do everything for everyone while doubling profit and revenue every year. How can a business that does everything recruit and train talent? How can that business create core competencies or marketplace positioning? How can systems be created and tracked for excellence? The course was unsustainable, and by the fifth year, our clients were beginning to notice.

In reaction to client feedback, David Warren shut the company down for six months, turned over staff, and selectively recruited an advisory board that included dissatisfied clients. Out of this process a new Gray Suit Marketing was born shaped around a new service offering: the Demand Generation Program.

The Demand Generation Program embodies what Gray Suit Marketing does best. There are many people that know how to do marketing tactics. There are very few that know why and when to implement certain marketing strategies and tactics.

A lot of the lessons Gray Suit Marketing learned by growing too quickly have new value to companies experiencing the economic downturn.

What were those lessons?

• Marketing spending must be based off of data and what is best for the company, not off what is fun or strokes the CEO’s ego.
• If you don’t know core metrics such as the lifetime value of a client and what it costs to gain a new client then it is impossible to successfully market a company.
• Have a serious list of what your company doesn’t do and don’t deviate from it.
• Any effort that doesn’t build revenue or shareholder evaluation should be discarded.

Gray Suit Marketing’s story is now being written in the story of their clients; clients who are pressed against the wall in a tough economy, but have learned they can’t save their way into prosperity or survival. Gray Suit Marketing has come along side these companies to apply many hard lessons learned, marketing best practices, and smart man power to move ahead.