Teleos Marketing

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the president of a pharmacy benefits management company that focuses on the hospital space, and we work on prescription drug insurance for hospices. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Telos Digital Marketing? 

We were in bad shape marketing- and branding-wise when we engaged Telos. Our branding, value proposition, and corporate image were generic and poorly defined. We had no real marketing strategy, and our materials were stale.

When we engaged them, we wanted to focus on defining our brand better as well as create a new market image and new marketing materials. We also wanted to better define the programs and services that we bring to the market. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Initially, we created a new brand for our service offerings. They then updated our website and helped us create new brand collateral. 

Now, they’re managing our social media channels and maintaining a webinar series for us. We’ve also launched a monthly newsletter. Occasionally, they polish and update the educational content we’ve developed as part of our clinical services. On top of that, we’re doing other ad hoc, project-based campaigns. 

What is the team composition?

We mainly work with an account manager, who’s also our main point of contact. They have a team of professionals focused on specific campaigns, such as graphics and social media. Occasionally, we have breakout meetings directly with the people in charge of such campaigns. 

How did you come to work with Telos Digital Marketing?

Their owner knew our VP of sales because they were involved in the hospice space. They had a meeting, and we decided to engage them for a limited project that focused on branding. We liked what Telos did in that project, so we decided to engage them in an ongoing contract. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $200,000 so far. They have a retainer model, where we pay to get a set of services up to a certain number of hours per month. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2019, and the engagement is ongoing. 

How did your relationship with the vendor evolve?

Initially, the quality of their service was good — they were able to contextualize our brand overhaul. However, no new ideas have come up since the inception of our engagement. After conceptualizing the brand, everything has become stale and repetitive. For instance, they simply post five images with various captions on our social media channels. 

Telos has a good marketing concept, but managing and driving the strategy forward has been unsuccessful. They often ask us what we’d like them to do, and this doesn’t add any value to the engagement. We’re only giving them assignments and specific tasks, and they’re not making any strategy for us, so the partnership hasn’t truly progressed. 

We do have some ideas and thoughts, but we have to work a lot to materialize them. We don’t have the capacity to do that. When we bring ideas to the table, we’d like Telos to conceptualize and own them and not simply take orders from us. 

How was project management handled?

From a project management standpoint, Telos accomplishes the assignments that they're given. Immediately after meetings, they provide notes of what we’ve discussed. They do that relatively well. 

On the other hand, we feel that our main point of contact isn’t a good fit for us. We don’t particularly like him as an individual because there’s a lot of attitude and huffiness around some of the tasks that we work on. 

Is there anything that the vendor did well or that you would consider a strength?

Telos’ strength is their project management style. They’re accountable, and they do what they say they're going to do. Their deliverables are reasonably good, but there isn’t anything that I’d describe as really good. 

In what specific areas can they improve?

They should own the brand and marketing strategy and realize it through various creative ways as time progresses.

What advice do you have for clients with similar needs to yours?

Telos may be a fine partner for people within organizations that have a clear sense of what they want. They can be accountable, and they can execute the plan relatively well. 

Meanwhile, people who are already working with Telos need to be direct and internally driven in terms of strategy in order to be successful.