Vonazon

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m an executive at a software organization that primarily serves important enterprises. We have a very successful brand with higher-level executives in the marketing and the training and development industries, so corporate communications is a throughline for us.

What challenge were you trying to address with Vonazon?

We needed a full-service marketing & advertising agency to help us with web design, communications, email campaigns, product launch support, Google Ads, social media management, and more.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We tasked Vonazon to help us drive our entire revenue stream through full-service marketing and advertising.

What is the team composition?

We worked directly with an account manager from Vonazon. Additionally, we sometimes talked with a graphic designer, a copywriter, and a technical team. In total, we worked with around five different people.

How did you come to work with Vonazon?

We found Vonazon through a Google search. What we initially found exciting about Vonazon was their executive leadership. Their CEO got on the call to start the relationship, we negotiated a bid, and they even expressed their interest in using our product, so we believed that they would be an awesome fit for us.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $125,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We signed a short contract with them for Q4 of 2017. In 2018, we signed a contract for Vonazon’s full services, but we had to end the relationship in May 2019.

How did your relationship with the vendor evolve?

As I mentioned, it was exciting to see Vonazon’s CEO joining our first call. However, we didn’t talk to him a single time after that. Despite that fact, they made us feel during the first three months that our relationship would work.

When we signed the big contract and committed to the full year, it seemed like Vonazon got what they wanted. From there on, we started to notice that they were not meeting our goals.

We tried to make it work for some time because we were expecting results. Still, every time I got on the phone with them, I had a bad feeling because I kept waiting for results and saw nothing.

Just when we were losing hope, they would deliver great assets. I saw great printed materials, email templates, and more. However, the deliverables were just a product, and they never delivered anything useful like a campaign or a digital strategy. They didn’t focus on revenue, so we were losing money — I guess we had a misunderstanding between what we wanted and what they were capable of delivering.

Before ending the relationship, we made some internal changes to try to make it work. For example, we changed the main point of contact from our side, thinking that Vonazon needed a more disciplined approach. The person we assigned to work with them started reminding them about our deadlines, expectations, and budget, and he asked for reporting and clear deliverables. However, it all kept going downhill, and six months into the change in our relationship, we ended it.

Describe the impact this engagement has had on your business.

Working with Vonazon, we had massive expenditure and very little strategic return. We wanted to grow, but instead of seeing the $600,000 revenue we had projected, we only saw $200,000–$300,000.

When we fired them, our business had been in decline for quite some time. Then, the coronavirus hit, and we had to hire a new agency to help us go through it. Vonazon had a massive negative impact on our business, and we’ve been recovering from it for the last two years, gaining our strength back.

How did Vonazon perform from a project management standpoint?

They assigned us a young, freshly graduated account manager who had no business acumen. She used to get on the phone and ask what we should be doing. I couldn’t believe that she, being the vendor’s representative, didn’t know the path to follow. Although she was a nice person, she lacked the managerial acumen to handle a six-figure account like ours.

In addition to this situation, the account manager would bring different specialists to our calls, but they didn’t seem to even know about us, constantly asking about our business and what they could do for us. It felt like they didn’t even onboard us in the first place.

As for technical project management, I didn’t see a single report on Vonazon’s time tracking so that I could see what the team had done each week. When we brought those issues to their attention, the relationship fractured, and we had to terminate the engagement.

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

The products created by Vonazon’s graphic designer were awesome, which is what kept us with them for as long as we did. It would be great if they were a graphic design agency, but the problem was that they promised so much more.

In what specific areas can they improve?

Vonazon needs to improve their project management, reporting, and revenue attribution. They never justified where we were spending money, and they just delivered visual assets.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you go with Vonazon, start with a very small project. If they start to deliver and guarantee results, you can step up your engagement a bit. Go little by little and ask them to document and report everything so that you don’t have a bad experience as we did.