The Agency Goldilocks Game

My biggest frustration when I was in-house head of marketing was working with agencies. It was the same set of problems over and over again. Here’s just an example from 2 years ago of this recurring story….

The first agency - too cold:Our company specialized in healthcare, and the agency I inherited in my new role didn’t know the industry. They took forever to get started on anything because they had to sit there and learn (and bill us for it while they were doing it.) After taking too long to return what we needed, the quality sucked. The whole output often had to be rewritten by us or extensively marked up and sent back. Which wasn’t saving us any time. It was a shitshow.The second agency - too hot:So we parted ways and worked with another one. They knew the industry inside and out. Absolute experts. They were awesome. They’d bring in 7-9 PhDs into every call (not exaggerating), all of them like me, former scientists turned marketers. The knowledge was impressive. Except….

The account manager did 80% of the talking and one of the PhD’s did the rest. And the other people? Just sat there silently contributing nothing. Some were actively multi-tasking. And I’d sit there thinking, am I going to be paying for this? No wonder the monthly fees are so exorbitant. Time to let them go also. The value wasn’t there for the money they were charging.

The third agency - just perfect:The third agency was that perfect Goldilocks sweet spot: knew the industry super well but wasn’t overly expensive. Could get started fast and deliver with exceptional quality. Could do the strategy and the execution, and act as strategic advisor to the company’s exec suite as well.

Except…. it didn’t exist. At least not that I could find.

Now read this unedited quote from a Chief Commercial Officer at a life sciences tech company I just spoke with this past week:

“We’re paying for all 15 people to be involved with every single part of it. So you’re paying for a lot of basically fat, like that doesn’t need to be there. And then the other thing is, yeah, you’re working with a bigger agency. You’re having a huge ramp up time. Everything has to go through six people to get anything done. It’s not very agile.”

Sound familiar?

And I’ve heard various versions at almost every customer interaction we’ve had these past 2 years.

And it’s exactly this silly Goldilocks game that I kept having to play which directly caused me to partner up with Caitlin La Honta to start Sirona Marketing. Our value proposition was exactly that.

• we know healthcare, we know life sciences, we know technology

• so we get started fast and deliver with high quality

• we execute AND advise, and we do it at reasonable rates. We’re not the cheapest and we’re not the most expensive, but we provide the biggest bang for the buck

• and we’re nice :)

That’s been at the root of our brand promise since we started in August 2024. To date, we’ve helped 28 healthcare, healthtech and life sciences companies, and we’re excited when we hear comments like this from that same customer:

“With you guys, we’re not paying for all that excess fat that we don’t need, but we’re also just able to move a lot quickly in order for us to hit this number next year.”

That’s the kind of feedback that confirms that we’re on the right track.

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I’m Abdul, co-founder of Sirona Marketing, a dedicated marketing agency for healthtech and life sciences companies. If you need help with your GTM and marketing, we can help. If we can’t, we know people who can.