Goodway Group is a finalist at the Campaign US Agency of the Year Awards for our New Business Development Team, and our Nick Gaudio is a finalist for Strategic Planner.
According to Campaign Live, the Agency of the Year Awards recognizes “inspiring leadership, creative excellence and outstanding business performance at agencies across the U.S” and those organizations or people who broke new ground and moved the needle with client work.
Why Goodway Group Is a Campaign US Awards New Business Development Team Finalist
Our new business development approach is centered around the client, and it’s this four-pronged approach that led our Goodway team to become a Campaign US New Business Development Team of the Year finalist.
Leading Through Change
2020 was a year when everything changed, and this was true for Goodway Group. Selling in a world that’s known a global pandemic has challenged the modern sales team: arrested supply chains, shattered customer journeys and put companies under fire due to a shrinking workforce.
Buying into “another advertising agency” became a low priority for most brands, creating a new watershed moment in many marketing organizations like Goodway. To find sustainable growth after a year when marketing teams felt the pang of the pandemic, our Senior Vice President of Business Development and Strategy Adam Herman led our business development team to scrap traditional selling methodology and rebuild it with people—not the product—at its foundation. A year into the transformation, Goodway is celebrating record achievements including over 10 prestigious award recognitions for our client work and team success, onboarding nationally recognized clients and partners, building a deep dynamic leadership model to forge a strong selling team and reaching a significant improvement in new revenue models.
Putting Clients First
A longstanding mantra at Goodway is “Make Clients Heroes,” and we strive to do this every day by understanding clients’ needs, creating personalized programs for their business goals, measuring successes and opportunities at every turn and customizing recommendations that are most important to clients, not us.
As the challenger to traditional agencies, Goodway sellers prioritize transparency and honesty while bringing maximum performance value and strategizing with brands on how to use media dollars to drive real business outcomes. Our teams leverage a combination of bespoke technology and top ad tech platforms to build a full ecosystem that not only delivers an unparalleled client experience but results. Our customer-first agile strategy creates an atmosphere of unlimited opportunity, both for our people and our clients.
Rebuilding Learning and Development
Learning and development is a flagship pillar of the business development team.
“In our leadership model, we lead by example,” Adam Herman says. “I use Goodway-sponsored resources to prioritize my personal development and coaching. Taking that approach helped me prioritize that self-owned growth on my team.”
Business development contributors take personal and professional growth into their own hands. Rather than taking the typical sales training classes, they use Goodway’s monthly dedicated learning day to sharpen their sales acumen and grow their skill sets.
This opportunity made it possible for Adam and his team to create a separate space for career coaching and personal development and build more sustainable results and confidence in the talent pool. For instance, a few business development team members hired career coaches who provided valuable resources and helped them fully recognize their value and talents.
Creating Exponential Growth
Goodway’s business development team made their successful transition during a challenging time and created growth in more ways than just revenue. Each team member created opportunities for collaboration during the sales process. They identified powerful allies internally to extend their deep bench of resources and expertise. Every conversation started with the client’s end goal in mind and included internal thought leaders’ innovative strategies that clients desired.
Why Our Nick Gaudio Is a Campaign US Awards Strategic Planner Finalist
Nick Gaudio is Goodway Group’s strategic powerhouse. It’s a status that didn’t happen overnight, but one that he came to after a deliberate journey in digital media strategy. Much of his success comes down to his optimistic mindset, his adventurous spirit and staying open to possibilities. As he likes to say, “There are three kinds of people in the world: fire starters, fire stokers and those who keep the flame alive. I’m a fire starter, keeping things fresh by always asking ‘why not?’”
Building a Wealth of Experience
Before joining Goodway, Nick started his career at Digitas LBi, as a strategy and analysis analyst, creating custom metrics for General Motors through statistical modeling. His model correlated online activities with offline sales and was used from 2008 to 2017, well past when he worked there.
Nick then moved to Millward Brown Digital. As a senior associate of advertising effectiveness solutions, he ran the team that measured and assessed brand lift across attitudinal and behavioral methods, overseeing 30 Fortune 100 accounts, which included Goodway due to the brands we were working with at the time.
Deepening Digital Strategy Expertise
In his first role at Goodway, Nick was as an external-facing director of account strategy for the entire western region, leading client strategy for hundreds of accounts. He developed internal and client-facing materials, including white papers, blogs, strategy road maps and custom solutions.
Following his stint in account strategy, Nick added insights to his repertoire and moved to a director of account strategy and insights role, focusing on internal strategic education. In the few months he was in this position, he developed an enterprise-wide consultative process for account teams to audit key accounts. He also created a quarterly business review report template called the Enhanced Insights Program.
Challenging the Status Quo
Moving to another internal role as director of account management, Nick oversaw the development of a new account management program, which included leading 12 account manager direct reports. During this time, he also developed a new client experience model, worked with Product Management to develop new reporting dashboards and collaborated with sales leadership to establish annual goals.
Fostering Innovation
Nick’s current Goodway role as director of data and business planning combines both internal and external strategic projects. Over the past few years, Nick has created a crawl-walk-run data strategy for Goodway’s sales and sales enablement teams, overseen custom projects involving statistical modeling and predictive analytics for internal and client use and led business planning efforts across the organization.
From winning an Oracle Markie award to significantly contributing to incremental business and much more, it’s been a celebratory year for Nick.
Here at Goodway, we could not be prouder of Nick, Adam and all our talented employees on the business development team. Today, we congratulate them on their accomplishments and wish them the best of luck along with the acclaimed companies and individuals in their respective award categories. Campaign US will announce Agency of the Year Award winners during an in-person award ceremony on February 17 in New York City.
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