By Ben Kleckley, Director of Strategy
Ben Kleckley is PlatinumBlack’s Director of Strategy. He leads the firm’s strategy capability, working with clients to define business objectives and translate them into executable growth plans. He brings over 15 years of experience in market and competitive assessments, M&A, growth strategy, and business transformation with a strong focus on creating value from growth opportunities. Ben has previously served as a consultant for multi-national professional services organizations including Capgemini, Accenture, and KPMG supporting clients across industries and functions.
In the race to grow, many companies leap straight into execution—launching campaigns, chasing leads, or entering new markets—without pausing to define their direction. It’s a costly mistake. As Morris Change famously said, “Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.” Ben Kleckley, PlatinumBlack’s Director of Strategy, has spent over 15 years helping companies turn insight into action and accelerate their growth. In this conversation, Ben talks about why strategy isn’t just a “nice to have” before execution—it’s the foundation that keeps your marketing and sales aligned so you can chart a course to lasting growth.
Q: Many clients want to move quickly into execution. Why is the upfront investment in strategy so critical?
Ben: Strategy determines where and how you’ll grow. I completely understand the impulse to move fast—we all want to see results. But if you skip defining your direction, you risk running too far in the wrong direction. Harvard Business Review found that strategic misalignment can drain 60% of a company’s resources—that’s a significant hit to a company’s bottom line (Harvard Business Review, 2021).
It’s like planning a road trip. You wouldn’t just get in the car and start driving—you’d know your destination, the best route, and maybe a few stops you want to make along the way. In business, your “true north” comes from a clear, data-backed strategy. That’s what ensures the work you do—the campaigns you launch, the markets you pursue, the partnerships you form—are all pulling in the same direction. Without that, you can waste time, budget, and momentum.
Q: What’s the risk of moving too quickly into execution without that strategy?
Ben: Fast execution can create the illusion of progress, but without direction, you risk rework—which is far slower and more expensive in the long run.
Strategy forces you to answer some essential questions before you start spending: What are your goals? Who exactly are you trying to reach? What’s the competitive landscape? What do your customers actually care about? It also helps define what not to do. That’s just as important. You don’t want to invest in the wrong markets, products, or channels simply because they look attractive in the moment.
In marketing especially, understanding your audiences and speaking their language is critical. Without that alignment, you may be executing well…but on the wrong positioning, messaging, and go-to-market (GTM) plan.
Q: How do you balance the need for strategy with the urgency to act?
Ben: It depends on the starting point. Some clients come in with solid research—they know their market, their competitors, their customer pain points. In those cases, we can move quickly by absorbing that work and validating it.
But often, what gets handed to us as ‘strategy’ is a set of business goals, buzzwords, or broad statements of intent (e.g. “We will increase market share by 10%” or “We’re going to deliver best-in-class customer experience” or “Our strategy is to grow revenue by 20% YoY). They’re more targets rather than strategies.
A real strategy must answer the how. It’s actionable. It’s incisive and deliberate. It demands trade-offs and establishes clear direction. It should make some people inside your company uncomfortable because it forces clarity. If it sounds like something any of your competitors could say, it’s probably not strategy.
In our process, absorbing and understanding that existing research is important because it drives alignment downstream. When marketing planning and creative execution are built on the same foundation of insights, you avoid the disconnect that happens when strategy and execution are developed in isolation. It keeps everything—messaging, content, sponsorships, media pulses, and marketing campaigns—focused and pulling in the same direction to maximize impact. Companies that get upfront strategy right are three times as likely to report above-average growth and twice as likely to report above-average profits (“Deals That Win”, by J. Neely, John Jullens, and Joerg Krings).
If that foundation doesn’t exist, we need to build it. It’s not about slowing things down unnecessarily, it’s about making sure we have the right insights so execution can move fast and stay on track. The cost of a short research phase upfront is almost always less than the cost of fixing misdirected execution later.
Q: When you’re developing a growth strategy, what are the primary paths a company can take?
I generally see five main ways a company can grow:
Which path makes the most sense depends on a lot of factors like ownership structure, how much capital you have to invest, your growth goals, and how quickly you want to get there. Are you trying to grow 3X in three years, or grow steadily over a decade? The answers to those questions shape the strategy.
And sometimes the best approach is a mix of these. The strategy phase is where we sort through the options, quantify the opportunities, and pick the ones that align with both the ambition and the reality of the business.
Q: Can you share an example where strategy work revealed a new growth path?
Ben: Sure—one that comes to mind is we worked with a telecommunications infrastructure contractor that digs trenches and lays fiber optic cable, read our case study. Through interviews with their customers, we discovered that speed to market was a significant competitive factor. In an industry where schedules often slip, the companies that reliably kept their promises were the ones customers valued most.
With that understanding, we uncovered that by reducing trench depth with a technique called microtrenching, the client could still meet regulatory and safety requirements on top of working significantly faster and at lower cost. Yes, it meant slightly lower revenue per project, but the increased speed allowed them to take on more projects overall and deliver at speed. Shortly after we did the strategy piece of work for them, they acquired a company specializing in shallow-depth trenching. That move came directly from insights gathered in the strategy phase—it’s the kind of opportunity you can miss entirely if you skip the upfront work.
Q: A big part of strategy is uncovering a client’s unique value. Why is that so foundational?
Ben: Unique value is what your customers can’t get anywhere else. If you try to be everything to everyone, you end up being known for nothing. The companies that grow best know exactly what they’re best at—and they double down on it so they become known for it.
It’s about clarity and focus. Once you’ve identified your unique value and established yourself in that space, then you can expand into adjacent markets, new products, or new geographies. But your growth strategy should start by owning a specific position in the market.
Q: How do you uncover that unique value?
Ben: You have to talk to customers. Without those conversations, you’re making assumptions. Customers will tell you—often very directly—what you do well, where you fall short, and why they choose you over competitors.
Sometimes the feedback is about performance, sometimes about experience, and sometimes about intangible factors like trust, relationships, shared values. Once you know the “why” behind their loyalty (or their decision to go elsewhere), you can make better choices about where to invest and how to position yourself.
Q: How important is it to use customers’ own language in messaging?
Ben: It’s critical. Technical accuracy matters, but so does emotional resonance. Too often companies talk at their customers, using internal jargon or marketing language that might sound good in the boardroom but doesn’t resonate in the real world. You want to speak to customers, in their words, about what matters to them.
That’s why listening is so important. When you interview customers, you pick up on the exact phrases they use to describe their needs and challenges. Customers might value that you can deliver to spec, but they might love that you’re a handshake business, or that your founder has been a part of their community for decades.
Those details matter because they’re authentic. When you use the exact language customers use to describe you—both the rational and the emotional—your marketing feels familiar, relevant, and trustworthy. It signals that you understand your customers.
Q: How do you balance qualitative insights like interviews with quantitative data?
Ben: Both are essential. Qualitative research tells you the “why.” Quantitative data shows you the scale and helps prioritize. So they complement one another.
One without the other can be misleading. You might hear a great idea in an interview, but without data you can’t tell if it’s a one-off opinion or a broad trend worth investing in. On the flip side, you might see a spike in market data but have no context for why it’s happening, which makes it hard to act on.
That’s why, in strategy work, we connect the two. For example, we might hear from customers that speed to market is critical. Then we validate that with market data showing which competitors are gaining share because they deliver faster. There’s more data available now than ever before, but the value comes from cutting through it to find what’s actually actionable. So it’s the combination—the voice of customer research plus the hard numbers—that gives you a strategy that charts a course to lasting growth.
About PlatinumBlack
PlatinumBlack helps B2B companies accelerate their growth. Unlike most marketing agencies, we don’t start with brand positioning and identity. Unlike most strategy firms, we don’t stop at delivering data-driven insights in a sizable PowerPoint. We integrate strategy, marketing, and creative execution for maximum impact.
If any of this resonates—whether you’re navigating a tricky business challenge or just want to exchange ideas—we’d love to hear from you.
