Revolutionizing Marketing with AI: Brantley Davidson's Journey with Prometheus
Brantley Davidson left a decade at WPP agencies to start Prometheus with his brother during COVID, bringing enterprise marketing and tech strategy to mid-market companies. The agency optimizes CRM systems like HubSpot and Salesforce, builds automation workflows, and increasingly sells AI-first solutions. Revenue is shifting from 70% CRM work toward a 50/50 split with AI within a year.
Questions this video answers
A WPP agency network (Wonderman → Wunderman Thompson → VML) where he led client strategy and services.
Around a decade.
He left during COVID; Prometheus was conceived around that period when he transitioned to middle-market work.
Approximately 70% CRM, 20% data, and 10% miscellaneous (ad hoc/AI/consulting).
He expects revenue to be split roughly 50% CRM and 50% AI.
Chapters
Welcome to Founders Future, a podcast powered by Closures IO, where we dive into the journeys of innovative entrepreneurs and explore the road ahead for them and their companies. I'm your host, Amar Elm, and in each episode, we uncover the stories behind impactful ventures, the challenges faced along the way, and the strategies driving their future growth. Today, we are absolutely thrilled to be joined by Brantley Davidson, the founder and CEO of Prometheus of Prometheus Agency. This is an agency that is igniting growth by leveraging AI to transform marketing and sales strategies into a dynamic and integrated revenue engine. With over a decade of experience in branding, strategy and content creation, Brantley's vision is rooted in building meaningful connections between brands and people. His agency stands out for merging powerful storytelling with strategic direction. Brantley, welcome to Founders Future.
Man, thanks for having me on. This is going to be fun. Let's chop it up.
I'm excited to dive in, man. Yeah. Take me on a trip down memory lane to before you started Prometheus.
Yeah.
What were you doing before and then what was really the motivation behind starting the company?
Yeah, I spent and was blessed. It's been around a decade for a large marketing agency based here in Memphis, so it's part of the WPP ecosystem. Our shop here in Memphis was the Performance Marketing center of excellence for Wonderman, which became Wonderman Thompson and is now vml. And for call it five to seven years, I was leading client strategy, doing new business, putting together solutions across client sales funnels and helping to say, hey, here's what you need. Here are your objectives here. Let's go build a team to make that happen. And then working with teams to ensure that it was actually driving the results that we were promising. Towards the end of my career there I was leading the strategy and client services teams and honestly just got to work with some really great people and great brands both internally and externally. Large Fortune 250 clients in the financial services, healthcare space, consumer goods, lots of different sort of enterprise experience that sort of catalyzed me to where I am now. So lots of great foundations and strategy and really good people to get to partner with.
I love it, man. Why branch out on your own? Why not just keep working there?
It was one of the hardest things I'd ever done, honestly, to leave that company and kind of a combination of COVID and which was when I left and just really a desire to go and help the middle market. I felt like I had been given this gift of enterprise strategy and I wanted to bring it into the middle market and prove growth there Maybe have a little bit more of a catalyzing impact versus an enterprise. Maybe it's a little bit slower at times to see the impact of what you're putting together. That and my, my brother is on my team and we wanted to work together and had always chatted about the opportunity to partner together on certain things. And I took a short stop at an Amazon retail business here locally, which was super fun to learn that world. Amazon's just very different. Retail media was very different from my past.
Yeah.
And while I was there, that's where Prometheus was birth, if you will, was the idea of saying, okay, now I've got some experience now in the middle market with that company, seeing what their pain points are, the types of things that we would need to build and think through. And yeah, so that's where when my brother moved to Memphis, I was like, dude, let's go build something together.
Yeah, that's awesome. It's nice to have somebody who obviously is as close as a brother. Building with you makes a decision slightly easier. Let's fast forward to give the listeners more context into Prometheus. So you mentioned market a couple times. I would love for you to expand a little bit on who is your ideal customer.
Yeah. So we started out with this premise at first where we would go and talk to companies that maybe had recently been in a private equity round or seemed like they were maybe on the tipping point of going through that potential transaction. Mainly because what the thesis, where my thesis was these companies maybe have traditionally grown with more of a sales foundation, maybe really haven't taken sort of the growth component of what marketing can do at scale. And so they might need enterprise thinking and strategy to come on board and say, okay, you've got these existing platforms, here's where your existing performance is, what is needed to go to the next level. And from marketing ourselves, that's where we started. And so we couldn't obviously solve every problem for every client. I'm not operating as a large agency. And so a lot of times we were coming in with those clients and saying where is performance lacking? Where can we maybe also look at your tech stack and make some optimizations to prove like that piece of the sales funnel. So not necessarily creating more inbound on the lead side or the traffic side, even though we would have potentially partners if the clients wanted us to be accountable to that. But we were primarily saying okay. And you think through the lead to conversion life cycle and the things at the conversion point to drive loyalty, you've made these investments in tech stacks or maybe you haven't. How can we prove that out for you? Build it, optimize it and really turn that into a true growth engine for the company.
So it's less about let's increase the top of funnel numbers and more about, okay, you're already getting this many leads.
That's right.
How can we convert more of these leads and systematize automate, streamline the process more effectively?
That's right. Yeah. And my background at Wonderman, we were always we, even though we thought full funnel, we were primarily given the responsibility and strategy of driving like the top funnel activities. What's the right media strategy? How do we drive leads and prove that those leads convert into customers? So we were always going to market with other centers of excellence within the network, like the Salesforce Partnership or the Marketo partnership, and always linking arms with those folks at a large enterprise scale. And now we're bringing that performance media mindset into tech to say we know media, we know what it takes when you've got those activities going and the algorithms are working. Now, how do we set up your platforms in a way that help your sales team can maybe automate things for them, make it easier for them. And now as the sort of evolution's happening, it's how do we make AI be so embedded and borderline native and what y' all are doing if you've already invested in the tech to scale exponentially, what those people are capable of doing within the organization and within the tech that they've already invested in.
Yeah, that's huge. And I can see how a lot of sales teams, most founders, especially at a certain level, they don't have the time nor the desire to learn how to implement these types of systems themselves. So somebody like Prometheus, that you have the knowledge, you have the know how, you have the expertise, come in and just help us implement this. Walk me through what a typical client engagement looks like. So let's say somebody signs up, all right, we're going to start working with Prometheus. What does that client journey look like from start to finish?
Yeah, it's similar to like the really the foundations even start with media planning. It's. I really believe in good strategy and objective setting at the very top. From a business perspective, even though we're thinking technology solutions, we want to understand what the business is trying to accomplish. And starting at the top, but then getting into the detail to say, all right, where is the tech? Maybe misaligned with what the objectives of the CEO is or the CMO or the CRO, and then let's look at it, listen to pain points and solve some things that maybe, whether it's a utilization problem or a data problem, we can come in, prioritize those things with the team, put some at times, some ROI to those factors to say if we fix this is what we think it can drive over time. And then we work with the team to really create a roadmap to implement those efforts directly within their technology stack or bring new resources to bear from a technology perspective to help lift what their current investment is. And that's where whether. Maybe we want to go into this in a little bit where we think about if a client has invested in something like a HubSpot, right, and they've got certain seat pricing that they're leveraging, there's a lot of systems that they can do within HubSpot, but now one actually has the ability to pilot or test new things, maybe outside of HubSpot, and have them connect and work together at a different scale than I think we've ever been able to do. So whether that's leveraging make or Zapier or different AI automation tools and have them really connect and talk together, that's what sort of is the sort of budding ask for that's happening with all of our clients, where we're able to not just stitch, but really align different tech platforms in a way that I think is really the new sort of like evolution of these efforts in the middle market. Who's willing to invest in these types of things.
Yeah, I completely agree. Make is a great one. Zapier is a great one. N8N yeah, he has a little bit more experience with the tech side of things.
Yeah.
Super, super powerful. But I couldn't agree more. The companies that implement this are going to be leaps and bounds ahead. The companies that don't. Because my thought process is anything that is. Has been is being done manually. That doesn't really require a lot of critical thinking that can easily be automated today simply.
Yeah, yeah. Being able to talk with the company CEO and say, hey, we. You've wondered if it's possible this thing is causing bottlenecks. We've got three people dedicated to this. How can we augment new tech on top of it to save time? And how much time could we save? Yeah, that's where we put some ROI to even like the operational side of things. It's not just the marketing and sales. It's saying, okay, these things. If we implement this, we think we could save you 5 hours 10 hours a week per employee, that adds up. Then you get to say, okay, that's admin work. We can now move those hours into more higher level strategic thinking efforts. And that's what I mean by business case with clients, it's saying sometimes it is a conversion lift, which really does just go straight to the bottom line. But if it's an operational optimization, that's when you can say, let's work with you to put real math to it and prove that what we're doing works and then we can go do more and those teams get augmented, they get to do higher value work and it's better for the company and it's better for the team. We're not necessarily talking about replacing people. We're basically saying, let's give them better work.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's making them more efficient, driving productivity, which ultimately will drive revenue and drive profit. Yeah, I love that. Let's shift a little bit to the back end of the business when it comes to client acquisition. So when you're looking to bring on more clients into Prometheus, what are you doing from a lead generation and marketing perspective?
Yeah, I've got believe that it's tough to market yourself. I have two different shops that I work with that do my LinkedIn. I invested in LinkedIn what I would say around this time last year where I hired a content team that I work with, I think does great work in keeping me active and thinking through efforts and consistent on the platform. I've got an outbound agency that I work with that goes out and we're testing different types of targets and booking calls and conversations with those folks directly. That's something that I've launched within the past 120 days and I'm seeing a really great success in terms of the compliment with what we're currently doing. So those are like the channel base of LinkedIn. Like that's one area where we've seen thankfully some uptick in the types of conversations we're having. The second part of my funnel is local, so if I'm in the middle market, then I want to be active and present here with people in the Memphis and mid south area. And that's again another effort that we've really just picked up. We've really just gotten to the spot where we've created systems and processes. We know who we are, we know what we're doing. It's time to go out and really start creating conversations with folks and seeing if there's pain points that we can help alleviate. And so Those conversations are going really well I think early on. And then thankfully the third piece that I think is really the lifeblood of any agency is really like the combination of organic growth and referrals. And so I think we've been able to have really good organic growth with people and our current clients who are doing good work. And we keep growing what we're able to do with them and hopefully having shared value and opportunity together. And like that referral mechanism of people I've used to work with in my previous time as those folks are taking on different roles in different companies are coming to us, which is really fun. That's why it's great to have to be a founder when people you used to work with come back to you and say I'd love to work with you in your new environment. That trust that's honestly even the past six months has been the most to me where I've had probably four to five new projects with people that are folks within my decade of doing this have said we'd love to bring our business to you and that's a great reason to be in business and do this kind of stuff is to work with those people.
Yeah, powerful. You mentioned a couple different things when it comes to the outbound agency. What are they doing in particular, are they using Sales Navigator? Are they doing cold email? What does that look like?
Yeah, they're doing all of it. They're they. I have not given access over to my email yet cause I just would prefer to handle those things directly. But they're in LinkedIn talking with folks on Sales nav and they have some a platform that they use and integrate into into that tech stack and they're using our HubSpot with us partner and that overall automation opportunity. And their remit is simple. It's to book calls and once the call gets booked, it's up to me to chat with those folks and understand what's happening and go from there. And so if there's if email, you know, one time or this week, literally yesterday we had someone come through on LinkedIn and they wanted to just chat on the phone really quickly. So that was one of those things where it was a fun like quick reaction. Someone where I had a lot of mutual contacts with, we got their text message details and we're able to like hopefully get or we got a call booked for tomorrow.
Yeah, I'm super curious because I've talked to a lot of agency owners and there's kind of mixed feelings about this. As you grow and scale, are you Planning on bringing the marketing internally and put new initiatives yourself instead of outsourcing it to an agency that you're reliant on.
I think historically I would have said I would love to market myself and I just think it's really hard. I just think as agency people we have the tendency to think that we're right a lot of times, particularly strategists. Right. So. So it's really beneficial for me, I think, to work with people that are similar minded in their craft but are bringing a different perspective for what they're seeing as helping me grow my own business. And so obviously I'm going to have a lot of opinions on those types of things, but the success thus far has said it would not be valuable in doing that. So it allows me to focus on how I'm marketing and helping my clients and receive that sort of similar service back. Who are people focused specifically in helping agencies grow and scale?
Got it, Got it. Yeah.
The short answer would be no. I think I feel great about keeping it outsourced for now.
Okay, fair enough. Walk me through the sales process because I can imagine this might be a multi step process in terms of multiple calls, but let's say you have the first initial conversation. What are the different steps at that point for somebody to actually become a client?
Yeah, there's really, there's two ways that we do it. Some go really fast in this market. We want clients to pay for strategy because if, if that, even if it's a small project, that investment on their end lets me know that they're willing to be strategic in how we work and that the onboarding process is and the briefing dance is going to work really well from a client partnership perspective. So that's almost a little bit of like how I screen is and I don't want those stress, I don't want the monetary value of that project to have us lose. However, I do think that there's a lot of value in what we provide in those strategic roadmaps and thinking with folks. And we've, we've done some work with clients where that first step they'll, they like that project, they're pleased with it and they're willing to take it and implement it in house. And so I think that we're able to provide great value that way. And then that leads into oftentimes custom scopes on a retainer basis or project basis just depending on, you know, what that client is hoping to achieve. This the other way that we'll pitch work. And this is also a sort of a similar framework, but just a little bit of a different methodology is getting access into clients accounts like a HubSpot where they're saying they've got a pain point and we'll do a free audit and give them a little bit of a report and say here's the things that we would do. So we're still starting strategic based. We do a quick introductory call with them and say, hey, let's understand your business. What are you trying to achieve? Why do you have issues with this platform? And then we go in, look at it, give them some scoring across data and automation hygiene and different sort of hub hygiene to where we can say here's the thing specifically that we think that we would fix over the next period of time to meet the objective that you're wanting to have.
Interesting. I can imagine the second one might be a little bit more difficult to sell someone on or to get them to want to do that, if that makes sense. Is that your experience or is that kind of the other way around? Because I could actually, yeah, I saw.
If I get on a call with someone it could go as awesome as possible, like the best call ever. And I still feel like it's a 5050 chance. And that's because I just think B2B selling is hard, it takes time, it's complicated. The CMO may really like it and the CEO may just say, no, we're just gonna stay in house for now or let's just muscle it up ourselves versus paying a premium to an agency, which is just the name of the game. We, I would say that they're equal in terms of like how we sell and it really just depends on the existence this, the specific scenario. And I'll use an example like we had a client who came to us, I don't know, 120 days ago and they had multiple enterprise seats on HubSpot. And they were dealing with classic issues of utilization data and really performance metrics that really help them confirm if it was the right platform for them and if it was truly working as a real muscle within the organization. And so in that example, their business and their usage of the hubs, there was nothing we could tell them in a quick snapshot without going super deep with them and taking time to really get to know the people, get to know folks using the hubs. And so a free audit in that scenario did not make sense whatsoever. We did a light audit with them before putting together a formal roadmap. Juxtaposed that with a client who is relatively new to the Platform has a little bit of a smaller team, is in a growth mode as well, but really hasn't started to utilize all the features quite yet. We can go in, understand what they're trying to do, the leanness of who they are, look at some pieces and really put together a combination of best practices and things that we. Things that we've seen work to give them a real plan that, that still has value and is helps us know where we could start with them if we were selected as their partner.
Yeah. Powerful. Yeah. I can. I appreciate you for sharing those examples because it illustrates when each scenario makes the most sense.
Yeah.
Now you think of your vision and where you want to take the company, let's say over the next 12 months from a revenue perspective, performance target perspective. What are you truly aiming towards?
Yeah, I think if we continue to hit on what I think is out is possible and realistic by the end of next year, we'll say, I would expect our revenue to be split 50, 50 between traditional CRM work and AI work. And we're already starting to see that mix shift where right now it's probably, we're probably a mixture of, let's call it 70% CRM, 20% data, and then another 10% of sort of ad hoc miscellaneous, whether it's AI or consulting work. But the more conversations that we're having locally and directly with leaders and we say, hey, we have the capability to help you think through AI solutions, whether it's in your current stack investment or think through new tools and how you can leverage these things to fix sales and ops. That momentum is very tangible for us and we're really excited about some scopes that we've just recently gotten signed that are focused on those efforts in particular. So CRM would still be a piece of it that it's AI first versus CRM first. I do think that those nuances will really matter in terms of how we are helping folks modify and like a little bit of a transformative way. Or we're talking with companies who honestly never went through a digital transformation. They didn't really invest in cloud, they're still foundational in their overall stack. But now they know with AI they need to take a leap. So the solution for them may not be about optimizing a HubSpot or a salesforce, but using different types of tools to stitch things together in a way that still gives them transformation in the AI space, but with a little bit of a reframe on what we would typically think how SaaS would solve those problems. The solutions are just really different now. The opportunities are just significantly different.
Yes. And you really have to be doing this full time to be on top of it 100%. What is the best way for people to reach out to you, to work with you?
Yeah, I would love for them to. They could follow me and reach out on LinkedIn in my DMs pretty regularly with folks. I've got a calendar link I think on my profile where they can reach out and book appointment directly with me. And meeting folks and just chatting with them about their problems is fun. Would love to work. But also just networking is part of the fun of this job as well.
Awesome. Brantley, thank you so much for your time today.
Yeah, man.
So that wraps up another insightful episode of Founders Future to our listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to reach out to Brantley D. Davidson on LinkedIn. We'll have it linked around here so it'll be pretty easy to find. And if you're inspired by today's conversation, don't forget to subscribe to Founders Future wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you are a business owner, coach, consultant, or an agency and you're really looking to scale your business and enhance your sales and marketing efforts, visit Closers IO to discover how we can support your growth journey. Until then, keep on climbing.