Scroll2Lead vs Directive: which fits a software company better?

What is the actual difference?

Breadth against depth, and that is the whole comparison rather than a polite way of avoiding it.

Directive operates as a full-funnel B2B performance agency. The proposition is that search, paid social, measurement and the strategy tying them together sit with one team, which matters a great deal when the channels affect each other and nobody internally is coordinating them.

We do one channel for three kinds of company. That means we have seen the same Meta problems repeatedly in the same context, and it also means we cannot tell you what your search account should do, because we do not run search accounts.

Neither of those is a better model. They answer different questions, and the question you have depends mostly on how many channels you are trying to run at once.

Breadth against depth. Which is right depends on how many channels you are running, not on which agency is better.

When is Directive the better choice?

More often than a page on our own site would usually admit, and the cases are specific enough to recognise.

If search is your primary channel and paid social is secondary, you want the team that owns the primary one. If you have multiple channels running and nobody senior coordinating them, a single agency across all of them will beat two specialists who do not talk to each other. If you are a larger SaaS company with a budget that comfortably supports several channels at once, the coordination is worth more than the specialisation.

And if you want one relationship rather than several, that is a legitimate operational preference and it points away from us.

We would rather say that here than have the conversation in month three.

When are we the better choice?

When Meta is the decision you have already made, and when your company is not a pure SaaS business.

The clearest case is a company that has decided paid social is the channel to solve and wants somebody whose whole practice is that. A specialist has seen your specific failure mode before, because they see very little else.

The second case is the shape of your business. Directive's centre of gravity is SaaS. A good deal of our work is with software development agencies and IT services firms, which sell delivery rather than a product, have a different sales motion and a different definition of a qualified lead. Those are not SaaS problems wearing a different hat.

The third is scale. A smaller budget does not spread across channels well, and one channel run properly usually beats three run thinly.

• You have already decided Meta is the channel to fix.
• You sell delivery work rather than a software product.
• Your budget suits one channel run properly, not several run thinly.
• You want the people doing the work to be the people in the meeting.

What should you ask both of us?

The same questions, and compare the answers rather than the pitch.

Ask who will actually run the account day to day and how many other accounts that person carries. Ask how a qualified lead will be defined and who agrees it. Ask what happens if the target is missed, and whether the remedy triggers automatically. Ask what you keep when you leave: the ad account, the pixel history and the creative.

Ask both of us what we would expect to go wrong in your first ninety days. A specific answer indicates someone who has run accounts like yours; a reassuring one indicates a good salesperson.

If the answers are close, pick on breadth versus depth. If they are not, the answers matter more than the model.

1. Who runs the account, by name, and how many others do they run?
2. How is a qualified lead defined, and who agrees it?
3. What happens automatically if the target is missed?
4. What do we keep when we leave?
5. What do you expect to go wrong in the first ninety days?

What are we worse at?

Several things, and they follow directly from being small and narrow.

We cannot run your search account, so if the answer to your problem turns out to be search, we will tell you and then not be able to do it. We have no bench: a specialist team of our size has less capacity to absorb a sudden increase in scope than a larger agency does. And we have less institutional process, which is a genuine cost as well as a genuine benefit.

We also work with a narrower set of companies, so if you sit outside software, IT services and B2B SaaS, our pattern library is worth less to you than it looks.

If those matter more to you than channel depth, the comparison has already answered itself.