incite

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the marketing communications director at a marketing communications agency.

What challenge were you trying to address with incite?

We needed help with lead generation.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They manage our lead generation campaigns and calling to generate opportunities. The team manages email outreach campaigns with follow-up calls.

What is the team composition?

Laura (VP) is our main point of contact. We also work with a client manager, a junior client manager, and a managing partner.  

How did you come to work with incite?

They were the incumbent provider when I joined three and a half years ago. They continue to do a great job.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent somewhere in the region of £500,000 (approximately $699,300 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in April 2008, and our work is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We track the number of leads they generate for us, the quality, and profitability of the new business. Overall, their work has been very positive for our business.

How did incite perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re very good at meeting deadlines.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They continue to deliver a high standard of work. They’re approachable and very good at their job.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could offer a wider variety of services in different business models; we’re always looking for new ways of doing things.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

My advice is to work with them. Be open and honest and let them know what your objectives are.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the managing director of a brand design agency based in the UK.

What challenge were you trying to address with incite?

They manage our new business outreach, which is something that we found very difficult to do in-house because it requires a broad funnel, as well as managing all of those potential prospects all the way through the funnel to the close is actually enormously demanding. We are a small agency, and there are only about 10 of us, so to devote that time simply wasn’t possible.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our positioning is a bit complicated, and we’ve always struggled to encapsulate it in 10 words. We target companies all over the world, and they tend to self-select to bigger companies and the senior people in them, who are very difficult to reach. Incite gives us lots of different ways to come at our target audience, managing channels with a wide reach. This gives us a number of different bites at the cherry and helps us not rely on one channel all the time.

We run a number of services, including a LinkedIn connection program and webinars, and incite recruits for those, as well as follows up with attendees. We also do classic email outreach, and, again, incite follows up with responders. Finally, incite has set up white papers and other resources on our website for visitors to download, which requires them to put in their contact details.

Some companies only operate in the digital space — whether it’s email or LinkedIn — and don’t jump on the phone with targets, but incite is able to do that as well. They will actually talk to people to get them to commit to meetings.

What is the team composition?

We have a day-to-day account manager, and there is also an account director who oversees the work. Occasionally, I will deal with Alex, who is the managing director, and there are quarterly review meetings with one of the other partners as well.

How did you come to work with incite?

When we decided that we needed to outsource, we started with a classic Google search. We spoke to three companies. Interestingly, one of these business never got back to us, and that ruled them out. The other agency contacted us with a classic cold call, and that felt like a very old-fashioned approach — not similar to what we do. They didn’t seem to have any means to truly create a proper funnel. incite was very clear about the need to keep topping off the funnel, but also growing different channels to tap into people through. In the end, it was a pretty simple choice.

A lot of new business agencies are hired for six months, but they don’t transform your business and then you fire them, so they start to demand a six-month minimum contract. incite doesn’t do that, however. We commit to them one month at a time, which speaks to their confidence in themselves.

How much have you invested in them?

We spend £30,000 (approximately $41,900 USD) a year.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them in September 2017, and we are still working with them.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

They drive business that we simply wouldn’t receive without them. We have a pretty good client base, and we’ve obviously developed our own contacts as well, but they successfully place us in front of companies that we simply won’t approach or can’t access with our contact list.

We just sent off a proposal to a company I had never heard of, but they are really big. They have some very prestigious brands and do joint ventures with a well-known internal consumer goods corporation. They’re the real deal, but I had literally never heard of them.

We have a genuine partnership with incite; the webinars run on our content, but they manage the recruitment and follow-up process. We focused on big companies in the past, but inevitably we talk to the same ones that everyone else is talking to. incite has been able to widen the net a bit, and that’s very important to us.

Incite stays within our target audience of large companies but they’ve expanded our reach through a shotgun approach. We wouldn’t be able to handle the scope and cost of this project by ourselves as we don’t have the necessary infrastructure, but their systems have enabled us to reach masses of people.

If you look at this work realistically, the success rate is 1 in 10,000 or less, you only need one success — more than one ideally, but you don’t need many. It doesn’t matter if 99.999% of what we do doesn’t convert because, with incite, we are able to do a lot at that early outreach stage.

How did incite perform from a project management standpoint?

We have a phone call every two weeks with the project manager, whose job it is to manage the funnel and the follow-ups. Our initial outreach is fully automated — incite presses a button and sends 10,000 emails or LinkedIn requests or whatever form the message takes. As responses come in, she manages those and follows up, either with emails or phone calls.

We also discuss what is coming up in terms of content that is required. One of the responsibilities that the process puts on us is that we continually need content to put into these different channels. If we don’t give incite high-quality content, then inevitably, their efforts are less effective.

After meeting with the project manager, I sometimes speak to the account director. Their roles are fairly well defined I would say. There’s also a quarterly review to look into bigger pieces of the plan.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We wouldn’t have stuck with them this long if we weren’t seeing results. This isn’t the first design agency I’ve run, and I’ve seen how difficult it is, whether you run the process in-house or take it outside. incite actually gets the results in terms of the business going through, rather than other companies that measure their success on the number of meetings set. This can be disastrous, as it was when I flew to Denmark while working with another company to meet with a lead that had no ability to do business with us.

We’ve been able to deliver our proposition through a number of different channels very consistently, and we are becoming known for it. Incite is able to entice and seduce targets in different ways, whether it’s through blog pieces or LinkedIn, or direct email. Additionally, being able to offer these companies something has been effective, rather than simply stating that we are really great and asking for a meeting. Together with incite, we have worked out an approach that speaks to these big companies and inspires them to talk to us — and occasionally they commit.

It’s absolutely unrealistic to expect a small company to do everything we ask of them, but incite does it very well.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It’s taken a while to nail down how we work best together. In the first six months, everything was great because they were so many new people we could talk to and we were getting hits. After that period, we started to feel like we were treading water a bit. I think it took perhaps a bit too long — and this is a criticism of us as well as them — to realize that we needed to step up. It wasn’t sustainable to rely on the exact same content with only slight variations time and time again.

Now, we know what we should be doing, and it works really well. We are pretty happy with them. I think both parties underestimated how much collaboration would be required to make our particular proposition work.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

You can’t subcontract a new business and then walk away to focus on something else. You have to be involved.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a brand language agency. We help clients find their voice in the marketplace, build a distinctive value proposition, and take that to market with persuasive copy and content that gets them in front of their customers.

What challenge were you trying to address with incite?

We’re great at the marketing side of things, but we’re not well placed on the sales side of things. Building a sales process from scratch as well as bringing existing people and new individuals up to speed was not something we were in a place to do.

Our challenge is that nearly 100% of our client acquisition is through referrals. That meant we were always getting business from the same type of clients in the same type of sector. There’s no harm in that and it’s a nice place to be in, but if we wanted to leap up the ladder a couple of rungs to work with different types of clients, it was extremely difficult to do so when we were entirely reliant on the referral business.

Essentially, we wanted to extend our reach and bring ourselves to new markets. That was the challenge we had and we didn’t have the infrastructure to do that ourselves.

What was the scope of their involvement?

incite held a few in-depth sessions with us upon the initiation of the engagement. During this time, the objective was for them to understand what our offering was to the market. They were taking the time to understand how we could splice up the marketplace in an effort to start going after different prospects. Their process and manner for this execution were quite detailed. Those efforts led them to do a series of campaigns.

We then had some work to do around building some collateral to take to those prospective clients when incite were on the calls with them. Being able to reference case studies, slide decks that share our process, or testimonials from clients all added to our collateral. The process was very much led by incite. They looked in our target markets and defined what it was about our company that’d persuade those prospects to keep the conversation going.

What is the team composition?

We work with an online marketing executive, account manager, and one of their founders.

How did you come to work with incite?

One of my colleagues had been in a mentoring program. She was having a discussion about lead generation and how we could utilize it and incite was immediately referred as a company we should be talking to. We had already considered outsourcing these efforts because it’d be far too time-consuming to do it well ourselves.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested about £25,000 (approximately $35,000 USD) thus far.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing engagement started around August 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

incite has had a huge impact on the types of people we’re having conversations with as well as the type of prospects we’re winning. We’re bringing business in that wasn’t on the table before; it’s fantastic. Our agency is building relationships with clients that we’ve never had the opportunity to build with before.

The most important thing is billable work. We knew we wouldn’t get an immediate bottom-line improvement. We finally hit on a rich sea of prospective clients around November 2020 and it’s been constant since. It was a case of refining what we give incite as well as our teams working together to figure out what’s working and what isn’t.

We retired some of the propositions we take to the market as well. Some of the propositions were very slight with the prospects. It’s better to focus the effort on the areas where we do have successful conversations and people willing to spend money. There’s no point in offering something to the market when the market doesn’t believe it needs it.

The first few months were relatively slow but we kept the faith and adjusted the approach a little bit. It’s paid dividends for us since then. That was something we knew we were in for but until we’re spending the money and not seeing an awful lot come back in, we wouldn’t have known to refine the approach. incite has stuck with it. We’re now in a much better place where it’s working and continuing to progress from them.

How did incite perform from a project management standpoint?

We have a portal we utilize for communication and project management. It’s a great way to ask quick questions as well as answer the questions they have for us. Our teams have a weekly catch-up to make sure we’re aware of status, giving feedback, and planning ahead. The information exchange is really good.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have a sense of professional tenacity. incite is great at wrestling down a lead and getting that prospect to talk on the phone with me. They also utilize a strong process behind all of this. Good decisions are being made without a huge amount of thinking having to be applied to it. incite is able to qualify really quickly and do it well. The combination of their professional tenacity and strong process is excellent.

Are there any areas they could improve?

This isn’t a criticism of them but more because we’re copywriters and language experts. Their team members who write the email and LinkedIn outreach campaigns provide a good template. They’re getting to learn our style and voice better. That’s important to us because the written word is our currency in our business. We have a high level of expectation on that.

We bolster what they’ve done and build on top of it while refining. This isn’t something they need to work on. Our reviews just make sure they’re hitting our tone of voice. It is the one thing we spend the most time on. Again, it’d be an unrealistic expectation for any agency. The combination of their formula and our voice is great.