Sometimes you just need to move quickly. And with The Culture Club, we had full buy in from their team which made that rapid deployment so much easier. The top of funnel challenge is one we tackle every day, and this was a similar scenario.

But it’s a challenge we see time and again, businesses that are ready to make the leap into growth mode but their hands are tied by a non-existent top of funnel engine.

That’s not to say they’re bad businesses, with no sales capability. Far from it. It’s just that scaling can be tricky.

The Culture Club is a genuinely brilliant business, with even better people – but the challenges are similar. Trying to find their niche, their place, their space in the industry. They just needed a guiding hand.

There needed to be clarity in a number of areas that work in sync to deliver the message and build authority in harmony with each other.

Not to mention building key components of your engine inside the business.

So how did we solve it?

We were able to get into a super speedy ramp up with The Culture Club thanks to the total buy in and attitude from their team. This meant quick start campaigns, tooling and set up, and a number of stages ticked off:

• An intensive review and update of the proposition
• Understanding the market challenges faced by the The Culture Club audience
• Sector profiling so we understood exactly who we were targeting and why
• Authority, awareness, and knowledge building content plan that helped establish the business in the space they were targeting
• A refresh of the sales ladder we’d built out previously, validating it and ensuring the buyer’s journey still made sense
• Designing a sales flow that was natural and easy to lean into
• Full tooling and system set up inside the business (not ours) so it ownership could be taken once training on all tools and systems had taken place

Here’s how we went about solving the top of funnel conundrum for The Culture Club.

Launching into discovery made the most sense – as is the case with most projects. Particularly when we needed to enable the top of funnel engine rapidly.

That meant kicking off with a number of micro workshops across four weeks so we could solve:

• Proposition alignment: Understanding the value of New Icon’s business and how that is communicated to their audience
• Connecting the proposition to the sales engine, so that the challenges solved by New Icon were obvious in the minds of the audience
• Sales ladder design so that there was a clear sales pathway for buyers, and that the knowledge inside the business was clearly productised
• Sales strategy design so that the business had a clear roadmap and toolbox of tactics to attack the future with
• Demand engine build so we could get out the gate with campaigns on LinkedIn and email quickly
• Content planning so we could amplify authority, awareness, and knowledge in the target sectors and industries

This kick off approach and rapid onboarding meant that we could then focus eight further weeks on:

• Campaign creation
• Campaign management
• Campaign optimisation
• Inbox management
• Triaging
• CRM best practice
• Weekly rhythm and routine

By loading the project up with strategy and discovery at the start, it meant that we could spend the bulk of the project in activity and optimisation mode.

This, ultimately, meant achieving scale and results.
But crucially, there was the handover period and handover of an engine playbook and wiki that showed exactly how to run the engine and the tactics required.

But what did that all add up to?

The whole of this project would mean nothing without clear deliverables and outcomes. The fact that there was a speedy onboarding, ramp up into campaigns, and then clear training periods made life easier – but it’s not relevant unless there were tangible outcomes.

The profiles we used for demand generation, grew their reach significantly with their Ideal Customer Profile and their LinkedIn profile visitor stats increased by 20% within the first 4 weeks. 

Connections and followers have grown at a rapid rate and the overall reach of the profiles has increased significantly supported not only by the outreach but through the content strategy. 

The meeting booking rate for all profiles was also a brilliant result, booking more meetings than we’ve ever had since the engine started running, which keeps improving month on month. A true example of what operating at scale can do for you.

The outcomes speak for themselves, but even internally we’ve all said how much we enjoyed the project. A shining example of sales accountability and ownership in action.

But what’s important isn’t us, it’s what the client thought.