Client: Jade Solutions
Period: June 2020 – March 2022
Challenge: Increasing revenue ready for exit.
Key activities: Re-messaging, cross-sell strategy, outbound campaigns, comms, assets/creative, PR, IM/SM sale preparation.
The challenge
Jade Solutions (now part of Renovotec) supplies comprehensive IT solutions to the transport, hospitality, and retail sectors, with high-profile clients including Clarks, Costa Coffee, Eddie Stobart, FedEx, Marks & Spencer, McDonald’s, and Next. The management-owned company was profitable, but growth had stalled, and the management team needed to revive this, as they had an 18-month window to prep the company for an exit.
The background
Although the company had always had ‘marketing’, this had been outsourced to a marketing agency, with the primary interface back to the business being the Sales Director. The agency had helped with a rebrand but, for the last 6 months, had been retained to deliver social media updates and the occasional supporting sales literature. It certainly wasn’t strategic, and it wasn’t helping drive any revenue or growth. To be fair to the agency, this wasn’t entirely their fault. They had tried to discuss campaigns and outbound efforts, but the Sales Director didn’t have the time to invest in the relationship, so it stalled.
The engagement
Andy joined the business as a Fractional CMO to implement a marketing strategy to increase revenue over 12 months. This was a mix of new business in greenfield accounts and a plan to upsell and cross-sell to the existing customer base, which was diverse but bought only a small subset of the solutions the business offered.
Everybody knows that you can go and get a part-time Finance Director/CMO … it’s a little-known fact that you can do the same with Marketing and get the quality of people like Andy that we were lucky to work with.”
For Jade Solutions, we implemented a four-phase plan:
Fact-find & strategy
Understood the business, their customers, and where the marketing needed to focus to align with the revenue growth targets.
Fractional support team
We put together a small team of three part-time specialists to handle strategy, implementation, comms and outbound marketing.
Implementation
We implemented the plan, which was based around generating new business opportunities and upselling to existing customers.
Regular review & report
Each month we reviewed progress against the strategic targets and KPIs we agreed.
The results
SGC Marketing engaged with Jade Solutions over a two-year period, during which time we helped increase revenue by over £2 million and positioned the business for a successful sale to Renovotec. Highlights include:
Sales
- Inbound lead gen from new business
- Upsell to existing customers
- +2m increase in revenue
Support
- All new solution assets
- CRM/outbound strategy
- Active campaign plan
Strategy
- Positioned the business for exit
- Created IM/SM documents
- Business sold to Renovotec