The Challenge

A spin-off boutique consultancy with an amazing array of clients, but very little brand awareness and market affinity of its own, in need of a growth guide to get them to the next stage.

Client Struggles

The client had an incredibly unique strategy and delivery approach to a common problem with life sciences companies, but they didn’t have a good way to tell the story.

They sounded like a “me too” consulting firm even though they were really solving a critical need in the market, but nobody outside of their clients knew it.

They had incredibly smart, knowledgeable, and dedicated experts. Yet marketing was an afterthought, and sales was a part-time job. They needed to find a way to focus more energy on sales, while building up their marketing infrastructure and engine.

They had industry experts that could theoretically create thought leadership content, but in reality didn’t have the technical expertise, nor the actual time to do the work consistently. Consistency is 50% of the equation… quality is the other 50%.

The Work

Build a sustainable growth strategy that leverages existing SME knowledge and industry expertise by creating thought leadership content streams that play double-duty as ways scale sales conversations.

Strategic Narrative

After interviewing both internal stakeholders and past customers, our team was able to synthesize the actual secret sauce, while also uncovering the core pain points and related language that actual customers use. Leveraging these insights, we crafted an all-new narrative and implemented it across core marketing and sales materials (e.g. website and sales decks).

Leveraging a key research insight - leading within life sciences startups is lonely - we developed and launched a podcast to help build affinity (read: credibility and trust) in the industry.

This allowed us to leverage existing client relationships, by inviting them on as guests, and also open the doors to new conversations by leveraging the content in outbound, and inviting prospects on the show.

BD Team and SME Activation

Leveraging podcast and virtual event (webinar) content we were able to help key players activate on LinkedIn to drive even more affinity and start actual conversations. We also worked with the business development team on how to leverage these assets in their outbound strategy.

To further amplify the message we used a mix of podcast content and strategic narrative-based messaging, we drove affinity and conversations via LinkedIn Ads, including leveraging LinkedIn's new Thought Leadership ad units.

Acquisition Integration

The client ended up acquiring another firm and we were brought in to help them merge the two very different go-to-market approaches. We assessed existing team capabilities and the execution and assets of the acquired entity and then facilitated working sessions to collaboratively put together a go-forward plan as a combined entity and go-to-market team.

Offer Design

We worked with the client to better organize and promote their service offerings, and specifically worked to help them build an activation strategy for their Executive Advisory Network offering.

Results

• $52 million in revenue (30% YoY growth)
• A clear market position and sales narrative
• Sustainable and scalable go-to-market framework that has executive and board buy-in

It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows though

Our team first struggled to grasp the technical complexity of the life sciences space, which left a lot to be desired with our first pass at the strategic narrative.

We knocked it out of the park with our second pass, by doing incremental qualitative and 3rd party industry research, and coming back with something that really resonated both internally and externally.

We also had a number of operational struggles around keeping all the various stakeholders bought-in, aligned, and rowing in the same direction, without straining the client’s internal billable resources.

We evolved our project management workflow and created a number of what are now standard templates and assets to create and maintain alignment across the various stakeholders.

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