Situation

An established global IT solutions provider had been selected as a supplier on the initial UK Government G-Cloud framework.  Whilst the company was a substantial and existing provider to UK central and local government, it was looking to quickly establish itself within the new framework agreement.  It had a range of cloud-based propositions within the framework and wanted to deliver a series of campaigns to promote the breadth of capability.  It had also invested in building a secure, UK-based information management platform based on Microsoft’s Office 365.  Being confident of an early win, the company was looking to promote the solution more widely across the UK public sector.  XLR8 Marketing, with its Public Sector and Microsoft expertise, was a natural fit and therefore Microsoft recommended that the company should engage with XLR8 Marketing to help engage the Public Sector market.

Solution

The initial deliverable was an on-site Marketing planning workshop where we pulled together the various stakeholders from the public sector, marketing and solution delivery teams to identify and prioritise the offers to be promoted, define the target market segments and develop the proposition messaging.  Following the workshop, XLR8 Marketing were engaged to plan and deliver a series of events and lead generation campaigns to engage the target audiences, identify opportunities and nurture leads through a joined-up marketing approach.  Deliverables included:

  • Development of a series of sales enablement assets for sales teams to quickly absorb the individual propositions and position them with regard to market need, solution benefits and competitive advantage.
  • Event planning for a range of cloud-based service/ solution events to multiple market segments including Central Government, Local Government and Police.
  • Audience drive including new contact development and contact data cleansing/ management
  • Lead generation and pipeline development with ongoing lead nurturing and opportunity qualification
  • Microsoft account-based marketing and sector-based engagement to accelerate opportunity development
  • Scottish Regional engagement to generate awareness throughout public sector bodies in Scotland, to generate interest and attendance at local events

Results

The company was quickly able to plan and deliver a series of six cloud-based events which were well attended (over 80% attendance) and aligned to specific sector issues.

The event series and lead nurturing was delivered over a 12-month period enabling continuity with the target segments, leads to be developed/ tracked and relationships to be built with target contacts.

Many significant opportunities were identified, documented and nurtured during this period, enabling the company’s sales teams to apply their focused expertise at the right time, to pre-qualified opportunities.

Said the company’s senior sector marketing manager “We have worked with many agencies, but were looking for a marketing partner with industry knowledge and experience, to provide insight into how to engage with our target markets to help strengthen our client relationships and identify new sales opportunities.  XLR8 Marketing bring this expertise and being a full service marketing agency, can also advise on how to integrate complementary marketing tactics and best practice techniques which enable us to improve the overall effectiveness of our campaigns and deliver better results.  We have been very impressed with their deep understanding of our market and industry; we like their responsiveness and the collaborative way they work to add value to our internal marketing team”