Booking 15 Monthly Meetings with Cognism

3 minute read
By: Emma Sands
B2B Data, Marketing

The UK’s leading provider of part-time marketing directors used Cognism’s sales intelligence platform to:

Create 15+ new business meetings per month
Generate a list of warm opportunities
Obtain many new customers in one year
Assist in shortening their sales cycle by 2-3 months

Website: www.themarketingcentre.com

Number of employees: 90

Industry: Marketing & Advertising

Founded: 2011

HQ: Surrey, UK

Target market: CxOs in SMB & MM businesses

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The company

Founded in 2011, The Marketing Centre is part of The Liberti Group. It provides high-calibre part-time marketing professionals to small and mid-size businesses across nine geographic regions in the UK.

Its mission is to supply businesses with a whole new means of acquiring marketing expertise into their business - an experienced proven Marketing Director plugged into the business on a long term part-time basis. The team is driven by the frustration felt by business owners at their lack of appropriate options for accessing marketing skills.

The challenge

We interviewed Pete Jakob, Marketing Director and Mia Russell, Marketing Manager at The Marketing Centre about their experience using Cognism.

Mia explained why they required Cognism to support their new business development efforts.

"Our sweet spot target market are CxOs in small to mid-size businesses in nine UK regions. Prior to Cognism, finding quality data for this vertical was challenging. We had reliable data sources but were typically tied to one-year licenses. At the start of the contract, the vendors would generate the data on our behalf. After 12 months, this data inevitably degraded and became stale very quickly."

"Continually sourcing fresh, relevant data was an ongoing challenge for us."

The solution

What do they predominantly use Cognism for?

"Cognism plays a core role in our email marketing mix."

Mia is the primary user of Cognism. Her central role is to start initial conversations with people who might be interested in hiring a part-time B2B marketing expert to transform their brand.

How long did it take Mia to start using the platform?

"After a very smooth onboarding process, we started using the tool within a couple of weeks. The system was very easy to navigate and dedupe against."

What are her workflows with Cognism?

"We create highly targeted searches based on the requirements of each region. In Cognism’s highly granular filtering system, I refine and segment the list based on these requirements in order to find our desired audience."

Has Cognism helped them reach a new audience?

Mia told us:

"Yes, with our Marketing Mentoring offering we are now reaching out and engaging with smaller businesses."

Mia praised the customer support she’s received.

"The onboarding training was really personable and helpful. Our CSM is very forward-thinking, proactive and aids us in assisting our campaigns and reaching new audiences."

The results

The Marketing Centre’s B2B sales cycle used to be approximately 6-9 months but now it’s around 4-5 months. Pete explained why this has shortened in recent years.

"This has reduced due to a number of contributing factors but it’s undeniable that Cognism has a part to play in this. Its accurate B2B compliant data has increased the chances of our messaging resonating with businesses who might be interested in our services."

"Overall, email marketing is our most successful new business channel. Using Cognism’s valid email addresses to run email campaigns has helped accelerate our sales cycle."

How many more leads have they gained since using Cognism?

"On average 15 new meetings per month."

Mia discussed how impressed she is with the quality of our data:

"Cognism went through a large data cleansing exercise in 2021. Our deliverability significantly improved as a result."

"We have been really pleased with the repeat performance of the Cognism data – it definitely has not degraded like contact data from other vendors."

"Cognism has enabled better operational efficiency – by consistently improving the data so that we can maintain consistent performance levels."

What is the biggest reason they’d recommend Cognism to other businesses?

Pete explained:

"With previous vendors, they’d generate data on our behalf. However, Cognism gives us the autonomy to create our own personas. Having this self-service capability allows us to have control of segmentation. It makes the process much more interactive, usable and reliable. We can create smaller lists on an ad-hoc basis. That’s really powerful."

"Due to the strong data, our wastage is much lower than it used to be. Having a highly qualified list gives us confidence. We really trust the data."

"Overall, our job is to add value to the businesses that we serve. What Cognism allows us to do is find opportunities to add that value and help more people."