About 6B
6B is a 50+ person, digital product development company out of the UK. Their focus has been integrating clients’ digital health technology applications with the UK’s National Health Services.
Headquarters
Wakefield, UK
Industry
Digital product building
Used Klear for
GTM strategy, ABM, sales-marketing alignment
Founded
2014
6B’s founder and CEO, Paul Brown knew that in order to scale and move up-market, they had to stop relying on referrals and SEO.
6B needed a system that would get enterprise clients at will, in a predictable fashion.
Paul’s three main challenges were:
- Creating marketing assets (content) that positions the company as a prominent Digital Health technology partner.
- Building campaigns that drive actually qualified leads for sales.
- 6B needed to craft a strong positioning in the red ocean of development agencies.
6B didn’t want to keep pushing with old school lead generating, cold outreach. They were looking to upgrade to a value-led, modern B2B approach to growth that facilitated cross-departmental collaboration for better results.
This conundrum, combined with the choice of being the generic, friendly neighbourhood development agency that serves all or niching down to become a prominent Digital Health technology provider was a tough one to make.
6B’s vision was grand, so the execution had to be on par. They needed someone capable of leading marketing operations and driving the business in the right direction.
To build a proper, enterprise-capable GTM mechanism, 6B brought seasoned marketing leader Helen Walker on board. Aligning teams internally, challenging mindsets, and cracking the UK’s healthcare market was no easy feat.
The newly appointed marketing head knew 3 things:
If marketing wanted to make a real, tangible impact, it had to be
- Through demand generation and ABM
- Alignment between GTM teams was a necessity, not a nice-to-have
- She needed strategic wizardry to make this vision come to life
Around that time, she approached Klear.
The Challenge
When Klear first got in touch with Helen, a few things were apparent. At 6B,
- Marketing and sales had little internal alignment
- Most revenue activities were sales-led, and marketing didn’t have measurable contribution to revenue, “marketing ROI” was undefinable.
- Lead-gen was the norm, but it wasn’t sustainable
- Positioning was a key challenge
Cold outreach was the #1 way 6B had been getting sales, and while it worked okay, leadership had a conviction that the way to move into the enterprise segment is by:
- showing up for their prospects,
- having multiple touchpoints in the buyer journey
- building authority, and eventually establishing a good client relationship with them.
And that would take more than just old-school leadgen-based sales.
Our Approach
The ultimate goal was to build a sustainable marketing growth engine that helps catapult 6B’s growth. Klear recommended a path that consisted of two major pillars:
1. Transitioning from a cold-outbound-based GTM to a value-led, authority-building, and buyer-centric go-to-market motion.
2. Introducing a culture of collaboration where marketing regularly aligns with sales and client success from planning to running joint campaigns. In order to do that, Klear would implement a process called Full-Lifecycle Revenue Growthmapping which serves as the blueprint.
Klear helped in two very important areas:
1. We wanted to stand out and connect with our audience in new ways – and the podcast is an amazing vehicle for that.
2. The ads+webinar+sales motion gives us more control than SEO in the companies we have in our pipeline. Instant results were very convincing.
They helped with both strategy and execution.
Once we had the foundations in place, it was time to test a value-led go-to-market motion and see it in action.
This GTM motion starts with proper demand generation. It revolves around familiarizing the prospect with the problem, addressing their pain points, and positioning the solution. By providing real value up front and consistently, 6B would be way more likely to steer the prospect into a successful sales conversation.
This motion was a 30-day experimental sprint that involved
- Generating demand through organic and paid content on Linkedin
- setting up an interactive assessment for prospects,
- promoting it through organic LinkedIn posts and paid ads,
- hosting a webinar to report on the findings and elaborate on the solution, and ultimately,
- following up with ICP accounts who showed sufficient buying intent in the previous stages.
The ROI on this single campaign was multiple times 6B’s investment in Klear and ad expenses.
The webinar’s results were awesome. It had a 25% show-up rate and brought in 2 sales conversations and one new won deal.
It also succeeded in creating a landmark for 6B as a well-reputed, expert bespoke development agency in the health integration space in the UK.
Results and Learnings
This GTM experiment led the team to a ton of insights and learnings. For one, getting actual, closed-won deals from an initial experiment is rare, and usually, clients tend to get better results in subsequent campaigns.
So, striking gold the first time around was a welcome surprise. Still, 6B’s biggest wins, according to Helen:
Control our destiny
New ability to laser-focus our targeting, not depending on random quality of leads
Build presence and differentiate
The podcast is a great way to stand out, engage prospects and build demand.
Fill pipeline. Always.
Having a GTM motion we can count on that is scalable – unlike SEO and referrals.
