Case study: Using automation to deliver a go-to-market strategy

About Block8

Block8 works at the leading edge of digital distributed ledger technologies, developing products and platforms across multiple sectors including fintech, proptech and commercial enterprise solutions. 

Its development and project management team partners with subject matter experts who have identified a need for blockchain within their domain of expertise to bring the idea to life. The company’s client partners include Start-ups and Founders, Enterprise Innovation Teams, Investors and Venture Capital.

What Block8 needed

Co-founder and CEO of Block8, Tim Bass, says that before partnering with g2m, Block8 had “no idea what good looked like” in terms of a systematic process to address the market. “We didn’t know where to start.” 

They lacked a coherent strategy that straddled marketing, sales and the customer experience, aligned KPIs, measureable targets or an integrated approach to automation. As a result, Bass says Block8 was missing out on potential sales. “There just wasn’t enough co-ordinated activity happening,” he says. 

Previous efforts had been based on looking at what other companies in the tech space were doing in terms of blogs, content or social media, and following their lead. They needed an overarching go-to-market plan that translated their business strategy into specific set of sales and marketing processes and a clear idea of how to automate those processes to create a scaleable demand generation engine - and a suitable means of measuring the effectiveness of that lead generation.

Sales Director, Leighlah Ashmore says there was a lack of data and insight to systematically improve its approach to the market, and little clarity about what direction it should take.

Bass said the business to date had been built on referrals, but the efforts that had been made to cast the net more widely, simply were not working.

Solution

Block8 worked with g2m Solutions on a rapid and effective transformation. The 5 key steps were:

  1. Generating real clarity around how Block8 wanted to talk about itself to the market; Its positioning across the buyer's journey
  2. Designing its go-to-market processes to align marketing, sales and service so everyone was pulling in the same direction.
  3. Implementing an integrated automation platform  - HubSpot - with its CRM sitting at its heart, as the one source of the truth; a marketing platform for inbound and outbound digital marketing delivery; and an efficient sales pipeline management tool to track live opportunities.
  4. Fuelling its new automated revenue engine with quality content aligned to its positioning.
  5. Regular reporting of the campaigns and channels that were and were not working to allow better decisions on where to spend precious funds.

Results: "We have over-achieved"

Bass believes his company is now “years ahead” of where it would have been in terms of business growth and market position. Using an external growth specialist has not only vastly enhanced the marketing and sales function's success it has also delivered gains for everyone in the Block8 team.

“Now we are all getting to work to our strengths – that’s where the rubber really hits the road,” Bass says.

Ashmore says the whole process from the very start helped find direction for the business. “Now I can go and focus on my job – I trust g2m, they know what they are doing, and they are delivering positive results for us.”

The sense of confidence carries through to the Board of Block8, Bass says. Now he has an effective CRM, sales and marketing technology platform, he can use to report accurately on business progress and prepare data-backed insights and analysis for Board members.

“We had KPIs for marketing and sales agreed at board level – and with g2m’s support, we have exceeded every single one of those,” Bass says. “We have over-achieved!”