52 | SME News Greater London Enterprise Awards 2023 Most Innovative B2B Marketing Agency 2023 Successful results come from experience and his is something that marketing agency, Ice Blue Sky Ltd, has in droves! We speak to the firm’s CEO, Charlotte Graham-Cumming and find out what makes it so successful as it celebrates a win in the Greater London Enterprise Awards. Ice Blue Sky Ltd provides services that create revenue growth for technology, IT, and manufacturing organisations. We support with strategic planning, ABM (account-based marketing), lead generation and sales, and channel enablement. The firm’s aim is to drive early-stage sales conversations and market awareness for the clients it serves, thus enabling better than average possibilities to covert opportunity into tangible business. This is done through a combination of effective marketing campaigns, messaging, and an array of content creations including e-books, infographics, email, animations, LinkedIn, blogs, podcasts/VRTs, and even direct mail. “The business is almost unrecognisable from where it stood five years ago,” explains Charlotte Graham-Cumming, the firm’s CEO. “Doubling growth year-on-year and acquiring an array of top-level clients – the likes of CISCO, CITRIX, Brother, and SITA.” At the start of its journey, Ice Blue Sky defined its ‘why?’ as ‘helping and sharing’ and this is still reflected today in the firm’s overriding culture. “This culture is not just outward facing, it is key to our whole approach internally within the business,” Charlotte elaborates. “Sharing is our north star; this drives a culture within Ice Blue Sky of collaboration which we believe is key to our success and why we produce such great campaigns, and retain the high profile accounts we win.” In addition to daily 'check-ins' with the team, there is a weekly overview of the whole business, which acknowledges key contributions from individual or account teams, and shares account wins or new opportunities within the current pipeline. Every six months, Ice Blue Sky brings the whole team together for a half-year review, sharing the financial position of the business, its successes, and any new strategies that will be introduced. “We also open the floor to input and suggestion, both good and bad,” adds Charlotte. The depth of experience in and around the technology/IT and manufacturing sector is a key USP of Ice Blue Sky’s business. It also has a wide and holistic understanding of the marketing industry and what processes really work to achieve outstanding success to drive sales. The combination of both marketing and sales enablement addresses a common challenge within business today, and by creating a strong bond and strategy between the marketing and sales process that addresses the discord, the firm achieves better outcomes and success. “This alignment positions us uniquely when we can control and manage the whole process of driving new customer engagement right from the outset of Top of Funnel (TOFU) all the way through to early stage sales conversations and final deal based negotiations,” continues Charlotte, and she goes on to tell us that in the past six months, Ice Blue Sky has launched two new unique services, Peopley and Evently, both based around LinkedIn, which work with individuals’ personal accounts to create automated outreaches to a defined target audience in order to drive greater awareness of services or to gain sign-ups to online or real time events. “We also are very self-sufficient, so need very little hand holding from our customers, and the wide range of channels we can use in combination is a big advantage when deploying our campaigns to the strategies we agree.” Of late, CMOs, CROs and CSOs are taking a longer and harder look at how they drive new sales opportunities to their business, and Ice Blue Sky is seeing a notable shift where organisations are hardening their view to more targeted forms of marketing, moving away from more generic or wider forms of communications in the hope that they may create small amounts of inbound leads. “Just email and online activity in its silos are not working and cut through is becoming increasingly difficult with the amount of digital noise and inbound traffic that people are being exposed to on a daily basis – Just think of your own inbox!” Charlotte exclaims. “What is working is when you combine strategy with multi-content creation with high degrees of personalisation and align that with sales outreach; although it seems a very basic principle, very few businesses adopt this approach.” Recently, for its dedication and hard work, Ice Blue Sky gained recognition in the prestigious Greater London Enterprise Awards and was named Most Innovative B2B Marketing Agency 2023. Now, Charlotte tells us that, with new business and growth and the existing customer base looking strong, the company is on track to hit its targets for this year, and has identified a new stream of work function which involves driving outreach to a new market segment. “Data is absolutely king when it comes to any business,” she adds. “I would encourage organisations to look at what they know about their current customers, and look to grow their share of that wallet. Relevance is the strongest form of outreach, giving insight and a higher level of understanding targeting businesses that they may not be aware of. Create that point of difference and see how the value of your relationship rises.” Contact Details Contact: Charlotte Graham-Cumming Company: Ice Blue Sky Limited Web Address: www.icebluesky.com
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