The end of last year was certainly a memorable one when we enjoyed celebrating 15 years in business and enjoyed a lovely evening getting together with so many clients past, present and new!
Covisint sponsored the evening and helped to provide the fantastic location. And now it’s the summer of 2017 and nearly time for holidays to begin! It’s been a busy year so far and the Next Call team never cease to amaze me with their relentless drive to deliver successful campaigns and to please all the customers they are working with.
We’re also very lucky to have such great customers who are not only a pleasure to work with but who have also provided us with some great referrals that have led to new clients starting with us this year as well as opportunities to work within new areas of our existing clients' organisations.
Some of the new companies we have started working with this year include: Mkodo, Praesto Consulting and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. One of these, Mkodo- a major supplier of global mobile engagement services via mobile Apps, webapps, messaging and associated proximity, geolocation and payment services - is utilising this type of marketing approach for the first time. We have worked closely with the new business sales team, marketing, and senior management to ensure we understand the business goals and targets.
“Sarah has assembled the perfect Next Call team to work with our Sales and Marketing team. She has understood our sales and marketing requirements, and provided people who have immediately integrated into our team and delivered results from calling and nurturing our client base. Sarah’s team are pro-active, efficient and focussed and it was a good business decision to choose to work with Next Call.”
Stacey Wilkins, Marketing Manager, Mkodo
We also continue to work with our existing clients on a number of exciting new campaigns, including Claremont’s ‘mind the gap’ campaign about Gender Pay reporting. We also work closely with key marketing partners, on a variety of clients and projects, such as Bright Innovation who we met as a result of their work supporting Claremont’s marketing.
“The team at NextCall have provided Bright with a mixture of proactive support on demand generation campaigns and nurture activities. The team’s understanding of the market, specifically Oracle, professional approach and collaborative style of working has led to some excellent results. Next Call feel more like an extension of our sales & marketing team, rather than an outsourced agency.”
Lydia Kirby, Marketing Manager, Bright Innovation
Salesforce continue to keep us nice and busy with a large number of strategic demand generation activities across the business. We were delighted to receive some lovely feedback from Joanne Chidwick, Strategic Marketing Director of Industry & ABM at Salesforce, for our work with them, as well as a fantastic trip to see U2!
“I just wanted to show how much we appreciate what your team are doing for us!”
Joanne Chidwick, Strategic Marketing Director, Industry & ABM
Looking after the clients we have will always lead to more new clients down the line. Word of mouth is the best marketing tool in the business, and our good relationships with existing clients has always lead us to new opportunities.
This is an important tip that applies to any business, not just ours; if you nurture your existing client base, even if initially that is just one, treat them as though they are your most important client and that client will undoubtedly recommend you to others, either when they change jobs and start somewhere new, or in conversations with their network of contacts who may be looking for exactly the service that you are offering.
Our customers are key - it’s a cliche, but of course without them we wouldn’t have been able to stay in business for this long. But it is the type of customer that makes all the difference, and we have been very fortunate that ours are interesting and loyal and a pleasure to work with.
“From the beginning we knew we were working with a very good team, and they knew what they were doing”.
This particular client went on to say that they particularly welcomed the fact that we took time in the beginning to understand fully the type of business they were and the markets they wanted to target. We take pride in our discovery phase and this emphasises the importance of that and why we are particular when we first meet with a client to ensure that we don’t miss anything.
As we look ahead to the rest of this year we have lots more projects that we will be working on including some very specific event fulfillment work for Salesforce for their Commerce Cloud dinner events series. More about those events and how they went in our next blog.