Persona, positioning and enablement work, in practice.

Case study 01

Step 01 · Persona development

Delivered against an $18M target: a 272% overshoot

Of the top global pharma companies licensed the life sciences knowledge feeds within two years

The situation

For decades, revenue came from journal subscriptions sold to university librarians, a well-understood buyer. When U.S. political pressure began squeezing library budgets, the company faced a shrinking core market at the exact moment corporate R&D teams were racing to adopt AI. It held the trusted, peer-reviewed research those AI tools desperately needed, but had zero insight into who was actually buying, or why, inside a pharma R&D department.

The persona work

We were tasked with building a dedicated persona for the pharma R&D buyer, rather than pitching the corporate market the way the company had always pitched librarians. The insight that emerged: this buyer was not evaluating content depth or subscription value. They were blocked by trust, operating in a regulated, high-stakes environment where a bad AI output could cost lives. Three non-negotiables surfaced:

What changed

We rebuilt the entire go-to-market (value proposition, sales deck and campaign messaging) around those three pillars instead of generic "AI-ready content" language. Sales stopped selling access to research and started selling defensible trust.

Case study 02

Step 02 · Sales enablement training

The situation

Ahead of the launch, the instinct was to do what sales training always does: open with the product, walk through its features and value proposition, then send the team out to sell it. But the account managers already carried years of training towards exactly that pattern. Nobody had ever explicitly trained the opposite skill: to sit in a customer conversation and hunt for the customer’s problem before saying a word about the solution.

The exercise

We designed and delivered the enablement training, and opened the session, before a single slide of product content, with a live exercise: look around the room for ten seconds and count every red object you can see. Then, without warning, we asked the group to recall every green object instead. Almost nobody could.

The lesson was immediate and visceral: attention is finite and selective. Whatever you train it to look for is exactly what it will find, at the total exclusion of everything else.

Then we named the two colours. Red is the product: features, functionality, the value proposition, everything years of product training had taught the team to spot. Green is the customer: their problem, their goals, the impact of doing nothing. The team had been counting red their entire careers, which is precisely why they walked out of customer conversations unable to describe a single green thing they had just been told.

What changed

We sequenced the workshop backwards from convention:

The outcome

Account managers carried "look for green", the customer’s problem before the product, into every subsequent sales conversation and stopped leading with red. Customers noticed the shift directly, reporting that they felt heard and seen rather than sold to. The company began showing up in those relationships as a partner, not a vendor.

Case study 03

Step 03 · Initiatives that open new doors

Of US hospitals already run the ambient-listening tool the evidence now feeds

Licensing agreement signed; commercial results still building

The situation

The company held one of the most extensive and authoritative bodies of clinical evidence in the world, published through a leading medical society. But hospitals are notoriously hard to sell into directly: no clear channel, no single buyer, and a research subscription pitch that does not map to how clinical decisions actually get made at the point of care.

The persona work

We were tasked with building a persona around the real buyer inside the hospital, rather than continuing to sell direct with no channel. We found that this buyer’s world already ran through Microsoft Dragon Copilot, an ambient-listening tool used in roughly 70% of US hospitals to document doctor-patient conversations and surface real-time diagnosis and treatment suggestions.

Understanding this persona revealed something sharper than a new prospect list: it revealed a channel. Dragon Copilot’s suggestions were only as good as the clinical evidence behind them, and that evidence gap was exactly what the company’s research could fill.

What changed

Rather than pitching hospitals one at a time, we shifted the go-to-market to a channel play: we partnered with Microsoft and licensed our clinical evidence into Microsoft Dragon Copilot itself, so the company’s research now sits inside the tool clinicians are already using at the point of care.

That meant reaching the hospital buyer through infrastructure already embedded in their workflow (Microsoft’s distribution, our evidence) instead of building a channel from scratch.

Case study 04

Step 03 · Customer journey mapping

The situation

The client had no obvious reason to worry. They were the largest player in their market, the platform every competitor got measured against, with a technology roadmap nobody seriously disputed. Growth had slowed, though, and renewals were getting harder to win, not dramatically, just steadily, in a way internal metrics could not quite explain.

They came to us assuming the answer was a feature gap. It was not. It was a relationship gap, and nobody inside the business could see it, because nobody inside the business was the one living it.

What the journey map found

We ran interviews across the full customer lifecycle, from first contact through years-long renewals, asking people to describe the relationship in their own words, stage by stage. Three things came back consistently:

The shift

That last finding reframed everything. The client had built its identity, internally and in every pitch, around technical superiority. The research told them customers did not rank technology first at all. Given a straight choice, they ranked partnership above it, consistently, in their own words.

That is not a messaging problem you fix with a new tagline. It is a positioning problem, and the client treated it as one. Over the following months the brand’s external story moved away from "the most advanced platform in the market" and toward "the partner who treats you like the priority you are", a repositioning that reached product marketing, sales enablement and how account teams were trained to run renewal conversations. Internally it showed up just as clearly: a renewed focus on the customers who had been with the company longest, the ones most likely to have quietly stopped expecting anything to change.

Case study 05

Step 04 · Win/loss analysis

Of churned clients cited price once asked directly, in their own words

Ranked technology position held; it still could not win a bidding war on margin

The situation

The company was the undisputed market leader in its category: richer functionality, more reliable infrastructure and better integrations than any rival. Yet quarter after quarter a technically inferior competitor kept winning their clients, and it was consistently the smaller clients slipping away first. Every senior stakeholder interviewed gave the same explanation: "We’re losing on price."

Two tools, two layers of insight

We were tasked with running a win/loss analysis to test that assumption directly with clients who had actually left, in their own words rather than the account team’s summary. The price theory did not survive contact with reality. What churned clients said instead, independently and repeatedly, was that they felt like "a small fish in a big pond": unseen, low-priority, slow to get help when something broke. Scale had quietly become the problem.

We then led a customer journey mapping exercise to trace how that feeling showed up at each stage of the relationship:

What changed

Positioning shifted entirely away from price and technology and onto the client’s felt experience at every stage of the journey. The fix was not a discount. It was a new customer success function built to make every client feel like an equal partner regardless of account size.

Case study 06

Step 03 · Initiatives that open new doors

Local authorities named and prioritised, instead of waiting to see which ones put a contract out

The window before renewal where a relationship can still shape how the tender is written

The situation

The operator builds car parks and runs car parks it does not own, for the organisation that does: an NHS trust, a council, a train operator, a transport authority like TfL. Those contracts last three to five years and are worth millions.

Competitors were not waiting for the tender. They were meeting the people who would write it up to a year early, and shaping what it asked for. The operator waited for the tender, then responded, answering a question someone else had already framed.

The bid feedback showed it. They were not losing on price or capability. They were losing before they entered the room.

What we did

The job was to start the conversation earlier. That needed two things: the right person, and the right moment.

What changed

The dates were the unlock. Anything renewing inside six months was already decided. Six to twelve months out, a relationship could still shape the tender.

Twenty authorities, each with a name and a date. Conversations now start six to twelve months before a tender exists, with the person who will decide it.