Success Story

I appointed Julian as my business coach at a transitional time for my company: having started as a sole trader content creator and PR expert, I had rebranded to Sharp Minds Communications to reflect the full range of marketing services that I had developed within the business and taken on my first employee.

Julian spent time getting to know and understand the business: the respective strengths of the personnel, the key challenges we faced, the range of our clients, which of these were most lucrative for us and what we delivered for them.

One of the most significant challenges for our business was cost of sale, including length of time from first meeting a prospect to beginning to work with them.  Julian helped us develop a range of marketing materials to help speed up that process.  This may sound ironic as we are a marketing agency, but it can be hard to see the wood for the trees when you are working on your own projects; Julian was able to provide an objective perspective to scrutinise the materials that we prepared, to hone and refine them to make them deliver maximum impact for third parties.

One of his key strengths is in understanding different personalities – and how to get the best responses from them.  He provided coaching for different scenarios and personalities to help us strike exactly the right tone to optimise conversions.  His attention for detail is superb, down to making the most subtle of changes to the pay-off line in our emails to encourage a positive response, no matter who it was sent to and their preferred working and communication styles.

Julian also worked with us on creating standard packages to make it easier to sell our services to smaller clients.  When we hit adversity, such as losing a major client, he devised strategies that we would never have come up with on our own.

The net result is that we now have a range of marketing materials and tools, from e-brochures through to guide telephone scripts, that enable us to follow up new leads quickly and have improved our conversion rates and reduced our cost of sale considerably. Our growing business strength has also enabled us to win prestigious local awards, increasing our brand recognition.

Siobhan Stirling / Sharp Minds Communications