Nexa's Strategic Investment in Pipeline:  The reason why

You may have recently come across a press release announcing Nexa's investment in Pipeline - a lead generation company based out of the UAE. If you haven't, here's the press release:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, June 21, 2020

Nexa, a business growth agency with offices in Dubai, Manchester and New York, has acquired a stake in UAE-based outbound lead generation specialist Pipeline Business Growth Services (Pipeline), creating a partnership that will help enterprise clients source sales qualified leads.

This strategic investment by Nexa into Pipeline will create a unique service offering allowing enterprise companies to outsource their entire lead generation process. By pooling the expertise of both businesses, the combined teams will provide a seamless end-to-end solution through a comprehensive 6 step process. Services range from undertaking initial research, strategy creation and data sourcing through to telesales in order to identify and qualify sales-ready leads.

Understanding that each business faces unique sales challenges, multiple packages are available to create a solution bespoke to each client. In addition, by engaging with an outsourced provider, business leaders can mitigate the risks of employment-related costs, whilst being assured that all leads meet International BANTC standards.

Amit Vyas, CEO of Nexa said: "Being a growth-focused agency, Nexa provides its clients with a comprehensive portfolio of services focused on delivering effective and measurable digital marketing campaigns. This direct investment into Pipeline allows both companies to combine our core service offering, allowing us to provide clients with best-in-class marketing and sales prospecting services.  Pipeline's expertise in converting marketing qualified leads into sales-ready opportunities means that we can shorten the sales cycle for companies and drive further efficiencies, allowing sales teams to focus all of their efforts on converting hot prospects into new clients. This is an unmatched service offering and we're incredibly excited to offer this to clients located in the GCC, Europe and North America."

James Gosling, Partner at Pipeline Business Growth Services, added: "With Pipeline offering the last mile in the sales process, this partnership with Nexa is an unparalleled opportunity for us to remove the headache from the sales process for our clients. From creating a lead all the way through to a fully qualified BANTC sales opportunity we can now provide a complete outsourced solution. The coming together of the two business enables us to offer something unique in the current market. We are excited by this next step in the Pipeline journey and look forward to creating a new and innovative approach to the sales journey that delivers tangible ROI and drives business growth for both large Enterprise businesses and the SME market."

For those of you that know us, you'll be aware that Nexa already provides lead generation services and have won a host of awards on the back of our work in this area. Our Diamond-tiered partnership with HubSpot has been pivotal in our success with lead generation, where campaign insights gained from HubSpot-generated data, has allowed us to improve both marketing and sales processes for a host of clients. Our new partners Pipeline, also offer lead generation services and are exceptional at doing so, but their approach is a different, more traditional approach to ours, and that's why the deal is exciting for both companies.

Nexa is a digital-first agency and this has been engrained within every service and client touchpoint since 2005. We're strong believers in the use of technology, specifically within marketing and sales, so that businesses can measure marketing performance and align this to sales success.

From a marketing perspective, there are obvious advantages for businesses who use digital technology to generate leads such as cost, efficiency and speed of results. Compared to more traditional lead generation practices including offline advertising and participation at trade events, digital marketing has the ability to create a highly predictable flow of leads for a business. While this works well, the focus of any business should not be to embrace the number of leads generated for them but to sell more products and services as a consequence of the lead generation process. In other words, success should only be determined if there is clear revenue growth from these activities. The role of an agency should therefore be to provide a predictable stream of highly qualified, sales-ready leads to their client. While lead qualification can be determined using metrics such as lead scoring or prospect engagement, sales-readiness is an altogether different metric that often requires human touch and interaction. And that's why we're excited about our relationship with Pipeline.

In the digital marketing world, and in a world where agencies dominate services such as lead generation, the hand-off to a client is unnatural and happens far to early in the sales cycle. More often than not, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) generated from form fills or contact requests, as oppose to sales qualified leads (SQLs), where a prospect has made it clear that they are willing to enter a sales discussion, are delivered to clients. The challenge with MQLs can be defined as per the below:

• They are generated much earlier in the sales process (closer to the top of the funnel).
• The volume of leads generated are typically higher, which in turn means more sales time is spent qualifying or nurturing top of funnel prospects into sales-ready ones
• Time is often wasted speaking to leads who are perhaps not ready to make a purchasing decision rather than focusing full attention on those ready to buy now.

Based on this, the impact for an organisation is the following:

• More sales staff are required to manage the volume of leads generated.
• Opportunities may be lost where sales teams are focusing their attention on the wrong leads. This in turn impacts revenue.
• It becomes difficult to scale the business and more sales people will need to be hired if the company obtains an even greater number of leads.

Clearly, a better approach for businesses would be to hire an agency who can deliver a greater number of SQLs. The challenge with this approach is that agencies aren't typically equipped to offer this type of service given that sales qualification requires a very specific set of skills and expertise. Pipeline's core service offering is centred around sales qualification via its ever-expanding telesales operation. This now allows Nexa to continue generating quality MQLs, which are qualified further via Pipeline's sales qualification processes. The end result is a list of highly qualified, sales-ready leads that are passed directly to a client's sales team for closing.

This process removes the need for a company to invest time in qualifying marketing generated leads and allows them to focus on what their team do best - closing deals.

I don't say this lightly, but our partnership with Pipeline is an industry game-changer that unites best in class digital lead generation with best in class sales qualification services.  And in doing so, offering Enterprise and SME clients with an opportunity to maximise the efficiency of their marketing and sales processes, while introducing scale to otherwise difficult-to-scale operational activities.  This is a unique, business-friendly offering that can produce results almost instantly for our clients and the Nexa team as a whole, together with Pipeline's, can't wait to get started!

Visit Pipeline's website here