Critical Power Supplies

The Focus

UK emergency and standby power specialist: Critical Power Supplies (CPS) designs, supplies, installs and maintains uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), generators and power infrastructure. Its customers include data centres, healthcare, education, telecoms, manufacturing and utilities. CPS is headquartered in Thame, Oxfordshire, has regional offices across the UK and a European base in Amsterdam, and supports its systems with design, maintenance, load testing and 24/7 remote monitoring.

CPS had built a strong inbound and PPC engine. It captured buyers at the moment of need: a failed UPS, a point solution, a quick order. But demand from PPC was softening, and competition there is fierce on speed, price and availability. To grow, CPS needed to move up-market. That meant higher-value, project-led work with larger, more complex organisations, which also opens the door to recurring service and maintenance contracts.

That shift needed a new route to market. As we introduced outbound, it became clear that the business was set up for order-taking:

• sales processes built around clear product intent and short sales cycles
• no explicit ICP or buyer-ownership definition, because PPC had never needed one
• a website built for transactional buying, not for trust in estate-level, multi-site decisions
• no system for targeted follow-up, opportunity tracking or re-engaging past purchasers

Specifically our objective was to:

1. Build a Sustainable Route to Market Beyond PPC
2. Define Precise ICPs and Segments
3. Position CPS as a Partner, Not a Product Supplier
4. Set Up a Marketing Operating System to Track and Nurture Demand

The Strategy

Redefining What Outbound Is For

Our first job was to separate outbound from PPC, both in how it is judged and in what it is asked to do. PPC captures buyers who have an immediate problem. Outbound’s role is different: to open conversations early and make CPS a credible partner for organisations with more complex UPS estates.

That meant agreeing a new definition of success with CPS. Outbound would be judged on conversations opened, credibility built and opportunities surfaced over a longer buying cycle, not on short-term lead volume.

ICP Precision Over Breadth

Broad segments like “data centres” or “healthcare” weren’t specific enough to drive demand. We rebuilt CPS’s ICPs around three tests:

• Ease of reach: can we get in front of these buyers?
• Inherent interest: does the proposition matter to them?
• Buying power: can they transact, or strongly influence a transaction?

Each segment then got its own messaging. That messaging reflects how the segment experiences power infrastructure, who owns the decision, and what justifies spend internally.

Messaging Built Around Buying Triggers

The market had heard plenty about risk: storms, outages, downtime. Instead, we anchored CPS’s messaging to the moments when organisations actually need to change what they have. These include performance constraints, end-of-life replacement, repair-versus-replace decisions, and reconfiguration driven by estate change.

These triggers sit closer to a real purchasing decision and a larger transaction. This approach shaped CPS’s own outbound campaigns and its manufacturer-partner campaigns with Cyber Power.

A Marketing Operating System

Outbound only converts if buying signals are followed up. We set up the marketing operating system for this. It includes HubSpot as the CRM, structured prospect data, a regular newsletter, and a content generation and delivery engine. Together these mean every open, reply and engagement can be tracked and acted on, and prospects are nurtured over time rather than contacted once.

Integrating the Funnel

We identified the gaps that were stalling prospects early or mid-funnel. The biggest was a website journey built for quick transactional purchases. We recommended a dedicated web content workstream so that prospects arriving from outbound find proof points and content that support complex, multi-site decisions. We also recommended SDR-style follow-up so warm signals don’t go cold.