Sancroft

The Focus

International sustainability and ESG consultancy: Sancroft works with corporates and financial institutions on their sustainability performance, from strategy development and materiality to nature, climate risk and supply chain governance. Founded by Lord Deben, former Chair of the UK Government’s Climate Change Committee, Sancroft is a B Corp and has won both the Drawdown Awards and the Real Deals ESG Awards (ESG Consultancy).

Sancroft already had a strong reputation, senior-level credibility and a respected thought-leadership programme. What it didn’t have was a joined-up way of turning that reputation into new clients. Over time, several client acquisition systems had grown up independently:

• personal BD plans held by individuals
• target accounts sitting in MoneyPenny, disconnected from outreach
• a separate LinkedIn outreach process
• Mailchimp data used for both targeting and nurturing, without a clear structure

Our work with Sancroft started as marketing support, covering newsletters, blogs, reports, case studies, media relations and social. As we introduced proactive meeting origination, the brief grew into something bigger: designing and embedding a full relationship-first client acquisition system.

Specifically our objective was to:

1. Define Who Sancroft Serves and Why
2. Build a Relationship-First New Business System
3. Turn Events Into a Platform for New Business
4. Track Every Relationship From First Name to Won Business

The Strategy

A Framework Built for Sustainable Growth

We built the programme around five drivers of client acquisition:

• Clarity: who Sancroft wants to serve, and why it’s the right partner
• Focus: choosing who to target, and who not to
• Relationships: finding the people who can become clients
• Engagement: building trust with those people
• Impact: turning relationships into clients

Every part of the system had to meet five guardrails. It had to be repeatable, scalable, measurable and reliable, and easy for Sancroft’s colleagues to support. Twelve months in, we reviewed each part of the system with the Sancroft team against three questions: Does this work for the business? What could we do better? What needs to change?

Clarity & Focus

Between November and December we ran an in-depth review of Sancroft’s go-to-market approach. That review confirmed the target client and industry focus, and gave us a clear ICP to build from.

From there, we set guardrails so that all marketing activity supports relationship-first acquisition rather than running alongside it. We then used Visual Pixel’s own tech stack to source new data and develop relationships targeted to the ICP. This meant outreach started with the right organisations and the right people.

Events as a New Business Engine

Sancroft’s events were already high-calibre, drawing senior leaders under Chatham House Rule. However, they were being treated as outputs in their own right, when they could be the starting point for new relationships.

We reframed the events programme as a platform for new business. We planned the full year of events around buyer interests, and paired each event with targeted outreach from Sancroft’s directors. Board dinners and open plenary events became springboards into one-to-one conversations. After each event, we managed the follow-up, both individual and wider.

Take the construction sector event as one example. It started with 150 new targets, which produced 70 new connections and 15 engaged contacts. Five of those attended the event. Through reactivated network contacts, the event produced 32 active relationships.

Data, CRM & Attribution

The biggest structural change was making Pipedrive the foundation of the system. We built relationship tracking that links event attendance, email opens and meetings back to MoneyPenny records.

This gives Sancroft attribution from first name through to meeting, proposal and won or lost business. It also reduces the need for ongoing MoneyPenny customisation.

Alongside this, we reviewed and consolidated the MoneyPenny and Mailchimp lists. Records now reflect live organisations and individuals of interest, with clear ownership between Sancroft and Visual Pixel.

Follow-Up & Nurture

Good relationships aren’t built at a single touchpoint, so we built follow-up and nurture as a repeating cycle. Each event, conversation and email feeds the next step. No contact is left cold after they’ve engaged.