Rebuilding Sales from the Ground Up for a 25-Year-Old Agency

Services delivered

Summary

Diva Creative, a well-established agency in the local government sector, engaged Scaled as a growth consultancy to assess their new business approach and identify opportunities for sustainable growth. Through this consultancy work, it became clear that the agency’s sales function lacked structure, visibility, and proactive processes – highlighting the need to rebuild and reshape the team and sales process from the ground up.

After they hired a new Business Development Manager, we provided the consultancy, tools and coaching to help him hit the ground running. By embedding CRM systems, building the agency’s first‑party database, kick‑starting targeted outreach and introducing repeatable processes, Diva quickly established a proactive new business function.

Within the first six months, Diva won over £140k in new client work, built a seven‑figure pipeline and equipped its BDM to own and grow sales independently.

Challenge

Despite a strong reputation in public sector campaigns, Diva Creative’s growth was bottlenecked by:

Reliance on tenders, with little control over pipeline.
No CRM or consistent visibility on opportunities.
Business development activity was largely relationship-driven and reactive, with limited proactive outreach at scale.
Minimal consistent outreach or marketing presence.
The agency’s BD approach, while careful and client-focused, wasn’t set up for the agility and pace needed to drive new opportunities consistently.

Simon (new BDM) joined without a traditional agency BD background but with significant commercial experience in events, partnerships and marketing. His challenge was starting fresh with no inherited structures, while also learning the unique nuances of public sector procurement.

Our Approach

Scaled supported both Diva’s leadership and Simon as a newly appointed BDM through a mix of consultancy and hands-on enablement:

CRM implementation (HubSpot): Provided structure, reporting, and visibility of the full pipeline.
Database expansion: Grew Diva’s contact base systematically within the agency’s public sector niche.
Targeted outreach: Designed and ran LinkedIn and email campaigns, then trained Simon to take over execution in-house.
Coaching and mentoring: Weekly coaching gave Simon guidance, reassurance, and “a colleague in his corner” to sense-check strategy and campaigns.
Agility and enablement: Equipped Simon to act faster, build collateral quickly and focus on activity over perfection.

“Rich has given me the reassurance I needed, but he also gave our leadership confidence that what we were doing was right - and now the results are showing. Scaled doesn’t feel like an external consultancy; it feels like having a business mentor embedded in our team.”

Simon Tomlinson

Client Services Manager

Impact

The transformation has been cultural and commercial.

Sales structure where none existed before: Diva now runs consistent, visible outreach rather than reactive tender chasing.
Data growth: From ~1,000 public sector contacts to 1,600–1,700 highly targeted prospects (in 10 months).
New client wins: Several new business wins, including South Yorkshire Combined Authority, Lancashire County Council, Derbyshire County Council and renewed local authority relationships.
Expanded pipeline: Seven‑figure opportunities in play for 2025.
Cultural shift: Faster pace, greater confidence in sales and a proactive mindset embedded across BD and marketing.
Independence: Simon now manages end‑to‑end BD activity using tools introduced by Scaled, with Scaled shifting into a mentorship role.

Why It Matters

For Diva, this wasn’t simply about short-term wins, but about changing the DNA of how the agency approaches sales and new business. With a scalable sales process, visibility of pipeline and a confident internal BDM, Diva Creative is positioned for sustainable growth in a sector that demands resilience, trust and agility.

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Scaling from small agency to medium sized company is something that few start ups and agencies master. Scaled have proven their ability to help companies like ours break through that glass ceiling time and time again. In helping us do this Scaled played a very significant part in the trebling of our top line revenues.

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