About me.

Forming Works is my consultative sales offer for agencies that need to win complex work by understanding the client’s real problem before they propose or pitch.

Consultative sales overlaps with plain old sales, but not entirely.

You may already have a sales capability, but this can often reduce to “this is who we are, here are our awards, we build and offer this thing, for this much and here’s a timeline”. Under pressure, salespeople tend to sift less (is this suitable work for us?) and bat more (how many proposals do I need to get out this month?).

How is Consultative Sales different?

As you'll read later, I’ve held quite a few roles and developed skills throughout my career, and I believe that by combining them at each stage of the process, I can devise more compelling approaches to help prospective clients understand why your solution is the right one.

Sometimes that means interrogating the client’s brief and even rewriting it based on research and client interviews. That requires intensive listening and drawing on my skills in business, design, technical, organisational, and political experience to decode the underlying problem and context.

Sometimes that’s by writing a proposal that makes an approach, or even a range of solutions, the open and obvious way to go. That may include demystifying the technical approach so a non-technical boardroom can see the value. Often, it’ll include the design and production of a persuasion deck to explain and pitch the core ideas, without bullet-point death and overwhelming a client’s attention span.

This approach works well for clients and their specific challenges that you really want, in ways that copy and pasting your usual agency deck is unlikely to do.

I’ve seen all the mistakes and committed quite a few of them myself. This experience allows me to craft responses that answer the procurement questions — but still connect with the end client.

Stardotstar

For 20 years, I co-founded and served as MD of one of Manchester’s foremost digital agencies, Stardotstar. We built a reputation for unusually creative approaches in and outside of digital: Online music games, interactive installations, CD-ROMs, data visualisations, and phone apps. We won many awards along the way, including 16 Big Chip Awards and 5 BIMAs.

We worked with a variety of clients, including: BBC, Channel 4, The Open University, Transport for Greater Manchester, Institute of Physics, DfT, Coram, Caltech, Monster and Sony.

I was, in no particular order, a designer, coder, exec producer, insurance ‘expert’, contract negotiator and reader, 3D designer, animator, keeper of the spreadsheets, accounts and tax. My understanding of insurance was broadened when our building partially burned down in our seventh year. Better add disaster management to my list.

CTI Digital

I sold Stardotstar in 2020 and joined CTI as a Creative and Strategy Director. Principally, this was to create the conditions to establish a User Experience arm, which I successfully and profitably did. Later, to support that UX department and the wider group, I focused on consultative sales. During this period, whilst working with actual clients, I won between £4.6 and £7.7 million, depending on how you count it.

Clients there included: London Transport Museum, Chatham House, Ordnance Survey, The Law Society, Committee on Publication Ethics, HAYS, PREZZO, Drinkaware, Donkey Sanctuary and Chester Zoo.

It also produced some of my most successful proposals and pitches for clients with deeply fascinating problems to solve. This is the experience that I’m now offering you.