Right company, right problem, right decision-maker

The challenge

HG Technology sells Microsoft-led business improvement, mostly Power Automate and Power BI. The difficulty is that nobody wakes up wanting to buy Power Automate. They want an end to the thing that eats four days a month: the onboarding that runs on email, the approvals that queue behind one person, the Subject Access Requests handled by hand, the invoice processing nobody has looked at since it was set up. The same is true of reporting. The buyer does not want a dashboard, they want to answer a question from the board without three days of spreadsheet work first.

So the product is not the opening line. And the people who own that problem are among the harder people in the mid-market to reach cold. IT directors and heads of IT inside established professional-services firms field vendor approaches constantly and have every reason to ignore another one. Getting to them means arriving with something they recognise as their own problem, described the way they would describe it.

The approach

1. Open on the process, not the product

   Outreach led with a question about how the business actually runs rather than with a Microsoft product name. Is there a process in your team that feels more manual than it should be? How much time goes to onboarding, approvals or Subject Access Requests? If the board asked for last month’s margin, how long would it take to get a reliable answer? That creates a business conversation before a technology one, and it means the product arrives as an answer to something the buyer has already said out loud rather than as an opening pitch.

2. Go where the problem is worst

   Professional services was chosen deliberately. Legal, investment and recruitment firms run a high volume of repeatable, document-heavy processes under real compliance pressure, with reporting spread across systems that were never built to talk to each other. It is the sector where the pain is most acute and, just as importantly, the sector where a buyer can name the process that hurts without being led to it.

3. Go straight at IT leadership and stay there

   The target was the person who owns the decision, not the person who forwards it. Outreach was aimed at CTOs, IT Directors and Heads of IT, and qualification held that line rather than accepting a softer conversation lower down to make the numbers look busier. A meeting with someone who has to ask permission is not a meeting, it is a referral with a calendar invite attached.

4. Keep everything that did not close

   Accounts that engaged but were not ready were not discarded. They went into a nurture pipeline with the context of the conversation attached, so the next approach starts from what was already said rather than from a cold open. In this sector the trigger usually arrives on its own - a compliance deadline, a system that finally breaks, a new finance director asking why reporting takes a week - and the job is to still be in the account when it does.

What the campaign returned

The organisations below are described by sector rather than named. They are HG Technology’s prospects, not Caption’s clients, and we have not asked them.

• £180k of pipeline generated.
• Every meeting booked was with senior technology leadership: Partner & Head of IT, Head of IT, IT Director and CTO. No gatekeepers, and nothing that had to be passed upwards to someone who could actually decide.
• Meetings landed inside UK law firms, a UK investment group, an international recruitment business and a London private equity firm. Established organisations with real process debt, not early-stage companies with nothing built yet.
• Ten further organisations were carried into an active funnel after a positive conversation: asset management, payments, property, more professional services, and a listed infrastructure group.
• A message proven on a live market rather than argued about internally, and a clear read on which parts of it did the work.

Where it goes next

The campaign proved the argument lands and that the people who matter will take the call. The obvious next moves are about width rather than repetition.

• Multithread the accounts. Engage three or four decision-makers across IT, operations, finance and sales inside each target rather than depending on one contact, so a single person leaving or going quiet does not close the account.
• Open the second argument. Power BI reaches a different buyer entirely - CFOs, finance directors, operations directors - with the same underlying complaint about fragmented data and slow reporting. That is a second route into the same firms.
• Replenish the data. Contact data decays, so refreshing it mid-campaign keeps later touches landing on people who are still there, and surfaces the decision-makers who have arrived since the account was first worked.

Why it worked

Nothing here was volume. The list was 500 accounts in one sector, and everything had to come out of the targeting and the conversation rather than out of the size of the universe. That is a useful thing to know about a market before you scale into it: if the argument works at this width, the constraint on growth is capacity rather than whether anybody wants to hear it.

Right company, right problem, right decision-maker. Get all three and the meeting is available. Miss any one of them and no amount of dialling fixes it.

We were happy with the work Caption did on our campaign and pleased with the results. They took a Microsoft proposition that is not an easy cold conversation and got it in front of IT leadership at established professional services firms, and the people they put in front of us were actively looking for what we do and keen to keep talking. We are not looking at other lead generation companies.