Video
Driving Revenue Growth by Rethinking Brand Activation
Rethink activation to boost revenue by fixing moments of choice and equipping the frontline. See which workstreams deliver early, measurable impact.
Summary
Every brand reaches a point where growth depends on being shortlisted before the first call—the reality of early‑stage engagement, unseen. That moment tests whether your story travels without you. It does when leaders distil a one‑sentence promise with proofs, then equip allies to share it. From there, referrals accelerate trust and deals move with intent.
Watch The Video
In this video, Preetum Mistry (CEO & Managing Partner) explains how to spark early referrals so growth starts before buyers make their first shortlist.Our Perspective
What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.
The Early Advantage
When organisations treat referrals as a late-stage lever, they enter conversations uphill. By the time a prospect hears from you directly, others have shaped the buying criteria, and your team is left rebuilding trust from cold. That’s when spend creeps up, cycles stretch, and pricing discipline erodes because you’re negotiating without the strength of peer endorsement.
The real advantage is won earlier. If your story is already in the room when the first list forms, you inherit trust instead of having to earn it line by line. Early advocacy doesn’t eliminate effort; it changes its slope.
Design For Advocacy
This is a design challenge, not a waiting game. The message that travels before you arrive must be simple, credible, and consistent enough to be repeated by people you don’t control. McKinsey’s Consumer Decision Journey analysis indicates that roughly 18% of purchases are swayed by word‑of‑mouth at the first consideration point.
We often see leadership teams underestimate how much pipeline is governed by what peers say before any briefing. Build a referral-ready proposition: a single, specific promise; three crisp proofs; and a short proof story that demonstrates the outcome in human terms. Then make that story visible where early conversations actually happen.
Make Sharing Inevitable
Turn advocacy from luck into something predictable by lowering the effort for trusted voices to share.
- Map the first triggers (new mandate, missed target, board nudge) and who hears them first.
- Distil a one-line value promise with three proofs that colleagues and partners can repeat verbatim.
- Provide portable assets designed for the messenger: a 50-word note, a 90-second explainer, and a one-page proof story.
- Build prompts into moments that already occur: post‑milestone updates, quarterly reviews, and partner check‑ins.
Leadership Implications
A referral engine is commercial infrastructure. Treat it with the same discipline as any growth programme.
- Appoint an owner for early advocacy and set standards for response speed on warm introductions.
- Measure leading indicators: referred opportunity rate, time to shortlist, and average discount on referred wins.
- Equip customer, partner, and advisor networks with approved language and friction‑free ways to share, with clear ethical guardrails.
- Align internal teams to one message, not ten variations; coherence is what makes a story repeatable.
Quiet Compounding
When your narrative arrives ahead of you, prospects spend less time testing your credibility and more time testing fit. Over time, an organisation known for a clear promise and dependable outcomes becomes the default recommendation, which shows up as faster shortlists and firmer pricing. That’s the quiet compounding effect of early advocacy: the momentum that accrues when trusted voices carry your story into rooms you haven’t entered yet.
Sources:
Further Resources
No two brand journeys are the same — connect with us if you’d like to test where your next step might lead. Let’s talk.
Video
Market & Brand Trends