Sean and his co-founder, Rock de Vocht, SimSage’s CTO, had extensive experience of leading major enterprises in the past, and so didn’t need a refresher course in how to run a business. They needed the support of an industry expert that would understand what stage they were at and what would help elevate them to the next level, which is how they came to work with Oxford Innovation and their Lead Coach, Ernie Capbert.

Though they already had an industry-leading product, with Ernie’s support it became clear the final piece of the puzzle they were missing was the right marketing, identifying that the product needed to be explained in a way that would appreciated by customers, rather than leaning on its technical achievements.

“Ernie provided some fairly targeted coaching in helping us to understand the critical importance of this to our business success, and how to start addressing the issue,” Sean Wilson, CEO and co-founder of SimSage explains. “Ultimately, this led us to understand that we needed to transform from being a technology-centric business to a marketing-centric one, and that this would not only help ‘the market’ and prospect customers to better understand our value-add solutions, but also helped us to focus our business in selection of key market segment, complementary business partners, and providing the collateral that our sales force would require to be really successful.”

Sean and his team had worked with other marketers in the past, but found on more than one occasion that without a total understanding of the product and the benefits to clients, the way their products have been sold have been wide of the mark. “If we had had this input from Ernie earlier, those companies would have done so much better,” Sean says.

For Lead Coach Ernie, there was never any doubt that SimSage had what it took to thrive as a business: “Sean has been full of belief since the moment I met him: full of passion for what he and Rock are doing, full of passion for their technology and how it can really help businesses power forward and enhance their users’ experience. I’m really excited to see what Sean does with SimSage, it’s a start-up that’s going to enhance the way in which we search for things online – powerful stuff.”

This new focus on how to market SimSage in a way that would do the product justice led to the business appointing a CMO, who has helped create a working strategy for what marketing will look like going forwards.

With all the key players in-place, 2021 is looking to be their biggest year yet, with prospective clients including a number of household names.