Inside Missguided: how a weeks-old agency won a six figure deal with a global brand

Whenever anyone asks me to tell the story of Rise at Seven, I casually mention that we won global fashion brand Missguided when we were six weeks old and it never fails to get a reaction.

“How did that happen?” is probably the question I get asked more than any other. Here’s the inside story of the initial deal, plus how the contract expanded over time. Throughout this long read I’ve explicitly called out what I think my clients should be thinking about.

Rise at Seven pre-Missguided

Rise at Seven wasn’t fully formed when it launched in June 2019 (and it evolved rapidly even in my 3.5 year tenure), but we had a clear hypothesis around who we were for and what we would represent to them.

Before we had a single client, we outlined what kinds of brands we would work with and who we wouldn’t. If we hadn’t chosen a market segment and positioned ourselves to solve a problem that we believed that segment had, we quite simply wouldn’t have won the brands we did, which would have meant we didn’t get the momentum we did. I do a lot of this work with agencies now. We started with “we do X, for Y brands, with Z point of view” (we’re a “creative SEO agency for people who want more than they get from full-service agencies”) - it wasn’t perfect, but we iterated (which my co-founder, Carrie Rose, has continued to do after my exit).

We launched the agency 2 days before SearchLeeds, the conference I’d founded and programmed until the previous year, with the hope that it would be too late to remove me from the main stage speaking slot I was scheduled for. I’d called my former boss at Kin + Carta Edit, Damien Coverdale, the night before we launched the agency and explained what he would see from us in the morning, which probably helped. Damien was very supportive (more supportive than some of his colleagues and their lawyers), so the talk went ahead. We made sure that it was impossible to miss our news in the 48 hours before SearchLeeds 2019 and, as a result, we got a lot of attention in that first week (nearly half a million social media impressions; 1,378 new followers across our accounts; 23 job applications; and 16 inbound leads).

I could write a whole case study around Rise at Seven’s use of social media (and Carrie could write a better one) so, instead, I’m going to talk about SearchLeeds. Branded3, which merged with other agencies to become Kin + Carta Edit, produced the event four times (I’d left the company by the fourth edition) and I’d made sure I was the face of it by approaching the speakers; programming the talks; and often hosting. This is one of the reasons I had ~20,000 social media followers by the time Rise at Seven launched. Producing SearchLeeds each year took at least half of (B3/Edit Head of Marketing) Charlie Harris’ time; 100% of (B3/Edit Marketing Manager) Frankie Bisi’s time; a bunch of design resource; the entire agency staff for a full day; and around £50,000 of cold, hard cash. It featured as a touch point for around ⅓ of the clients who got in touch with Rise at Seven over the first couple of years - despite the fact that the agency was two days old the last time the event happened - and I suspect it featured in a similar number of deals for both connective3 (one of the other big agency success stories of the last decade, where Charlie and Frankie now run marketing) and Edit (though probably not anymore because it doesn’t do search and it’s not in Leeds). I’m calling it out because, if you want events to drive a significant amount of business for your agency, you do them properly: you think about how you can make them the best experience possible; how they can be properly reflective of your brand; and you spend some proper resources on them. I answered some questions about SearchLeeds for Tom Etherington’s Agency Life series last year and I could talk about it for hours.

Missguided’s Sam Pennington wasn’t one of those first 16 inbound leads, but Matalan’s David Williams was (who I’d co-incidentally met while he was at Missguided).

David needed a small piece of work doing at the time and, since Rise at Seven’s proposition was aimed squarely at him, got in touch. We quoted the job on email; David then picked us up and carried us through Matalan’s procurement process (at one point I had to send a screenshot of our bank account to prove we had one); then he allowed us to promote the win as if we’d just been handed the contract for Matalan’s Christmas ad. So, by the time Sam got in touch, Rise at Seven already had retailers like Matalan and Halfords on its books (shout out Kevin Wiles too).

Call it foreshadowing the Missguided deal, or call it what it is: having a champion at the client’s side is the biggest single determinant of winning a transformative contract.

Sam was already paying attention when we launched. Like David and Kevin, he’d attended SearchLeeds. Like David, we had connections in common (like then-Matalan Head of SEO Tom Armenante - a former Branded3 colleague - who had asked about Sam while he interviewed to be Tom’s replacement, long before he joined Missguided and before I really knew him personally…a fact that I’m not sure I’ve ever mentioned to Sam). Initially, Sam sent me a direct message in the MancSEO Slack workspace and the ask was something like this: “another agency has pitched us for Digital PR and I’m interested to know how much you’d charge us”.

We quickly decided that Missguided was Rise at Seven’s spirit animal, so we should kill this deal dead, there and then.

Carrie ran a Missguided-esque campaign for Rise at Seven; getting us talked about in Cosmopolitan and 20 other publications that we thought Missguided would probably also like to be mentioned in; then getting interviewed about it on BBC News. The message was clear: this could be you, sitting on this sofa. If I sound a bit blasé about this part, it’s because Carrie did/does this kind of thing all the time.

Meanwhile, I pulled together a cost proposal and details of how we’d propose to work together. We used the other agency’s proposed fee as a high anchor; along with how I’d have costed the work at Branded3 a few weeks prior as another anchor price; and two cost options for Rise at Seven: one UK-specific and one global.

We didn’t audit Missguided’s situation, pretending to know things about them that they didn’t, and we didn’t pitch free ideas. In fact, we didn’t pitch at all: we had a contract in place by the time we arrived at Missguided HQ (accidentally ruining a take for Channel 4’s Inside Missguided documentary in the process: the brand’s entire staff was standing outside the office, waiting to cheer owner Nitin Passi as he pulled up in the MG-wrapped Rolls Royce; instead they cheered Rise at Seven arriving in Carrie’s Audi Q3 and had to regain their composure quickly when Nitin did roll in a couple of minutes later). But for several weeks in the lead up to this moment, Sam and I exchanged messages on Slack every single day: someone high up had asked him for some specific detail and we tackled each objection together.

From the moment you deliver your proposal, your prospective client defends it against the rocks the rest of their business throw at it. If you’ve done your job properly, your marketing has made it clear to your champion that you’re the only agency that can deliver what they really want and your sales process has built enough trust with that person that they’ll keep fighting for you (and, ideally, ask you to give them the ammunition they need). Lots of deals die because your client loses hope that the objections will ever be overcome and stops fighting…they can’t bear to disappoint you, so they ghost you instead. It’s less awkward that way.

Rise at Seven chose its target segment (people like Sam, with problems like the problems Sam had) and positioned itself as the (one and only) solution to those problems. Then our proposal focused on a) a clear commercial offer to solve those problems; and b) proof we could deliver. We worked out the specific details together. Right now, I help my clients (marketing agencies) to work out what problems they solve; who has those problems; what the clear commercial offer to those businesses should look like; and how they prove they can do it…then I coach their business development teams through the specific details.

As well as identifying a champion, Sam features in the sales training I do in another capacity: his personality. Sam hopefully won’t mind me referring to him as a “skeptic”: he assumes anyone approaching him is full of sh*t until they prove otherwise and he can smell that bullsh*t a mile off; then, when he’s convinced that you are, in fact, not full of sh*t, he’ll back you to the moon (read The Challenger Customer which, in my opinion, is the most important book on sales ever written, for more on why the skeptic is one of the customers we should be actively pursuing).

All of this is a way for me to take some credit for what can ultimately be summarised as: champions like Sam make deals happen.

Rise at Seven post-Missguided

I’m going to gloss over the next 4 months, because I had very little to do with them: Carrie and the team did a stellar job of doing exactly what we said we would do (and more), which meant we were in a great place to win more work.

During this time, though, Missguided had commissioned an audit from another agency. In my opinion the agency had recommended the right things, but turning the recommendations into actions required Jira tickets in a specific format, with success criteria and a testing plan for each.

So, from our fifth month together until our eighth, I spent three days a week on-premises with Missguided to get that done, working with a team of business analysts; QA analysts; web developers; and a scrum master (none of whom had commissioned the audit); as well as the wider organic team.

Some of the issues could not be fixed, which the client knew immediately upon reading the document. What the client already knows is valuable input, along with what our tools and our knowledge and experience tell us. We need to account for proper fact finding and accept that it’s not possible to do most work in a single sitting (in this case, the audit took three months, not three days). AI has the same data you have, except for what’s buried in the dark corners of the client organisation, so if you want to defend your margins against ChatGPT, you need to be willing to go where it can’t.

We also need to understand what will happen next when we’ve done our strategy or insight work; who is going to use it and what do they need from us; and we need to anticipate and account for implementation costs, rather than filling our roadmap with more issue spotting.

…and no shade on the other agency at all: the audit was one of the better ones I’ve seen. I know the person who pulled it together to be a smart, conscientious professional, which I pointed out. The Missguided team ultimately brought me in to implement the work because they needed a negotiator with some grey hairs, not a technical specialist.

I spent much of the first week of the engagement working out how we would measure and report on success.

Different stakeholders needed different reports: the board pack consisted of four charts on a single slide, for example.

If our approach to measurement and reporting discussions is to say “we can create dashboards with whatever you need to see” then we’ve fundamentally misunderstood which part of this our clients actually need help with.

Over the months I was in the office with Sam and the team, I met Nick Bamber, then-Missguided’s Chief Digital Officer. Nick had popped his head into our onboarding meeting; he was occasionally copied in on emails, which he’d sometimes respond to; and Sam had passed on some of his queries during the negotiations, so we knew who he was. The Rise at Seven team had a vague sense that he could pull the plug on us if he wanted to, but he didn’t appear to be that interested in what we were doing for the brand.

It turned out that he was very interested indeed.

One day, when a Google rep announced that the search engine had changed its algorithm (which it does all the time, without ever specifying what has actually changed), Nick stood over Sam’s desk by 9:05am, asking what the impact might be. Here’s a very senior person, who rarely speaks to the agency, who’s keeping himself up to date with the news that might affect his business. While Sam is more than capable of fielding questions like this without me, I can think of many clients who would have appreciated some help from the agency they pay for channel insight, which tells you how “on it” an agency has to be to become indispensable.

On more than one occasion, Nick pulled me aside and asked for my opinions on Missguided’s team; tech stack; strategy; and roadmap.

When you establish yourself as someone with valuable insight, clients will ask for it. That doesn’t mean “wait for someone to ask” - nor does it mean “give unsolicited advice”. It means: demonstrate that you’re around to help the client win; and make yourself available to have a conversation like that by-being on-site. It’s offering to go with them when they go to make a coffee; it’s accepting the lift to the train station; it’s being on-site with them.

I feel like this article risks getting a bit too David Attenborough about a client in their natural habitat, so I want to bring this back to the solution to all your agency’s problems* with one more anecdote.

I was in the Missguided office when Propellernet shared Hidden Keywords which, in my opinion, is one of the best agency marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen. Hidden Keywords is a single webpage that contains 20, err, hidden keywords…many of which you’re only likely to find if you’re a better technical SEO than I am.

No work got done that day and the whole Missguided SEO team spent the day talking about Propellernet. I swear that if the campaign had been published three months earlier, Dave Peiris would be sitting in that chair instead of me.

The individuals making up that client team are competitive (which of them can complete it first); they are smart and experienced (they know how to solve the challenges themselves); and they appreciate an agency that respects those abilities. They don’t want a white knight who thinks they know nothing and thinks they’re just waiting around for us to add things to their to-do lists.

There’s this popular analogy that I’ve never quite agreed with: if you’re a doctor and your patient comes to you having already diagnosed their own issues, you don’t just prescribe the drugs they’re asking for. Marketing is not exactly the same because the client in front of you is a trained marketer: their diagnosis means something, even if they’d benefit from your experience of lots of people with the same ailments.

I’ve sat at the client’s side of the table, on a couple of occasions. I’ve been Sam, championing agency partners and getting deals done. I’ve also done hundreds of deals for agencies. Did I mention that I’m now a consultant and non-executive director?

* marketing. Marketing is the solution to all your marketing agency’s problems. That’s pretty fortunate, isn’t it?