Outcome

A robust growth engine at Series A anchored in distinctive positioning, messaging, and branding with a clear Go-To-Market strategy leading two sales motions: product-led and sales-led.  

📍 Defined positioning

👥 Developed value proposition per Ideal Customer Profiles (ICP’s)

👉 Created new messaging and brand identity

🛣 Established sales-led and product-led motions

📈 Built growth engine

🧗‍♀️ Hired a great team

Project partners: Giles Brenard of Full Flood, Nahim Afzal of Confederation Studio & Luke Carthy.

The impact

In their words

It is always a bonus to work with an incredibly capable and passionate team that enables the success of a project.

The Context 

Created by researchers for researchers, Prolific is a platform that provides access to diverse, vetted participants to source high-quality human data and insights for cutting-edge academic research and AI training.

Having secured a £25m Series A funding and poised for hyper-growth, Phelim, their Founder & CEO, was keen to ensure Prolific’s growth operations were best-in-class and was seeking support to define and scale their marketing and Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies. 

Prolific is well-loved by academics of top universities and grew organically with this audience. It was also getting early traction with AI researchers building premier frontier model builders – a newer client profile for them with huge potential.

Our Starting Point 

The marketing team was leading a strong events calendar and supporting the cross-functional teams well tactically. However, it was under-resourced to match the ambitions of the business.

I began by auditing the current growth operations across marketing, sales, and product. Based on the findings, I developed a growth plan that covered everything from foundational elements to organisational design and growth motions. Once defined, we divided and conquered – with both external and internal teams implementing and executing the plan.

Insights into Action

Product-led and sales-led motion

To best deliver against the growth ambitions of the next stage, I identified the need for two distinct sales motions: self-serve (product-led) and enterprise (sales-led). This dual motion allowed us to tailor our approach to meet the specific needs of their varied buyers and end-user profiles. This further informed the marketing team’s organisational design and cross-functional collaboration paths. 

I also developed customer lifecycle triggers with customer email automations and in-product notifications to ensure the onboarding and activation flows were optimised to improve the impact of the top of the funnel activities. I also established robust reporting mechanisms for ongoing performance monitoring.

Messaging and positioning

A clear understanding of the audience and creating messaging that resonates with them is key. So I started by developing customer insights and defining ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles) for their audiences –  from AI engineers to academics – which would underpin all our positioning and messaging work.

As a researcher-led brand Prolific had a wider purpose of ‘revolutionising how the world learns about people - so people can revolutionise the world.’ – underpinned by their obsession with giving people access to reliable, diverse data.

In creating the new brand positioning, I doubled down on the unique safety and quality of data that Prolific was able to generate from its’ carefully vetted participants. We also aligned that with the new AI audience’s need to generate data in amounts and at speeds that were not possible using other methods or platforms. That produced a simple, focused positioning:

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‘The highest-quality human-powered data at scale.’

I then defined 6 critical messaging pillars that would underpin all their communications and their messaging framework going forward and created individual value propositions and messaging, founded on the initial ICP work, that would resonate with each of their diverse audiences. All this new messaging was incorporated into a redesigned, conversion-optimised website that supported both sales motions and brought to life with a distinctive new brand identity that reflected Prolific’s authority and ambition in this space.

The right team to take Prolific forward

With the growth plan and new branding in place, we set about bolstering Prolific's marketing team to support the new initiatives and motions. We defined a new organisational structure that aligned with the growth plan and assisted in hiring a VP of Marketing to lead the team post-engagement. This new structure included cross-functional teams that enhanced collaboration and operational efficiency.

Final thoughts

Partnering with Prolific at such a pivotal moment in their journey was an incredible opportunity to showcase how a strategic approach to marketing and messaging strategy can drive significant business transformation.

Thanks as always to our incredible partners at Confederation Studio,  Full Flood and Luke Carthy who helped us bring this brand to life.

And a big thank you to the team at Prolific for your collaboration and dedication to your work. It is always wonderful to receive positive feedback on top of delivering results for my clients. 

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