Announcing the acquisition of demand generation specialists, oneninefive
Since we were formed in 2013, Agent3 has established itself as the only global provider of Account Based Marketing solutions, delivering campaigns on behalf of brands such as LinkedIn, Salesforce, Citrix, Splunk and Sony from our offices in London, Cheltenham, New York, San Francisco, Sofia, Sydney and Woodbridge. And by combining the three agents of change that deliver modern marketing today; data, technology and creative content, we’ve differentiated our offer by providing our customers with ABM products and services that uniquely meet their strategic commercial goals.
Our end to end ABM delivery model allows customers to benefit from specialists in Insight, competitive positioning (through our team at The Craft), creative services (through our team at This Machine), digital activation and campaign management. This specialist model allows us to build bespoke programs that map to the customer needs rather than an agency operational model. But increasingly, our customers have been asking for more from us. Frustrated by traditional methods of lead generation, which have all too often been based on vanity metrics biased towards quantity rather than quality, our customers want to develop better demand generation processes to deliver higher quality leads that are faster to close.
We’ve therefore been taking many of the lessons we’ve learned through our ABM campaigns and applying them to the process of creating leads, in a thoughtful, account centric manner. And I’m pleased to say we’ve seen significant success. Our only challenge has been keeping up with (no pun intended) demand. Which is why we are delighted to announce today that we are combining forces with oneninefive; a passionate team of demand generation specialists that thrive on helping their clients accelerate their pipeline. By bringing oneninefive into Agent3, we’re able to instantly increase the scale of our demand generation capabilities by jointly creating a dedicated team of 40 people globally, and in particular have reinforced our ability to serve customers in the APAC region, through a new presence in Dubai. By coming together, we’re creating significant opportunities for our customers to build better demand generation campaigns, for our people to learn and extend their skills globally, and for our existing demand generation partners to continue to innovate with us on an even greater scale.
Having worked on a number of acquisitions during the course of my career, I feel experienced enough now to recognise what the right ingredients are to determine success when two businesses come together. The overriding ingredient is alignment around future opportunities being the thing to get excited about, as opposed to the moment that the businesses combine. And this was exactly the thing that struck me when I first met Jordan Adams, CEO at oneninefive. Jordan has an exuberance that is contagious when talking about the opportunity to grow his company further and so every conversation he and I have had in the run up to today’s announcement has been about the huge growth potential we see by working together. He and I both believe there is significant scope for disrupting the traditional demand generation landscape and that the market opportunity to do so on a global scale is massive. In short, when bringing businesses together you have to have a clear vision for how the combination of the businesses can propel far greater growth than if both businesses remain independent of each other. It’s fair to say that Jordan and I absolutely share the same ambitious growth vision here!
The second key ingredient in driving successes when businesses come together is culture. From the moment I first met Jordan I immediately knew that the way that he was building oneninefive and the values that he and his team displayed were consistent with what we are doing at Agent3. We’ve worked tirelessly to try and create a diverse, inclusive environment for our people, where they can bring their whole selves to work and thrive accordingly. I’m utterly convinced that Jordan and his team feel the same way and that by combining our respective teams we will only enhance each other’s cultures. This, for me, is something to get really excited about!
And lastly, the third key ingredient for driving value through two businesses combining, is market demand. The impetus for myself and Jordan initiating a conversation about partnering originally (before we even started to discuss 195 joining Agent3) was a belief that too much of the demand generation process wasn’t working. We both feel that customers are tired of a volume play in demand gen and hanker after a more thoughtful, data driven and insight led approach to deliver better outcomes. As such, we’re going to be spending significant time and resources together to innovate in this area. To coin a cliche, watch this space…
So, it’s another huge step in the development of Agent3 today. With this announcement, I’m massively confident that our overall proposition for our customers just got even stronger. We have new colleagues joining us through the team at oneninefive with new skills and a restless hunger to grow their capabilities and reach. We couldn’t be more delighted to have them on board.
Clive Armitage, CEO, Agent3