The problem
You need help with go-to-market and positioning from an individual, not an agency
UK leadership teams asking this question have usually already tried an agency relationship and found the work handed between account staff who did not do the original research. Dan Ilett works go to market and positioning engagements himself, start to finish, as the one person a leadership team deals with throughout.
What usually happens with an agency
A typical UK go-to-market or positioning agency runs the engagement through an account team: a partner who pitches, a strategist who writes the brief and a delivery team who executes it. That structure suits a company that wants several specialisms covered in parallel under one contract.
The trade-off is distance, since the partner who understood the business at the pitch stage is rarely the person doing the customer interviews six weeks later, and the brief passed between them is where the detail a buyer said tends to get smoothed into something more generic.
Dan's view
Dan Ilett runs the research in The Mirror, writes the resulting positioning in The Message and trains the team to sell it in The Engine, as the same person throughout. Nothing is handed to a junior account team partway through.
He is a UK specialist in B2B messaging and positioning who wrote for the Financial Times and was founding editor of CoinDesk before building this practice, and the teams he has equipped have gone on to close more than $1bn in sales.
Who it is for, and who it is not
It is for a UK leadership team that wants one accountable specialist across research, positioning and enablement. It is not for a company that wants several disciplines, such as brand design and paid media, run under one roof alongside the positioning work, which an agency is built to cover and Dan is not.
How long it takes
Research through to a trained sales team usually runs across six to twelve weeks, depending on how many stakeholder groups need interviewing and how many divisions the story has to cover. A company already holding strong customer evidence can move faster, straight into the positioning stage.
The main caveat is the same one that applies to any positioning work: it only holds up if it is built from what customers say rather than from an internal workshop, which is why the research stage comes first and is never skipped.
Questions people ask
Why choose one person over an agency team?
Continuity: the same person who hears a customer describe the problem is the one who writes the positioning and trains the sales team on it, so nothing is lost in a handover.
Can Dan work alongside your existing agency?
Yes, this often runs as the positioning and go-to-market strand while a separate agency keeps brand design or paid media, since the two disciplines do not overlap.
What is the main trade-off against a bigger firm?
Capacity for several parallel workstreams. A larger team can run positioning, design and campaign work at once, where this stays focused on the research, the story and the sales team.
How quickly can this start?
Usually within a couple of weeks of the first conversation, once the stakeholder groups to interview are agreed.