90. How I Landed (and Lost) a Meeting with a £2.2B Construction Giant: An ISG Story

With a call plan

19 August 2024.

After 6 months of asking, probing and chasing, I finally landed a call with ISG.

An opportunity to speak with not one, but two, decision makers at the UK’s biggest fit out contractor.

Getting to this point started here and included emails, LinkedIn outreach and discovery calls.

I had a 20 minute call scheduled with ISG’s Head of Supply Chain and Estimating Director.

Here’s how I prepared for the call.

In today’s email:

• Call context

• Call prep

• Call planning

👇🏾 Listen: How can automation improve your sales operations?

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1. Call context

After landing the call, I was also tasked with leading it.

The weekend before, I shared this email with the SLT (while taking my daughter to the park):

It outlined:

• The actions I took that lead to the call;

• Key learnings from other contacts at ISG; and

• My thoughts on the purpose of the call and a suggested approach.

2. Call prep

The call was only scheduled for 20 minutes.

I wanted to use it to learn as much about the next steps required to work with ISG. That meant being prepared and coming in hot with the right questions.

I spent an hour researching ISG’s attendees, Robert Scriven (Head of Supply Chain) and Ian Dickinson (Estimating Director). That meant:

• Checking their LinkedIn profile for recent updates;

• Reviewing ISG’s LinkedIn page for recent posts mentioning them;

• Checking ISG’s website for blog posts and updates mentioning them; and

• A Google search of their name and title.

Neither had active LinkedIn profiles and I found nothing relevant on ISG’s website.

However, I did find this video of Robert presenting at TSM Customer Day in 2023.

It gave me valuable insights into ISG’s approach to their supply chain:

• ISG had 7.5k supply chain partners in 2023 and expects this to grow to 10k+ in the next 3 years.

• ISG regularly works with the top 7/8 partners on their supply chain.

• ESG and sustainability are essential to ISG. Clients want to work with local, diverse, and ESG-conscious companies.

• Carbon negative suppliers get the lion’s share of ISG’s work.

• Local site teams handle their buying requirements. They don’t have a centralised buying team.

I referenced most of these points as part of the intro on the call.

3. Call planning

I spent 45 minutes creating this call plan on the morning of the call.

It outlines the stages I wanted to progress through and what I wanted to get out of the call - from introductions and rapport to next actions.

The call was scheduled for 20 minutes.

It lasted almost 30 minutes, led to 10 introductions, and allowed me to carry out the first collection for ISG.

Not a bad result.

Unfortunately, a month later ISG went into administration.

It was the sixth-largest construction company in the UK (and the largest fit-out company), with revenues of £2.2bn. The collapse sent shockwaves through the industry.

Months of hard work down the drain.

Regardless, the experience gave me the playbook for pursuing the next Unicorn in the fit-out space: Overbury.

Let’s Fucking Go!

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Thanks for reading!

Matt @ The Growth Lab

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