CIENCE Sales Development (legacy) vs. S2M-group

Cience is well suited for providing building blocks when you are starting with very little. They took the time to learn our unique product and weren't hesitant to jump on an account for a less than traditional ICP. If you are looking to outsource sales, just be prepared to be an active voice in the partnership.

Based on our experience, s2m-group is an excellent choice for B2B lead generation, account-based marketing, sales pipeline acceleration, regional expansion, and increasing brand awareness. However, it may be less suitable for organizations with an established customer base or limited budgets for account-based lead generation services.

• Rapidly created marketing scripts based on the domain knowledge we provided.
• Rapidly identified the key executives and ways to reach them in our target audience.
• Provided well-spoken representatives who were able to get our message across.
• Provided excellent weekly feedback on their 'hit-rate.'

• S2M sends detailed reporting which helps us gain insights in their activities and see where they add value.
• S2M has set up a great communication through email and calls, which helps to easily stay in touch with them for questions, feedback or other topics.

• STEER CLEAR- their company and model are a mess. We had a kickoff call in February with our "team" and by mid-May, none of them were still with the organization. We were never looped in on this turnover and as a result, there was a total diffusion of responsibility. Beware of the "10-20 day onboarding period" ours was more than 30 despite the fact we proactively provided them with a 15+ page playbook detailing everything they needed: 1) Target personas 2) Objections and counters 3) Product info 4) Company history 5) Talk tracks 6) Etc. Every ball that was dropped was on their end and there was a complete lack of ownership and accountability from their leadership team. The only person who took ANY ownership was our CAM, who was let go as part of a massive company-wide layoff. Their whole organization is a mess.
• We made numerous coaching asks of their team after hearing in the call recordings that the SDR was deviating from the script completely and had no idea what they were talking about. Their message was, "We help HR leaders retain talent so that they can promote their talent and not lose existing talent"--- the most generic of pitches and not at all related to what we do. They continuously referred to it as a "system" when we are a professional coaching organization. We coached continuously on every biweekly call and gave them suggestions, none of which seemed to get back to the SDR as they continued to repeat the same mistakes and even went far as pushing a prospect to take a meeting when she was in a rush because "I get incentivized from meetings booked over the phone."
• Despite our continuous asks, there was no collaboration. Our landing page mockup featured companies that weren't even customers of ours and would've been catastrophic to our brand had it been released. We never saw a mockup of this until the last minute and ended up having to do the entire thing ourselves despite them selling us on the fact that it was something they could handle.

• Sometimes S2M-group cannot achieve a balance of results across markets, and subsequently sales representatives. We are working with them clearly on this to improve the targeting in markets with lower results.

They are easy to work with and very organized.

They have a pool of talented teams and being responsible.

The process outlined was exactly what we were looking for (hand holding before, during and ongoing) and was right on in terms of what we needed for implementation. We were successful in identifying the team from CIENCE who would be dedicated to Manifest and were able to have all levels of both companies involved in the implementation process.

We evaluated a handful of other companies in this industry before signing on with CIENCE. After doing the research, we found them to be a far better company with a much more compelling value and cost. I don't even remember the exact names of the other companies we met with, but I do recall how secretive and dubious their competition was about pricing and how the team resourced their time. The other models honestly did not make sense because they were cheaper but claiming that they would produce more for us with fewer resources and less of our support and collaboration. I have a lot of experience working in this industry in my past, and CIENCE was the only vendor our Executive team trusted after discussing potential contracts with at least 3 other vendors. They have since proven themselves even more, and the transparency, clarity, and collaboration that they sold us on originally have only developed more as we continue to work with them.

After having been supported by several agencies along the way, in S2M we finally found our go-to agency. Since 2020 we have been in a continuous collaboration with them, and there is no intention to go back to any of the agencies we worked with prior to S2M. None of the other agencies were abel to provide actual qualified leads. Based on the quality of S2M's services, I would not put them in line with common "lead generation agencies", but rather position them as a strategic partner for continuous pipeline growth to support sales and marketing. When evaluating an agency, at the bottom line I am looking at the quality of the delivered results and the persistence of these results over time, and in that regard S2M is the strongest reference that I have worked with during my career as an Account Manager

• Terrible waste of money. Just starting out we want to use our funds the most effective we can. This had ZERO ROI and was a waste of time.
• They ask for a three-month upfront payment and gave us nothing back. While this is the risk we take with no guarantees, you would expect a reputable business to offer something for a performance so poor. A free month to try and make things right by providing a few leads, or some small amount of refund, something. Their response was to tell us they did nothing wrong and they would not even consider anything.
• The good reviews from this company are baffling to me. I reviewed them before starting and felt they must be reputable. The truth is the onboarding process took 30 days even though we provided them with everything before it started. They charge for this ramp-up time even though nothing of substance is happening.
• Within two weeks of the campaign starting our Cience team had lost over half of its original members due to attrition. 3 out of 5 of their members left the company

• They delivered at least 4 highly quailifed leads per month
• 50% of these leads were qualified sales opportunities
• We signed 2-3 new clients per year thanks to opportunities from S2M
• Hundreds of relevant market feedbacks that helped us shape and improve our startegy