Tech marketing agency MeetingPoint restructures
MeetingPoint boss bullish about future of telemarketing after completing full company restructure
Demand for telemarketing in the IT channel has never been higher, according to a lead generation agency that has just completed a restructure of its business.
Kingston-based MeetingPoint, which counts Palo Alto, Elastica and Core Security among its clients, has formed a new holding company and two new trading entities after performing a company restructure last month.
A notice in the London Gazette confirms that MeetingPoint Global Limited was liquidated by Live Recoveries on 20 November after agreeing to be voluntarily wound up. A new holding company, The Point Company International, has been formed, alongside two new trading companies: ExecutivePoint Ltd and MeetingPoint International Ltd.
A string of channel and tech marketing agencies, including SCi Sales Group and Xact, have ceased trading this year amid growing question marks over the effectiveness of traditional B2B marketing methods.
But MeetingPoint manager Ian Brigden maintained that demand for telemarketing and lead generation services is "greater than ever", adding that his firm's decision to restructure was solely attributable to an historic bad debt.
"The issue is that, three years ago, a reseller customer of ours used vendor funding to try and stay in business," Brigden explained. "After this failed for them it resulted for us in a serious bad debt. This was hindering our accelerated growth plans after such a successful year of growth in 2015.
"The advice from the accountants was to restructure the business to protect our valuable assets and give us a better foundation for growth."
He added: "We are finding that demand for lead generation and telemarketing is greater than ever - that's why a number of leading vendors are building out their own call centres. It's still all about relationships. People buy from people, and there is no better way of starting a relationship than picking up the phone and talking to someone."
However, Brigden lent his weight to recent headlines questioning the potency of email marketing, particularly with the recent introduction of the new ‘Clutter' function on Microsoft Office365.
"I feel that this is going to cause an issue with email marketing and other forms of marketing that are not relationship based," he said
MeetingPoint bills itself as a tech-focused appointment management and lead generation specialist. It has testimonials on its website from vendors including Palo Alto Networks, Snow Software and Mimecast, distributor Exclusive Group and reseller Nebulas.
Brigden said the firm is firmly in growth mode now the restructure is behind it.
"We specialise in helping cyber-security technologies coming out of Israel or the US," Brigden said.
"We started 2015 on 15 employees and we are now up to 30 employees. We needed to create a better structure because we are growing so rapidly, and our forecasted projections show us doing the same growth again next year."
A representative for Live Recoveries refused to comment other than to confirm "the company [MeetingPoint Global Limited] was placed in to creditors' voluntary liquidation on 20 November 2015".