Client Testimonial - Sharps Furniture Group

Hear about the experience from our client’s side:

Q. To start, could you describe your role at Sharps?

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Ben: I’m Group CMO - responsible for all things marketing across the Sharps business. That includes our brand, customer proposition, digital product, physical product, and a small analytics function as well.

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Q. What originally triggered the search for external support?

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Ben: Sharps has never really had an insights capability in the business before. We had individuals in the finance team who could run reports, but this didn’t properly translate into insights.

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The technology infrastructure had grown very organically over time, so we had lots of different data sets in different formats and structures. Nobody really owned the data or architecture.

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There wasn’t a single view of the customer. The business thought a lot about orders and how to process them through the factory, but not about customers, customer events, and how those connect to orders, sales value, and subsequent behaviour. We needed to unpack this and didn’t have the capabilities in house to do this.​

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Q. Why did you choose to work with Coppett Hill rather than any of the alternatives that you were considering?

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Ben: I was new into the business — only about a year in — and we had recently brought in a Head of Data and Analytics. Therefore prior experience with a trusted advisor was key for me. I’d worked with Dave previously to build an insights platform - consolidating marketing and customer information into a single view of the customer. We set out to do the same thing at Sharps.

What we were looking for was a partner who wouldn’t just deliver a process, but who could help us on the journey — not just answering questions, but also helping us ask the right ones. Because of my previous relationship with Dave, I knew we’d be able to do that. That past knowledge and trust was important, compared with someone who might just come in, treat it as a sales opportunity, deliver a process, and leave us with something we couldn’t actually use.

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Q. What were the key objectives of the engagement?

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Ben: The main objective was to understand the customer journey, and how to acquire customers more cost-effectively, particularly through digital marketing. We were using a digital marketing agency but had no real knowledge or experience in house. That in itself isn’t a bad thing, but it meant all the value sat with the agency, not with us. We didn’t have the data to challenge them or help them be more efficient. Part of this engagement was about was about building out that functionality and capability in-house.

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Q. So far, what has the impact of the work been?

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Ben: What the Coppett Hill team did was take something that seemed really complicated and difficult, do the hard work behind the scenes, and present it back simply, with clear and actionable insights.

What it has shown is that some “truths” the business held dear weren’t actually true. For example, sales believed we always allocated leads to our top-performing designers. That was just accepted as fact, but there had never been data to prove or disprove it. The data showed it wasn’t happening and when you do allocate leads to the best performers, the size of the prize is enormous.

The work has provided insights that challenged long-standing business norms and led to structural changes. We are also migrating how the business reports performance — moving away from legacy systems and instead reporting from the platform. That shows the level of structural change that’s come from this work.

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Q. What would you highlight as a strength of Coppett Hill?

Ben: The biggest one for me is the ability to take vast amounts of data from a variety of different sources and deliver concise, actionable insight. It wasn’t just “here’s an interesting observation” — it was “here’s an interesting observation, and this is what we think you should do about it.”

In my experience, that’s quite rare. Lots of people can tell you the what, but not the so what and the now what. Coppett Hill delivered on all three.

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Q. And if you were to characterise the overall experience of working with Coppett Hill, how would you describe it?

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Ben: I’d say it was easy — which is always good from a client’s point of view. At no point did the team ever come to us saying something was really difficult or couldn’t be done. They just took care of it.

Equally, there was a healthy degree of challenge. Coppett Hill didn’t just give us what we asked for. There were a number of discussions where they said, “I know you’ve asked this, but a better question is actually this.” That challenge and dialogue was really valuable, and it’s why we’re keen to retain a relationship with Coppett Hill. We know they’ll add value to our bigger, trickier questions and bring a point of view we don’t necessarily have.

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Q. Would you recommend Coppett Hill to CMOs of other private equity backed businesses?

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Ben: Yes 100%.

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