N2 Growth Through Innovation Session Four

We're excited to share that the N² Growth Through Innovation programme has been renewed and that we at SSC were back in the room for the latest session. This time, the focus was on a topic crucial to all growing businesses: sales pipelines.

The session was led by a digital marketing agency based in Manchester, who brought strong insight and energy. They'll also be leading the next few sessions as part of the programme's ongoing agenda.

We kicked things off with a group exercise where each business ranging from a remote sports coaching startup to an architecture firm, and even a behavioural psychologist shared their goals and biggest challenges around sales and marketing. Hearing how common some of our struggles are was unexpectedly reassuring.

After that, the marketing team introduced a number of tools and strategies small businesses can use to strengthen their sales efforts. Some were familiar; others, especially those powered by AI, were completely new to us. We're now looking closely at several of them and may have some reflections to share soon.

One core idea they shared really stood out: their use of generative AI is focused on prototyping, brainstorming, and sparking creative ideas, not delivering polished final outputs. That approach aligns closely with how we at SSC see it. 

AI is a powerful tool, but it comes with risks. Hallucinations still happen, and keeping a human in the loop is essential to avoid costly or embarrassing errors.

Later in the session, the team walked us through how to build a marketing plan and a sizzle reel, automate an email campaign, and even create a virtual assistant or chatbot to help answer customer questions in this instance  about saunas.

That last topic led to a great discussion about ethics. If someone’s speaking with a chatbot, how clearly should that be disclosed? Transparency in these interactions is a growing concern, and one worth addressing early, especially in the context of small businesses looking to scale, as these customer facing functions can be a seriously limiting factor for a small business looking to grow, as headcount can be costly, so chatbot and agent functions may be very appealing. 

We're looking forward to what Nottingham Business School and our delivery partners have in store for the next session. As always, we'll share our key takeaways with you once we've had the chance to learn more.