LUX Rewards: from a stalled consumer app to a £2.5m enterprise deal

The challenge

LUX Rewards started life as a consumer rewards app. Growth on the consumer side had slowed, and the team needed to know whether more spend on B2C acquisition would ever pay back, or whether there was a bigger opportunity elsewhere.

What we did

1. Researched the market before spending on marketing. Our research pointed away from more consumer acquisition and towards an enterprise card-linking product: the same technology, sold to banks and card issuers instead of individuals.

2. Defined a narrow ideal customer profile. Rather than “financial services”, we focused on one buyer: bank partnership managers, the people who decide which rewards and card-linking partners a bank works with.

3. Ran a hyper-targeted account-based campaign. A small list of named accounts, reached through curated LinkedIn and email outreach plus warm introductions from our own network. One channel, done properly, instead of a broad multi-channel launch.

4. Built the go-to-market around the first traction. As meetings landed, we turned what we learned into the positioning, pitch and process for the new enterprise product.

The results

The campaign booked five enterprise-level meetings, and one of them became a multi-million-pound deal that has delivered £2.5m in revenue, a return of roughly 50,000% on the marketing investment.

What other startups can take from it

When growth stalls, the answer is not always more channels or more budget. Sometimes the highest-leverage growth work is deciding who you sell to. For high-value B2B deals, a short list of the right accounts and genuinely personal outreach will usually beat a broad campaign.