Harnessing Data for Growth: Analytics Insights | Kyle Daniels of Assimil8

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Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Pathmonk Presents. We’re really excited for today’s episode because we’ve got the Head of Marketing over at Assimil8—Kyle Daniels on the line today. How you doing today, Kyle?

Kyle Daniels: I’m good, Kevin. Thanks for having me.

Kevin: Of course. We’re really looking forward to today’s conversation. So before we get into the nuts and bolts about everything that’s going on from a marketing perspective over at Assimil8, why don’t you give our audience a little bit of a background in your own words. Tell us about the company and what it’s all about.

Kyle Daniels: Yeah, of course. So Assimil8 is, in its simplest form, a consultancy that specializes in data analytics and AI. They’ve been going for about 19 years now—two co-founders who decided they could do better and they could help people with their data—and they’ve grown from there. So there’s probably about 27 of us now. Not necessarily in marketing, but in the whole company. We deal with everything from cloud data warehouses, to building financial tracking, to building SaaS platforms. Really anything to do with data—we can come in, consult on it, or build it, or help you grow.

Kevin: Interesting. And it sounds—I did check out the website—within the services that you guys have, it’s a pretty long list, so really looking forward to diving into that for sure. To get things started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you serve? Who is your audience? Who are the companies or industries that you work in? And what are the typical types of problems you’re looking to solve for them?

Kyle Daniels: Yeah, of course. So I think from a target audience perspective, you’re looking at your department heads—always an easy one. So people who are obviously in charge of something. Let’s say finance department heads. They’ve got to make sure the money’s there and that there’s money to pay for things, and that they’re budgeting for the time ahead, and making sure cash flow is always consistent. So they’ll often reach out to us and look at the data because it’s segmented and siloed all over the place. Different people have different things, everyone’s using different technologies to collate that data. We’ll come in and we’ll work with them to consolidate it all in one go.

So recently there’s been a lot of financial heads, a lot of sales heads—people wanting to get more growth. Sales has obviously changed pretty much from what it was four years ago, so people want to know how they can automate getting out there and reaching people, how they can understand that target audience more so that the SDRs and the researchers can then become almost account executives. So rather than them doing that initial research, they’re actually then performing the sales calls and trying to get people into the next steps and stages of the process.

Right the way through to data analysts, IT managers, always C-suite—your CTO, CIOs, Chief Data Officers, things like that. So it’s pretty wide and varied, but I suppose from an Assimil8 point of view, if they’ve got some kind of technical knowledge, it always makes that conversation a little bit easier. Sometimes you’re talking acronyms and people are just going to sleep halfway through. Anyone that’s in charge of something, that’s got a problem and it’s like their head’s going to roll if it’s not fixed—they’ll come to us and look for a solution.

Kevin: So it seems like anyone that’s really making decisions, but they need the data to be able to make these types of decisions—you guys come in and help work the data in whatever way they need so they can help make those decisions a little bit easier. Within the audience in terms of the types of roles, that’s pretty clear. Are there any specific industries that you guys work in, or can it be applied across the board? Because it seems like anyone who needs help figuring out and getting more valuable insights from the data they already have—you guys can help with that. So it seems industry agnostic, but maybe you can tell me: are there any industries that you guys work in more often or maybe some case studies?

Kyle Daniels: Yeah, of course. It’s probably a shorter list to say what industries we don’t work with. But it is typically, again, anyone that’s got data. Some of those really small one-man bands that don’t really deal with data—we don’t have much there. We get a lot of marketing agencies—they’ve got data all over the place, certain people are using different tools and platforms to get data, and then it’s how do you get the commentary over the top of it?

So we work with loads of agencies whereby we’ll almost white-label for a client. We’ll gather all that information and then generate commentary over the top of it. So rather than just saying “you did this,” it’s “you did this and here’s what you need to do more of” or “to improve it” or “to reach out to these people.”

Travel management, weirdly, has been a massive success for us. We work with a lot of global travel management companies. They’ve got travelers all over the world and they work with suppliers as well. So if you’re negotiating rates with suppliers, you need to know who’s booking, when they’re booking, what kind of rates are available, whether people are going to be booking more next year… If they’re going to be booking more of a certain hotel chain, their rates will come down because they’re booking so many.

So really, anyone that’s dealing with data—we’re right there. There are certain companies like government—we tend not to get involved with them. That’s more “too many cooks in the kitchen,” and the actual sign-off process becomes quite labored. We’ve dealt with things before where we’ve been on retainer and no one gets things over the line. They really want to do some amazing things, but it’s got to go through so many people, and you’re just sat there waiting for something to happen. We’d rather be actually doing the work with people.

And also things like weaponry, gambling firms—we don’t really get involved in that sort of stuff.

Kevin: Yeah, that makes sense. I would also imagine maybe some smaller businesses—like local service businesses, dentist offices, maybe a local construction company or something like that—they’re not really utilizing data to make their decisions on a regular basis, so they’re probably not leveraging the services that you guys have to offer.
And yeah, I would imagine there’s probably this sweet spot where people are really coming into 2025 and figuring out there’s so much data to be utilized, but we’re not squeezing enough out of it. So I think that’s probably where you guys fit in.

Kyle Daniels: Definitely.

Kevin: Awesome. Speaking of the audience, I want to talk a little bit about how they find you. What are you guys doing from a marketing perspective to make sure that you’re pulling in more business? Are there any sort of top acquisition channels?

Kyle Daniels: Yeah, a lot of our marketing is very much like wing and a prayer, which completely ruins it for me. But do you know what’s been our most successful acquisition channel? It’s got absolutely nothing to do with me. A lot of it is people we’ve worked with.
So you’ll find that it’s a little bit incestuous—people work with us at a big company, and then they’ll move on and go to another company and they’ll remember us and come back.
That word-of-mouth thing has been incredible for Assimil8 for so long, and it actually almost had an inverse effect on the marketing, where they didn’t do a lot of marketing for so long.

So when I joined two and a half years ago, the website was very much a landing page, and you could hover over the services, but you couldn’t click on them.
Which—day one when you come into a company—is a great thing to find out.

Kevin: Yeah, of course.

Kyle Daniels: But it also gives you that ability to go, “Okay, now I have to understand what we’re going out there with.”
Go and talk to the team, and then build that. So suddenly I’m approaching it as the customer.
So when I came in, it was, “Okay, what do I understand about business intelligence? What do I understand about cloud data warehouses, digital transformation, or all these amazing services?” And then go off and build that stuff.

Probably our biggest acquisition now is events. So we try and do a lot of event stuff. It’s a little bit harder to go out there and, I think, converse with people because we find that—you probably get it as marketers—people will reach out and say, “We can solve all your problems, we’ll do this, we know your business like the back of our hand,” and it’s like, “You’ve never spoken to us before. What do you know about us?”
So us going out there with that same approach and being like, “We’re gonna do all this amazing stuff, our data’s gonna solve all your problems, we’re gonna help you grow X-fold”—it can’t work like that.

Instead, what we do is we partner with a lot of these bigger companies—like your IBMs, your ThoughtSpots, your Googles, your AWS, your Microsofts (I’m probably missing some out and I apologize)—but we’ll run events with them, typically outside of London.
Because for the audience: there are cities outside of London in the UK.
We don’t always have to go to London for events.
So most people will never see IBM outside of London, they won’t see ThoughtSpot outside of London.

So we’ll go to Liverpool, partner with a hotel chain there, and we’ll run a full-day event where we actually get IBM speakers to come and talk about how they can grow the business.
We’ll put on workshops so it actually feels like you’re learning something and there’s some take-home stuff as well.
We’ll just reach out to people and it’s all free. All the events are free—you don’t have to pay anything.
But it just means you can come and actually speak to these big, unattainable companies, almost.

And I think if you’re looking at IBM and companies like that, you probably think, “No way we could afford that.”
Actually, IBM has changed from that whole pale, male, and stale Royal Blue standard that they had a while ago.
Now they want to work with those smaller companies that are looking to grow—because there are opportunities to come in, grow with that company, and then help them achieve more things as that growth kicks in.

So we found that actually having face-to-face conversations with people, helping them learn something, and then having take-homes that they can go to work the next day and start implementing—it almost feels like giving them something for free. And then they come back to us.

Kevin: Sorry, say that again?

Kyle Daniels: So if it is a case of—they’ve got something that they can take home, they’ll implement it themselves, they’ll see some growth, they’ll come back to us and then they’ll say, “This really worked for us. If we actually came to you guys and worked with you on this project, what could we do?”

Kevin: I see, okay. Because you gave them stuff for free.

Kyle Daniels: Exactly. And everything doesn’t have to go behind a paywall.
Sometimes it’s that element of—they can get this information for free from anywhere.
Go on TikTok and you can learn how to use Excel and get the best out of it and create formulas.
Whereas it’s—actually, if we give you that bit for free, you’ll do it yourself, but then you’ll soon realize, “Actually, if we could automate this process,” or “It would’ve been much easier in the first place.”
Then you think, “I don’t have to spend my time doing that—I can focus on bringing the acquisitions in,” as an example.

Kevin: That’s an interesting strategy. I was expecting something like, “We’ve been doing a lot of SEO, PPC,” which I’m sure you’re doing some of that as well.

Kyle Daniels: Yeah.

Kevin: But this event strategy, and then giving them something that kind of makes them realize the sorts of problems that they might not… that are actually possible to solve—a lot of people think, “Oh, this is a task that I have to do so often, but there’s no solution out there for it.”
Maybe there actually is a solution—you just didn’t know about it until you gave them something for free. So that’s a really interesting strategy and maybe something I’ll take a hack at myself later.

Moving on to the next question. I want to talk a little bit about the website for you guys. I know you were talking about when you first came on board as the marketing manager, it was in a really, let’s say, unoptimized place.
But nowadays, what role does the website play in terms of new client acquisition? Are there still some weaknesses to the website, or what are some new strengths that you’ve added?

Kyle Daniels: Yeah, I think from our point of view, the website almost becomes a research tool so people can come on and learn more about us.
We don’t necessarily treat it as the front end of sales—like, you come on and we’re trying to get you down a sales path straight away—because chances are, when they come to us, they know what they’re looking for if they’re coming onto the site.

They’re technologically minded, they’re thinking about data, they’re thinking about analytics or whatever it is.
They’ll then understand when we talk about business intelligence what that is. But it’s then, “Can we give you some research bits?”—some white papers, some case studies, some success stories that give you a little bit more—and then you can start getting into that sales funnel with us.

I think if we treat it as, “We’ll give you as little information as possible just to make the sale,” they can go and get that information from elsewhere.
There are loads of competitors out there that are much bigger than we are, that have probably a 10-year head start and are doing similar things.

I think from our point of view, it’s having that credibility—do we know what we’re talking about?
Are we giving you more information than the stereotypical “we can help you grow” or “come to us and we’ll solve all your problems and your boss will think you’re great”?

It’s, “If you are experiencing this kind of challenge in your day-to-day, if this is a bit of a headache, we’ve done this for somebody else.”

Our biggest bugbear—well, my biggest bugbear—on the website is that we do a lot of NDA work.
Because it’s data. It’s somebody’s data. Or we’ll build a platform that then becomes their key selling point.

So case in point: we work with a big travel management company.
They’ve got a reporting tool that we built for them, and this reporting tool is incredible.
It allows you to talk to it, and it’ll start drilling down data that you’ve had forever.

So, from an account manager’s perspective, instead of doing those old 90-page slide decks and going in and boring the pants off your customers, you go in with this almost live dashboard reporting tool.
And somebody asks a question—you go, “We’ll just ask it.”
“Who’s our best booker across the company?”
Ask it.
“Who’s the worst booker?”
It’s always the CEO—because they don’t care. They just book whatever they want in comfort.

But then it’s, “If you moved all of your flight bookings from the New York office to Virgin Atlantic, next year you will save £42,000.”
Brilliant. Let’s implement that.

So it connects to their booking tool, they click a button, and then that goes through.
And that is a locked-in process now. So anyone booking from the New York office cannot book anything but Virgin Atlantic flights.

Kevin: It’s interesting though that you mention a lot of NDA clients—because you can’t share their data.
When we talk about the role the website plays in client acquisition, you want to be able to showcase this stuff. You want to be able to say, “Here are the clients we’ve worked with. Here are the solutions we’ve implemented. Here are the results that they got from this type of solution we created.”

But it seems like you’re a little bit handcuffed just because of the nature of what you guys are working in—because all of this data is private and important. So yeah, it must make your job a little bit more difficult when it comes to showcasing those success stories, when you’re not really allowed to.

Kyle Daniels: Yeah, and it’s that thing of “show, don’t tell,” isn’t it?
You want to say, “We built this platform—come have a look at it and imagine that in your business, and you using it every day.”

Whereas actually we’re saying, “We’ve done this, and it’s done this for this company,” and it’s all the fluffy stuff that everyone talks about. Everyone’s got the best product. Everyone’s got the best service. It’s always going to 100x your business and help you grow.

But it’s like, no—actually, we do have that. We just can’t really show you.

So sometimes it’ll be a case of we’ll build proof of concept. Somebody will come in and we’ll say, “Actually, we can’t show you that, but we could build something,” or “We could demo something that isn’t quite that.”
Or, “If you give us your data…” Like, we worked with a client this morning where we’ve built a front end of something where we can go and research—do the SDR element.
We can go and research some companies in industries and figure out: are they open to working with you? Is that company positioned where they need your services? Are they working with one of your competitors? How could you even communicate with them?

Now, you need the front end to go and put that information in. The front end’s not ready yet—it won’t be till May.
So they send us the data, we go off and do that.

We can’t show it to them. If they came through the website to try and get that, they’d move on to somebody else because they can’t see it.
Luckily, because we know someone through somebody, they were happy to get on a call. I talked with them. I could show them some stuff that I’ve done, and that conversation becomes a lot easier.
I can’t do that on the website.

Kevin: True. You’re limited as to what you can actually showcase. That’s true.
Yeah, it’s an interesting topic. Some people out there are happy to say, “This is what we’ve done. These are the results. These are all the clients. Here are all of our logos of all the brands that we work with,” and… yeah, you’re in a little bit of an interesting situation.
So I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s a strength or a weakness, but maybe a challenge that you have.
So yeah, you’re definitely in an interesting spot there.

Kyle Daniels: Post it on social media. Hate it. Like really. I’m, weirdly enough, sitting with what we do and stuff like that—as soon as I finish work, I wanna throw my phone across the room and not look at it. I was talking to somebody last night and they were like, “You’re a terrible text backer,” because they’ll text me and then I don’t text back. And it’s because I’m on it all day and I’m constantly on LinkedIn and all these other social platforms posting. And you’ve gotta think of something good and something witty. And nowadays, anything you put out there, people accuse you of being AI. So it’s like, “AI wrote that,” and it’s—no, just, this is how we write. It’s just me.
Yeah. Like I can’t—sorry—if you put a hyphen, God forbid, in any piece of text, it’s like the ChatGPT police come out and it’s “never work with these people.” But it’s like, just being able to get the right content out at the right time to the right people. If there was something that just did that for me so I didn’t have to sit on there…
And again, we see it more like X now—it just feels like it’s the most depressing place to be, seeing people argue. And the same with LinkedIn. You can’t have an opinion on LinkedIn without somebody coming in and telling you why that is a terrible thing.

Kevin: Yeah. That’s totally true.

Kyle Daniels: Yeah, just automate that. Don’t let me use social anymore. Just automate all of it.

Kevin: So managing not just the new posts that you need to go out and create, but also the responses and the social engagement?

Kyle Daniels: Yeah. Be done. That’s something else—handle that.

Kevin: Okay, great. So we’re moving on to the last question. And before we dive into it, I just wanna say thank you so much for joining, Kyle. We really enjoyed having you on today.
But to sign things off: if you were to give yourself one piece of advice, if you were to restart your journey as a marketer today, what would be that one piece of advice?

Kyle Daniels: Probably, going back to that thing—usually, connect with peers more. I think there’s that thing where you wanna almost do it yourself. When you come in, you wanna prove yourself, you wanna show that you can do it, and you take on a lot more than you should.
I think building those networks, speaking to other people, understanding what you’re good at and what you’re not good at… When I first became a manager, delegating to the right people—because I didn’t wanna put on people, I didn’t wanna build those relationships. I just wanted to prove that I was the right person for the job.

And it doesn’t do your mental health any good. You just end up… producing really substandard work because you’re trying to do everything yourself.
Anyone that’s starting a journey—just make friends, network with people. And when they go off to other companies as well, you’ve got that network. You’ve got those other people, you’ll connect with them, you’ll get invited to stuff.

And unfortunately, if you ever lose your job or get made redundant, there’s somewhere possibly to go.
And you’ll learn so much from people. Everyone’s got a different experience. Everyone’s doing marketing slightly differently.
You can learn so many amazing things by just going out there and talking to people.

Kevin: A really well said and really mature answer. And Kyle, we really appreciate having you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining.
Before we sign off, why don’t you give our audience just one more kind of background—what is Assimil8 all about and how can they find you?

Kyle Daniels: Of course. So Assimil8 is a consultancy specializing in data analytics and AI. If you’ve got data and you’re struggling to do amazing things with it, give us a shout and we’ll help you.
Best place to find us is www.assimil8.com, or on LinkedIn—that’s probably the easiest just to get in touch with us.

Kevin: Awesome. Thanks for the time today, Kyle. We really appreciate you.

Kyle Daniels: Not a problem. Thanks so much, Kevin.