The principles haven't changed. The toolkit has.
A working paper for James and Deirdre. It sets out how KubiqAI lands a £15k Discovery audit, grows it into a £100k programme, and what we'd build to do it.
Selling hasn't changed in thirty years. The toolkit has. Every owner of a £5 to 50m business now feels the pressure to do something with AI. Most of what they get shown is autonomous-bot hype that ignores how senior people actually buy.
KubiqAI answers that. People who have run sales and marketing, using AI on the work it is good at. Small solutions that prove their worth in weeks, not quarters. Low risk, low cost, easy to say yes to.
Agencies sell you people and hours. An AMO sells you a number, then proves it.
KubiqAI starts with a £15k Discovery that pulls the truth out of a company's own data. That earns the £100k programme that follows. AI does the heavy lifting, so the margin holds. The people running it have sold for thirty years. They aren't engineers renting you tools.
The proposition
KubiqAI is an AI practice for sales and marketing. Built by practitioners, on proven method, with the right tech behind it. It is not another engineering shop with clever tools and no domain knowledge, and not another platform nobody asked for.
We build in phases. Each solution solves one known problem and shows a clear result. They don't have to join into one platform on day one. Each earns its place by working first.
The five point solutions
Each solves one known problem and starts small. Each is tagged Built (Articulate has it already, ready to resell or drop in) or Co-build (the JV and shared-IP conversation). Across the five they cover the whole revenue cycle, from getting found to keeping the customers you already have.
1 · The Growth Model — the board-room opener
Type in the budget. The model runs the channels and shows the growth curve, and what it does to the company's valuation. It plans the year, and it sells the next engagement. For an owner heading for an exit, it speaks the only number that matters. Build status: Articulate has a v1. Resell or integrate.
2 · The Profit X-Ray — the big-catalogue opener
AI takes their messy sales, cost and product data and hands back a clean margin map, by product, customer and channel. Read-only. Days, not weeks. Measured in pounds of margin found and dead lines to cut. The best opener for a big-catalogue client. Build status: co-build. Strong JV candidate. Not built yet.
3 · The Delivery Multiplier — the margin lever
Take one job a professional-services firm is buried under, such as proposals or pitch production, and treble the output with AI on top of proven method. Tightly scoped. KubiqAI runs it on itself first, which is how the practice holds its margin, then sells the proven thing. Build status: co-build, on ourselves first.
4 · Gold Digger — the fastest proof
Wake up the dead customer base. AI sorts the list, picks the ones worth a call, and drafts the opener. Their own people send it. No mass blast, because that is the part senior buyers bin. Quick cash, low risk, measured in pounds brought back. Build status: built, and proven on a live client with 2,000 dormant contacts. Fastest way to show AI earns its keep.
5 · The Answer — the forward bet
Factual, sourced content on domains the firm owns, written to get cited inside AI answers. This is where senior buyers now do their first research. Cheap to run, measured in citations and share of answer. Nobody in the UK mid-market has claimed it. Build status: proven on live domains. Co-build to turn into a product.
The commercial model
The five solutions run off one motion. The Discovery gets you in. The retainer is the prize. AI is what keeps the retainer profitable.
| Stage | What it is | Price | Powered by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Land | 20-day Discovery. Sales and marketing audit, on-site extraction, AI analysis, a board-ready insight hub | £15k | Solutions 1 & 2 (Growth Model + Profit X-Ray) |
| Expand | Retained marketing programme. The growth plan delivered and reported every month | £100k / yr | Solutions 3, 4 & 5, plus the AI delivery layer |
| Renew | The Growth Model becomes the live report that shows the return every month | Rolling | Solution 1 as the proof engine |
The toolset
Built to be affordable. Price is a design constraint here, not an afterthought. We spend where it counts, on the reasoning layer, and buy cheap everywhere else. The engineering partner is sized to the price point.
| Layer | Job | Tooling (indicative) |
|---|---|---|
| Extraction / ETL | Pull CRM, finance, catalogue and marketing data by API and structured export | n8n orchestration; native connectors for HubSpot / Salesforce / Pipedrive / Dynamics, Xero / Sage / QuickBooks; custom Python for ERP and flat files |
| The Vault | One structured store per client. The asset, and the repeatable schema | Supabase (Postgres) as the spine; Airtable for v1 and client-facing views |
| Enrichment | Add firmographic and contact detail to the base | Apollo (primary), Hunter, FullEnrich waterfall |
| Reasoning / RAG | Structure the mess, run the audits, make the Vault answer questions | Claude (Anthropic) for judgement work; local models (Ollama) for high-volume or sensitive passes; pgvector for retrieval |
| The Growth Model | Scenario engine. Budget in, growth curve and valuation impact out | Web app (Next.js) over a transparent model; deployed on Vercel |
| Visibility (GEO) | Produce and track sourced content cited in AI answers | Reasoning layer for drafting; owned domains; AI-answer monitoring |
| Insight hub | Where the findings live. A gated client microsite, not a dead PDF | House CSS + Next.js / static; Vercel; private per-client URL |
| Build & infra | Stand it up cheaply and keep it running | Vercel + Supabase + n8n on VPS; a South African engineering partner for build-out at the right price point |
The workflow
The 20-day Discovery, packaged so a mostly-junior team can run it the same way every time. People on-site for the data and the interviews. AI for the sorting and the first-pass analysis. Practitioners for the judgement and the read-out.
| Days | Phase | What happens | Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1–3 | Scope & access | Kick-off, system access, tool-stack inventory, interviews booked, data checklist issued | Access secured. Vault schema stood up |
| 4–10 | Extract | On-site and remote pulls across sales, finance, catalogue and marketing. Interviews capture the head-knowledge no tool can reach | A full Vault, structured and unstructured |
| 8–14 | Analyse | Run the audits: margin, pipeline, CAC and lifetime value, dormant value, AI visibility. AI structures, surfaces and cross-checks | The findings, and the brain you can question |
| 14–18 | Synthesise | Build the Growth Model, the ranked recommendations and the retainer roadmap into the insight hub | A live insight hub and a board pack |
| 18–20 | Present & convert | Board read-out from the live hub: the growth gap, the plan, the path. Land the retainer | A signed retainer. The hub stays live |
The delivery plan
Phased and deliberate. The early steps prove the partnership works before we scale it.
| Phase | Focus | Move |
|---|---|---|
| 0 · Now | Prove the engine | Stand up the Discovery spine (Vault, brain, hub) on the two ready solutions: Gold Digger (built) and Profit X-Ray (the JV pilot build) |
| 1 · First blood | One paid Discovery | Run the 20-day audit with a friendly KubiqAI CEO. The test: a board-ready growth gap and a converted retainer |
| 2 · Productise | Quality at scale | Templatise the audit, lock the Vault schema and the hub shell, so a junior team delivers the same result every time |
| 3 · Scale | Volume at margin | SA engineering builds out the rest of the solutions. The practitioner bench delivers retainers off the proven playbook |
The partnership and build model
| Party | Brings |
|---|---|
| Equals Five / KubiqAI | Clients, brand, thirty years of sales and marketing, the commercial motion. Deirdre architecting. Part-funds the build |
| Articulate | Domain expertise, the apps already built (Gold Digger, Growth Model, GEO), build capability, and the productised Discovery method |
| SA engineering partner | Affordable, capable build-out at a workable price point |
| Shared | Jointly-owned IP on what we co-build. KubiqAI takes it to its clients. Articulate uses it with its own. Apps that already exist are a resell or integration conversation |
Can we scale the offer and keep the quality?
Yes, because the quality lives in the method, not in a few star people. The same spine and the same audit templates run on every job. A junior team produces senior-grade work, and AI carries the volume. That is what an AI Marketing Operator is for.
What we need from you
- Confirm the economics. A £15k Discovery that lands a £100k retainer, as the headline motion.
- Pick pilot one. We'd start with Gold Digger, which is built and proves itself fastest, and co-build the Profit X-Ray to test the JV.
- Agree the partnership shape. JV, sweat equity, shared IP, and where the South African engineering partner sits.
- Name a friendly CEO for the first paid Discovery, so phase one has a real client and a real number.