About Breakthrough
We are in the business of being opened.
Everything we make is aimed at ninety seconds: a named person, at their own desk, turning a parcel over in their hands to see who it is from. That is the scarcest thing in business now, and it is the only thing we sell.
Breakthrough was not designed in a marketing workshop. It came out of a real pipeline, in a real quarter, when the usual channels stopped working and something had to.
Our founder, Charlie Hollinrake, is an enterprise sales director in governance and compliance software. He is not a retired one, or an ex-one who now teaches courses about it — he still has a target, still has a list of accounts that will not reply, and still has to open the CRM on a Monday morning like everybody else.
A few years into selling to some of the most defended buying committees in the country, the arithmetic stopped working. Cold calling was costing more trust than it bought. Email had been flattened by tools that made it free to send ten thousand a day, so the people worth reaching had simply stopped reading any of it. Attention had become the expensive part, and he had no way left to buy any.
So he started posting things instead. Socks to risk directors, the month everyone in the sector started saying “UK SOX”. Handwritten notes to people who had not been written to since their nan sent a birthday card. Each one addressed to a named individual, at an address checked twice, with a note that made a specific point rather than a general pitch.
It worked on prospects at Tesco, M&S and the Open University. Colleagues started asking him to do it for their accounts. Then people at other companies did. At some point the favour became a service, and the service needed a name.
Breakthrough is that service, run properly: sourcing, copy, verified address research, handwriting, packing, tracked postage and honest advice on when to follow up. The unglamorous half is the half we are best at — because the unglamorous half is where most campaigns quietly fall over.
What we believe
Channels get commoditised. Experiences do not.
Every outbound channel follows the same arc: it works, it gets cheap, everyone piles in, and it stops working. Physical mail is the one thing that resists it, because effort cannot be automated down to nothing — and effort is exactly what the recipient is reading.
Effort is the message
The object is not the point. The point is that somebody spent money, time and handwriting on one named person. That is what gets read, and no amount of personalisation tokens fakes it.
Fewer people, done properly
A hundred parcels beats ten thousand emails, and twenty beats a hundred if the twenty are the right twenty. We would rather help you pick better than help you send more.
Say the price out loud
No membership, no application, no “request a quote”. Every price is on the page, because a company that hides its prices is telling you something about how it plans to sell to you.
Who is on your list that has never replied?
Start with one campaign and one account you would love to win. That is how all of this started.