There is a moment in the life of a technology company when the machine works but the explanation does not. The founder begins with a sentence, interrupts herself twice, opens a slide and says, “Perhaps it is easier if I show you.” This is the moment Nectar Communications learned to sell.
The San Francisco agency was founded in 2008 by Rachel Petersen and Tracy Sjogreen, two communications veterans who understood a quiet asymmetry in enterprise technology. The people building it knew too much. The people buying it had too little time. Reporters sat between them, politely declining pitches crowded with abstractions. Nectar’s product was a bridge: a strategic story sturdy enough for a chief executive, a journalist, an analyst and an employee to walk across without hearing four different versions.
That sounds like public relations because it is. But it also explains why the firm now offers messaging, integrated campaigns, research, internal communications, crisis counsel, executive platforms, social content, video, podcasts and answer engine optimization. A company’s meaning no longer lives in a press clipping. It lives everywhere someone asks what the company does.
Enterprise software is hard to love on first explanation
Petersen had been the first employee at The Outcast Agency and spent more than a decade around companies such as Facebook, TiVo and EMC. That history mattered. Consumer stories often begin with an object you can see or a feeling you already know. Enterprise stories arrive as systems, workflows and promises about what will happen after a long implementation. The communicator must locate the human consequence without flattening the technical truth.
Nectar became known for precisely this work. It represented Salesforce, LinkedIn, VMware, Quip and Brocade. It helped Workday through its 2012 public offering. Later rosters included Google, Google Cloud, Stripe, Plaid and Menlo Ventures. The current client wall ranges from Amazon Business, Coinbase and DataRobot to Levi’s, Instacart and Shopify. The logos look eclectic. The common assignment is not: make a complicated change feel specific, consequential and credible.
The best technical narrative is not the cleverest description of the product. It is the clearest account of what changes for someone because the product exists.The useful principle inside Nectar’s model
Its distinction is less a secret method than a practiced sequence. First, clarify the business goal. Then decide what the company can credibly own. Build the narrative. Put executives, media, analysts, creators and employees around that same center. Nectar calls partnership the root of every engagement, and the phrase is commercially important: retainers are easier to defend when an agency behaves like an extension of management rather than a vendor waiting for launch day.
The marquee account left first
In 2017, Nectar lost Salesforce. For a specialist agency, a famous client can become both proof and gravity: it attracts business while bending attention toward itself. Losing one exposes the risk. The public record does not supply a cinematic postmortem, but the sequence afterward is revealing. By 2019, Nectar had expanded to Austin, kept operations in San Francisco, New York and Seattle, and added content and digital services. It had 38 people when Next 15 came calling.
What changed their mind about remaining independent? Sjogreen’s explanation was unusually plain. Nectar had ambitious plans but wanted the “independence and flexibility” to carry them out. Next 15 chief executive Tim Dyson had been a mentor, and both sides shared a view of where marketing and communications were moving. This was not surrender to a large network so much as a wager that scale, capital and shared capabilities could arrive without erasing the boutique.
What Next 15 recorded for the deal
Total recorded consideration: £7.799m. The contingent portion was tied to later performance, so this is an accounting value, not a claim that all cash changed hands on day one.
The filing supplies a rare window into the economics. Next 15 paid £2.156 million in initial cash and recorded £5.643 million in discounted contingent consideration, for £7.799 million in total consideration. On a full-year basis, Nectar would have contributed £7.020 million in net revenue and £1.909 million in pre-tax profit to the group’s 2020 results. It was not a speculative startup. It was a profitable service business, and the deferred price made part of the valuation depend on continued EBITDA.
The impression number had become embarrassing
Traditional PR measurement has a comic flaw. An article may appear on a publication with millions of monthly visitors, so the resulting report awards the placement millions of “impressions,” even if the article itself was read by a modest roomful of people. Everyone understands the fiction. The number survives because it is large, convenient and familiar.
In 2024, Nectar joined sister agencies Archetype and Outcast in Marker Collective. Marker was designed as a shared product builder, business incubator and creative accelerator. Its practical logic was simple: three agencies could fund tools and specialized talent that would be difficult for any one of them to justify alone. The collective’s Delve platform analyzes news and communications signals. A partnership with Memo added article-level readership data gathered through relationships with roughly 10,000 publications.
That shift changes the client conversation. Instead of admiring a theoretical audience, teams can ask which topics, reporters and stories people actually chose to read. It will not prove that an article caused a sale, and it does not make judgment obsolete. It does make a weak proxy harder to hide behind. Helena Maus, who leads Marker and Archetype, has said technology should support the work while consultancy keeps the “human fingerprints” on it. This is a sensible boundary for an industry tempted to automate the visible part of thinking.
One story, five places it can come apart
Nectar sells expertise through projects and ongoing agency relationships. There is no public rate card. Clients pay for senior counsel and the labor that follows: research, positioning, campaign design, press and analyst work, executive profiling, events, employee communications, crisis preparation, editorial production and social distribution. The agency’s website organizes the work into five practices - strategy, external communications, internal communications, corporate, and content and digital.
That breadth solves a modern organizational problem. The chief executive announces one future to investors. Product marketing offers another to buyers. Recruiters tell a third to candidates. Employees discover the contradiction in Slack. An integrated communications partner earns its keep by finding the fracture before an audience does.
What a smaller company can copy on Monday
- Write the audience’s problem in one sentence without naming your product.
- Choose one claim you can defend with evidence, not five claims you hope will sound impressive.
- Give executives, salespeople and employees the same narrative spine, adjusted for context rather than rewritten from scratch.
- Separate distribution from impact. Count who read, responded, searched, applied or bought whenever the data allows it.
- Review the story after the launch. Markets move, products change and yesterday’s sharp position becomes today’s wallpaper.
The approach depends on conditions. There must be something true and useful beneath the narrative. Leadership must tolerate hard questions. Product, communications and sales must share information. And the company must be patient enough to build familiarity before demanding fame. If the product disappoints, executives contradict one another or the budget buys only a burst of attention, a coordinated story can spread the problem faster. Communications is leverage, and leverage is indifferent to direction.
Nectar now sits in an interesting middle. It is small enough to sell proximity and part of a public-company network large enough to invest in tools. Its founder-led identity survives, but its capabilities increasingly come from a collective. Competitors include other tech specialists such as Method, Highwire, LaunchSquad, Bospar and Hoffman, along with global firms and clients’ own in-house teams. The choice is not simply agency versus agency. It is whether a company needs extra hands, outside judgment, specialized relationships or an entire temporary newsroom.
The sentence before the spotlight
Nectar’s history is useful because it resists the usual agency myth. There was no single campaign that changed everything. There was a capability, accumulated across accounts: hearing the awkward explanation and locating the clean one inside it. The firm lost business, widened its offer, sold to a parent, kept its name and joined a collective trying to make the results less imaginary.
Technology companies still arrive at the same old moment. The demonstration works. The founder looks up. Everyone in the room understands the machine, but nobody yet knows what to call the change it creates. Before the launch plan, before the interviews, before the dashboard, someone has to produce a sentence another person will remember. Nectar built a company in that pause.