The firm
Not a call centre. A calling floor.
Thirty-four people in Leeds who take the phone seriously enough to be measured on it. Founded 2011, employee-owned since 2019, and deliberately the size we are.
The story
Slow growth, on purpose.
Valence was founded in 2011 by Helen Marsh, after eleven years running outbound for a Leeds insurance broker taught her two things: that the phone still beat every other channel for complex sales, and that almost nobody did it well. The first floor was four people and one client. It stayed that way for two years, on purpose.
Growth since has been slow by design — a caller hired at a time, each embedded in a client's segment before the next. In 2019 the firm moved into an employee ownership trust, which is a prosaic way of saying the people who make the calls own the company that makes them.
The London presence is a client room, not a floor. Everything is made in Leeds — visitors are welcome, and the coffee is better than the address suggests.
- Founded
- 2011
- Founding team
- 4 people
- Ownership
- Employee-owned, 2019
- Callers on the floor
- 34
- Offices
- Leeds · London
- London office
- A client room, not a floor
The name
Why "Valence"?
In chemistry, an element's valence is the number of bonds it can form — how much it can connect. Helen found the word in a textbook the week the company needed a name, and liked the sound of it. The meaning caught up later.
It's become the point, actually. We measure campaigns in bonds formed: conversations that led somewhere, relationships that held, accounts that came back. The name was luck; making it true took fourteen years.
The mark is two atoms sharing an electron. Once you've noticed it, you can't unnotice it.
Senior floor
Who you'll actually deal with.
Helen Marsh
Managing Partner
Founded the firm in 2011 and still listens to five recorded calls a week. Makes two client calls herself, on principle.
Sam Whitfield
Head of Calling
Twelve years on the phone. Runs training, the Thursday listen-back, and the standard everyone here dials to.
Priya Nair
Client Director
Your weekly fifteen minutes. Joined from a Leeds SaaS firm in 2016; has run more pilots than anyone at the firm.
The calling floor
Good callers stay where they can win.
Pay here is well above the industry norm — nobody is on minimum wage plus commission — and every caller spends two weeks inside a client's product before their first dial. They sit a test at the end. We mark it.
On Thursdays the floor stops at four o'clock and listens back to the week's calls together. It's the least glamorous ritual in telemarketing, and the reason the average caller here has been with us four years.
"We'd rather send you ten meetings you're glad to attend than a hundred rows of data you'll never call."
- Callers on the floor
- 34
- Average tenure
- 4 years
- Languages spoken
- 11
- Product immersion
- 2 weeks, tested
- Listen-back
- Thursdays, 16:00
- Sectors
- SaaS, logistics, insurance
Start a conversation
Come and hear the floor.
Prospective clients are welcome at Wellington Place any Thursday after four — sit in on a listen-back and judge the standard for yourself. Ask us.