Moving to Solutions Marketing and Selling and Away From Product Features

Publicly traded enterprise-reporting company needing to re-invent their go-to-market due to competitive pressures.

Reverse shrinking product license revenues after years of exponential annual revenue growth
Find ways to side-step the competition whose latest releases leapfrogged current feature list after years of marketing and selling product features
Find application and industry use cases in which Actuate could succeed
Reorient and enhance skill set of existing sales force

Sales force historically won technical sale by selling features with a comprehensive demo, which was now teeing up the competition to win
Marketing had kept the sales force fed by renting lists and executing volume direct email campaigns which were no longer performing
Very little product marketing content existed on the web site or in any digital form

Partnered with World Wide Sales Operations and Business Development Executives to understand competitive challenges
Observed sales calls and demonstrations to understand current process
Analyzed lead generation program results
Led executive task force through a “Crossing the Chasm” process to identify key applications and vertical industries at which the product excelled
Analyzed product to identify key differentiation, strengths and weaknesses
Analyzed customer installations to find mapping between technical differentiation and successful use cases
Researched potential target applications and industry for current trends, business issues and competitive landscape

Unique combination of “under-the-covers” technical features made the product excel in companies going through frequent mergers, acquisitions and reorganizations
Unique combination of “under-the-covers” technical features made the product excel at applications with hundreds or thousands of report users but whose reports were 65% or more the same
Selling services with initial deal significantly increased probably of future add-on sales
Financial Services had the most use cases with the need for unique features
Finance or corporate banking departments were the best paths to penetrating a new accounts

Developed new go-to-market strategy focused on unique business value and applications of product line instead of technical features
Developed internal resources to become domain experts in key use case areas
Innovated new multi-level marketing messages from corporate to product to use in all outbound communications
Created solution-oriented marketing assets and new website
Trained sales force on new solution-selling techniques

Rejuvenated struggling product line, increasing revenues to $53M from a low of $36M by redefining marketing programs and repositioning product
Drove record $10M in new solutions licenses and first year maintenance revenue in one quarter
Generated 80%+ of license revenue from financial services vertical by concentrating marketing efforts on online customer statements, corporate banking, budget variance reporting and sales reporting
Leveraged digital marketing to achieve quarterly results of 32,766 organic search referrals, 6,648 registered content downloads and top 10 rankings for 62 keywords

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