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.
Domains
- Business Intelligence
- Performance Management
- Financial Management
- Financial Services
Objectives
- 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
Challenges
- 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
Process
- 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
Findings
- 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
Solutions
- 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
Results
- 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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