Aligning Marketing and Sales to Drive Leads and New Customer Wins
A Pittsburgh, PA based Software as a Service (SaaS) company in an emerging market, was challenged with effectively defining the products value proposition, target market and positioning relative to both direct and indirect competition. Through detailed meetings with industry analysts, one-on-one customer and prospects interactions and adjacent market analyses, Entra was able to:
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Build a strategic marketing plan encompassing an internal and external analysis, SWOT examination and strategic marketing roadmap highlighting key activities required to drive news sales growth, improved market awareness and identify partnering opportunities
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Develop a compelling and defendable product positioning statement that clearly communicates product value versus direct, indirect and potential new market entries
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Create effective lead generation offers, fulfillment vehicles and tracking metrics that tripled qualified leads from the previous quarter and increasing the pipeline by nearly $2M
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Spearhead key partner activities designed to decrease the sales cycle and improving market awareness
Connecting Integration Partners Delivering Real Customer Value
A Pittsburgh, PA based electronic billing Software as a Service (SaaS) needed to improve its customer experience with integration partners, while lowering its related support and maintenance costs. The challenge they faced, which is not uncommon in many high growth companies, was that they relied heavily on internally developed proprietary integrations which by their nature were brittle and not “officially” supported by the partner companies. Applying previous business development expertise from the enterprise software area, Entra determined that a formal “value-based” technology and marketing alliance partner program was required to address these needs. By focusing initially on the top 5 partners and creating a value based partner fee structure, Entra was able to:
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Reduce the “brittle” nature of the integrations and formalize a standard open (SOAP-based) set of APIs
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Improve communications and awareness between the two support organizations, reducing support workload and vendor finger pointing
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Increase customer satisfaction by partner members sharing release schedules and roadmaps to enables proactive product cooperation and release coordination, greatly reducing customer issues and complaints
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Expand the companies perception as a thought leader and market innovator
Focusing Product Positioning Accelerates Customer Adoption of New Offerings
An Akron, OH based professional services organization was wrestling with the best way to present and communication a broad and deep set of training and certification offerings to a maturing market space. The challenge was how to accelerate add-on sales to existing customers and increase the ASP (average sales price to) to new customers. Through on-line surveys, analysis of customer purchase history, review of competitive offerings and discussions with industry analysis, Entra was able to:
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Align current offerings to be consistent with purchasing patterns of new and existing customers tied to the associated business drivers
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Develop a single compelling diagram that sales could use to demonstrate the individual and collective business value of the offerings across the typical implementation lifecycle
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Drove product discussions and activities for new packaging, pricing and promotion of the service portfolio
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Delivered a marketing and sales template for key activities and deliverables required for new product introductions
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