With a complex offering, this start up with $5 million in annual revenue had an identity problem.

For one, the company had a product that was layered in technical complexity. It was a solution that was innovative enough that the market hadn’t yet been defined; and many of the target buyers didn’t understand why they would use it instead of manual efforts.

Internally and externally, there was a lack of understanding of who would be best suited for the company’s products. Every internal team had a different vision and understanding of the value that was provided to the market. Because of this, the company had serviced customers from several different segments — which was creating a strain on customer-facing resources. It also meant that sales wasn’t repeatable. Marketing was extremely broad, yet specific, which led to confusion.

Solution

Before building a marketing strategy, it required immense focus on the go-to-market strategy. A cross-functional team worked together to identify the go-forward products, while identifying the segment that would be best suited for the products based on previous customer feedback. With a more focused go-to-market strategy, the marketing strategy could be developed to focus on the identified segments.

Defining the Corporate Messaging & Positioning
With an understanding of the product mix and segments that the company would pursue, the executive team was brought together to provide insight into what this meant for the company. What was their vision? Where was the company going to go in the next six months, year, five years? Gathering this insight informed the development of a corporate message house (the first in company history) and helped to identify how it could position itself in the market.

Building the Framework for the Target Market
Understanding the positioning of the company was imperative to build the key foundational elements for the target market. This included market research (e.g., customer calls, prospect interviews, customer-facing team conversations, third-party research, etc.) to help inform:

• Market sizing. Understanding the total addressable market (TAM) and ultimately, serviceable obtainable market (SOM), helped to identify the main targets for marketing and sales outreach.
• Ideal customer profile. With the SOM identified, it helped to inform the ideal customer profile (ICP), which was used to train sales and the rest of the company when sharing the go-forward go-to-market strategy.
• Buyer personas. With insight from the market, buyer personas for the target segment were created to help sales team members with varying levels of experience.
• Competitive intel. As with many companies in technology, the market was extremely crowded — but once digging into the competitive insights, a succinct list of competitors were provided to focus.

Creating a Marketing Strategy Focused on a Lead Engine
Traditionally, the organization had focused on brand awareness. To be successful with aggressive revenue goals and targets, marketing needed to be responsible for a portion of the revenue targets. The marketing strategy focused on building a strong content strategy to fuel a demand strategy, focused on bringing new leads into the funnel so that sales could explore conversations and inform them about new products.

Results

With a more targeted and focused marketing strategy built on the foundations of messaging, the entire organization finally understood who the target buyer was and the value that the company provided. The external audience also garnered a better understanding of the value that the company could deliver, helping to streamline communications overall.

Marketing accelerated lead growth, and for the first time, was measured on the number of leads it was able to bring in and qualify for the sales team! The marketing strategy attained 115% of its goal for marketing qualified leads.

As a result, the company was able to drive 40% year-over-year sales growth.