The Client:
Telamon, a 21-year-old software/hardware company that
specialized in niche products involving data
communications.
The Situation:
The company
had acquired a utility for IT departments to
automatically notify
support personnel concerning outages. The
product was marginally leading a pack of six
competitors despite superior stability and
features.
Silicon Strategies Role: Marketing
strategy and tactical programs chief.
The Research: Telamon had not
performed any formal marketing research,
despite having sold the product for three
years before Silicon Strategies Marketing
became involved. This resulted in a meager
annual sales growth of approximately 5%.
Silicon Strategies conducted fundamental
research including:
- Market sizing and
definition
- Market
segment models
- Customer interviews - psychographics
- Deep competitive analysis
- Pricing studies
The Strategy: Our research
identified one compelling aspect of the
market: that all buyers required integration
of the product with their existing support
software. Research also identified
three product categories (help desk, network
management and systems administration
frameworks) that were prime segments.
Silicon Strategies Marketing also delved
into the psychographics of the key buyer
genotypes for this product, and discovered
one universal and compelling trait:
all buyers had high-stress jobs within IT.
These studies created a multi-pronged
market dominance strategy:
- Work with leading partners in the
top three segments to integrate products
- Educate partners on the integration,
turning them into unpaid sales staffs
- Promote directly to partner
customers using their psychographics
It was important to have the entire
Telamon organization follow this strategy.
Silicon Strategies Marketing codified the
marketing strategy in an easy-to-remember
set of objectives, and educated the entire
organization on the plan:
- Integrate: Create and
encourage new integrations with partners
leading their respective market
segments.
- Educate: Educate partners,
press and analysts about the product and
the reasons it was valuable (financially
and managerially) for IT buyers.
- Propagate: Use any news about
partnerships and integrations to garner
not only press, but to establish the
image that this product was the only
serious solution available. This
extended down to the web site, where the
front page was a tabloid news sheet that
promoted integration news.
- Pacify: Central to the
marketing message was highlighting that this product
made life easier for the buyer. We sold
"decreased stress" before selling our
features and benefits.
The Results: The success was very
positive:
- Sales increased 53% within a year
and a half
- The company garnered contractual
partnerships with leaders in three
targeted market segments.
- The product had an installed base
approximately ten times the size of the
nearest competitor.
- Three integration partners
distributed demos of TelAlert with every
shipment of their product.
- One partner (Hewlett Packard) was an
active reseller. Other partners
were working on reseller agreements.
- One competitor went out of business,
one sold out, and the other left our
target market segments.
The Lesson: Every product has a
unique strategy, which must be based on the
expected outcomes of the buyers. The
strategy must be clearly and concisely
communicated throughout the company.
But more importantly, marketing
messages may have nothing to do with the
product. In this case the message had more
to do with the stressful lives of IT
workers, and what they wanted to achieve on
a more personal level. By taking the time to
know our prospects, we learned their deepest
personal motivators and used those to
generate leads.
Contact Silicon
Strategies Marketing for a telephone
consultation on driving your competition out
of business. |
