Note: Due to the privacy agreement to not share the client’s name/company, I am using CLIENT to refer to the business I helped here.
Client Service
They’re a big player in the data storage & computational space. They don’t sell to the end user; they rely on partnerships & distributors to recognize opportunities for CLIENT to excel.
Some of their projects include:
SpaceX came to CLIENT to help solve their “rockets keep exploding on landing” problem. With the CLIENT‘s solution plugged into their rockets, suddenly SpaceX could compute the terrabytes of telemetry data quickly enough that the navigation systems could finally stay far enough ahead of the landing sequence to successfully land ships.
NASA has also come to CLIENT to solve other rocket science challenges.
Amazon came to CLIENT to solve AWS server issues. This is significant as AWS powers most of the apps & online programs you’re used to using. They have some of the best computer science engineers in the world, and when they couldn’t figure out their bottleneck issues, they came to CLIENT who was able to solve the challenge.
Client’s Problem
The CLIENT can do so much & do it in such a technical field that their partners had trouble:
- recognizing the many opportunities where CLIENT could be of service
- knowing how to explain to the end user how & why CLIENT is the best answer
Further, the CLIENT‘s own teams had trouble “communicating with the outside world.”
While technically brilliant, their delivery AND sales teams were overly technical when talking with customers. The result was losing to less-technically-capable competitors who were better at speaking with non-technical decisionmakers.
My Involvement
Over the course of a couple months I met with multiple engineers, sales teams, marketing people, the CEO, others in the C-Suite, and other stakeholders. The goal was to understand their most common situations, the tools & materials they used in those situations, and their most frustrating challenges.
Once I understood the various perspectives, my goal was to create simplified messaging that didn’t sacrifice accuracy.
The result was a “voice document” that defined a clear sales conversation path and it included anecdotal stories that the sales & marketing teams could rely on to empower their partners to close more business.
It included a Call 1 / Call 2 / Call 3 script that empowered the client-facing teams to remember less, rely less often on personal anecdotes, & know exactly what to say at each stage of the client’s buying journey.
The voice document also served as the foundation for the rest of their sales support materials including technical & non-technical sales decks that were framed for maximum persuasion & clarity.
The Result
The C-Suite announced the launch of the initiative at their annual all-hands conference.
Referral partners were happy to have new tools that made it easier to solve their clients’ problems while being able to explain what in the world the client could expect.
The in-house sales & marketing teams were happy to see an easier path to closing new business without having to rely on their own experience & stories. This was especially useful as CLIENT was expanding their teams who might not have existing institutional memory.
All in all their revenue went up in the following months by
- Increased deal flow
- Higher average value of project
- Repeat projects with existing clients