Tech Underdog Grows 400%, Sells to Sequoia Capital-Backed Company
B2B CONTENT OPERATIONS
WHITE PAPERS
INFOGRAPHICS
ONLINE CONTENT HUB
LEAD MAGNET FUNNEL STRATEGY
EMAIL MARKETING AUTOMATION
The Client's Situation:
Prologue
In the lead-up to customer experience (CX) rocketing to the top of every company’s digital transformation roadmap, IntelliResponse (IR) was a digital CX software pioneer selling to the front edge of an early adopter market.
Their first-generation enterprise chatbot allowed virtually any organization to deliver automated customer service interactions online at scale. With natural-language processing and machine learning at the core of its technology, IR’s chatbots helped open up the enterprise market appetite for AI in customer experience.
When our engagement with IR began, the competitive landscape in CX was filling up with several comparable “Davids” and a few “Goliaths” (including, Genesys, Nuance, and 247.ai).
For its part, IR wanted to be the tech underdog that could grow fastest and win the spoils that come to the challenger brand that manages to take a high-profile, infant market by storm.
It was a brave but highly unlikely ambition for any CX company to have at the time, given how intensely competitive the CX space was about to become.
A New Marketing VP Arrives to Find a Mess
When a new VP Marketing, Mike Hennessy, entered IntelliResponse, he found a tech-centric organization sustaining itself through the sheer effort of its small sales and product development teams.
Pure inbound inquires at the company were virtually nonexistent. Sales people dragged in revenue by doggedly hunting for early adopters inside target enterprises.
Educating prospects and closing deals was hard, with resource-intense pilot programs required for proof-of-concept for almost every customer. While major horsepower was being directed to sales and product development, comparatively little was going toward marketing.
Hennessy saw that this needed to change quickly. Larger, deep-pocketed competitors were already investing in well-funded branding and big sales teams. Meanwhile, the similar-sized competitors were all competing for the same breakout growth inside the same crowded verticals where everyone hunted (banking and insurance, healthcare, oil & gas, and retail).
What’s more, all the players in this space, including IR, were selling technologies with very similar feature sets. Lack of differentiation of the product was a major limiting factor.
Hennessy needed to figure out how to make IR not only a contender in this market, but a stand-out winner—and fast. The only support he had for entering this market battle was a junior, two-person marketing team that was already starting to burn out.
The Strategy:
Find the Potential Growth Beyond the Early Adopter Use Case
Hennessy engaged Savage Marketing to help at this pivotal time. He needed a strategy for putting a lead-generating marketing engine in front of sales, and expert help with executing on that strategy.
As we began our discovery work into the CX market, we immediately learned something important. If digital CX kept advancing like it was, demand would one day explode beyond the early adopter buyer type.
The potential for digitizing customer service delivered economic value that extended throughout the enterprise into customer service, marketing, sales, finance, and even HR. This was a massive ‘audience in waiting’ inside virtually every enterprise.
The problem? Leaders in these roles had never heard of IntelliResponse.
We set out by studying IR’s competitors and saw that no one was really talking to this wider audience in a focussed and differentiated way.
The product-centric, feature-frenzy messaging that everyone was using had worked for early adopters. But functional business leaders throughout the enterprise had different needs and required a different approach. These leaders were largely unaware of the promise of digital CX because no one was telling them a compelling story about why they should care.
This was the gap in the market that Hennessy needed to exploit, right away.
If IR could begin, right away, to help decision makers and influencers in customer service, marketing, sales, finance, and HR understand how this newly emerging digital CX technology could add value to their own corner of the enterprise, IR would have a
head start on connecting with this untapped audience.
The marketing strategy had become clear. IR would invest heavily in becoming the best provider of digital CX education and decision-making resources for enterprise prospects, at every stage of each buyer’s journey.
They would commit to building the industry’s pre-eminent content library for buyers in this wider audience, before other competitors.
Use Content to Generate a Lead Machine for Sales
Savage helped IR execute on the strategy immediately. IR would rely on us to produce a content library so deep that there would eventually be no point along the customer journey where a potential buyer would be without a resource or decision-making tool to help them move to the next step. Executing the content strategy involved four elements.
1. Content Discovery. Savage conducted deep dive interviews with key stakeholders. We gained understanding of IR’s business strategy, marketplace, customer profiles, sales process and buyer journey, in order to build out buyer persona profiles and inform content planning.
2. Content Planning and Mapping. Savage created a plan for delivering the right kind of content, to the right audience. We created a content map showing what pieces needed to be created to run campaigns for the next two quarters. We started with
content plans for the customer service persona, then broadened into marketing and sales, finance and HR.
3. Content Production. Savage produced all manner of content including white papers, videos, ROI guides, consensus builders, checklists, videos, infographics, and more. The production volume began with a minimum of three campaigns every month and continued for six years.
4. Content Distribution. With our agency focused on content production, the IR marketing team was able to focus on distribution and measurement. This included adding team members to focus on distribution channels, nurture partnerships with analysts and third party media outlets, and managing IR’s growing marketing tech stack.
A Clear Processes and Consistent Lead Flow Begins to Enable Scale
With this clear process, everyone knew their role. With Savage managing content production, the VP Marketing could focus on team-building, developing a strong internal relationship between marketing and sales, and taking on an increasing role at the executive table.
Within a few months of our engagement, content operations were running so smoothly that Hennessy was able to hire a new Head of Digital Marketing. Tim Peters stepped in to take over all day-today marketing operations. Things were coming together.
Savage created a deep content library of hundreds of assets including white papers, industry reports, videos, online surveys, emails and landing pages, trade show materials and more. This volume and variety of content allowed IR to mature across four
cornerstones of content strategy:
1. “Go wide.” Produce anchor content pieces across the entire buyer journey to support campaigns.
2. “Go deep.” Develop a high volume of varied content themes to see what resonates. Try new ideas and take creative chances.
3. “Go targeted.” Develop content for several specific personas.
4. “Go for the sale.” Modify content to support specific ABM strategies and strike a balance of maximum personalization with minimal effort.
The Results:
Content Carries the Day. In an Industry of Goliaths, this David Wins in the End
From the day IR decided to invest heavily in content, the company stayed committed. A wide range of content was produced.
Inevitably, some pieces had little impact, but many did very well, and a handful did exceptionally well. This is the formula for finding a content production groove that gets results. Get into a rhythm of regular production, learn from what works, and repeat on success.
The hypothesis that this devotion to content publishing would connect with and activate a dormant market-in-waiting proved to be true.
In fact, IR enjoyed a six-year run of developing this market and consistently moving leads through the buyer journey into sales.
The content produced by Savage achieved these results:
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200-400 new leads generated per month over 6 years
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5X growth of the prospect list, from 10,000 to 50,000 leads over 4 years—with a marked improvement in lead quality
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Activations of 200-300 existing leads from the house list per month
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400% company revenue growth over 6 years
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In a hotly contested market, against well-funded competitors, IR never felt like it was on its back foot when it came to marketing and content production. On the contrary, other competitors were always the ones playing catch up.
IR’s style of content would be mimicked in fits and starts by competitors over the years, but no one became a consistent, threat to IR’s content presence, thanks to the well-oiled content operations machine designed and run by Savage.
Epilogue
A shining footnote to the IntelliResponse story. Over the six-year period, IntelliResponse revenue grew by 400% and was acquired by Sequoia Capital-backed 247.ai, a larger player in the B2B AI space.
The VP Marketing for the acquiring company commented that IntelliResponse's "top-shelf" branding and marketing would be the model for 247.ai to model going forward, and immediately retained Savage marketing to remain the agency of record, whereafter we repeatedly delivered the same kind of results for the next a three-year period.
“Savage understands content operations and how to generate leads that turn into sales. They are a super-efficient agency and save time for each person on the marketing team. We worked very closely with Savage to build an organized, efficient content operation system that brought in thousands of qualified B2B leads per year. A top-tier partner."
Tim Peters, VP Marketing, IntelliResponse
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