Fortune 500 Computer Company finds untapped prospects, reaches 130% of revenue expectations
ASSIGNMENT: A leading direct sales computer manufacturer had been given aggressive new objectives for the expansion of PC and server sales into the K-12, higher education, state, local and federal government and healthcare segments. This directive came on the heels of this business unit having achieved only 91% of their revenue objective in the current fiscal quarter.
Massini Group was tasked to assure:
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The marketing team had visibility to the entire available market;
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Current marketing effort covered the entire available market;
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Marketing dollars were applied to target institutions and contacts in alignment with their propensity to buy;
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The most efficient media were used to overcome any challenges with visibility, coverage or delivery of messages and offers.
KEY STRATEGY: Rapidly increase sales by assuring visibility to untapped or underserved prospects through the use of a comprehensive methodology for identifying target institutions, grading available contacts, collecting additional valuable contacts, assessing the current sales relationship with all contacts and addressing gaps in marketing coverage.
Over six quarters, the client’s visibility to the total available market (contact coverage) went from 31% to a sustained 90%. At the same time, quarterly sales performance relative to goal went from 91% of goal to 132% of goal, even though the sales goal was aggressively grown each quarter.
ENGINEERED PROCESSES: Overall, the company needed to gain control of their complex sales process, and Massini Group teams worked with them to accomplish this goal. A four-phase comprehensive marketing process improvement was implemented, based on Massini Group’s Dialogue StrategySM, including:
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Identification of the entire available market via analysis of the business’ existing customer base and initial internal market universe research combined with an extensive matching process between the market universe at an institution level and the contacts available to the marketing team for running campaigns. Massini Group determined that all of the available contacts were associated with only 31% of the total available market, and that specific knowledge of purchasing profiles and interests had not been captured for any of the total available market.
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Establishment of a multi-layered operation to close the 69% visibility and coverage gap via a combination of low-cost but non-comprehensive data overlays matched to the institutions in the marketing universe, followed by a directed outbound telemarketing effort to identify high priority contacts within the institutions for which contacts could not be purchased. Massini Group assured that its client achieved maximum coverage at minimum cost by closely controlling the operational parameters of the outbound telemarketing efforts. The ultimate outcome of this composite effort was an increase in market visibility from 31% to 90%.
- Application of a highly accurate method to codify the importance of specific contacts attached to the institutions in the marketing universe so as to direct the appropriate communications to them. This effort employed various methods, including codification of contacts based upon mapping of 100,000’s of unique titles, statistical correlation analysis between contact categories and actual purchasing behavior, codification of responsiveness to specific messages/offers and finally, management of the codification of historical progress relative to building a sales relationship.
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Use of the combination of marketing universe, comprehensive contact coverage and codification and historical campaign history codification to direct the targeting of campaigns to contacts and institutions based upon inferred and confirmed interests. This process raised the instance of documented and confirmed interests from 0% to 60%. The remaining 40% of contact interests and responsibilities were inferred from statistical analysis of the response base.
At the same time, the client’s business performance went from 91% of goal to 132% of goal even though the goal was aggressively increased on a quarter over quarter basis.
RESULTS: The results of this effort can be measured in two ways:
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Quantitatively, there was a marked improvement in sales on a quarter over quarter basis. This trend was directly correlated first to increased visibility to deals as they happened, by addressing the large, previously untapped, area of the market, and then to increased understanding of the needs of the contacts at the target institutions. This is summarized by the tracking of sales performance relative to goal with contact coverage and documented relationship. On a detailed level, Massini Group’s client was able to directly attribute the increase in sales to the accounts that were previously not reached.
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Anecdotally, the process identified a very large number of “bluebird” accounts and deals that excited the sales force because they were situations that might have gone to the competition without their knowledge based upon the previous process. Hundreds of extraordinary and previously unknown opportunities for 100’s of laptops or desktops and 10’s of servers or heavy duty networking devices were common in the initial stages of the effort as accounts to which the sales force were blind became visible and understood.
In summary, over six quarters, the client’s visibility to the total available market went from 31% to a sustained 90%. At the same time, the quarterly sales performance relative to goal went from 91% of goal to 132% of goal, even though the sales goal was aggressively grown each quarter
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