How A Decade-Old IT Firm Stopped Competing On Price — And Started Winning On Value
A global IT services firm repositioned and transformed — in one year.
A global provider of IT Services for over ten years. A stable team. A good level of technical ability. However, the business experienced increasing difficulty in revenue growth.
They weren’t actually losing because their work lacked value; the agency excelled at its craft. The real problem was simply getting that value across to their customers (and, more crucially, the right customers), they needed to communicate both the extent of their skill and how it could be applied to produce top-shelf output for demanding clients.
Here's what was actually broken when we walked in:
Incorrect targets. Yes, leads were coming in, but from customers who wouldn’t pay what the business deserved.
Viewed as a commodity. They were seen as easily substitutable and undifferentiated.
No common ICP. Neither sales nor marketing understood the target customer.
Inconsistent revenue. There was neither a system nor a repeatable process for generating leads or, at least, there was no transparent method of anticipating what the next quarter would bring.
They felt the problem. They just couldn't put their finger on it, yet.
Diagnostic Audit
We did the hard work. An audit, not a survey. An audit, not just a review of existing assets. It involved a deep dive into the CXO team, the marketers, and the sellers, including an honest conversation that most agencies wouldn't be willing to have. It was not a nice conversation, but it was a very clear one. The company was underpricing itself. And, they were not a web and mobile dev shop. They were a product development partner.
Repositioning
- Repositioning around premium product development
- Rewrote their web, presales collateral and decks
- Aligned everything from marketing to sales to customer success
Demand Engine
- Created an ICP that the team could understand, for the first time
- Established outbound, targeting the correct buyers in the correct industries
- Launched an inbound content program to complement the repositioning
- Added a CRM where sales and marketing teams can see the same data about every lead and deal in their pipeline
Sales & Marketing Alignment
- Weekly alignment meetings between the sales and marketing teams (this was non-existent before) before
- Shared feedback from sales conversations to the marketers
- Alignment of numbers between marketing and sales
Team Building
Identified team gaps and made relevant hires, trained and mentored team to align with the repositioning, and the new GTM. Remained with the organization to help the system work independently of us.
Increase in leads
Improvement in lead quality
Revenue growth
Their customer conversations were no longer the same. Their customer expectations were no longer the same. The deals were bigger. The hourly rates were higher. The CXO team no longer was firefighting, they were developing partnerships that advanced their own business.
It takes more than a website and a LinkedIn profile for a company to tell their customers who they are.
It takes the kind of alignment, messaging, lead gen, sales enablement and customer success teams that allow them to say what they actually stand for. If they are not different from your competition, then they are not your customer. Repositioning is a revenue decision. It includes the pricing, the pipeline, and the kind of customers that they get from there on out. This company decided to reposition themselves. Everything else was a consequence.
Ready to find out what's broken?
Most growth problems aren't mysteries — they just haven't been diagnosed properly yet.