Case Studies

Bottom Line

Decision makers are busy people – it’s hard enough to get ahold of them, let alone use their time effectively to persuade them to buy your solution. In order to capitalize on the limited time you score with them, you need to be able to pitch them on helping where they’re always hurting – their wallet. By conducting customer interviews and identifying the key value drivers your solution provides, you’ll be able to calculate a tangible ROI that showcases how much customers can save or generate by working with you.

By leveraging ROI case studies, you invite the prospect to start thinking through the value your offering provides to their organization. This is critical as building the ROI case early in the process establishes the business case and revenue, cost savings, or efficiencies generated to justify the purchase. Too many companies show a demo then send pricing – in that world, all you’re doing is sending a request for payment. Your proposal is nothing more than a cost at this point. What comes next - prospects go dark.

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Situation

At the time of our investment, Axium was the #2 player in the architecture and engineering ERP market. The #1 player was over 10x our size and generic solutions captured the lower end of the market.

Our sales team did great work getting prospects to demos, but seemed to stall out following the demo stage. As we dug into the cause of these issues, we found that our internal champions were repeatedly stonewalled by the CFO or Head of Project Management who felt there wasn’t a big enough reason (read: $$$ value) to make the switch from either the large incumbent or a light (read: cheap) solution.

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What

Over several weeks we developed crisp ROI case studies with 4 main components:

1. The “So what” or the three high level, quantitative results that our product achieved for clients. These were eye-catching, relevant stats that would grab the attention of a prospect in under 30 seconds.
2. The challenges that our customers were facing that would resonate with prospects. The goal is to have these words come alive and evoke the pain these prospects have with their current (or lack thereof) offering.
3. The detailed, qualitative benefits that our product brought to clients. These would shine a bright light on what the world could look like if they made a switch.
4. The profile of the customer – this enabled the reader to understand whether the case study was relevant to his/her own company.

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How

First and most importantly, our goal was to convey our value propositions to prospects. We also wanted to further one of our strategic initiatives to move upmarket through these efforts. In order to do so, we needed to convey to larger customers (in this instance, prospects with 100-500 employees) that our solution could deliver for their teams.

With these two goals in mind, we worked with the sales and customer success teams to identify 2-3 small- to medium-sized customers (the typical size in which our product shined) and 2-3 larger customers (in order to build a relatable narrative for larger prospects to show that we have successfully serviced similar sized companies) who were strong advocates for our platform.

Through a series of interviews with both the customers’ finance and project management departments, we developed the key value drivers that our software offering provided. Using this real client data, we calculated the impact of our product after adoption, summarized the prior challenges and realized benefits into an ROI calculator, and ultimately pulled our learnings into a succinct 2-page PDF we used to better engage with prospects.

NOTE: AXIUM IS A COMPANY THAT ONE OR MORE OF THE MANAGING DIRECTORS OF M33 GROWTH WORKED WITH PRIOR TO STARTING M33 GROWTH. M33 GROWTH IS NOT MAKING A STATEMENT ON THE PERFORMANCE OF THIS INVESTMENT AND IS NOT CLAIMING THE PERFORMANCE TRACK RECORD. SEE LEGAL FOR MORE INFORMATION.