The work
Sometimes even the most innovative and powerful product can struggle to find its place in the market.
This was the case with Perpetual Corporate Trust’s Business Intelligence solution – a software product that had the potential to change the debt securitisation market in Australia.
Perpetual is an Australian Financial Services powerhouse, with an enviable reputation in wealth management and corporate governance.
Through these businesses, Perpetual had built a treasure trove of 25 years of mortgage data. It realised this data could be used to offer more value to its customers through an analytics solution. Partnering with Microsoft and Deloitte, Perpetual built Perpetual Business Intelligence – a best-in-class solution designed to help them meet reporting obligations, reduce costs and make better, data-driven decisions.
Business Intelligence was a new area of focus for Perpetual and the decision makers for acquiring PerpetualBI were different from existing clients. This meant a new strategy was required to deliver an effective go-to-market plan.
Yell was asked to diagnose existing issues, solidify the value proposition and help Perpetual Corporate Trust find a path to profitability for its Business Intelligence solution.
The solution
This was a perfect opportunity for Yell to apply our ‘Proven Customer Vision’ framework.
We knew that the product itself was strong, but that the current approach was not sufficiently communicating the value that it could offer to the right people at target organisations.
We deployed our three-phase approach to ensure that we fully understood the current situation and solution’s capabilities, understood the actual needs of the market and then developed a go-to-market strategy to ensure that prospects understood that PerpetualBI meets an emerging, bur essential need.
In the first phase we interviewed internal stakeholders, uncovering an existing low-touch SAAS-style marketing approach for what was, in reality, an enterprise solution that required significant investment and time for customers to implement.
The second phase saw interviews with customers and prospects – those currently using the solution, those in the sales pipeline and ex-prospects who had made the decision to not continue with PerpetualBI.
We learned that features that were the original focus of the marketing and sales push were viewed as low priority by prospects, while other features of the solution offered considerable benefits that weren’t being communicated. Understanding which features and benefits were most valued by customers allowed us to re-focus .
In the final phase of the project, we developed a go-to-market plan, which:
- identified the type of organisation which would benefit most from PerpetualBI and which decision-makers would be most receptive
- identified two key personas within those organisations that needed to be addressed,
- formulated a positioning and messaging platform to communicate the solution’s value and answer any potential objections, and
- recommended an active engagement and sales approach, with an innovative long-term trial which would allow PerpetualBI to demonstrate its value to organisations, while minimising risk for customers and without impacting Perpetual’s bottom-line.
The go to market strategy and activities are now in place and, following a refresh of the marketing and sales materials, PerpetualBI is building a healthy pipeline of prospects and a growing reputation within the BI space.
