Problem:

Accanto Systems was a new company that had spun a division out of Sunrise Telecom. They sold protocol analyzers and large networking monitoring systems to Wireless and Wireline service providers. They needed to develop awareness about the new company and create more professional and effective sales tools. Lastly, their channel was not well-trained in the new products and was widely varied in its ability to generate leads, indentify new business and close sales.

Approach Taken & Lessons Learned:

1. An internal positioning workshop was held to determine the best positioning and key messaging to use in launching the new company;
2. A new website was designed based on Drupal;
3. SEO optimization was completed and ongoing PPC and SEO programs were put in place;
4. Sales collateral was totally rewritten and rebranded;
5. The company was launched at the Mobile World Congress conference;
6. An aggressive but cost effective PR program was put in place to create a monthly stream of customer wins, new product and partnership stories;
7. To help the VAR Channel with lead generation, off-the-shelf marketing programs were developed in the areas of email, road tours, vertical events and webinars; and
8. Social networking programs involving Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook were prototyped to learn how to best use these tools in this market.

Results:

1. The company launch at the Mobile World Congress in Spain and was widely successful and received a lot of press and analyst coverage.
2. The new website and sales collateral proved highly effective during the sales process.
3. The channel marketing program adoption grew each month as the channel was interacted with and began to see results from educating their customers.
4. Leads generated from the channel marketing programs were collected, distributed, tracked and reported upon.
5. Getting an estimate of sales based on leads provided required inside sales subs for first pass qualification. 100% tracking was not possible, but enough tracking was done to make statistical estimates.
6. Accanto’s business grew 25% in 2008 in an economy where many companies were shrinking.
7. It had more deals in the funnel in 2009 than it can adequately respond to.