Case Study: Cold Warm Calling
Challenge
Warm calling: Sales are hard, and nothing is harder than trying to sell a new product in a new category. Convincing a prospective client to take your call when they have no experience with a product like yours, much less a perceived need for what you offer, is extremely difficult, making initial lead generation one of the biggest barriers to market entry. This was the challenge facing an IoT technology company that had developed a distributed storage system with novel applications for enterprise IT infrastructure. The business development team at the company couldn’t get their target customers to even take their calls.
Critical Issues
Urgency | Customer Insights | Niche Expertise
The Solution
Maven recommended changing the company’s approach from “prospecting” to “research,” targeting prospective buyers to learn more about their target’s actual pain points and perceived needs. To accomplish this, Maven launched a Telephone Consultation inquiry on the topic of how Chief Information Officers, Systems Integrators, and major IT Consulting Firms thought about the enterprise storage landscape and the evolving needs of their businesses. Over the ensuing year, the resulting conversations have generated key insights that have influenced product design, dozens of warm leads, and several beta customers.
“By changing our approach from ‘We want to sell” to ‘We need to learn,’ we opened the doors in ways we never would have expected.”
– Head of Business Development
