Case Studies

Bottom Line

Enter bottom line description here

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Situation

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

The 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 ($$$ value) to make the switch from either the large incumbent or a light (cheap) solution like QuickBooks.

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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 important, 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 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.