Turning the Tide: A Competitive Win in the Cloud Market

Recently, I had the opportunity to lead a consulting engagement with a cloud provider who was losing sales to several competitors in their segment. After meeting with executives representing Sales, Marketing and Customer Success it became clear the primary issues stemmed from three factors:

– An Outdated Go-To-Market Strategy
– Lack of Clear Competitive Differentiation
– Inconsistent Messaging and Content

Together, we developed a strategic plan that would result in an increase in visibility, awareness, engagement, and differentiation to drive pipeline, net-new revenue, and competitive market share.

🏁 Step 1: Competitive SWOT Analysis

Together, working with Sales, Product Marketing, and Product Management we reviewed their current messaging, value propositions and existing customer base to understand how their offering was currently positioned.

Secondarily, we performed a comprehensive SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis that included the following:

➡️ Client Needs: Detailed description of client requirements and capabilities for cloud implementations
➡️ Competitor Capabilities: Primary capabilities of each competitor to effectively address client needs.
➡️ Pitfalls vs. Strengths: Potential pitfalls of competitive solutions contrasted against my clients’ strengths.
➡️ Impact Analysis: Business and operational impact resulting from competitor weaknesses contrasted against the cloud providers ability to deliver increases in KPIs as faster implementation, increased deployment flexibility, increased service reliability, and reduced operational costs.
➡️ Case Studies: References demonstrating previous successes with customers in targeted segments.
➡️ Collaborative Analyst White Papers: Co-authored with leading industry analysts, describing cloud trends and competitive solutions.

🏁 Step 2: Account-Based Marketing Strategy

➡️ Target Account List: Identified accounts and buyers most likely to purchase.
➡️ Marketing Go-To-Market Strategy: Competitive messaging and positioning, cloud use cases, references, competitive collateral, white papers, demand generation for events, trials/proof of concept offers.
➡️ Sales Enablement: Educated sales teams on opportunities, competitor sales playbooks (presentations, messaging, value propositions, battlecards by competitor)
➡️ Sales Strategy: Opportunity identification, competitive positioning, and resources to support the sales process.

🏆 Result: Over the next 12 months, our efforts led to a remarkable increase in marketing-led revenue of $490 million in competitive cloud revenue, representing an 83% year-over-year growth.

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