Our client is a well-established company that produces innovative solutions for measuring and managing vacuum systems. They wanted to increase current revenues to $15-20 million, including growing their core product line and adding related technologies.
We provided the company with an opportunity to transform a mature business into a growth business by redefining their product value proposition, their customer base, and their product development effort. The goal was to increase their revenue stream by three times. We conducted a Go-to-Market planning workshop to help them identify their core competencies and who might be the market segment that would have greater value for what they offer.
We asked one of the company’s principals how Breakthrough Marketing Technology helped them with their business challenges.
What challenges led to your initial contact with Breakthrough Marketing Technology?
We launched a product that we were pretty certain was the best in every way. However, it wasn’t selling. Since we had price pressure, we chose to lower the price in order to increase sales. On the eve of this price change is when [our company] engaged Breakthrough Marketing Technology.
How have you addressed those challenges in the past?
In the past, we would address the issue of products not selling by doing an analysis of why the product wasn’t selling—be it feature, price or otherwise—and address it.
Why did you decide to engage Breakthrough?
We engaged Breakthrough on the advice of a trusted advisor. We recognized that it was difficult for us to see the forest through the trees. We weren’t convinced that we had the ability to confidently assess our situation since our whole team was so deeply involved in the decisions that led to our current situation. It was clear we were in need of an objective third party perspective.
How has working with Breakthrough impacted you and your business?
Breakthrough saved us time and money by getting to the heart of the problem early in the product launch. If we hadn’t engaged Breakthrough, we would have lowered the price of our product. I believe if we lowered the price, the real issue with our strategy would have never been revealed. Breakthrough was able to uncover that we had not done enough digging to assess if price was or was not the problem. They uncovered two really important points: That we were selling to the wrong people through the wrong channels, and thus we had improper messaging to boot. Breakthrough not only uncovered that our target market was wrong, but that our reach and margin possibilities for this product were far greater than we had anticipated.
