Enabling Sales Teams

The Situation

A few years ago the Boeing corporation had a challenge with their 737 Max fleet in which a software bug, or rather a systematic software issue, plagued their fleet enough that the FAA and Boeing felt it was best to ground the fleet until the software quality issues could be addressed. A client of ours at the time was working in the software quality assurance space and asked if we could help them secure a meeting with the core leadership team for software quality over at Boeing. To help enable this, our team leveraged our deep insight, marketing intelligence capabilities to solve this interesting problem.

What We Did To Gather Intel

Our team then set out identifying the key leaders within the software quality assurance organization over at Being and we pulling copy that their leaders had written or put up online so we could analyze it with our methods and tools.

What’s interesting in these cases, but has proven itself to be the norm over time, is that most leadership teams share personality traits and are in many ways reflections of each other‘s values and personalities. Many times a company will call this their “culture“ but from our perspective, it’s just a group of people who share similar psychographic profiles. The leadership team, in this case, was no different, and as we continued our research it became very clear who we needed to speak to and influence, as well as where online they hung out, and what their thoughts on various subjects were. Specifically, those who were researched ended up being a mix of “architects“, “skeptics“, and “questioners”.

These are people many times who have questions about how the world works and it’s in some regards just a matter of the level of trust they have in the information presented as to whether or not they end up in either of these three categories. So for example a skeptic questions how the world works and needs a tremendous amount of facts to agree to the mechanisms at play. While an architect questions how the world works and is more willing to be intuitive about which mechanisms are working.

The Actions and Outcomes

So having found the people within this particular department, we chose to combine their psychographic profiles to form a singular entity. Essentially, if we had smashed all the minds of everyone in that board room together into one human how would that human think, act, and rationalize the world. That was then the primary profile we used and targeted going forward.

We then set out to build one on one messages, LinkedIn inMails, blogs, emails, and social posts that were specifically written for this avatar. Equally, we coached the client’s sales team on some tactics to engage this leadership team and friendly banter on social media using language and methods that we knew would resonate based on the target’s psyche.

The end result in this campaign being that our client was able to secure a sales call with this leadership team and propose ideas and solutions for how to address the software issues that were systemic across the entire fleet.

We love helping other clients in similar ways, and this use case is fundamentally similar to many of the other stand-alone subscriptions that we offer today. Building and engaging with core audience members in ways that resonate with their hearts and minds is in many times 40% more effective at building engagement, impressions, and ultimately new sales opportunities for our clients to follow up on.