Being Right Can Be So Wrong
Instigation: Asigra has been quietly providing data backup and recovery software for decades. Positioned as the “cloud backup expert”, Asigra serves more than 550,000 sites throughout the world with single-minded devotion. Content to devote all their energy to supporting their channel partners, they are one of the most accomplished companies you’ve never heard of. By focusing solely on backup and recovery, Asigra developed a string of product innovations that led to industry analysts including them among preferred enterprise-grade backup solutions. The good news was that this opened a long-sought opportunity -- to expand from SMB to the enterprise. The bad news was that the enterprise marketplace is home to the well-known and well-entrenched 500 lb. gorillas of technology. Asigra needed a positioning that enabled them to get meetings with senior decision-makers at the corporate level.
Tradeshift
Instigation: Tradeshift is a B2B start-up offering a free invoicing platform and a growing web-based business network. Like many start-ups, its vision was grander than its reality. It quickly found itself in a sea of small companies offering commoditized e-invoicing services. Frustrating to employee and founder alike was the challenge of navigating between here and where they want to be. Their marketing had become muddled. As the new CMO John Eng observed, “Our vision was so big it was hard to communicate. Our messaging had to speak to a range of small to large companies. The challenge was that we’d never really codified a company-wide story or the messaging that conveyed that story.”