Defining a new category

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The Challenge

The business of sales keeps some 190 million companies across the world afloat. Altify, (now Upland Altify) helps coach the next generation of sales and marketing leaders, at the likes of BT and Honeywell, to reach their sales goals through a smart digital sales methodology.

Altify’s technology helps companies like BT, Sage and Honeywell gain more revenue worldwide. Yet, lacking strong PR representation in the UK, and without a Category to differentiate it, Altify found it hard to get its message in front of the right audiences.

Before Positive worked with Altify on its Category creation, Altify led with undifferentiated messaging which presented the company as a ‘Digital Sales Transformation’ business. This did not demonstrate how Altify’s technology solved a very specific problem for businesses, namely how to maximise revenue gained from a customer through creating meaningful, mutually-beneficial relationships with buyers and customers.

Upland

Our Response

Positive’s team travelled to Altify’s offices in Dublin to host a series of Category definition workshops which extracted intelligence across the business to support the Category creation process. Working closely with the CMO and other key stakeholders, Positive and Altify created a differentiated Point of View (PoV) for Altify as well as a brand new, differentiated Category name, Customer Revenue Optimization, or CRO.

With a new Category successfully defined, alongside fresh in-depth research about how a diverse workforce improves business performance, Positive spotted a number of opportunities to secure press coverage – taking Altify where it needed to be.

Positive convinced and coached Altify’s leadership team to combine their latest research data on diversity with the news agenda. The study found:

70% of senior executives believe a diversity policy impacts the business performance of their organisation.
78% of businesses with great diversity retain the customers they want to.

As the issue was focused within the IT industry, Positive identified the most relevant UK technology writers on the topic of diversity and fast-followed the news cycle by showing how businesses can improve their performance if they had a more gender and racially diverse workforce.

Positive worked tirelessly to gain interest in Altify’s newly defined Category. Working with the media, as well as select analysts, customers and partners, Positive gained public endorsements supporting the benefits of Customer Revenue Optimization as well as Altify’s vision for the ‘Post-CRM World’. This solidified Altify’s Category definition as not merely a simple exercise of vanity business change, but of a strategic market domination process which has greatly benefited both Altify’s customers and partners.

The Results

Together with Altify, Positive was able to secure coverage with titles such as The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, Information Age, ComputerWorldUK, Verdict, Diginomica and Yahoo! Finance. Yet, perhaps the greatest result of all is Altify’s recent acquisition by Upland Software for a cash price of $84m, less than a year after Positive officially announced Altify’s Category to the world.