Client Profile
Applied Sciences Group (ASG) is a software engineering firm. It engineers solutions for factory automation, instrumentation, and control, and provides custom embedded software applications. ASG also provides FDA software validation and verification services specific to medical device environments.
Business Situation
As an entrepreneurial business, ASG developed a strong regional client base in the Western New York area. Given the unpredictable nature of the local economy, it wanted to expand its customer base into new geographic regions and focus on growth-oriented industry segments.
ASG had a small sales and marketing staff and needed to find a way to quickly identify qualified prospects without constraining its staff from servicing existing accounts. It needed to find a highly synchronized process that could consistently deliver awareness and education to the new geographic markets and targeted industry segments. This process would need to create the necessary education enabling its internal sales staff to enter the process when the prospect was fully aware of ASG’s offerings, qualified, and ready to engage in an active sales cycle.
In addition to developing new business in targeted regions and industries, ASG would need to inject the optimal amount of project work in its sales pipeline to fill present and future capacity requirements.
Finding the Right Targets
ASG selected Athena SWC to develop a targeted marketing campaign focused on delivering qualified sales opportunities from outside of the region in industry segments. Athena developed a plan to identify the best potential regions and targets most likely to be receptive to ASG’s outsourced software development model.
It identified medical device manufacturers as an optimal growth industry for this campaign effort. This marketplace was strong, given federal healthcare funding for new medical technologies, continual advancements in medicine, and highly compressed product life cycles. Additionally, these companies often outsource software engineering as it relates to FDA verification and validation of a device.
It’s extremely important for device manufacturers to launch new products quickly and correctly (getting to the market ahead of the competition) given FDA compliance guidelines and the highly competitive nature of this marketplace. Additionally, ASG has had good success working with medical device manufacturers and could leverage its past experience regarding the complex nature of the FDA verification and validation process.
RAMPing For Success
Athena used its synchronized Relationship Acquisition and Management Process (RAMP) to execute the campaign. RAMP is an infrastructure focused on the front-end of the sales cycle. The process uses a unique blend of direct mail, email, and follow-up sales calls to educate and qualify prospects. Athena also assisted in developing compelling messaging and a targeted educational webcast offer focused on the medical device software development compliance requirements.
Attending the webcast provided a solid first step in ASG’s active sales process and provided a mechanism for potential clients to learn more about ASG’s expertise within the software development process and knowledge of FDA compliance requirements.
Using Athena’s process, ASG successfully broke into new markets and built up its sales pipeline.
The Results
Introduced $120,000into ASG’s active sales pipeline
Extracted market intelligencerelative to decision makers and key influencers
Increased market awarenessfor ASG’s FDA verification and validation compliance software development offer
