Top 3 Results
1K+ downloads of the report
¼ of active selling partners engaged with the report
Executive team went from skeptical to sold
“We’ve never done something like this before, so we weren’t sure if anyone would care. Everyone cared. It mattered. We’ve gotten feedback saying that we’re head and shoulders above our competition because we provided our selling partners with something really useful that they can use with their customers to display their expertise.”
Challenge: Build a strong thought leadership content program
Telarus is a global technology solutions distributor (TSD) with a singular focus on accelerating its selling partners’ success. As part of their strategic vision, the marketing team wanted to build out a thought leadership program to elevate their Vice Presidents of Advanced Solutions as thought leaders in the industry. To do this, they brought on marketing consultant, Rachelle Lara.
As Lara begin putting together a 2023 content strategy, rather than just plug in standard types of content like blogs and case studies, she pitched the marketing leadership team on an annual tech trends report that would incorporate survey data from their selling partners and the end user customers, like CIOs. She believed this type of data-backed content would deliver a lot of value to their partners, reduce the time burden on executives, which was crucial, and would best achieve the goal of increasing Telarus’ thought leadership.
“Telarus wants to position itself as trusted advisor and resource and this type of research would be one more example of really valuable, high-quality free content that our partners don’t get with other technology brokers they work with.”
Telarus’ CMO, Jennifer Dimas, was onboard with Lara’s vision. “This is a very relationship-driven business and a very engaged audience,” says Dimas. “There’s was also a vacuum for scientifically-managed data in our space.”
However, when Dimas tried to sell the project to the executive team, despite it requiring very little of their time, there was a lot of pushback. “They were kind of pooh poohing the concept of the piece,” says Dimas. Still, she believed this type of research-based report was the right approach, and so she pushed through the resistance and got the project approved.
Solution: Redpoint delivers provided smart guidance and strong project management
Once Telarus committed to a data-driven trends report, the next step was finding the right research partners. Lara and the marketing team determined they wanted to survey two separate audiences, their selling partners, and CIOs and CXOs that their partners would be selling to directly.
“It was a nice balancing factor,” says Dimas. “We have a complex, multi-tiered marketplace and it gave depth to it to have both audiences surveyed.”
Dimas had worked with Constellation Research and brought them on to survey the CIO/CXO audience. To assist with surveying their partner email list, and to manage the overall research portion of the project, Lara recommended Redpoint. What set Redpoint apart for Lara is that they offered a customized, end-to-end service and they had good relationships with B2B tech panel vendors. Price also came into play, as they were cost-effective. For Dimas’ part, she trusted Lara’s recommendation for a partner, but she felt even better about the partnership once she met with Redpoint. “We were impressed and knew we could work well together,” says Dimas.
Throughout the project, Telarus appreciated that Redpoint was very efficient with their process. “They asked smart questions, were super-fast with turnaround, very organized and responsive, and the process was just easy and streamlined,” says Lara. “I never had to worry about being off track with the timeline. The project management piece was amazing.”
Dimas also felt that Redpoint’s expertise in guiding the entire project was one area Redpoint really shined.
“What I really appreciated was Redpoint’s work style and approach. We have a tendency to circle and spin, but Redpoint kept us on task. They listened and then moved the ball forward and did it with grace.”
Results
The project has been a bigger success than Lara or Dimas could have imagined. The report been downloaded more than 1,000 times with over a quarter of their active selling partners engaging with the content.
“This year we will have 4,500 active selling partners – that’s how many people will have booked an opportunity with us and done business with us at some point during the year. A quarter of those people downloaded and engaged with this report in some fashion.
In addition, the executive leadership team is now fully onboard. Dimas recalls being prepared to be eaten alive by the executive team when they presented the report just before launch. But, she got the opposite response. “It was hilarious,” says Dimas. “They were all quiet as we scrolled through it, and then one of them just said, ‘I came here wanting to hate this, and I can’t. It’s awesome – really good job.’”
Dimas remarked how just recently, the CEO reminded her how much pushback she got in the beginning and how he was so glad that she had fought through it. “We’re definitely going to do this again next year,” says Dimas.
The final report has also generated a lot of interest for Telarus, including media outlets that don’t normally write about Telaurs. “We have a very small media universe that we operate in,” says Dimas, “but we had one journalist who was really interested in the report and he met with our subject matter experts and wrote articles about the tech topics and used our tech trends data in the articles.”
Another way they’ve been able to maximize their investment in the research is through repurposing the data. In addition to creating the initial 2023 Tech Trends Report, which was intended for their selling partners, Telarus also created another version that selling partners could then distribute to their end user customer.
The data has also been used organization-wide. “These trends were teased out at our annual summit. Every single keynote that any of Tealrus’ C-Suite was leading, cited data from the report,” says Lara.
“The sales reps are out there, putting the report into the market, having conversations with their advisors saying, ‘hey, have you considered talking about this with your end user customer? Have you looked at this report?’ From an operational perspective, I feel like we did a really good job of pushing this out all over the place. It's not just a marketing asset. It's being used in field enablement, and all of the organization is offering it.”
While this was Telarus’ first annual tech trends report, the momentum and excitement is there to continue. “Next year, we want to make it bigger and get it out earlier,” says Lara.
Quick Summary
Challenges
- Wanted to create high-value and high-impact content
- Needed to build thought leadership but without leaning too much on executive team
- Struggled to convince executives that a data-driven trends report was worthwhile
Solution
- Invested in collecting original research to elevate thought leadership
- Outsourced the project to research partners to reduce demand on internal leadership’s time
- Managed the project tightly to keep it on track and reduce delays
Results
- 1K+ downloads of the report
- Over ¼ of Telarus selling partners engaged with the report
- Executive team went from skeptical to sold
- Elevated Telarus thought leadership within the industry and amongst partners
- Maximized ROI by repurposing report in multiple formats for multiple audiences
