Digital Demand Center™ Launched as “Build to Transfer” Marketing and Demand Engine for Start-Up and Generates 320 “Sales Ready Leads” and $1.4M Opportunity Pipeline

Summary

In this software start-up demand gen case study you will learn how a software start up in the process of closing its initial round of professional funding launched a productive demand gen engine in less than 90 days.

Company Background

Transeo is a cloud-based software that helps both administrators and students prepare the student for success after graduation. Transeo offers multiple applications to manage community work based readiness programs, college and career readiness and college planning.

Transeo Serve, Transeo’s initial product, helps students and administrators track, report, and manage community service learning experiences. The product makes hour verification, logging, and report generation easy for students and counselors to replaces paper-based processes so counselors can invest more quality time students. It helps school district meet multiple Federal and State compliance requirements.

Situation

Transeo was a privately held start up company founded by prominent educators/administrators. Transeo Serve had been sold and successfully implemented for school districts giving it a first mover advantage. The founders were in the final stages of closing an initial seed round to launch and scale sales and marketing efforts.

Transeo had proven the viability of the solution, which is often difficult for early-stage seed companies. They had successfully closed their initial 12 deals and had a solid base of happy and referenceable clients; they were ready to launch their sales and marketing efforts.  

The Challenge

Transeo Serve had a great start with 12 happy customers but limited additional resources and personnel. Other items included a solid sales deck and proven closing process, an explainer video, a one-page website, and a database of 40,000 targets. The company had no CRM or automation tech and had never run a campaign. The sales and marketing efforts were being supported by one part time communications director, a customer service rep and founder Don Fraynd, PhD. This was Don’s second education tech company.  The company had a very strong advisory panel of industry thought leaders.

Once funded, Don’s first priority was to build an internal sales and marketing team. As a startup veteran he realized this was going to take time and he needed to:

• Protect his first mover advantage
• Implement sales and marketing operations infrastructure to manage/support a team
• Build a sales engine to be able to recruit talent
• Launch a lead gen and lead nurturing process to build a predictable sales funnel

The Solution

Month 1

During the first month, Digital Demand Center’s parent company Gabriel Sales crafted a go-to-market strategy that included a content plan for the first year. This content plan and campaign strategy was enough to fuel an integrated social media and email campaign that included: an awareness campaign, a lead nurturing campaign and a sales automation/conversion campaign. The strategy also included monthly live webcasts to include and leverage Transeo’s advisory board of thought and guest speakers from the board’s network.  

Month 2

Gabriel Sales ran a three-day onsite content workshop in Boulder and a one-day content workshop in Chicago to create 16 videos and 12 blog posts. Digital Demand Center’s full tech stack was launched and integrated with multiple Salesforce seats.

Month 3-4

A 3-part awareness campaign was kicked off to 20,000 targets. Content production was completed, giving sales reps a library of content to pull from and allowing the team to focus on selling.

Transeo hired and trained an internal Sales Development Rep to follow up with leads, staffed an entry level social media manager and started recruiting a Senior Sales Executive to close business. Company prepared to launch monthly live webcast.

Month 5-14

Digital Demand Center™ kicked off lead nurturing and sales automation campaigns then entered steady state with ongoing managed services. Over next 10 months 40,000 additional targets were added to campaigns.

With sales and marketing operations in place and a growing late-stage funnel of educated sales ready leads, Transeo was able to hire a Sales Executive in month 7. Company also launched monthly live webcasts and started to build its own internal content production team.

Months 14-16

Transeo hired its own marketing full time marketing manager and Digital Demand Center™ was transitioned to the company for ongoing management.  

Results

Within the first year DDC™

• Produced 320 Sales Ready Leads
• And engine started producing 18 to 32 sales ready leads per month

At time of transition DDC had:

• Created an opportunity pipeline of over $1.4M
• Adding an additional $150K monthly recurring revenue

Additional Strategic Benefits

Founder Don Fraynd was able to focus on identifying and scoping additional needs in the market, hiring and staffing the organizations and building industry partnerships.

Because of increased bandwidth and proven sales traction, Transeo was able to launch and support Transeo Serve with one additional software application (and two more in development) with cross-sells and upsells for increased revenue per deal downstream.

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