Case Studies

Situation

Alex is the CPO of a series B retail tech company. When we started working together, his situation was challenging on all fronts and he was trying to figure out how to:

• Stay on top of conflicting priorities including the release of multiple products alongside integrating an acquired company

• Navigate a leadership transition and a new CEO

• Stop being a bottleneck for his team

• Feel less exhausted

• Reach alignment more often with the rest of the leadership team

He felt stuck and didn’t know how to address it all.

1. The first thing we worked on together was to scale and structure his team:

• There was confusion at the junior and mid-level around how to integrate two platforms and a gap in the senior level within his team

• Out of the 10 people that he interacted with on a weekly basis, Alex identified 3 with the potential to quickly grow and groom into more senior roles.

• He spent more time with them and took inventory of possible gaps in their product knowledge to design an ad hoc training plan

• He finally embraced another way of going about the platform integration which his team had been advocating for

• He hired an Executive Assistant/ Chief of Staff to manage his inbox – a task that had become particularly draining for him

• Overall, he started to continuously take steps to delegate and empower his team so they could take more initiative on the product side and so he could focus on high-value work and be more productive

• After a few months, he promoted two team members to VP of Engineering and VP of Product roles

2. Then, we established new processes with his team and the rest of the leadership.

• He made an inventory of how he spent his time and skipped/ adjusted the cadence of some calls

• He carved out time twice a week during work hours to step back and gain a big-picture perspective on the current state of affairs

• He also blocked 20% of his time on a weekly basis to deal with the side effects of the change in leadership and formed a strong partnership with the CFO

• He mapped out different scenarios of how to scale the team to allow him to interact more directly about costs and feasibility with his new CEO

3. Once these practices were in place, we established a product-led culture:

• Alex put in place a cultural transformation meeting to focus on what could be improved in the team including:

  • Interview processes

  • Enhanced communication within the team (increased use of Slack, celebrating birthdays, etc.)

  • Happy hours

  • Creation of a profit-sharing system for some members of his team

• Overall, he managed a shift in his team culture from “engineers-driven” to “product-driven”

4. Letting go of projects not directly connected to the core strategy freed up some time and bandwidth.

• He put aside 2 potential partnerships pursued that were not currently consistent with the core strategy (although they seemed appealing) and that had become a distraction from what had to be done

All of this was only possible because we surfaced and worked on Alex’s limiting beliefs. In coaching, he realized that:

• He was afraid to push back and have difficult conversations with his team and with leadership

• When things got difficult, he had a tendency to isolate and not engage with other team members to get more data and reach alignment before moving forward

• When facing a challenge, he often went to the worst-case scenario, which prevented him from seeing the whole picture and acting accordingly

• He wasn’t fully aware of how much his voice mattered and how much agency he had

• He had been avoiding conflicts and needed to have a more “vocal leadership”

• He needed to change his management style:

  • From: wanting to figure out the puzzle himself before passing it on to his team

  • To: making progress one step at a time, all together

• He saw that he found it hard to let go of details and focus on areas where he was the only holder of information

• He needed to shift his mindset and stop focusing on what was not yet achieved, which added extra pressure on him

• He realized that he hadn’t thought through his own needs in order to be a resource for others and perform well

• Eventually, he realized that when facing tough challenges, he was getting very focused on proving to others that he knew what he was doing and that he could deliver – at the expense of spending more time with his team to empower them in making decisions

At the end of our 6-months engagement, Alex was thriving. He had built a machine that created clarity, consistency and freedom for himself and for his team. He had become a key member of the leadership team together with the CEO and the CFO. Not only was he excited again about what the organization was accomplishing, he was also eager to continue to learn as the organization was entering the next level of growth. And last but not least, he was starting to plan vacations with his family and to project himself long-term.

Situation

This is a global high-end packaging company with offices in New York that considering expanding to the West Coast market for a number of years but feared the market was too small and crowded, thus was hesitant.

First step: size the market

We began with a broader market which is already well-researched (here, the US packaging market) and broke it down into several elements in order to approach the core target market. In this case, the Core target market was the Californian share of this broad market and high-end segment in the state.

It turned out that the market was actually quite sizable because it encompasses the high-end industries the company already addressed (luxury, cosmetics, apparel, accessories, etc.) as well as the tech industry which also uses elaborate packaging.

Next step: assess the competitive landscape

The market was very crowded but filled with numerous small players with no manufacturing capabilities. In this context, the East Coast packaging company had a comparative and competitive advantage because they had a factory in China, allowing them to differentiate from other players.

The last step: talk to the end users to make sure that there was a product/ market fit and to supplement the data gathered from pre-existing market reports. It’s an important step of Kinesis Partners’ methodology that knows how to incentivize the interviewee’s time (share information, contacts, etc.).

The topic guides for those interviews cover 3 areas:

• Market topics (qualitative and quantitative trends, market size data, key selling products/ brands, evolution, etc.)

• Competition topics (main players, positioning, trends, etc.)

• Client topics (key success factors in the market, product characteristics, feedback on main players, etc.).

Situation

This Workflow Solutions SaaS company was committed to expanding to the US, this market being key for its growth strategy. Their challenge was that their solution, as it stood, necessitated a lot of organizational changes to the communication teams they were targeting. They were stuck trying to start a conversation with big accounts.

Approach

The objective was to come up with a lighter service offering to initiate a relationship with prospects. Once trust is established, they would be able to roll out their solution. The context was clear and next it was the time to turn the idea into reality.

The approach Kinesis Partners followed integrated several workshops with all the related departments (leadership, product, marketing, customer success and finance) and can be illustrated by this dialogue that took place over the course of a few weeks:

Q: Who is the target user?

A: The communication teams.

Q: Apart from facilitating collaboration within teams, what else can be done for them? What industry trends can we use?

A: Prevalence of fake news.

Q: For corporate communication teams, making their news reliable is key and this creates an opportunity! How does it translate into a new solution? What tech trends can be used right now?

A: Blockchain! There is there an opportunity to make the entire process trackable, accountable and transparent.

Q: Now, which communication teams specifically need this solution the most?

A: Financial services! The new vertical is complete.

Outcome

• The dialogue led to the following pitch to the new service offering being developed: “You have doubts about a news release? With this solution, companies certify their corporate information on the blockchain and invite to check its authenticity on their platform."

• Since then, they’ve secured as clients some of the biggest names in banking and asset management groups and have hired a business development manager dedicated to this new service line.

Situation

This is a NY-based Marketing Automation software company that wanted to expand to a new vertical but didn’t know where to start.

Approach

Together we began by making the objective clear internally and allocated resources for it by creating a dedicated task force (for a certain portion of their time) – a startup within a startup. This led to making an estimate of the time and resources needed to dedicate to this expansion plan and finding an internal lead to partner with Kinesis Partners and help navigate politics and allocate resources.

The new vertical was actually founded by one of the sales reps that were part of the dedicated team in one of the workshops Kinesis Partners facilitated. By giving him the frame to present his idea and love of sports, we succeeded in motivating others on the team.

Kinesis Partners started to look for ways to work with sports clubs and was able to quickly identify that their sales & ticketing departments were in fact poorly automated.

Kinesis Partners then designed a new marketing funnel for this new prospect category. This implied creating new content, use cases and articles describing specifically how to automate email sequences and templates for ticketing departments and how it permitted streamlining the relationships with customers.

Outcome

Today, sports clubs are one of this company’s top 3 verticals in revenues generated. More importantly, the process they went through to identify and address this new vertical was extremely valuable for their journey. It allowed them to restructure internally and build the tools, processes and capabilities necessary to later expand to other verticals, geographical areas and land bigger accounts.

Situation

This Adtech company had been approaching large media groups in New York for some time but was not getting the results they were hoping for. They wanted to know what was not working to make the necessary changes.

Approach

In order to get further information on the faults in their current approach, Kinesis Partners decided to test new customer profiles in new geographies. We started with companies in the tri-state area (30 miles away from NYC) and smaller in size, which required adjusting the sales and marketing materials.

Step 1: We created new customized sequences to automate the approach. For that matter, we needed to identify a common problem in the space, get current customers’ references and quotes in this space and design ad hoc collaterals describing the approach to solve the problem (2-pagers, use cases, sales deck, etc.).

Step 2: Once we had the right marketing automation in place, we were able to start measuring and tracking the results of the approach (open rates, reply rates, account engagement, number of opportunities, new pipeline generated, revenue closed, renewal rates, etc.)

Step 3: Analyzing the campaign metrics data allowed us to understand that this company was getting more traction with these smaller-sized media groups. By comparing the stats of this approach to the one in NYC over the course of a few weeks, we were able to decide to invest more time in these new prospects.

Outcome

These smaller-sized media companies in the tri-state area became their biggest market for a while. More importantly, they had found their ICP (Ideal Client Profile) and were able to replicate this approach with similar-sized companies in other less crowded markets.

Situation

This company had a lot of challenges, including a 3-year growth stall, a decreasing presence in department stores and declining online revenues that no longer compensated for the gap created by offline activities. They didn’t know what to do.

Approach

When we brought up the possibility of reinforcing their presence at regional independent stores, they didn’t believe it was going to be valuable, assuming that this distribution channel was going to be too small and too difficult to develop.

Providing market insight on independent speciality retailers made apparent the potential of this distribution channel that represents a significant share of the luxury segment. It required a region-by-region approach but the work to properly address them could be extremely rewarding.

The next challenge was related to the difficulties associated with prospecting these retailers. Every account required regular visits, care and attention - as a medium-sized company they were wondering how to manage such a network, given their limited internal commercial resources.

Kinesis Partners was able to point in the direction of independent sales veterans who specialize in specific territories and industries. These agents are on the road 200 days a year to easily access these small speciality retailers. Their commission-based compensation model (usually 10% of generated revenues) makes them a good fit for companies which do not have the resources to build a large internal business development team.

Outcome

This company had to rethink and reduce its product offering to expand its distribution channel in the US but the efforts paid off. Today, they have more than 10 independent agents with exclusive regional contracts covering the North East, the South East, the South and the West Coast independent retailers. This distribution channel accounts for nearly 30% of their US revenues.

Situation

For the past 30 years, this company had been selling their products successfully and exclusively through retail outlets. Once they expanded their activities to the US, they could not maintain the same approach in this new market/geography. Retail channels were way too crowded in this category and it was too difficult to differentiate based solely on digital marketing. They needed to get creative and that is when we started to explore the partner/ prescriber model.

Approach

Since the product was reliable, Kinesis Partners had substantive conversations with medical professionals. The choice of the most relevant prescribers (doctors, certified nurses, dieticians, etc.) became a key question.

We soon learned that patients trusted nutritionists the most with respect to digestive health. The real challenge then became bringing the nutritionists on board and including them fully in the go-to-market strategy of the company.

The answer we found here was to go all in. The idea to have a multichannel approach and to balance risks did not permit to send a strong message to the nutritionists to make them feel like a key partner in the future. Instead, we proposed to put the nutritionists at the centre of the strategy and to create a dedicated space on the e-commerce website to allow them to book products for their patients.

Outcome

Through this partnership model, each patient was able to log into his/her nutritionist’s dedicated account and purchase the right product right away without having to look through thousands of references first. This solution also provided a way to leverage the trust put into nutritionists by patients and allowed the company to build a long-term relationship with nutritionists.