Actuate Gets Big Results From Industry Research ROI Program

The Situation

In late 2000, Actuate suffered from spotty awareness and understanding among the BI industry analyst community of its corporate and product strategy, as well as little visible support for sales & marketing efforts . The company also had low visibility with Gartner Research even though it was the inventor of term “business intelligence.” Actuate management recognized the need to develop a greater understanding of leading BI analyst research agendas in U.S., EMEA and Asia/Pac
.
The Program

M.O. Partners' Associate Partner Mike Teeling led the company's aggressive effort to get a better return from their analyst relations program investment over next the four-and-a-half years. He created a process to provide:

• Sales Support to lend current opinion and references from prominent analysts to shorten sales cycle
  
• Product Marketing Support with regular counsel on industry trends, issues, and opportunities to directly impact go-to-market strategy
  
• Investor Relations Support to increase management team visibility and cross pollinate AR and IR efforts
   

The Results

As a result of Teeling's Marketing Operations approach, the company:

• Closed sales directly attributable to industry analyst support totaling more than $300,000 in new business in a single quarter – thanks to quick response, active references, and sales tools packaging

• Increased raw amount of industry analyst research coverage by 58 percent (2002 vs. 2001); “share of voice” measurement of coverage relative to top competitors improved by 52 percent (2004 vs. 2003); dominated enterprise reporting segment in 2004 vs. larger competitors (ReportNet, Crystal, IBI)
  
• Increased media “share of voice” from 4 percent to 29 percent in only 8 months (July02-March03)
  
• Achieved 100% analyst coverage, quotes for Actuate / Eclipse open source partnership announcement (Aug04)
  
• Was recognized as the Enterprise Reporting Leader in Forrester Wave report (Aug04);

• improved plotting of Actuate along “vision” axis on Gartner’s BI Tools Suite Magic Quadrant (3 years in a row)

• improved position in Meta Group’s BI MetaSpectrum (2004 vs. 2003)
  
• Successfully defended Actuate “uniques” among key influencers: BI extranet deployments, high scalability, managed spreadsheet server, strong Java development, EII for reporting
  
• Was rewarded with successful account management of Actuate’s six-figure Gartner contract spanning consulting services, events, direct marketing and research sponsorship

• Enjoyed lawless execution of annual Analyst Day, combining both Wall Street and industry targets
  
• Received r egular, ongoing analyst support for PR activities – including multiple analysts as press references for use during major product launches and news announcements
  
• Averaged 10 analyst interactions per month across 70+ global analyst targets (2004-05)

back to top