Firmwater Case Study

Firmwater is in the software business. Firmwater has a Software as a Service (SaaS) Learning Management System, which we sell to a small niche market – Training Vendors.

We had hired a recent university grad to be our sales person. We only had a handful of clients, and we were very reliant on one large client. We wanted to bring in more clients and increase revenues.

After about a year, our sales person was not performing the way we needed. As technical people, we were unable to give him much direction in sales and marketing, and although we asked some sales and marketers we knew to help him, it was very hit and miss, and with no real direction for our sales person.

We had tried an out call service to get appointments, but that wasn’t working, and we also tried Google Adwords with very little success.

Ian Dainty had contacted me with his out bound email campaign and his coaching. We bought his online coaching sessions, but after Ian had spoken to our sales person, he soon realized that he needed more hands-on and direct coaching exposure.

When the sales person had to resign from Firmwater for personal reasons. Ian stepped in and took over the marketing and sales until we hired someone else, and Ian was instrumental in getting her up and fully functional within four months.She too was fresh out of school, and knew very little about sales and marketing.

What Ian Did

Ian started coaching our sales person. He also noted that we really didn’t have a lead generation system in place. Although we were using Google Adwords, we really didn’t know the system very well, and we were really just wasting our money.

Over the next several months, Ian coached our sales person and set up several marketing campaigns for us. These included;

• A marketing strategy for our company.
• Marketing campaigns directed at our niche market.
• Revitalizing Google Adwords so that it started bringing in real leads.
• Coaching the sales person in the right way to qualify people using his GAIM Plan.
• Coaching the sales person in the right way to give demonstrations of our product.
• Getting me (the President) involved in how important marketing was to Firmwater and getting the Firmwater partners involved in the marketing process.

Real Benefits Achieved

The biggest benefit Ian brought was the tripling of our client base over the next year and a half. And all of this was accomplished with a limited marketing budget.

By entrenching Google Adwords as our main lead generation, we now get from 30 to 40 qualified training vendor leads per month.

By involving the Firmwater partners in the marketing process, particularly in doing demos for prospects, and by ensuring we were involved in the marketing process, and what that process was, we have realized the following benefits.

• We better understand what our prospects and clients want in our product.
• We better understand the marketing process.
• We have a better understanding of Google Adwords and how it can bring good qualified leads to Firmwater.
• We have a much larger client base, and we are less and less reliant on our largest client.

Conclusion

We have no hesitation in recommending Ian to any business to help them increase their revenues and client base significantly over a short period of time.