Regulating the complex sales cycle by educating the marketplace

Since 1999 Scalable Software has been a leader in enterprise IT asset management. In 2005, they began developing a second product line to address the regulatory compliance needs of their current customers.

While most large enterprises were aware of the need to conform to government and industry regulations (e.g. HIPPA, SOX, FISMA, etc.), the details of how to do this were concurrently being established as the regulations evolved.

Scalable set out to capture the thought leadership first-mover position as it launched this new product into an emerging market. Scalable’s strategy was to work with regulatory agencies and early adopter/key enterprise accounts to codify and automate best practices during this process while simultaneously educating the marketplace on state of the art results. Securing the SEC as an early customer and reference account was a critical tactic to achieve their goals.

Enter Water Design Studio.

Water Design Studio was brought in to develop sales collateral and customer education materials to support a direct sales force. This literature also had to serve multiple audiences (industry analysts, prospects, customers, investors, and regulators).

Scalable wanted to educate and keep the marketplace informed of the evolving compliance issues. Because these regulations were quickly and unexpectedly passed, most enterprises had not included regulatory compliance projects in their current budgets. As a consequence, all sales collateral needed to address these affected businesses’ top concerns: cost/schedule impact and a comprehensive and simple way to demonstrate compliance.

Our program simplified the complex selling process by educating the marketplace through company literature, case studies, data sheets, white papers, and advertising for webinars and conferences with messages that were simple, compelling and spoke directly to the targets.

The results? The new product was successfully launched in 2006 and the business unit spun out as an independent company (Compliance Spectrum) in 2007. Today, Compliance Spectrum is the recognized industry expert, enabling enterprises to cut through the compliance maze.