One product, two audiences
When we started working with Nuvolo, it was a pre-Series A startup with about $700k in sales. Its software, built on ServiceNow, helps organizations track and maintain expensive equipment.
Nuvolo described itself the way industry analysts did: enterprise asset management (EAM) and integrated workplace management systems (IWMS). Those were the categories analysts covered and investors were watching, so that language mattered. But the people who would actually buy the software searched for something else, a CMMS (a computerized maintenance management system), because they had equipment to fix that week.
Sales had a different problem. Nuvolo was getting a lot of leads, and reps spent hours giving basic demos to people who weren’t ready to buy. They were doing a sales engineer’s job instead of closing deals.
A track for analysts, a track for buyers
We kept both. Analysts and investors kept hearing EAM and IWMS, the categories they tracked. Buyers heard CMMS, the word they were typing into search, so Nuvolo showed up where they were already looking. Every buyer campaign after that was built on CMMS.
Kill Your Spreadsheets
The campaign went to facilities and healthcare IT managers who were tracking million-dollar equipment in spreadsheets. Its message was blunt: kill your spreadsheets.
It ran for 60 days across several channels at once. Paid ads and sponsorships in the trade publications those managers read were the main channel. Around them we ran paid and organic webinars, marketed through the ServiceNow partner channel, wrote the outbound messaging for sales, and sent outbound campaigns and content ahead of field marketing. Every channel carried the same message.
Leaning into “not-so-sexy”
Plenty of startups try to sound like the next big thing. We pitched Nuvolo to the press as what it was. MedCity News ran the story under the headline “Here’s a Not-so-Sexy Cloud Startup that just Raised $10M from GE, NEA.” Sales could send enterprise buyers a real news story about the company, and one with a sense of humor. We fed that coverage into the other channels, so every campaign had an outside story behind it.
Building the system sales ran on
We built the CRM from scratch: Salesforce and Marketo, connected, with lead scoring and routing, so the leads coming in reached the right rep.
Then we took the first demo off the reps’ plates. We built a demo center on Wistia where prospects could watch the product on their own and qualify themselves before a sales call. Marketo tracked what each prospect watched, kept nurturing them, and alerted the rep in Salesforce when someone was ready to talk. Reps could see who had been through the demos and spend their time on those prospects.
What followed
Nuvolo grew from about $700k to $8M in annual recurring revenue in under two years. The team grew from 7 people to 150 ahead of its next funding round. Trane Technologies later acquired Nuvolo.
