Itronis is a technology company, so the math added up for it to turn to its top investor for some business advice. MSP Today isn’t sure how the issue was raised, but in any event OpenView Venture Partners stepped in to help Itronis fine tune its market approach.
Last year Itronis was going after pretty much the whole of the MSP community. If you were an MSP, Itronis wanted you as a customer. The marketing team had a prospect list of some 80,000. That’s a pretty broad swath, and difficult even for a massive established vendor to serve.
Itronis knew it had to segment, and change how it goes after whatever narrower market it decided to target. This is a complex undertaking – and help was certainly, well, of help.
“We had access to everything we needed to be successful,” noted Rick Faulk, CEO of Itronis. “We were targeting this massive market of managed service providers (MSPs) and we had the capital we needed to address that opportunity. The problem, however, was we lacked the market focus that would allow us to do all of that in the most effective and efficient manner possible.”
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Plus, Itronis was too often bringing the wrong kind of customers, customers where the average sales price wasn’t enough to support the Itronis business model.
Doing the research and rework to change course would be expensive, and time consuming, and take Itronis’ eye off the backup ball. A partner was the best answer.
Who better than OpenView, which led Itronis’ 2007 Series A investment round? OpenView, meanwhile, last year pumped money into Itronis, and so has a literally vested interest in seeing the company grow.
So this year OpenView senior managing director Scott Maxwell and his team worked with the backup company to define what markets to go after, how to address those segments, and then how to use metrics to measure success.
Most importantly, Itronis is now focused on just three market segments. “As a result of this collaboration, today Itronis has a much clearer understanding of where, why, when, and how to go after its target market. In less than a year, the company’s average sales price increased by 185 percent, its win rate improved by nearly 20 percent, and its sales cycle dropped from 32 days to 24 days,” the company said.
The MSP Play
Itronis designs its cloud storage wares with MSPs in mind. That’s why the management console includes billing, scheduling, and account setup.
That’s also why Itronis is so liberal with its branding, allowing MSPs to fully brand the service and the portal that supports it as their own. “We recast our cloud backup software with your logo and your brand, so your clients won't know that you're using our platform. You can rebrand your website, software, and notifications at your convenience,” Itronis argues. And “you can use our portal customization tool to create your own completely branded portal for your clients in just four easy steps: Upload your logo, specify a color scheme, provide company information, and customize email notifications. In just minutes, your customer-facing web portal is entirely branded, meaning your clients will only see your own imagery.”
Edited by
Alisen Downey
