Creating Interest

interest

Creating leads for Enterprise Case Management within the Judicial Sector

Once we understood who were our Prospects, see positioning customer example story here, we shifted our focus to marketing, creating interest, and turning Prospects (those who potentially derive the greatest value) into active Leads (those who have expressed interest and fit the qualification criteria).

The funnel stages within B2B/B2G lead generation are mostly universal and range from not knowing the solution exists to actively considering. However, what is unique are the tactics and tools that are emphasized and how those marketing tactics are executed.

Often, the journey is a combination of both commodity and missionary. For instance the market may be established and there might be many known vendors but the approach may be new or novel. In this case, the Prospects’ journey leaned more to missionary as our SaaS delivery and self-managed workflow allowed “smaller” courts access to rich functionality not usually available at an affordable price point.

 The Positioning Funnel for Our Judicial Case Management Solution:

Although the courts at the bottom of the Positioning funnel were our best prospects, we also targeted courts higher in the funnel :

  1. It wasn’t easy to distinguish between certain criteria with a one-on-many approach.  For instance, the importance of “self-configuration for setup” was something we could only ascertain after multiple meetings with the prospective customer. 

  2. Depending on the marketing tactic, the incremental cost or effort of including organizations higher in the funnel might be low and the degradation in quality minor. 

  3. It was unclear to us if we could hit our targets by focusing only the “small” number of courts who met all the criteria.    

  4.  This is an art not a science, so we wanted to leave ourselves some flexibility.

Low Hanging Fruit

Both social and search (SEO and paid) are inexpensive and are a primary way prospective customers learn about what solutions are available.  The search term “court case management” had an average monthly search between 10 - 100, so we did spend money on paid search, but it was not a major focus (case management was slightly better at 100 – 1,000 MSV). 

Our target decision makers were judges and chief deputy clerks, and we did not find heavy social usage. 

As we were selling into the public sector, we had a third option within low hanging fruit: subscribing to sites that aggregated RFIs and RFPs.  Even though it was a good amount of work with low odds, responding to the RFPs helped us learn about the market.  We were able to see what features customers prioritized, how our competitors were pricing their products, and when we were shortlisted, hear directly from customers who were active buyers.  We had a 20% hit rate in making it past the first round when submitting “blindly” but only won opportunities where the local systems integrator already had a relationship.

Medium Hanging Fruit & Outbound

The Market Segmentation funnel helped us stay focused on who derived the greatest value from our solution and therefore who were the best Prospects.  This was especially helpful with the proactive activities as these activities take the longest time to yield results (and therefore the costs compound).  As an example, there are multiple court conferences we could exhibit at but given our focus on courts that served populations of a certain size, we focused on “regional” conferences and avoided the very large conferences that pulled courts of all sizes (we of course learned this the hard way – trial and error).

Getting ahead

Our approach for Getting Ahead was around educating the market to both our offering and the advantages a fully automated court management system.  By combining the funnel filters of population served with geographies that have a pro business philosophy, if you are USA based think Delaware, we were able to concentrate our efforts and keep up a sustained effort.  Furthermore, by focusing on select geographies, we could also concentrate our efforts around just a handful of S/I firms.

Curve Ball

Although we thought court case management systems were exciting, we were in the minority.  But then our lead Product Manager had an idea to create a plug-in for Microsoft Teams that turned an e-meeting into a remote court hearing.  As remote court hearings are somewhat “generic”, this plug-in had broad appeal and could easily be downloaded (PLG).  Although we didn’t get true adoption for the plug-in, we needed more functionality, the plug-in was a marketing success since remote court hearings were top of mind at both courts across the world and with the sales reps at our S/I partners due to the pandemic. In the end, we had 20X the number of Suspects contact us as compared to enterprise court case management.

In looking to create leads we targeted each group within the Lead Generation Funnel. Why? 

Unfortunately, there is no free lunch.  It would be great to focus only on actively considering, however those Prospects are also more likely to have decided on a list of preferred solutions.  With the top of the funnel, we have the best chance of establishing why our unique features provide the greatest business impact but at the same time, those courts are probably at least two years away from changing and making an investment. 

Our Marketing Plan

Foundational

All paths lead to the website.  Since almost all our marketing actions would result in a Prospect going to the website, maintaining an informative and current website was foundational.  Also, as a website is self-service and space is not an issue, we could offer multiple paths (General Courts vs Specialty courts) and match content to the stage of the Prospect’s journey (justification for automation vs detailed product features).

Conclusion

 In closing, the Funnel Framework was successful in helping us create interest by:

  1. Ensuring we targeted all groups within the Journey funnel from those who were unaware to the benefits of the latest solutions for court automation to those who were actively considering solutions.

  2. Pushing us to differentiate our marketing actions and tools to match our Prospect criteria.

  3. Prioritizing our marketing plan from Foundational to Low Hanging Fruit to Outbound and Getting Ahead so we addressed the areas that had the largest impact first and the highest ROI.

  4. Keeping us focused on where we provided the greatest value which led to quality leads and ultimately happy customers!

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