Entering New Markets

And Justice For All

An established case management ISV with customers in many different industries implemented a system for court automation.  Could this be the opening for a new vertical solution?

Case management involves the storing of related information (a case) with the ability to provide the right subset of data to the right people at the right time so that the right
action can be taken.  The right piece of information could be structured or unstructured data, the right group of people means not just a specific person but roles, hierarchies, and schedules, and the right action involves the workflow for what possible notifications or actions could be taken at this step in the process and by whom.

Defining the Target Prospect

When initially thinking about the verticals that would produce our best target prospects, we found it helpful to think along three axes: technology, process, and complexity.

Our software was delivered via the Cloud and this allowed us to reduce time to value and implementation risk. As most courts had the overhead of needing to administer their systems themselves, this was a differentiator for us.     

The case management software market is established, competitive, and for larger projects, the services can be 10X the cost of the software.  However, the usage of modern case management systems within the court sector is not mature with many courts only having an archiving system for paper-based records.  There are many reasons why the justice market lagged but those would all be backwards looking as once the pandemic hit, courts saw first-hand the vulnerabilities of having a judicial system that required physical paper and in-person attendance. 

The stars appear aligned.  The company had a successful initial customer, the market seemed ripe for change, especially post pandemic, and the company was getting detailed product and process feedback from their first customer.  Furthermore, having an automated judicial system was increasingly becoming a topic of discussion at conferences and in articles given the societal benefits of transparency and access.

Having not come from the judicial industry, we had not realized how many different types of courts there are, such as traffic, family, treatment, appeals, and superior, with each type of court having some unique processes.  For instance, treatment courts often require participants to submit samples to labs and the results of those labs need to be integrated into the court case management process.

The last axes revolved around volume and complexity.  There are some massive courts who do very high volumes of cases and the workflow for some types of cases can be very complex.  Our software, mostly do the technology stack, was not aimed at high-volume courts but our application could handle very complex workflows.

Based on the above, our best Prospects were small to medium general courts who had already embraced a Cloud IT strategy, and that is who we initially targeted.  How?  Courts self-identify by the types of cases they handle, and we could anticipate volume based on the geography the court served.  Cloud was more difficult to discern and sometimes we had to wait till we were engaged to learn the customer’s preference (as we sold through Partners, sometimes the Partner knew the customer’s preference).  Also, Cloud not only covered SaaS, our preference as it lowered the cost for the customer and simplified our operation, but also dedicated hosting and onsite hosting (not Cloud but we would manage the operation).

As we learned more about our Suspects and refined our positioning, we prioritize our Suspects as follows:

  1. General Courts: In the beginning, we did try pursuing some specialized courts and would have offered to build the missing integration points and needed specialized functionality (contingent on us receiving the business).  However, our competitors who focused on these types of courts already had both the functionality and references.  We decided a better entry point would be to win a general court and then grow our footprint horizontally within that court system.    

  2. Cloud: Over time we did expand our funnel beyond SaaS but drew the line at opportunities where the customer wanted to run the software in-house and self-manage.

  3. Population: We did compete for courts who served larger populations but mostly stayed on the smaller side which both kept our marketing actions focused and led to success.

  4. Self-configuration: Prospects didn’t raise this as a need, but we were able to translate this to a criteria around wanting a more economical solution where Prospects were willing to take on some of the work in order to keep costs down.

  5. The government where the court resided positioned itself as pro-business: Good filter but led to a small pool that we eventually outgrew.

  6. EU Grants: Good filter from the perspective of the customer being on a path to take action but our competitors also targeted this group so it ended up not being a beneficial filter.

Conclusion

It has been our experience that the initial inclination of founders is to err on the side of casting a wider net and pursue a broader range of Suspects. Although it may seem counterintuitive, we believe the opposite is true and that to maximize the odds for success you want to define the criteria as narrow as possible, while being broad enough to support the revenue objectives, and pursue targeted Prospects.

From a GTM perspective, we are all grabbing for the attention of a Suspect. In a world where marketing touch points have increased and Suspect’s attention span has decreased, marketing and sales actions need to amplify each other. The greater the actions build-on and amplify each other, the greater the odds for success. The more diffuse those efforts in pursuit of a broader range of Suspects, the more the odds are reduced.

Almost any court (type, size, preference or lack of preference for self-management, etc.) would have benefited from using our court case management solution and could, theoretically, have become a customer.  But by staying focused on the Suspects who represented our best Prospects, we maximized our GTM efforts and were successful in creating more customers.  

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