Workplace technology company pivots focus from products to solutions with thought leadership.
Archibus was the market pioneer in Integrated Workplace Management Solutions (IWMS), as the first and most well-established solution in its category. The industry had changed, however, pivoting from a traditional focus on customizable technical capabilities, toward a modern landscape where competitors were offering intuitive software focused on aligning organizations with a modern workplace experience.
Discover how I optimized our creative roadmap for demand generation and empowered our sales organization to approach the market as thought leaders.
Key Highlights:
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Archibus was a legend in its category, complete with its charismatic founder, a genius named Bruce Forbes who I never met. Those came before me talk about how Bruce created the industry by the sheer force of his personality, convincing an army of business partners to disseminate his innovative technology by always keeping one foot firmly planted in a future that only he could see.
By the time I joined, times were changing. Bruce was passed away and IWMS faced a fiercely competitive field of integrated product suites and point solutions, all marching to the tune of the latest industry focus, modernizing the workplace experience around the workforce of the future. Our product could solve any business problem you might imagine related to workplace transformations, commercial real estate, and facility management, but increasingly, companies were less interested in custom fit solutions. They wanted to partner with a market leader that understood the workplace of the future and how to get there.
"Mark’s knowledge and skillset were instrumental to our Marketing campaign efforts throughout the time we worked together. He worked with multiple departments serving as a strong foundation team member to link the Marketing department with sales, customer success, and product development among others. He was able to build educational, thought-leading content that was used across teams, and revised our webinar programs. His knowledge and skill helped develop a plan that serves as one of our strongest lead-generation efforts to date."
I began with Archibus as Head Writer, but soon my supervisor had retired and we were purchased by private equity. Our new investors also purchased one of our direct competitors, Serraview. Change meant that I was charged with helping our new CMO rebuild our team from scratch, and suddenly, we needed to generate leads for not just one company, but two. We also had to bring them together as a brand.
We had plenty of content for both organizations, but we did not have an agreed upon playbook related to our differentiators and overall position. This positioning also had to be embraced organization-we needed to bring everyone along on our journey of self-discovery. I approached the challenge by interviewing every sales executive and customer success representative I could schedule time with. Both companies also had incredibly dedicated users and partnerships with industry practitioners who were passionate about our software and eager to work with us. Together, with my supervising CMO, we outlined various fields that connected key industry pain points to best practices and then finally, to our software solutions. We frequently vetted this positioning across the organization to ensure we were all speaking the same language.
for our design, we worked with an agency to update our brand, modernizing our logo (still in use today) and leveraging consultant research to enhance our market visibility. We standardized our materials around the new brand guidelines, ensuring that our design shifted focus away from software screenshots and towards workers.
We had learned much from our discovery process, but we had not yet established a foothold in the market as credible subject matter experts. We needed to stand up in a crowded field as conversant leaders on how the workplace was evolving, and why that mattered to our clients. Furthermore, we needed to speak not only as a Marketing team, but as one collective organization.
Two questions limited our ability to lean into a content strategy of thought leadership: How could we leverage brand ambassadors to generate leads immediately without exhausting those relationships? How could we internalize that expertise across teams?
As Content Strategist, I approached these problems by creating an assembly line that went like this:
This strategy was effective because it allowed us to scale content around critical market positions with maximum efficiency. I could focus on working with subject matter experts to shape core narratives for webinars, while offloading the effort of producing much of the long-term materials onto outsourced talent. I could manage quality by providing outlines and webinar recordings up front, and polishing materials with revisions and edits on the back end. In this way, our webinars acted as critical nodes of knowledge capture, which could branch off into supporting ad campaigns, nurture streams, and SEO blogposts.
With so many new materials at our disposal, we had everything we needed to train and empower our Sales team. I leveraged three key touchpoints for enabling cross-functional teammates.
Our Webinar strategy became our strongest source of new leads and established a process that remained in place long after I departed. Most importantly, it was a collaboration that confronted sprawling challenges, and slowly brought us together as an organization. When I think about where we started, it's remarkable to reflect on just how much we evolved, and how we enthusiastically embraced the job of teaching an old dog a new trick. From what began as a difficult moment of reflection, we found our voice and regained our confidence.
Boston, MA
