How can Liminal analyze the passwordless authentication space in different verticals to create a tailored GTM strategy that identifies key metrics, use cases, and ideal customer profiles?
Introduction
As the CIAM and authentication market spaces evolve, new vendors enter and compete against one another. Liminal was tasked with a Go-to-Market Strategy engagement with a prominent, large-scale digital identity vendor client as they launched their passwordless platform. The project aimed to develop actionable playbooks that the client’s salesforce team could leverage when working with its global customers with significant presence across key identified verticals, such as financial institutions and eCommerce. To achieve this goal, the Liminal team of skilled consultants and strategists worked closely with the client to refine a GTM strategy that tasked Liminal with creating playbooks specific to the client’s key verticals that outlined the buyer’s journey. It increased their ability to grow their customer portfolio.
Challenge
While the client’s product portfolio boasted innovative capabilities and features, developing tailored sales materials that differentiated the client from its competition proved difficult. Liminal wanted to ensure the vendor could leverage unique insights into different verticals aligned with other industries’ various goals, personas, and metrics. Specifically, Liminal wanted to identify these key elements:
- Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs): Who are the personas with whom the sales team would interact across different verticals?
- Key use cases: Which use cases most apply to the respective vertical the sales team is targeting?
- The buyer/customer journey: What is the timeline for each vertical and ICP’s buying process? What questions or roadblocks might the potential customer raise along the way?
- Tailored sales metrics: How can Liminal provide the client with quantifiable sales metrics that differentiate their product from other vendors while specifically targeting each vertical?
To tackle the challenge, Liminal leveraged market research, extensive customer interviews, and the creation of a dynamic ROI Calculator for each vertical. Through our analysis of the identity market, we landed on two key verticals that the client could focus on in its sales efforts: Financial Services and e-commerce.
From there, Liminal pursued a long list of customer interviews to collect key insights about what customers seek in an identity vendor. Our research helped us identify the key use cases relevant to each vertical, such as Account Takeover Fraud in Financial Services or Cart Abandonment in e-commerce. We met with various personas that also led us to pinpoint which roles our client would interact with when selling. Our interviews provided information regarding the buying journey, helping us to identify how long the client could expect to engage with potential customers and who these customers might be.
Solution
The knowledge we gained during our extensive research led to developing two vertical-specific GTM Playbooks for our clients to leverage in their sales efforts. We used our four main takeaways from the research (ICPs, key use cases, buying journey, and sales metrics) to differentiate the playbooks so that our clients knew how to approach different sales scenarios across verticals.
Using our resources, we created ICP profiles in each vertical to provide insights into the different industries. We also made sure to weave in the key use cases we identified from our research so the sales team could understand which use cases applied more directly to the two verticals. This information allowed us to create specific sales enablement strategy materials, such as questions to ask the customer, key points to make, or categories where the customer wants to save money.
We combined the work in our vertical playbooks to transfer into dynamic ROI Calculators for the client to use in each vertical. The goal was to make the vertical playbooks go hand-in-hand with the ROI Calculators so our client could further their sales efforts with tailored metrics to the customer and their industry. This would allow our clients to avoid any industry-knowledge gaps in the sales process and expedite the sales process without conducting initial discovery or research into the industry. The goal was to enhance our client’s sales efforts as their products launched.
Outcome
Liminal successfully provided the client with two actionable GTM playbooks and two dynamic ROI Calculators, each tied to a unique vertical. The playbooks combined all of our key findings and presented them in a logical flow that followed the client’s specific sales framework and methodology. We hosted training sessions with the client, walking them through the playbooks so they could understand how to
The most unique outcome of the engagement was the two ROI Calculators we provided to the client. The calculators allowed our client to walk through a potential deal with a customer, selecting the use cases they were most interested in and the products they wanted to purchase. From there, the calculators also had customizable options, allowing the salesperson to work closely with their customers, tailoring specific metrics to their needs. This helped our client calculate savings categories across industry pain points, making the data digestible to the potential customer. Our ROI Calculators predicted an average of a 7x ROI for customers with a million end-users, providing the client with a metrics breakdown.
The client was able to target unique personas in different verticals, understand their wants and needs in the market, and provide uniquely differentiated metrics from competitors.
Conclusion
As a result of our engagement, the client walked away with actionable GTM vertical-specific playbooks and a customizable ROI Calculator to leverage in sales efforts. The engagement was successful from the client’s perspective, along with Liminal’s, and proved our ability to enhance a client’s sales process. Additionally, the engagement materials demonstrated tangible results, where the client could convert perspectives to customers and increase their revenue. As one of the first major GTM Strategy engagements, this project promoted our ability to leverage industry knowledge and combine it with feedback from customers we spoke to turn it into easily comprehensible deliverables. Overall, the engagement highlighted the team’s ability to successfully leverage our data-driven research and turn it into practical sales materials for a company to utilize in its sales strategy efforts.
Key Takeaways
- Delivered two comprehensive, vertical-specific GTM playbooks for financial services and eCommerce, including detailed ICPs, key use cases, the buyer’s journey, and sales metrics.
- Developed two dynamic ROI Calculators tailored to each vertical, predicting an average 7x ROI for customers with a million end-users and enabling metric customization for targeted sales engagements.
- Conducted training sessions for the client’s sales team, providing actionable insights and sales tools to enhance their ability to engage with prospects.
- Enhanced product differentiation, streamlined the sales process, and increased conversion efficiency.
- The client is now well-positioned for significant revenue growth through targeted sales strategies and improved
