Client Snapshot

Our client, the leading employee advocacy and social selling platform – used by enterprise marketing, sales and HR teams to activate employees as brand ambassadors across social media – needed competitive intelligence in a very specific slice of their market: banking and financial services.

The employee advocacy space has a handful of established competitors, each with deep footholds in regulated industries where compliance-approved social sharing is a core requirement, not a nice-to-have. Banks, brokerages and insurance companies don’t switch advocacy platforms casually – these tools are embedded in compliance workflows, archival systems and employee onboarding processes. Displacing an incumbent requires reaching the exact decision-makers who own the advocacy program at institutions already paying for a competing platform.

What made this engagement distinctive was how quickly the buyer narrowed his focus. When we reached out via cold email offering a demo file, the CRO’s response was immediate, but when we pitched our initial competitor data, he redirected us entirely – he wasn’t interested in the competitors we’d led with. He wanted to see data on a different competitor altogether, one with a stronger presence in his target vertical.

This told us something important: the buyer already had a clear displacement thesis. He knew which competitor’s customers were most likely to switch and he knew which industry to start with. He didn’t need us to tell him who to go after – he needed us to find them.