For 23 years, 3Sharp, a Seattle-based consultancy, has been helping Fortune 500 technology companies demonstrate their software products to prospects, customers, conference attendees, reporters, and industry analysts. Through its work on countless projects with some of the best-known brands in IT, including Adobe and Microsoft, 3Sharp has acquired vast expertise in helping companies tell the stories of their software products — what they do and how they can change the lives of their customers. If you’ve attended major tech conferences, there’s a good chance you’ve seen — and probably been wowed by — a demo created by 3Sharp.
Now 3Sharp is packaging its expertise in Regale, a software demonstration platform for enterprise sales teams. To help market Regale in a way that breaks through the noise of the marketplace for sales enablement tools, 3Sharp turned to Fulcrum Group. Fulcrum’s Product Marketing Manager as a Service (PMMaaS) provides 3Sharp with ongoing support across marketing strategy and go-to-market execution, so 3Sharp can sell their company’s powerful sales demo platform to one of the most demanding markets around — enterprise salespeople.
The story of 3Sharp building and launching Regale is the story of changes sweeping the IT industry. It’s also the story of 3Sharp learning how to expand its success with one business model, consulting, to another, selling software as a service.
Making Complex Software Easier to Sell
About 10 years ago, 3Sharp noticed that enterprise sales teams were struggling to keep up with product velocity and deliver effective demos. Until then, enterprise software had largely consisted of a few well-known desktop applications and a few monolithic server applications. The advent of smartphones and cloud computing increased the complexity of the enterprise software market. Sales teams, even technically accomplished ones, struggled to keep up. They also struggled with the rapid-fire pace of software releases that resulted from companies adopting DevOps practices with continous deployments. Fifteen years ago, a new software release might come out once or twice a year. Today product teams are shipping weekly, daily, and sometimes even hourly.
Because software is more complex, sales teams have come to rely on technically savvy sales engineers. Unfortunately, these well-paid experts tend to be in short supply. Sales teams clearly needed help. And who better to help them solve their software demo problems than 3Sharp, the company some of the biggest brands in software trusted to deliver their own high-stakes demos?
Becoming a Company That Builds and Markets Products
3Sharp recognized the market opportunity in helping sales teams solve their demo problems. They also recognized the opportunity for themselves to grow into a product company, selling to a much broader audience and growing its sustainable revenue.
But making the transition from a traditional B2B consultancy to a B2B consultancy that’s also a product company introduces two key challenges:
Changing what the company builds, delivers, and supports.
Instead of delivering customized services to clients for individual projects, a product company needs to develop and deliver a well-defined, fully documented, and supported product for clients looking for a long-term solution they can use over and over again for a range of projects. This requires ongoing investments in product development, support, documentation, and other areas. Instead of predefined projects with end-dates, customers expect to use a product for years.
Changing how the company markets its offerings.
3Sharp was often able to sell their consulting services and individual projects through individuals they knew and to company departments with budget to build content. They weren’t selling to the final users of the content they produced. Marketing a product requires entirely rethinking who the actual user of the product is and who will benefit most from using it. Additionally, it requires understanding how to develop a successful go-to-market strategy, sales program, and customer success process.
Before engaging Fulcrum, 3Sharp had tried a few other approaches for building its product marketing muscle. It had hired strategic marketers who ended up delivering grand visions and high-level strategies but no bottom-line results. They had hired a content marketer who wrote blog posts about their product, but without an overarching strategy and go-to-market plan, the blog posts fizzled. The company needed a combination of marketing strategy, tactics, and execution, so that its efforts would be well directed and help the company break through.
Marketing Products with Strategic Insights and Real-World Results
Peter Kelly, founder and CEO of 3Sharp, had worked at Microsoft with Ian Hameroff, the founder and CEO of Fulcrum Group. He called Ian, and soon Fulcrum was helping 3Sharp with product marketing projects. Over the course of several years, Fulcrum helped 3Sharp with various marketing projects and provided a sounding board for Kelly and his team when they were pitching Microsoft on a major engagement. The marketing projects went well, and Kelly decided to take full advantage of what Fulcrum has to offer and switched to PMMaaS.
“I just love the value we get from Fulcrum,” he says. “The value comes from the combination of having a really solid strategy and then quickly pivoting to action and building stuff that makes a difference in what we do. We’ve dialed in on both those things and established a rhythm over the last year, and now it’s really bearing fruit.”
A key benefit of working with Fulcrum comes from the long-term nature of the two companies’ relationship and the chance it provides both companies to learn from the market.
“Thanks to Fulcrum, we’re finally building things that we can use in the business,” says Kelly. “We’re getting a critical mass of activity and insight and lots of attention from Fulcrum team members. I feel like all this work with Fulcrum has really helped us mature as a company. Adopting PMMaaS and investing in ongoing progress instead of one-off projects really made a difference. We get to see what’s working and what’s not, and then iterate on that.”
Fulcrum began by helping 3Sharp evaluate product-market fit for the Regale platform. Through this analysis, Kelly and his team came to better understand the changes sweeping the IT industry, and how those changes made product demos more important than ever before, even as delivering those demos became more unwieldy and difficult. Fulcrum interviewed 3Sharp customers and helped 3Sharp better articulate its customers’ challenges. They also helped 3Sharp better understand how they were uniquely positioned to address those challenges.
Then Fulcrum led Kelly and his team through a narrative development process, helping the company refine its messaging and craft its go-to-market strategy for Regale.
Next, Fulcrum executed on this strategy with critical deliverables:
- a new first-call pitch presentation, which replaced an earlier deck that hadn’t proved engaging with prospects
- a pricing and packaging strategy based on value delivered to customers
- a review and update of 3Sharp’s customer onboarding process
- an ebook about changes in enterprise software sales and how a seller showtime platform can help.
The ebook is a marquee deliverable designed to help 3Sharp’s audience understand changes taking place in the software industry and offering guidance for how to respond to those changes. “The ebook really tells our product story in a concise, compelling way,” says Kelly. “It addresses our audience’s pain points and shows how, with Regale, sales teams can deliver great demos even very complex software solutions without the help of sales engineers.”
All these deliverables have made a difference at 3Sharp, not just in providing assets to support specific marketing activities, but in the company’s culture and thinking.
“There are other companies out there that promise lots of strategic work,” Kelly adds. “The difference with Fulcrum is that it’s a strategic advisory with a lot of tactical wood behind the tip of the spear.”
To explain how working with Fulcrum has changed the work of product marketing at 3Sharp, Kelly draws an analogy with college. “When I look at my college experience with its focus on liberal arts, I see deep, meaningful change that occurred gradually. During those years, I learned how to think critically, how to read well, how to communicate, and so on. If you were to ask me, on what day did you acquire the knowledge with which to behave differently in the world, I wouldn’t have been able to give you a date. It wasn’t on a single day. It was a transformation that occurred over time. I would say it’s a similar thing with Fulcrum, where our experience has been relational and transformational, with some tangible outcomes that crystallize our understanding along the way.”
“A lot of what we’ve gained is a clear perspective on the marketplace,” he continues, “and on what we need to be doing building and marketing our solution. In the conversations I’m having now with prospects and customers, I’m able to be more persuasive and articulate, even if I never actually pull out the new pitch deck.”
“Stepping back, I would say that working with Fulcrum on these projects has made us better marketers,” he says. “We have the marketing assets, sure, and they’re important, but we also have our deeper understanding of the market and of how product marketing works when it’s done right. Thanks to Fulcrum, we’ve learned a lot, and every day now, we’re putting that knowledge to work.”
With Fulcrum’s guidance, 3Sharp is managing the tricky transition from being a consultancy working with the biggest names in tech to becoming software-as-a-service platform company with deep relationships that allow them to respond to their clients’ enterprise needs. Fulcrum helped 3Sharp with a gamut of product marketing initiatives — from market research to pricing and packaging — that helped a company with deep expertise in storytelling tell its own story better than ever before.