How the Buyer’s Journey changed everything for CA Technologies
In 2000, CA Technologies was a global company providing a dizzying array of software to enterprise IT buyers. It had a complex offering, with approximately 4,500 products on offer, many of which were from acquisitions. It was already highly profitable, with its Australian arm alone generating about 200 million U.S. Dollars.
SNAPSHOT:
The challenge
As the dominant player in many of their markets, CA was finding it very difficult to continue to grow the business. When Jim Fisher first came on as marketing manager, leading a team of about 15 people, he didn’t have any specific marketing training. Coming from a more sales-based background – process and goal-orientated – he envisioned results driven marketing, but wasn’t 100% sure what that would look like.
He did, however, see parts of their marketing that he knew couldn’t continue:
The strategy
align.me’s Hugh Macfarlane was working as a strategy consultant for CA Technologies when Jim was asked to head up marketing. Jim realised Hugh had a different way of looking at marketing that matched his own, including:
Together, they identified the things they could do to grow revenue:
They focused on three aspects of marketing: Demand Generation, Channel Readiness (aka ‘sales enablement’) and Environmental Marketing (branding and positioning). This foundation was necessary for successful buyer navigation through what became known as the Buyer’s Journey.
The result
What had started as an attempt to get a small marketing team in Australia working more efficiently, turned into a global marketing overhaul that delivered unexpected results:
“Within a year we’d grown some parts of the business from three units to 30 units… We were growing the company significantly” – Jim Fisher, CA Technologies
Sharing success through training
Enjoying success driving marketing in a new way, Jim started thinking about how teams around the world were doing their marketing, and whether it could be improved. Upper Management was thinking the same way.
Jim was moved from his Australian team of 15 to head up the newly formed Asia Pacific & Japan market. There was 85 staff in this market, with different customers, cultures, languages, and opportunities. So, Jim once again reached out to Hugh – this time to build a training program that would teach what they’d learnt and implemented.
The same Buyer’s Journey logic they’d used successfully in Australia caught on in Asia, and from there Jim and Hugh took the training to teams in Europe, Latin America, and North America.
“We took a 500-person marketing organisation that was all at odds with each other and completely aligned them. It was probably one of the best things I ever did in my career” – Jim Fisher
