Data Driven Success – Revenue Growth Strategies
Treating data and analytics as assets and maximizing their economic value.
About two-thirds (68%) of data available to enterprises goes unleveraged, a survey of 1,500 global business leaders shows, according to Seagate Technology. One of the key challenges is making collected data usable to thrive and scale. At our recent GDS RevGen Summit, Puja Rios, CRO, Frame.io at Adobe showed us how she identified unleveraged data and used those insights to double their revenue year over year. Frame.io is a leading cloud-based video collaboration platform and in 2021 was acquired by Adobe. When Puja started at Frame.io she realized they were sitting on a lot of untapped data, here is her formula that led the organization to great success.
The 4 Pillars to Revenue Growth
1. The Data – Analysis with Key Metrics
Puja and her team looked at a 2-year cycle and found where the organization was growing, year over year by segment, brand, agency, and M&E (Media & Entertainment). Frame. Io’s bread and butter is M&E, however no one truly believed that they could sell in the brand segment, (financial services, healthcare, retail, tech, consulting) but the data showed they, in fact, could. When they looked at their B2C, E-comm side of the business, they discovered hundreds upon hundreds of users already inside their brands, working from Google and Microsoft. All these users were buying individually on their accounts through Frame.io, leading the organization to better understand users in their account. The result?
“If you look at our mix of revenue from M&E brands and agencies, M&E stayed pretty much the same, we grew about 5% year over year, but inside of our brand segment we grew 70% year over year and it was because we looked at customer insights from a B2C perspective, proving our hypothesis is right, let’s take it to market, let’s roll.”
2. Addressable Market
The second step was to better understand customer retention rates and how they could continue to scale.
“I was shocked to learn we were retaining customers at almost 100% and our net dollar retention over a 2-year period is 168%, that was great inside of M&E, but the questions were, how do we continue to expand inside our brand and agency, and second how big is the market that we can potentially serve?”
Once Puja and her team understood what the addressable market was, specifically in brands and agencies, and ensured they were capturing the full market share in M&E, they realized they only had 1% of the M&E market, and less than 1% in brands and agencies. That was the ‘Ah-ha’ moment. They had an unbelievable opportunity in front of them which subsequently led to doubling their revenue year over year.
3. Identifying the Competition
In M&E, Frame.io had a set number of competitors, but what they were trying to understand is why they were winning and losing. Taking a deeper look at 2 years’ worth of customer sentiment data helped them understand why they were losing to competitors. The list of 15 competitors boiled down to 5. They solely targeted those 5 while they took the business to market, and it worked. They unseated 50% of their competitors by acquiring 640 new customers.
“We really drilled down into our customers, did a lot of surveying and a lot of testing to better understand why we were losing to those 5 competitors. We then adjusted our strategy accordingly and from that came some key product features that helped us win.”
This process took Puja and her team 4 months to uncover but was a worthwhile exercise to identify key competitive differentiators.
4. Identifying Breaks in the Machine
When Puja started at Frame.io. they had a very small sales force, a separate customer support board, 2 employees in customer success, and had not built-out our mid-market world. The solution was sitting in the product world. They decided to bring everything together. But when you bring everything together, breaks in the machine rear their ugly head.
“How are we doing in terms of top of funnel growth, what are the key indicators that are coming up from a pre-sale perspective that we could put together in one document so we don’t extend the time our solution architects are spending on the standard questions that continue to come up from a pre-sales perspective.”
Mid-market was the gamble, taking it back to the understanding that brands can be a very fruitful place for Frame.io to go for revenue and mid-market was the test in doing that. They built their mid-market strategy from the ground up. No one truly believed they could sell into brands but over a 7-month period they were now selling 6 and 7 figure deals mid-market. The key break in Frame. Io’s machine was culture. Getting teams to believe they can in fact sell into brands. The result was bringing the teams together, facing those culture challenges head on, and truly operating as a go to market team.
“The final stage was relentless execution of culturally bringing all the teams together (remotely by the way) and it set the foundation for our double-digit revenue growth. My advice for those trying to align teams is constant communication.”
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