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Igniting Brother’s B2B Growth Strategy With Customer-Led Intelligence

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Case Study

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Customer Journey & Voice of Customer (B2B)

ABOUT THE CLIENT

 

Brother International Corporation is a global player in print, imaging and labeling technology. As a rising player in U.S. market, BIC created a B2B marketing platform called “Brother for Business”, to support aggressive growth goals for its channel partners, spanning Corporate, Retail, Enterprise, SLED, and Healthcare verticals.

PROJECT OVERVIEW

 

Brother’s US “Brother for Business” division set aggressive growth goals for its commercial channels across SMB and Enterprise. Faced with flat to declining print industry sales, end user shifts to smaller machines, diverse solution needs, and historically entrenched competitors, Brother sought expanded solutions to help make fact-based sales and marketing strategy decisions.  

 

Brother’s Commercial Sales, Product Marketing, and Partner Experience leaders chose to partner with Khatanalytics on a custom consulting project which delivered specific intelligence and critical insights to guide cross-functional strategy pivots across 4 verticals and within 9 sub-industries.

RESULTS

Insights ultimately drove significant business impact for Brother:

3X Opportunity Pipeline

Enabled significant pipeline growth by better engaging and closing deals with end customers.

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Strategic Sales Enablement

Strengthened commercial sales relationships and equity  with dealers with industry-specific insights and unique training programs

​Optimized Product & Solutions

Informed cross-functional roadmap to support priority use case and workflow needs by sub-industry, elevating Brother’s brand perceptions

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THE CHALLENGE

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To achieve its ambitious goals, Brother’s commercial team needed to overcome:

  • Flat to declining growth across key printer/scanner segments with end-customers shifting to smaller devices, intensifying share battles

  • Entrenched large competitors (e.g., Canon, HP), hard to displace

And upgrade the fragmented Intelligence on numerous managed sub-industries:

  • Limited understanding of B2B end-users’ product needs, use cases, workflows, and service expectations

  • Low alignment across Commercial Sales, Marketing, PX, and Channel teams in the absence of strong customer truth

Brother - B2B Major accounts Senior Sales Director: 

“The VOC has become a new foundation for engaging channel partners and end customers with more targeted products and solutions.

The sales team can now better articulate workflow, usage occasions and unmet needs… essential to solve with customers and move them faster to the buying stage.”

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OUR SOLUTION

 

Four-phase approach was used to design, develop and deliver high impact insights:

  1. Planning – Stakeholder interviews to identify goals, hypotheses, critical questions & success metrics resulting in a comprehensive, aligned research brief to execute.

  2. Field Research – Nationwide 22-minute survey across nine sub-industries with total n = 815 plus analytics (max-diff)

  3. Insights Delivery – Granular mapping by sub-industry of product priorities, use cases, workflows, service gaps, etc..

  4. Activation Workshop – Strategic working session to embed insights into go-forward planning across departments

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OUR INSIGHTS & IMPACT​

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Analyses revealed pivotal, actionable new learning for sub-industries:

  • Brand: Brother’s awareness is strong, but perception gaps remain

➥ Strengthen credentials on priority attributes vs top competitors

  • Products: Brother is well-positioned for shift to smaller devices, with opportunity to deepen penetration in select sub-industries

➥Optimize & sharpen products and solutions for target industries

  • Use Cases & Workflows: vary by sub-industry, require customization

➥Strategic target and efficiently scale tailored solutions

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Commercial teams upskilled & empowered to create custom consulting projects which delivered critical insights to guide cross-functional strategy pivots across 4 verticals and within 9 sub-industries

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Brother International CMI Lead: 

“This is monumental work!! I appreciate how much time spent not just on analyzing so many industries, but also how to present it so clearly. This is excellent work.”

Grow your sales and brand loyalty leveraging comprehensive strategic consumer journey Insights 

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