Student-led consulting project: Market expansion strategy for Engagedly

Whit Urdan, BSBA 2021, Nick Rizzo, JD 2019, and Alistair McKane, JD 2019, cowrote this for the Olin Blog.

We are assisting Engagedly, an employee performance management firm, with analyzing their market impact, client acquisition and outreach as they transform from a startup into an industry leader.

Engagedly has told our team we can be most impactful by using their client list to survey customers—and those of their competitors—to perform a win-loss analysis. The results will help us make recommendations surrounding Engagedly’s software in addition to aiding in the development of a marketing and sales strategy.

The goal is to make the firm more efficient in the customer acquisition process so Engagedly can grow in the domestic market.

Thus far, we have met with the Engagedly team to gain an understanding of their current positioning and how we can help them make their long-term goals a reality. Despite not having a dedicated client acquisition strategy, we have learned that the company targets three main industries, knows its comparative advantages and generally knows how the software can be improved.

Starting with the current client list, we were able to get more detailed information on Engagedly’s target industries, clients and customer acquisition process. This data allowed our team to hypothesize potential areas for growth, including ancillary industries that are under-penetrated.

We seek to confirm these assumptions through our client survey and win-loss analysis. Additionally, the survey results may lead us to other performance management tools that aren’t on Engagedly’s radar.

Our survey will focus on why prospective clients choose to employ Engagedly’s product or to go in another direction. We want to know what potential customers appreciated—or did not like—about the product and sales team. We will ask about their previous method of employee management and what problems they want to solve with such a product. Furthermore, we will inquire how they learned about Engagedly in the first place.

Engagedly does not send out such questionnaires, and because we are not employed by Engagedly, we predict current and lost clients will be more likely to give us information than the Engagedly team itself.

As our deliverable, we will recommend ways for Engagedly to grow its customer base, whether through improving its product or altering its marketing strategy. It is also our hope that our survey can serve as a template so Engagedly can continue to perform win-loss analyses on its own down the road.

Throughout the entire process, though, we have kept in mind Engagedly’s overarching goal of growing in the United States market rather than an international market. Therefore, while we will still survey their clients abroad, our focus will stay with making its product the most marketable to firms in the United States.