Client
Advent is an enterprise software company, providing business automation tools to the financial services industry including software, data integration products and Web-enabled services.

Challenge
As a well established and publicly traded software company, Advent has a number of product lines serving enterprise-level financial services firms. In late 2001, Advent released a small-business product line, Advent Office Essentials, designed to expand their customer base below their traditional mid-market channels. While Advent’s initial direct response campaigns were targetting qualified lists, the sales pipeline wasn't filling fast enough.

Solution
Advent hired Cymbic to retool their marketing approach and launch a new series of direct response campaigns. We began by surveying their new market to understand current behaviors and attitudes, and to determine what approach would attract new prospects.

We discovered that while Advent’s brand was well positioned for the enterprise, small businesses perceived Advent’s solutions as too advanced for their needs. Cymbic devised a campaign to position Advent Office Solutions as a subsidiary brand featuring low cost of ownership and ease of use for non-technical customers.

Results
Cymbic’s development process uncovered a number of new strategies for optimizing the messaging and segmentation. Over the course of the next two campaign drops, we were able to improve response rates to the same qualified lists by a factor of five.