Olark - Communicate With Your Customers

Overview

Olark hired us to help them validate a new market hypothesis in the higher education space. They had seen early traction with colleges and universities but had never focused on it, and were developing features for one of their larger customers that could apply to the entire domain.

Our approach to validating the market was multi-faceted. First, while we prepared a cold outreach operation, we conducted extensive interviews with existing customers in the space, recording them and gaining permission to repurpose the content as case studies. Next, using the feedback we learned in the interviews, we crafted messaging variants for our cold outbound campaigns based on what customers told us differentiated us from the competition. Finally, we launched, analyzed, and refined the cold outbound operation over a 2-3 month period.

While the outbound operation did not produce the results we wanted in terms of new revenue, it did produce multiple high-value conversations with decision makers at large higher education institutions. We documented their reasons for not moving forward, and Olark used that information to re-pursue leads in the space the following buying season.

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