Generating sales opportunities on a limited budget
ICaughtYou

Goal:
To generate media/analyst coverage to support the ICaughtYou.com launch that would provide the ICaughtYou.com's sales force with improved cold-calling entrée, generate sales leads, and shorten the sales cycle, all on a very tight budget.

Approach:
As a new company with only $2 million in funding, ICaughtYou.com (ICY) spent its first year in business fine-tuning their employee Internet monitoring offering and building a sales force. Although they had a strongly differentiated product in their market, the company was an unknown. Competitors were nipping at their heels, gaining market share fast.

While struggling with budgetary constraints, ICY was also facing a huge opportunity cost as Employee Internet Monitoring began to generate news interest due to terrorist activities and economic conditions that focused attention on employee productivity. At a minimum, it would be a shame to miss this opportunity due to a limited PR budget. Worse than that, any competitors who seized this media opportunity would likely grab industry positioning and market share that would be difficult - and expensive - for ICC to overcome.

With a joint mandate to act quickly and focus priorities for maximum efficiency and ROI, Stephenson Group (SG) designed a customized PR launch plan during the contract approval process which included estimated hours for every task. SG assembled a team of professionals who began initial research and hit the ground running.

SG selected media targets, geographic regions, audience demographics, conferences, analysts, and bylined article opportunities to ensure optimum use of a limited budget and prioritized PR activities that directly supported sales and generated revenue. This meant a focus on in-the-trenches media relations, drawing on SG's established media contacts to generate the maximum amount of ink. The team began pitching editors and producers within days. SG's media management expertise, solid media contacts, and a tightly targeted list of journalists (print, electronic and broadcast) ensured the best opportunities for coverage in the least amount of time.

SG provided a weekly report detailing where time was spent, results-to-date, ROI estimates, and plans for the coming week. This allowed ICY to discuss new opportunities, review priorities, and make changes to the plan-with SG able to shift "gears" on demand.

Results:
Within the first 75 days of the PR campaign, SG conducted 40 interview sessions with print, online, and broadcast media that resulted in 35 published/broadcast features. In addition, analyst briefings resulted in all analysts agreeing to serve as a referenceable resource for media on ICY's behalf.

Direct results of the PR efforts were numerous product trials with Fortune 500 companies, more than 200 customer inquiries, signed contracts, and increased web site traffic.

Specific results included:

• Three top tier media interviews: Business Week, Business 2.0, and CIO
  
• 18 trade and technology interviews, including: ZDNet, EWeek, CNet, Workforce, ComputerWorld, Information Security, Line 56, and InternetWeek
  
• Two consumer dailies "hits"
  
• Four television feature segments dedicated to ICY
  
• 13 major market radio feature segments
  
• Three targeted analyst briefings