Setting Clients Up for Success
Case Studies
Strategic Consulting & Leadership
Jaipur Living is the third largest rug and textile manufacturer in the United States, offering quality workmanship and beautiful design. The privately held company of over 400 employees is committed to craftsmanship. Jaipur Living's purpose is to make life beautiful for customers, consumers, artisans and employees.
Jaipur Living was experiencing very high growth and needed to rethink its approach to marketing to make their efforts more efficient – both time and profit – and to determine if they could pursue new channels without harming their existing business.
Jaipur Livings’ revenue were around $50M annually when they engaged our CEO Susannah Campbell as a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer. Specifically, she was charged with:
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Assessing and resetting overall business growth strategy, including channels for growth.
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Restructuring the marketing department to support that growth, and recommending changes to other departments as well.
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Setting clear expectations for employees, hiring new employees and discharging those not meeting expectations.
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Evaluating current marketing tools, such as trade shows, licensing/partnerships and lead generation in order to increase ROI per dollar spent on a 7 figure budget.
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Increasing consumer and customer understanding in order to inform a potential shift further into D2C without alienating current, long-standing home goods and interior design relationships.
Within a year, we had:
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Developed a multi-year strategy for branching into new channels while honoring the base business.
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Grew the base business by almost+30%.
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Implemented marketing automation and increased order values and frequency.
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Reorganized the department, replacing and/or hiring as necessary.
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Reduced the outsourced budget by half, bringing key activities in-house.
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Reduced the time to market new products by 6 months with marketing, photography, and Web efficiencies.
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Conducted the company’s first qualitative and quantitative research efforts within industry verticals (i.e. Ecommerce, Interior Designers, Homegoods Stores) and consumers
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Impacted product development by focusing on highest value consumers and products with the highest probability of success
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Reduced long-term inventory loads by informing quantities to be produced based on customer and consumer response to designs and buying habits.
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Recruited and trained a permanent leader with the skills necessary to see that multi-year strategy through, ultimately exiting the high-functioning department after over a year of part-time direction.
Jaipur Living
Third Largest Rug &
Textile Company
in the US
Customer Analytics & Understanding
Prologis, Inc is the global leader in logistics real estate with a focus on high barrier, high growth markets. As of December 31, 2022 the company owned or had investments in properties and development projects totaling approximately 1.2 billion square feet (113 million square meters) in 19 countries. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Prologis leases modern logistics facilities to a diverse base of approximately 6,600 customers principally across two major categories business to business and retail/online fulfillment.
Prologis engaged First Line Strategy to inform sales strategy for its Essentials business, a secondary revenue stream to answer its tenants’ “inside the walls” needs (i.e. shelving, machinery, services, equipment)-basically, all of the items necessary to help one of its tenants get up-and-running and stay high-performing.
Prologis revenue for the twelve months ending September 30, 2022 was $5.499B, a 19.71% increase year-over-year and they have 1,945 employees.
Prologis needed to gain in-depth understanding of its customer base, including the most likely prospects, sales approaches and bundles to achieve success.
First Line Strategy conducted:
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Deep data analytics on past customer leasing and purchasing behaviors in order to formulate industry-specific Customer journey Maps and Sell Sheets.
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Qualitative interviews and custom research with Prologis’ leasing agents and third-party brokers in order to deepen understanding and to receive feedback on moments of truth/moments of outreach.
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Qualitative interviews with CEOS, COOs and warehouse managers within 13 industry verticals and multiple company sizes in order to better understand purchasing limits, decision-making protocols, sales approaches, inside-the-walls needs, etc.
First Line Strategy developed industry, company-size and life stage-specific customer profiles and personas, customer journey maps, preferences and intent to purchase lists, and more.
Results
Prologis gained a deeper understanding of their customers, which better positioned their field sales representatives to offer quickly customized product and service menus to their client base. Further, these offers could be made at the right time in the decision-making/build-out cycle, and to the right decision-makers. Prologis continues to increase its profitability margin per square foot on an annual basis, ultimately contributing to a 19.71% year-over-year revenue increase in 2022.
Prologis, Inc
World's Largest Logistics REIT
Accessing New Markets
Wyda Industria de Embalagens is the number one aluminum products company in Brazil for both consumer and industrial use. The family-owned business is based in Sorocaba, Brazil, and focuses on the production of disposable/recyclable aluminum foil containers, trays and dishes, as well as PVC products from cling-wrap to household gloves.
After 30 years of steady expansion across Latin America and Africa/Middle East, Wyda had achieved annual revenues of over $100M USD. The company felt confident enough to look to the US market, but needed to understand the channels, retailers, distribution networks and price points.
First Line Strategy provided Wyda with its strategy for US market entry, which included an organized approach to both retail and wholesale channels and players:
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Costing they needed to hit in order to be competitive in light of import tariffs, distribution fees, and expected retailer markups by channel.
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Pricing and profit predictions by channel.
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Best set of products with which to enter the US market.
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Strategized on where and how to set up distribution headquarters here in the US.
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Best channel for entry into the US market.
As well, we worked with Wyda for 9 months to get them in front of the main players in their first two channels of entry, resulting in an 80% success rate for obtaining meetings and invitations to bid on product manufacturing needs. Ultimately, Wyda bid on over $100M USD in contracts – gaining access in a year to the same amount of revenue that the company had amassed over the last 30+ years.
Wyda Industria de
Embalagens
South America's Leading
Aluminum Products &
Packaging Company
Defining Success Metrics
Emory Healthcare, part of Emory University, is the most comprehensive academic health system in Georgia. They are made up of 11 hospitals, the Emory Clinic, and more than 250 provider locations. Emory healthcare was founded in 1905, has an annual revenue of $1.9B annually and has over 24,000 employees. Emory’s vision is to be the leading academic health science center in transforming health and healing through education, discovery, prevention, and care.
Emory Healthcare’s Marketing department engaged First Line Strategy to help them to establish an insights and analytics group. Specifically, FLS helped them to define the group’s purpose, structure, staffing, accountability, data sources and data needs. This included a multi-year plan for growing the department.
EHC and FLS collaborated though a series of discussions and database analysis sessions. FLS assessed the insights departments of other hospital and healthcare networks to define peer institution benchmarks, interviewed stakeholders and department leads to determine key metrics/drivers of patient choice, discussed current team roles and responsibilities to inform future departmental structure, and mapped out the steps in the patient journey to determine what metrics of success could be leveraged and what data needed to be sought. Ultimately, FLS developed a multi-year plan for the department, including waves of data acquisition, employee hires and promotions, and the like.
EHC was very satisfied with the plan developed, which included job descriptions, and leveraged the information in its decisions on how to reorganize and staff their department. Further, it highlighted where on the patient journey marketing needed better information to inform decision-making, providing the team with a clear go-get.
EHC has defined its insights group and is in the process of consolidating information from across the organization to better inform future allocations. The hiring plan is currently being reviewed as part of the marketing department’s long-range plan, and the data sources are in the process of getting “connected” so that information can more quickly be leveraged and accessed.
Emory Healthcare
Southeastern US Preeminent
Medical Center
