Augment CXM Building an enterprise business 2019 – Present
The beginning Augment was a company with strong technology, with great customers, but a relatively poor public image. The branding consisted of a bright, almost neon red, bold, in-your-face fonts, and in general imaging, which did not convey what the company conveyed was all about – customer happiness. Updating this branding, rebuilding the website, and updating the sales collateral was my first big goal with the company.
Simplifying and Rebuilding There were three main objectives in my rebuild of Augment’s presence: 1. Define: I wanted to stop referring to the company as an AI company since that means very little to a buyer. 2. Brand: I wanted to convey the feeling of happiness since we are selling “customer happiness.” 3. Promote: I wanted to make sure our company could be found, easily, through web search since the word “Augment” is a general word, Through a few iterations, we landed on the design and wording you can see here. • Define: We started loosely calling the work we are doing “customer experience management” or “CXM”. This pointed more to our work of ensuring that your company is delivering high-quality brand experiences, which is powered by AI. We consciously wanted to jump on the “CX” bandwagon, because there is a drastic increase in the number of professionals globally who are starting to be titled “VP of CX” and cementing ourselves directly in that space will ensure we are seen as a thought leader. • Brand: I toned down the red color to a shade, which is actually considered to be “International Orange”, better known as the color of the Golden Gate Bridge. Additionally, I added another color, blue, to the mix, which ensured we have some balance between the deeps reds and the whites. This gave the company the power of an eye-catching red with the cleanliness of white dominant materials. In the end, this combination of font, colors, and illustrations gives the product a “happy” feeling without losing the technical dominance, which made the company successful. I also chose to consistently highlight the number of conversations run through the system to give any prospects an instant feeling of security when they research the company. • Promote: We had to change our URL and company name. There was no way around it. For the immediate future, the best option was to start calling ourselves “Augment CXM” and to change our URL to augmentcxm.com. While this is a bit annoying and not very clean, this instantly improved our traffic from Google and validated our value proposition into people’s minds. Augment CXM is a company that helps you manage customer experiences.
Describing the Tech Building a new company is hard. Building a new category-defining company is even harder. After rebuilding all of the materials Augment used to describe itself, I had to figure out a way to both get the word out and teach our prospects why technology like this was important. I set out to build an explainer video, pictured here. I used a driving analogy throughout the video to ensure that our prospects would be able to understand our technology, and I wanted the video to be catchy enough to share. After building the script, storyboarding the scenes, and figuring out a way to shrink it all down to less than a minute, I sent everything over to an animation firm that pulled it together. For a small sum of money, we put together something which explained a complex topic in basic terms.
I then went to promote this material across our target buyers and walked away with some fantastic statistics. The video was viewed for over 42 hours, and the average watch length was 30 seconds. There were up to 100 people from target accounts who viewed the video and shared it with colleagues. The awareness campaign for describing this technology was an immense success. Building Pipelines Once our general company story was put in place, I set out to fuel our pipelines with new deals. The lowest hanging fruit for new opportunities was enabling our channel partners to sell Augment more efficiently. Without divulging company information – this effort was successful. The partner I allocated time towards pushed two large deals in through the company generating more $$ than had been achieved in the previous two quarters. This partner work is where I am focusing most of my efforts today.