How differentiating from same-sounding competitors while meeting the needs of complex buying committees allowed ScreenCloud to dominate its market

When ScreenCloud first entered the market in the 2000s, there were only a handful of businesses offering screen management solutions for customers. But as time went on, multiple competitors popped up – commoditizing the product and all offering the same service across the board. It was hard to distinguish one provider from the other as they all sounded like this:

While ScreenCloud was able to capitalise on its early-mover advantage and establish itself as one of the biggest players in the niche, it was getting harder for them to stand out in this saturating market.

And while the company had a clear idea of who its target audiences were – deskless organisations, warehouses, manufacturing plants, hospitals, packaging facilities and other mega-businesses that employ thousands of people – selling into these organisations presented some very specific challenges that ScreenCloud was struggling to overcome:

• How do sales teams maintain messaging consistency when they’re selling to such a diverse bunch of people – HR, IT, comms, operations, logistics and more?
• How do you speak personally to buyers when every member of the committee has a different agenda, cares about different things and has different evaluation criteria?
• How do you break through the noise in a highly commoditized space where every screen management business is selling exactly the same thing?

Here’s what ScreenCloud did to dominate the deskless worker segment:

1. Understand the buyers who typically form the complex buying committees that ScreenCloud sells to.

To do this effectively, you have to talk directly to the buyers or to people who deal with buyers daily – which is exactly what we did.

We discovered that, with the Great Resignation in full swing, employee retention was the number one challenge for deskless organisations. The pandemic gave employees around the world a chance to consider what really mattered to them and, for most employees, what they did for a living didn’t satisfy or make them happy in a meaningful way.

The implications for ScreendCloud’s customers were profound: nearly 3% of the U.S workforce resigned from their jobs in October 2021. To put that into perspective, that’s approximately 4.2 million people who quit their jobs during the month of October alone.

There are immediate negative impacts felt by organisations such as loss of knowledge, high costs of rehiring and retraining employees, low morale, low motivation and loss of productivity. But, there are also longer term complex negative consequences including missed annual targets, breakdown in supply chains, unhappy customers, business partners and counterparts, drop of companies’ share price.

Though different and more specific things were keeping individual buyers awake at night, high turnover was affecting the business overall. And that’s when we had our key insight – deskless organisations needed a solution that would help them build a company-wide culture of engagement, and not merely screen management service.

2. Craft the foundational narrative that appeals to the whole group

Armed with a clear understanding of the big challenge the industry was facing, we were in a good position to craft ScreenCloud’s positioning narrative around this core driver. While competitors positioned themselves as a tool to broadcast information on screens, ScreenCloud went layers deeper and stood out as a tool to help organisations engage and retain their valuable employees.

3. Make sure the message still resonates with every member of the buying committee.

Of course, individual stakeholders still had their own headaches and agendas they needed to tackle before they were ready to commit. So, we built a messaging framework that systematically took the specific needs and frustrations of each persona into account. Our goal was to craft the bigger story with individual nuances, so we could tell it without losing each committee member's most salient needs or, worse, contradicting each other.

By completing this strategic positioning exercise, ScreenCloud has achieved some remarkable results:

• A differentiated narrative that stands out in the sea of sameness and appeals to deskless organisations as a whole: ScreenCloud is not your typical screen management software. Rather, it’s a tool to engage, motivate and retain your deskless employees.
• Clarity and consistency of all external messaging: from cold outbound emails to landing pages and sales collateral, ScreenCloud ’s messaging is wholly aligned and supports a successful sales process with less friction down the line.
• In 2022, ScreenCloud was named a top Digital Signage Software Product by Capterra: which means they are absolutely killing their goal of dominating their space!