Challenge

New Relic is a leader in the market for Application Performance Monitoring with its cloud-first SaaS solution. The company is leading the movement to modern software with a Software Analytics platform to give developers, IT operations and digital business owners code-level visibility to help resolve problems 10x faster and track customer experience, as it is happening.

The company took the APM market by storm with a powerful product and compelling branding that helped make the term “data nerds” part of the mainstream developer community. New Relic created a movement for its innovative product, quickly establishing a beachhead in the market with developers building applications with modern languages and tools.The company took the APM market by storm with a powerful product and compelling branding that helped make the term “data nerds” part of the mainstream developer community. New Relic created a movement for its innovative product, quickly establishing a beachhead in the market with developers building applications with modern languages and tools.

In order to scale, the company needed to push up-market and compete for business in larger enterprises – and move to a blended sales model consisting of downloads, inside sales, and direct sales channels. The challenge for New Relic in the enterprise market is a more complex sale involving multiple stakeholders and decision-makers, plus a new set of competitors including established legacy vendors and a new upstart that had developed inroads with the IT operations buyer.

As a result, the company needed to evolve and strengthen its positioning for the enterprise market, prepare its field sales organization for this new selling motion and clearly define the target market and segmentation to focus the company’s sales and marketing efforts.

Solution

New Relic engaged Firebrick to help the company embark on an entire go-to-market strategy to accelerate growth, increase competitiveness and optimize selling efforts in the enterprise market.

This involved a repositioning of the company and its expanded portfolio of solutions with a fresh, differentiated story that was compelling to a multitude of enterprise buyers – developers, IT operations and digital business owners – as well as an enablement program to drive the new positioning down to the field level and optimize sales for this new selling motion. Finally, Firebrick was asked to help New Relic better understand the enterprise buyer market and deliver a data-driven analysis to precisely define and segment the buyers, understand who is buying now and where New Relic can “win” and deliver a target list of companies ranked by propensity-to-buy.

Result

Built upon the solid foundation established by New Relic’s existing and well-respected brand, Firebrick’s positioning, propensity-to-buy and enablement work accelerated the company’s penetration into the enterprise market, fundamentally establishing New Relic as THE vendor for SaaS-delivered APM and Software Analytics. As a result, New Relic is engaged with the “right” kind of buyers, has collapsed the length of its sales cycles, has improved its win/loss ratio and is driving market share by selling over 600 enterprise customers. With a recent investment round of $100M, New Relic is described as the next big B2B IPO prospect, and has established itself as the next significant technology company.