Case Study

Green Builder Media LLC

Symphonic Leadership Partners Demonstrate the Breadth and Depth of Their Executive Experience

Green Builder Media (GBM) is North America’s media leader in the residential building industry focused on green building and responsible growth. GBM leveraged their deep industry knowledge and unique, proprietary data to create an Artificial Intelligence powered tool called COGNITION Smart Data. COGNITION delivers data-driven insights that help green building industry participants identify trends and opportunities, and therefore inform business decisions on product development, product positioning, marketing content creation, and competition. While it had secured early proof-of-concept COGNITION customers, GBM was seeking help in scaling COGNITION in order to maximize its value.

“Symphonic Leadership Partner's executive team designed a new customer engagement model and refined our Go-to-Market process. Our COGNITION Smart Data platform has a stronger strategy and compelling story. Symphonic Leadership Partners came prepared to work together with us and deliver results. The best compliment we can pay SLP? We hired them for follow on, in-depth assistance as we execute our platform strategy.”

Sara Gutterman – CEO Green Builder Media

Symphonic Leadership Partners (SLP) was selected because the breadth and depth of its seasoned executive team matched the scope of GBM’s needs. GBM wanted to by-pass the typical consultative, requirements-gathering model and instead, partner with an experienced, integrated team with multi-functional experience who could engage as an extension of the GBM executive team. Since SLP is a coordinated team of seasoned executives with proven experience in mastering the art of business transformation, they were a perfect choice for GBM. SLP operates as an integrated executive unit, delivering diverse, multi-functional skill sets.

The SLP team that engaged with GBM had extensive experience in technology product management, business development, product positioning, Go-To-Market scaling, business plan development, and fund-raising.

SLP prepared extensively prior to meeting with GBM executive team and recommended a structured Sprint process. During the 3-day Sprint process, Symphonic Leadership Partners engaged to evaluate, propose, and develop steps for execution specific to COGNITION product roadmap and customer engagement strategies. In addition, SLP participated in refining GBM’s client and investor pitch decks, development of financial modeling tools supporting a subscription services model, and mapping of a Go-To-Market approach for COGNITION.

Symphonic Leadership Partners' involvement with Green Builder Media has already favorably impacted Green Builder Media’s prospect interaction, customer capture, upsell strategies and product development. GBM has extended their relationship with SLP to continue with product enhancement strategies and implementation, and there are several additional GBM opportunities emerging for SLP. In addition, as GBM evolves through its next phases of business maturation, SLP has executive legal, financial, operations, and marketing expertise ready to assist.

Workstreams

Product Roadmap/Enhancements

SLP reviewed the current COGNITION product configuration and early customer product experiences. SLP identified several product enhancement / roadmap suggestions for COGNITION. Perhaps the most important was the creation of a self-serve, proof-of-concept interface (named Explorer) where prospects could configure their own sample reports free of charge.

Go-to-Marketing Planning

Product Roadmap/Enhancements

SLP assessed GBM’s current GTM strategy and created a structured model that more clearly segments GBM’s target markets, optimizes their sales strategy, enhances their market positioning strategy, and refines their product/price bundles. The product bundle strategy created easy product entry points, with defined migration paths to larger subscription-based bundles. SLP also built a revenue forecast model that allows GBM to measure and adjust customer conversion/revenue assumptions.

Customer Engagement

Product Roadmap/Enhancements

Investor Presentation

By reviewing early customer use cases and target markets, SLP defined several ‘customer engagement hooks’ that will pro-actively increase customer interaction and demonstrate continued COGNITION value. SLP also proposed an industry specific Benchmarking Index, positioning GBM not only as a product vendor, but also as the definitive source of Sustainable Building industry trends.

Investor Presentation

Employing our experience in raising capital from investors, SLP constructed a concise story about GBM’s industry experience, the COGNITION product and its unique value, the market opportunity, key GBM team members, and their optimized Go-To-Market strategy.

Financial Modeling

Investor Presentation

Financial Modeling

SLP built a financial forecasting tool for GBM that allows them to easily model ‘what-if’ scenarios reflecting different pricing models, customer conversion rates, as well as costs of scaling the COGNITION business.