ADAPT Client Success Story – Interactive

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About Interactive  

Interactive is an Australian end to end IT services provider who deliver an integrated suite of managed and professional services to customers who need 100% IT systems availability.  

As Australia’s largest privately-owned IT services provider Interactive is a company of over 500 people strong who strive to “keep technology human”. 

Critical Problem to Solve 

Dan Cox, the General Manager of Digital Transformation was tasked with modernising how Interactive’s sales and marketing team approached their GTM strategy.  

The major factor prompting this change was Interactive’s mission to broaden their capabilities to be seen as a true end to end MSP (Managed Service Provider).  

“So rather than just being a cloud provider and having a single swim lane, the enterprise strategy is to build breadth and do everything from connectivity, to end user compute, to cyber, to cloud and all of the variations in between” says Dan.  

“We’re dressing the shop window and we’re broadening the capability portfolio. And that’s really our strategy for growth in the Australian market, we’re not entering new geographical territories.”  

For Dan, it was a matter of refreshing the existing services and positioning these services around current market challenges.  

Modern work is the newest part of Interactive’s portfolio, but Dan knew following legacy processes would not help the team resonate with CIOs, their target persona. 

It was critical for the team to account for post-COVID changes and disruptions to the market. According to Dan, “There’s no point us launching what used to be called ‘end user support’ five years ago which was all based around a desktop that was in a physical office premises.” 

How ADAPT helped  

To fill the gaps in their market knowledge, Interactive trusted ADAPT’s local market research.

“I think this is for me one of the key points as to why we align so well with ADAPT” says Dan.  

“We are operated, owned and focused on the Australian market”. Accessing ADAPT’s proprietary local market research and advisory services enabled Interactive to truly understand the needs of CIOs in the local market.  

“The CIO is the most important persona for us to speak to. So, we need to know what’s going through the CIO’s mind for a modern workplace solution? That will inform how we build that product portfolio and bring it to market.” 

Using ADAPT’s Research and Advisory, the Interactive team began to benchmark if there was an appetite in the Australian market for their modern work service.  

“There were a lot of questions to answer; ‘How do you solve for that? How do you build solutions for that? What’s the top challenge for us’? But, you know, it’s the Litmus test at the end of it”.

Do we understand the market? ADAPT’s Analysts listen to what we say and confirms which of our plans can work for the Australian market. That resonates because that is the litmus test before we go to the market and customers.”  

Through this process, ADAPT’s research helped Interactive’s sales team pivot expectations when it came to engaging senior security executives.  

“At the time, the question we were asking was ‘Why aren’t the sales converting?’ We know the message is right. We built the pipeline, we wanted to ensure the messaging we use gives us the best chance of resonating with decision makers on every deal we have.” 

“The CISO persona is the most challenging executive to try and get a meeting with these days. ADAPT’s cyber narrative helped us pivot in our go to market strategy”. 

Using these security persona insights, Dan decided the team had to shift some of their expectations of the average deal time and the deal flow mechanics that the team built in as KPIs. 

The result  

ADAPT’s persona and industry research directly fed into Interactive’s FY 2023 Go to Market messaging and roadmap.  

“A lot of the pain points that we are building narrative around were informed by research from ADAPT”.  

“We’re very tightly coupled with ADAPT’s cloud and infrastructure research. We’ll look for top reasons and drivers of cloud migration in ADAPT’s research, we’ll pick three of the top five and build solution propositions around those plays.”

“We make sure that we speak to those points very clearly in our messaging because we recognise the level and extent of the research that ADAPT does to inform those pain points. We speak to our target personas with the trust that ADAPT has done the research on our behalf” says Dan.

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