With major client accounts already in hand and scaling quickly after securing funding, Plus One Robotics came to Notable for help establishing thought leadership in a rapidly developing market, and to act as an on-retainer creative and content team to help shore up their lean in-house marketing department. By interfacing with subject matter experts and learning their business inside and out, Notable was able to supplement in-house efforts, combat a problematic messaging issue, and create foundational content to help accelerate growth.
Sector: Advanced Technology | Subtype: Robotics
Plus One Robotics came to Notable in high-growth mode. Backed by venture capitalists like McRock Capital, Translink Capital, and Schematic, the company was under pressure to grow, scale their offerings, and hit revenue goals. A lean in-house marketing team had extensive experience in public relations and communications, but needed support in product marketing as the company spun up products rapidly to take to market.
Time was of the essence, and Plus One Robotics came to Notable for support building out their demand generation process, and creating content and collateral that would support a complex B2B buyer’s journey. The parallel needs for content and design - along with the requirement for materials that captured the technical nuances of Plus One’s offerings - made Notable a perfect fit. Notable was asked to be the product marketing team the company didn’t have in house.
Plus One Robotics was developing new offerings rapidly, but had little collateral to support the sales and technical support teams once the products were rolled out. The materials required needed sufficient technical nuance to describe the desired outcomes for the complex businesses Plus One worked with. Notable understood the requirements and created a plan to develop a set of materials that would support the company’s rapid growth.
One of the issues facing Plus One’s team was that most customers assumed Plus One Robotics was a hardware company producing robotic arms. In reality, they were a hardware-agnostic software company, providing robot vision software for warehousing operations and shipping facilities. This key distinction needed to be immediately clear in any materials produced for the company, and it formed the basis for a new design approach.
Plus One’s complex technical products needed clear graphics that could help direct the focus to the main differentiators of their products, and that could emphasize the company’s focus - software. Because the company’s UI was being redesigned when we were brought on, Notable needed to showcase software without using the still developing UI, but in a way that made it clear the company was not selling robots.
To create technical illustrations that clearly showcased the company’s innovative software, Notable designers faded the robotic arms in all the illustrations designed. The arms were made subtle, greyed out with no detail or logos, and the focus was drawn to the solutions being showcased. In so doing, the work successfully highlighted the company’s offerings without misrepresenting their actual products or confounding the sales process.
SHOWCASING ROBOT VISION SOFTWARE - NOT ROBOTS - IN TECHNICAL ILLUSTRATIONS
The images below convey the methodology used for highlighting the key functionality of Plus One’s software solutions, while de-emphasizing the robots themselves. Because the company’s solutions were hardware-agnostic, having illustrations focused on the robotic arms (as in the photographs) was misleading. We utilized color to draw focus to the action of the robotic arms instead of the arms themselves, placing emphasis on the software capabilities that allowed the robots to pick, sort, and categorize a variety of items of different shapes and sizes and into and out of various containers, which was Plus One’s real selling point.
SIMPLIFIED APPLICATION LITERATURE AND PRODUCT MARKETING MATERIALS FOR COMPLEX PRODUCTS
Plus One Robotics had several solutions developed to meet use cases required in warehouse operations environments, and translating those into succint sales materials, PDFs, and booklets for the sales team to use was a main focus. We broke the materials down into individual modules to match Plus One’s offerings, allowing the sales team to offer only the features and benefits of the best-fit solution for a particular client, instead of overwhelming them with everything the company had to offer. Using clear technical illustrations and basic explanations of how each application functioned, the sales process was streamlined.
CLARIFYING RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PRODUCTS MADE SALES MORE STRAIGHTFORWARD
Plus One Robotics built software, but the various applications of the software ranged from a cloud-based human oversight solution to a management platform to the actual in-robot software that dictated specific actions. Developed collateral made the relationships and hierarchies between the platform, API and application clear, paving a straightforward path for the sales team to follow when talking with a new prospect about the offerings.
CASE SPECIFIC LANDING PAGES SIMPLIFIED COMMUNICATIONS
Each landing page we developed told a story that resonated with a use case or problem experienced by the customer. Because the products Plus One sold were complex and technical, we couldn’t begin with the products. Plus One’s challenge included the need to educate their audience about why they should use automation products at all. The landing pages explained how keeping humans connected to the automation process by elevating them to manage and supervise the robot vision functionality created more efficient workflows across a variety of warehouse applications.
NEW PRODUCTS REQUIRED NEW COLLATERAL
As Plus One Robotics grew, one hardware component became a natural evolution of their software - grippers. The unique solutions their software enabled highlighted a lack of adequate and functional grippers on robotic arms, so Plus One solved the problem. And we created new collateral materials to help them explain how and why they were expanding into hardware, and equipped the sales team with a clear answer when customers asked.
A SALES DECK THAT POSITIONED THE WHOLE PORTFOLIO
As a company pursuing high-dollar deals through long sales cycles, Plus One Robotics had a need to demonstrate uniformity and cohesion among all their offerings. They needed a way to illustrate how the products related and worked together to drive ROI after implementation. This part of the sales process often happened in board rooms, with multiple high-level decision makers involved, and often without Plus One’s sales team driving the conversation, so the requirement for an optimally structured sales deck was critical.
