If you have ever implemented or developed a business application, the chances are excellent that you’ve heard of Scaled Agile and SAFe® - the world’s most trusted system for business agility. 

Scaled Agile is a highly successful organisation; SAFe has been adopted by more than 20,000 enterprises across the globe, and its 1,000,000+ SAFe practitioners are supported by over 500 world-class transformation and platform companies. 

However, there’s always a ‘but’. 

A matter of time and timing 

While Scaled Agile has a full-stack in-house marketing department, Hannah Howard Bink, Senior Director, Digital Marketing & Operations for Scaled Agile, says there are never enough hours in the day to do everything they’d like.  

“We have a rather small marketing department for a company of our size and a brand that’s present in 43 countries. Our resources are split across five different marketing teams, so it's all too easy to get pulled quite thin very quickly. We had little to no capacity to tailor what we did – so we had to take a one-size-fits-all approach with some surface-level localisation. Certainly, nothing that speaks to the unique market dynamics of each country. The challenge of working with different time zones shouldn’t be understated either – it adds a whole new layer of complexity where a simple question could take an entire week to answer.”  

Accepting there wasn’t enough budget to build a truly global field marketing organisation servicing all the countries it worked with, Scaled Agile knew an agency strategy was the only way to reach its localisation goal. 

Enter One Little Seed 

Luckily, One Little Seed flashed brightly on the radar of Scaled Agile Asia Pacific – and became its first external marketing partner outside of the US. The agency’s primary mission (besides delivering great outcomes) was to work closely with Scaled Agile’s global team to determine what information, access, and processes were needed to onboard other agencies successfully.  

“One Little Seed spent the extra time to accommodate us,” says Hannah, “and they quickly mastered the art of asking holistic questions to cut back-and-forth communication down. They adapted well to a convoluted internal navigation structure with five different teams trying to figure out who exactly owns what and has permission to give permissions. As an organisation, we had to formally articulate and agree on our brand guidelines and overall strategies to communicate clearly and actionably to an international agency. As we’d never needed to get that granular, it was a learning curve for everyone. 

“One Little Seed did a wonderful job of taking our input and asking intelligent, well-considered follow-up questions for clarity. They turned out to be such a benefit to our company because we spoke the same language. So, we could easily vet the processes and brand guidelines without the added complexity of translation - and then lean on them to help us onboard new agencies in other countries. As they could bridge the time zone gap and had contributed so much to the onboarding process, they have been able to act as a trusted extension of our headquarters.” 

The Scaled Agile and One Little Seed learnings have been used to on-ramp agencies in Europe, China, and Japan.  

Eventful engagement 

As well as delivering the first case studies produced outside its marketing department, One Little Seed helped Scaled Agile design and run three major events in Sydney, Singapore and Bangalore. Each had different target markets, time zones, personalities, and scopes.  

“Ordinarily,” says Hannah, “we would have run them all out of headquarters, but we just didn't have time. Thank goodness One Little Seed had the flexibility to take on more work despite the project scope growing as we went. The event approaches were so individual, as were the local working styles – I don’t know that we could have executed them so well without One Little Seed.” 

Hannah flew to Australia before the Sydney event. She took a full day out of her agenda to spend in a meeting room with One Little Seed Senior Marketing Manager Vivienne (Viv) Winborne, a whiteboard, and an agenda to develop a list of actionable strategies. And after their first face-to-face meeting, Hannah was seriously impressed.  

“Viv demonstrated that she had already taken the time to learn our business, to understand the nuances of how we think about nurture strategies versus audience acquisition. So, I didn't have to slow down to explain those or any other concepts or acronyms. Viv had already asked those questions beforehand, meaning we could use that precious time together to get straight to work.”

Outstanding experience, outstanding people 

“One Little Seed has been in lockstep with Scaled Agile for over two years and has enabled the more-than-doubling of SAFe adoption in the region during that time,” says Rob Howard, VP Asia Pacific for Scaled Agile.  

“The experience has been outstanding, and the team’s high quality, attention to detail, agility and level of care has made One Little Seed a true extension of our high-performing team at Scaled Agile in APAC.” 

One Little Seed is renowned for the quality of its people, and Viv is no exception. Such is her dedication and drive that she’s currently working her way through Leading SAFe Certification. 

“Viv has been an ideal marketing partner both from her willingness to adjust and float scope,” says Hannah. “I don't think I've ever worked with an agency that is so able to adjust on the fly to the rapidly changing needs of a business. Viv is a self-starter – I’ve never worried about if she can find the tools and resources she needs or articulate what she needs to deliver on the mission she's been given. And she communicates at a level that reflects her experience in the market and working with clients of all shapes and sizes. She understands proactively and innately what we need.” 

“What I have found with Viv is back to the word “trust” in a partner. I can trust her to understand what I'm trying to achieve and work with me to uncover the solutions to get there.” 

Hannah Bink
Senior Director, Digital Marketing & Operations

Rob Howard
VP Asia Pacific

Unsurprisingly, there were sharp intakes of breath from both partners and end customers worried about the financial impact of NCE. And Tech Data, one of the world’s leading cloud providers, was no exception.

But once normal breathing was resumed, Tech Data wasted no time in asking One Little Seed to plan and execute an integrated marketing campaign to help allay channel partner fears, explain the implications of NCE in plain language, support training initiatives, and of course, build a pipeline to be proud of.

The fast and fabulous

Tech Data knew they had little time to waste waiting for other regions to develop content they could leverage. So, they didn’t. “We jumped into action from the very first day Microsoft announced NCE,” says James Bright, Tech Data Marketing Manager - Australia and New Zealand. “The changes were significant, and it was important that partners understood them so they could ‘do right’ by their customers and their own businesses.

“We knew we wanted a fully integrated, multi-touchpoint campaign, which was engaging, and supported and maximised the value of our local brand personality, offered our partner channel real value, and positioned us as the nice guys!” says James. “But we were very aware of the short turnaround time. So, we turned to One Little Seed to deliver an end-to-end NCE strategy and manage all the moving parts.

“And as it turned out, our sheer speed of execution through using One Little Seed made us one of the first to market in APAC for NCE.”

Awesome outcomes

James says the ‘NCE guy’ approach of the campaign positioned Tech Data as knowledgeable, helpful, and proactive. “I feel we definitely owned the NCE guy label within our partner channel, and I haven’t seen any of our competitors do anything as significant and impactful in the NCE space.”

“The campaign One Little Seed developed was very content focussed and generated awareness with existing and potential partners. While the objective of much of the content was to be educational, One Little Seed never lost sight of our need to gain marketing qualified leads and convert them to sales.

“The campaign exceeded our pipeline KPIs, and now we’re busy working on converting those leads to customers. What we’ve converted so far has already paid off our investment in the campaign, and there are many more opportunities on the table.”

One Little Seed’s three-stage integrated NCE guy campaign converted the challenges presented by NCE into an opportunity for Tech Data to grow its market share. “The combination of strategic awareness, enablement, and transactional tactics delivered an impressive sales pipeline,” says James.

Awareness tactics included sharing a series of targeted digital assets designed to nurture channel partners. The assets demystified the complexities of NCE in a series of blog posts, a sponsored article in CRN, informative eDMs, and social media posts posing key NCE questions. Each asset pointed to a dedicated NCE explainer landing page with a centralised hub of regularly updated resources.

The landing page attracted significant views and generated marketing qualified leads (over 10% of which were net-new).

Enablement tactics provided proactive, practical help to channel partners through educational webinars. Tech Data designed and built an online calculator to help partners and end customers calculate how to maximise NCE value while minimising the cost. They also rolled out NCE training and certification. All of which generated still more net-new and existing partner opportunities.

Lastly, the transactional tactics promoted additional limited-time-only partner incentives and discounts for specific Microsoft and Office 365 products to generate action.

And the outcome of the three-step strategic and integrated campaign approach? While obviously, we can’t discuss the dollar value added to Tech Data’s sales pipeline, or the conversion revenue, let’s just say – wahoo, NiCe one!

Still growing strong with One Little Seed

James says Tech Data in Australia works with around half a dozen agencies, each with specialist areas of expertise. He chose One Little Seed based on their channel partner superpowers and their ability to deliver what they promise.

“The knowledge One Little Seed have of distribution partners and vendors is hard to come by. And they’re not top-heavy with management – they’re all doers, making them fast, responsive, and cost-effective,” says James. “That’s one of their absolute advantages over other agencies!”

And the relationship with One Little Seed, he says, is “excellent.”

“One of the beauties of working with One Little Seed is that due to their in-depth understanding of our market and industry, they know exactly what do. There’s no guesswork."

“They always perform to my expectations – and that’s a bar I set very high, having known Kristal through the IT industry for many years. She’s a perfectionist by nature, and that’s rolled out to everyone in the company and how they perform. Nothing gets missed.

James Bright
Marketing Manager
Australia and New Zealand