Brand Repositioning Leads to 1800% Increase in Demand Gen & 2X ARR

PIXO started in 2009 as a gaming company that created training apps for enterprises to gamify training. When the first commercial VR headset became available, the company switched focus to developing training in Virtual Reality. Years later, in 2020, they launched their XR platform to manage and distribute XR content. I started with PIXO in December 2021, when enterprises were asking “What is Virtual Reality?” The platform had been launched for a year, but there was not much demand for it because it solved a problem (scaling) that enterprises were not feeling at the time. Between the pandemic and slow-moving enterprise targets, any traction with adopting VR had stalled. The product-market fit wasn’t there. PIXO had moved from being content and library-focused to platform-focused, but the market hadn’t; most prospects were only interested in content, which was not a big differentiator for us and was becoming less and less so as the market landscape gained more competitors. So, we had to think again, and reposition ourselves. I launched our Partner with PIXO initiative in March 2022. I focused on partnership because people perceived integrating VR as a difficult task they’d have to take on themselves, but we have a Customer Success team that helps them along the way and is just as much a part of the product offering as the training modules and platform. We built up our content strategy around thought leadership: why and how to implement VR in enterprise, features to look for to have a scalable solution, why PIXO is the right partner. We built up our founder’s thought leadership presence through articles on LinkedIn, in trade journals and other business journals, and I put him on Forbes Technology Council and tradeshow stages with our largest customers and industry partners. By 2023, enterprises weren’t asking “What is VR?”, they were asking “How can we implement VR?” And we are seen as “rock stars” at events. Prior to my tenure the PIXO team thought we had a strong website SEO presence. They were getting about 100 website leads per year, and of those up to five were enterprise-level. Most sales were generated through customer referrals. And our customer churn rate was high. In 2022 and 2023, we generated about 1,900 website leads per year, and of those close to 25% are enterprise-level leads. As of right now, 98% of our >2X ARR growth can be attributed to Marketing-generated leads, either net new or growth with customers that came in through Marketing efforts. About 80% of our leads come from organic traffic, while 20% come from direct traffic via nurtures and social ads to highly targeted ideal customer personas in highly targeted companies. Our customer churn also decreased from 60% in 2022 to 7% in 2023 because of better identification and targeting of ICPs that would stay and grow.