Our Recent Work

Becker

Accounting education isn’t just for CPAs anymore.

Tried and true for over 60 years, Becker is the go to in accounting education.

For more than 60 years, Becker has been the partner accountants trust with their professional education. Becker’s team of expert instructors draws on decades of real-world experience to deliver comprehensive coursework that translates concepts into real-life examples. Through relevant, up-to-date exam prep and Continuing Professional Education (CPE) content, Becker has prepared professionals from more than 2,900 accounting firms, alliances, corporations, government agencies and universities.

Challenge

But do they have something to offer a whole new audience?

To expand their portfolio of online course offerings, Becker was considering the development of a new curriculum aimed at educating non-accountants in the basics of accounting. Becker needed to determine whether there was a viable market for this product in both or either of their two main sales channels.

Goal

If we build it..will they come? Are customer challenges vexing enough to warrant investment in a solution?

Both Becker’s Product Management and Marketing teams urgently needed to understand whether courses for non-accountants would solve significant and pervasive customer challenges and, if so, whether decision makers were willing to pay to solve those problems. If validated, Becker wanted to develop positioning statements and sales and marketing assets that addressed who these products solve problems for, the benefits of solving those problems, as well as demonstrate how they solve those problems and with which core product features.

As often happens in organizations today, Becker’s internal teams were already at capacity, focused on existing product lines, and unable to implement research and marketing activities to achieve a new product launch within a year. As such, Becker turned to Honeycomb Collaborative to create a “pop-up” product marketing team that could support both the Product Management team with product validation research, as well as the Product Marketing team with the creation of Go-to-Market messaging and assets.

Market Research, Key Messaging, & Sales & Marketing Assets

Getting everyone on the same page — promoting a common understanding of accounting, finance, and auditing language.

Working very closely with the Product Management and Product Marketing teams, we developed a multiphase research strategy to understand audience needs, beginning with an analysis of the competition. We also interviewed key decision makers to inform an understanding of both appetite and content needs that could guide product development. As product development progressed, we continued to validate the direction of content creation and product capabilities through interviews.

We used research results to write a marketing brief that clearly communicated product background and description, business objectives and strategy, audience profile, unique value proposition (UVP), and key messaging. The brief also identified the necessary go-to-market assets. Honeycomb Collaborative wrote and designed these marketing tools, including customer-facing sell-sheets, sales presentations, and web copy, as well as an internal deck for sales training.

Outcome

Integration with the internal team produced a positive result.

To achieve these successes, Honeycomb Collaborative worked with a matrix of stakeholders across the Becker organization, including the Senior Director of Marketing & Product Commercialization, the Senior Director of Product Development & Innovation, the National Sales Director, and C-Suite leadership. We provided information to help drive decision making and pivoted with our client as needed to ensure that we helped them meet their goals. As a result of Becker and Honeycomb Collaborative’s efforts, the new product was successfully launched within the desired time frame to positively impact revenue.