SAS: Making references work for our clients

Reference program for Sales, Marketing and PR: Dr. Haffa & Partner makes customers speak for SAS

The Task: SAS, the world‘s largest provider of business intelligence software, also has an impressive roster of clients in Germany. Because satisfied SAS customers are the most convincing selling point, one of our most important PR tasks is to enhance and expand their references. Our second task is to develop and implement a strategy for communicating these references. The underlying idea is this: We let clients speak for SAS. We prepare their success stories in a way that's targeted to SAS's customer groups. And we disseminate these stories through suitable channels such as media relations, sales promotion, and direct communications.

The Implementation: To begin, Dr. Haffa & Partner worked with SAS to define a standard process that covers all stages of a reference flyer's "life cycle" - from input research and contacting the customer to copywriting to using the case study in the media. Once a customer agrees to serve as a reference for SAS, Dr. Haffa & Partner takes care of every aspect of coordinating with the customer's technical and PR departments, including interviews, copywriting, approvals and other agreements on matters such as subsequent use of the reference as a press release or case study, and comes up with the right image material. In all matters the SAS customer is faced with the same contact person at the agency. This guarentees a trustful cooperation and streamlined processes.
At the same time, we develop a communications program for these references, identifying the strategically relevant media, preparing the case studies to suit them, and handling all contacts with the editorial teams. Our primary focus for SAS was on the business and vertical press, so the IT side of SAS applications moved into the background as we focused more on "translating" the topic by highlighting business benefits or placing the applications in the context of current discussions.

The Result: Success in numbers: Dr. Haffa & Partner produces about 15 reference-flyers per year. We place about 60 case-studies in business-papers, IT-Media and journals, often in the name of SAS customers - which increases the persuasiveness.
An ideal example for a "by every trick of the PR-book"-reference is the Techniker Krankenkasse (TK). The TK uses SAS for strategic planning and fraud prevention. For case studies in IT-Media like CIO, ISreport and BI Spektrum we highlighted the technical implementation of the system, and connected it with the business-benefit. For the business media we linked the reference with the current discussion to the costs of the health care system. Specialized media were addressed with particular technical questions, so all in all we had media coverage with case studies in the most important journals. The results: articles i.a. in Handelsblatt, Die Welt, VDI-Nachrichten, CIO, ISreport und BI Spektrum.
Altogether, we could place case studies with the reference TC in twelve journals. Furthermore, we produced a flyer for the SAS-Sales-Team, which accents the strategic and technical opportunities of the SAS solution. Additionally SAS could use the TC story for direct customer relations - as title story in the German customer magazine SAS Special.