Case Studies
4aM Demand
CASE STUDY
Heather Stokes and Josh Verrill are demand generation experts.
Together, they share over 30 years of demand gen marketing experience and have held director- and executive-level positions at prestigious companies such as Oracle. In 2021, Stokes and Verrill co-founded 4AM Demand to help B2B companies increase revenue and scale customer adoption.
To maximize their impact on demand gen marketers, Stokes and Verrill needed a product — some way to boil down their years of experience and knowledge into an offering for customers. What they needed was a SaaS platform, and 4AM Demand tasked York IE with building it and bringing to life their vision: an operating system where demand gen marketers could live day to day.
“We had PowerPoints, spreadsheets, templates and processes for lead generation. What we needed, and what York IE gave us, was a user experience within a product and platform that we could bring to market.”
Heather Stokes, Co-Founder and COO, 4AM Demand
York IE’s Research and Development services were a great fit, allowing York IE to enter the process at the idea generation stage.
The Road to MVP
4AM Demand’s team had world-class subject matter expertise and needed a way to share the frameworks they’d developed over their many years in the demand gen space.
The development process began with collaborative conversations between York IE and 4AM. Stokes and Verrill had built out a workflow that included the activities they would conduct in the demand gen process: bottoms-up revenue growth planning, lead and pipeline management, budget analysis and more.
“Our job was to prioritize the most important features early in the roadmap and minimize the development time and resources it took to get to a usable, sellable SaaS platform,” said Mike Veilleux, co-founder and CTO at York IE.
Getting to market was a priority for 4AM. The company needed a platform that housed its core features and competencies, had an intuitive interface and didn’t take years to develop.
The York IE team built information architecture, early mockups and low-fidelity mockups to give 4AM a preview of what the portal might look like. They also developed dashboards, worked 4AM’s brand and color palette into the style and built waterfall planning and analysis tools into high-fidelity roadmaps.
Stokes and Verrill user-tested the mockups within their network, giving valuable feedback that York IE synthesized and applied with each iteration. As part of its launch, 4AM had acquired Explorics, an analytics engine with connections, data and intellectual property. Once the first iteration of the new 4AM demand platform was built, the York IE team worked to incorporate some of the elements from Explorics, repackaging the analytics engine within the context of the app.
The result was a sleek, secure and first-class SaaS platform that’s driving 4AM Demand’s first software-only sales.
“York IE efficiently took the vision we had in our spreadsheets and distilled it down into a streamlined platform. We had an MVP in five months and our first sales from the platform in less than a year.”
Josh Verrill, Co-Founder and CEO, 4AM Demand
An Extension of the Team
York IE didn’t just help create a new platform, chuck it over the fence and run away to leave 4AM on their own. Quite the opposite, actually. Instead, York IE and 4AM have formed a hybrid development team. Through the connections of its network, York IE even helped 4AM find the perfect hire for its new CTO.
The end result of this collaboration is an Infrastructure as Code platform hosted on serverless Amazon Web Services technology, meaning it’s secure and easy to maintain. As the 4AM and York IE teams continue to iterate together, they’ll continuously add new features, such as intelligent recommendations that help marketers adapt their roadmaps as they go. York IE’s Research and Development services helped 4AM Demand go from a vision to a game-changing product in less than a year.
“York IE truly acted as an extension of the 4AM Demand team,” Stokes said. “They supplemented and expedited our development of the 4AM SaaS offering but never operated in a silo, even helping us find our new CTO. We now have a product that distills the expertise of our team into a tool that demand-gen marketers can use every day.”