WELCOME TO XYPHID

CONNACT, a first-of-its kind cloud-sales agency has approached us after contemplating building their brand from the ground up.  They’ve built an amazing bootstrapped business and grew 8 people strong within less than a year on the simple premise of enabling cloud-consuming B2B businesses to sell more through their cloud partnerships. All the while, the founders and team were relying on a fast-paced, execution centric mindset and a strong network of key cloud decision makers.

The Logo

The CONNACT founding team, having come from a background of employment within the corporate cloud provider ecosystem, have never stopped to think about what it was that drove their newly found organization. Upon a quick investigation however, we were able to define the three aspects that drove them as people-at-work. Execution, they were all about groundwork and making things happen (makes sense that nobody stopped to define a brand-abstraction til then!) was the first. Further investigation revealed carefully weighing decisions through data analysis, and a truly customer-oriented mindset. And alas, our logo reflects the boldness that’s required for action-taking, the precision of data-weighted decisions, and a roundedness that reflects the humanness that’s required for true customer-centricity.

ILLUSTRATION, STYLE

Our dotted universe and “solar-system,” initially chosen to create a connecting (connacting) motive and ethereal feel, was deliberated on heavily — Given the sales-networking nature of CONNACT, we felt it imperative that people and tech should be married. We ended up choosing a careful mix of colder, sharp graphics and business people.

Fun: Although the founding team at CONNACT wanted a brand that would read high-end and respectable, we couldn’t neglect the fact that there was a certain playfulness to the founders — in life and in business, they seem to be a happy mix of working hard and not taking themselves too seriously. We made sure that our figures are humorous and further extended that humor by making them penetrate out of their confining boxes.

THE PEOPLE, THE SWAG

One of the seemingly small but heavily significant requests CONNACT had when we finished establishing the foundation for the brand and logo was to get some shirts going as soon as possible. The fresh team, having worked together mostly in a remote setting was eager to get together, and a photoshoot featuring a branded tee to tie them all together was just the right team forging experience. The alternating-color team featurette had ended up being at least one founder’s favorite part of their website.

WEBSITE, COMMUNICATIONS

One of the things that was important for the people at CONNACT to convey was its increasing technological capability, or rather, how CONNACT differs from other sales consulting businesses not only from a cloud perspective, but from a technology perspective.

First and foremost, CONNACT makes deals happen for its clients — But their ambition far surpasses that and they’ve already built their very own proprietary cloud-sales tool.

“So you really are a tech driven cloud strategic partnership agency,” was a powerful one-liner that brought up in one of our earlier brainstorming sessions. It struck a major chord, and we ended up keeping it exactly as it was! Much of CONNACT’s communication style, visual and textual, now revolves around it. We even made color choices with that particular sentence in mind.

ANIMATION

The animation style was carefully crafted to demonstrate what we pictured to be a CONNACTing experience between the multiple parties required to make a deal happen in the cloud ecosystem. On the live version of the website, you can see how our dotted CONNACT solar-system orbits the main message, introducing graceful movement and a sense of space.

GO-TO-MARKET

Once finished with the branding, website and collaterals, we were ready to form a go-to-market type launch plan for the new brand. Since CONNACT is still at a stage where throwing media budgets at digital advertising doesn’t make much sense, we chose to make some buzz organically via LinkedIn, which was chosen as the most cost-effective channel for them given their target audience.

Our strategy consisted of using their 8 employee profiles to simultaneously flood their network with posts carefully curated to drive traffic to their new website and LinkedIn page. Each post was carefully written to deliver the company’s value proposition while enticing the author’s particular network — we used highly emotional, personal messages along with a portrait picture of each individual to get a full bang for our buck with the LinkedIn algorithm.

The results were no short of amazing; we received just a little over 90,000 impressions collectively, driving some 12 hot, qualified leads, and a 40% LinkedIn page following growth.