Who is ABC Fitness?
ABC Fitness is the #1 technology provider for fitness businesses everywhere, from personal trainers, boutique studios, and gyms, to international franchise health clubs. ABC has been simplifying club and member management for 40+ years via scalable solutions including ABC Glofox, ABC Ignite, ABC Trainerize, ABC Evo, and ABC GymSales. The organization currently supports more than 40 million members around the world as well as processes over $11 billion in payments every year. ABC Fitness is a Thoma Bravo portfolio company.
Situation
With numerous high-priority growth initiatives across its portfolio of platforms, the ABC Fitness product marketing (PMM) organization found itself in need of a bandwidth injection. At the same time, the PMM organization itself was on the edge of a transformation to better support both the company’s global requirements and nuances of its flagship solutions and markets. So, ABC approached Fluvio in search of direct support via a consulting engagement to bridge the gap between today’s needs and tomorrow’s ideal state.
Solution
After an expedited onboarding, Fluvio’s Product Marketing Consultant and Principal team dove into the specific, tactical needs of two key ABC platforms. As part of our discovery, we uncovered strategic opportunities for global alignment of PMM processes and talent.
In order to keep up with go-to-market framework and launch needs, Fluvio’s involvement quickly expanded to include an additional consultant that allowed us to fully embed across numerous cross-functional teams. Throughout our year-long engagement with ABC, we provided strategic frameworks and advice to leaders, applied frameworks through execution, and reinforced trust in product marketing across the organization.
CLIENT INTERVIEW
We sat down and interviewed Candice Mueller, Vice President of Platform Marketing, to get her thoughts on ABC’s product marketing consulting engagement with Fluvio.
Candice Mueller
Vice President of Platform Marketing
What problems were you encountering that led you to believe a product marketing consultant could help?
We were seeking assistance with well-known priority projects, and we simply didn’t have the internal bandwidth to execute them. As a function, we knew we needed external assistance as we built and executed on a long-term strategic plan for product marketing.
Taking a flier on an unproven freelancer wasn’t an option. We had to eliminate risk and have absolute confidence in the team we engaged. Additionally, beyond project work, we wanted to improve our product marketing maturity across the global, multi-platform organization. So, we sought out a consulting firm with demonstrated success that was rooted in best practices.
Why was Fluvio the right fit for ABC Fitness?
Meeting with Fluvio’s leadership and project team made the decision to move forward simple. From an initial engagement scope through multiple extensions, Fluvio demonstrated that they knew how to approach, tackle, and socialize the product marketing efforts in front of us. We were able to immediately deploy the project team on market-specific and global efforts.
Fluvio quickly partnered with our platform PMM teams on a wide variety of initiatives, and often owned them from scoping all the way through post-launch. These ranged from customer-critical software and hardware upgrade projects, to strategic personas and messaging, to corralling disparate development efforts into a customer-centric roadmap. And when our needs expanded, Fluvio was ready to help by adding to our project team.
“Having Fluvio in my corner as I came onboard was a game-changer. Their advice, assistance, and partnership were critical in helping me stand up a modern product marketing function faster and more effectively.”
What are some of the benefits the partnership brought to your business?
As our priorities centered around multiple platforms in our portfolio, Fluvio needed to be able to work with many teams and target markets simultaneously. They were able to do so not only by absorbing materials and conducting their own research, but by building organic, lasting relationships across departments including Product Management, Project Management, Customer Success, and many more.
One of the most important outcomes of our engagement with Fluvio was how much they deepened cross-functional leaders’ trust in PMM. By offering a strategic perspective and continually delivering high-impact outputs, Fluvio generated frequent, unprompted praise from other teams for the acceleration of ABC’s Product Marketing function.
What does Fluvio offer that is unique?
Thanks to their work with so many PMM organizations, the entire Fluvio team was able to consistently offer realistic scoping and advice on how to best achieve our goals.
This was all supported by:
Analysis of our capabilities based on their Go-to-Market Assessment, paired with a report on our strategic needs for product marketing,
Their ability to onboard quickly to deliver work for additional platforms and markets, and
Refocusing tactical projects to support global best practices and frameworks as we build out our PMM team.
With new requirements surfacing on a regular basis, Fluvio’s external perspectives and embedded internal knowledge helped us prioritize and triage work based on what our business ultimately needs.