For Visma Solutions the course offers a change to find new and innovative ways to approach their own business problems from different perspectives. Visma Solutions gets concrete ideas for offering development, digital marketing, customer acquisition and retention, and visibility among potential future employees. For example, Visma Solutions has recruited some of the students who have participated and completed the Visma Marketing Hackathon.
Visma Solutions provides software-based business solutions that allow customers to work smarter – turning processes into a competitive advantage.
“For us, hackathons with LUT business students have been rewarding experiences. And not only from one point of view but two. Firstly, we have had great presentations by students that offer fresh perspectives for our real life marketing challenges. There have been great discussions around the ideas and suggestions by students. Secondly, we have been able to get to know the students”, says Juha Kuokkanen, Growth Manager at Visma Solutions.
I would definitely recommend working with Hackathon type of assignments with LUT students
“And it goes both ways. Students can show their capabilities and interest towards us and we can show how we work and think about marketing in our company. Maybe even leave a little mark that we are a workplace that they should keep in mind. I would definitely recommend working with Hackathon type of assignments with LUT students”, states Kuokkanen.
The overall goal of the Hackathon is to teach students how to apply a wide range of different marketing theories to solve a genuine and real-life corporate challenge in practice. In addition, the Hackathon teaches students that real-life challenges have seldom clearly defined problem or one correct answer, but rather open problems and multiple potential solutions, which have different advantages and require different skills and resources.
A growth plan for Visma Group's B2B market customers
In a real-life fashion, the Visma Marketing Hackathon is based on open problem solving, limited information, and multiple solutions -format.
Students work in groups and develop a growth plan for Visma Group's business-to-business (B2B) market customers in the fast-growing SaaS industry (Software as a Service industry).
The students can choose which key areas they want to focus ranging from segmenting, value proposition design, and pricing to growth hacking. In addition, the students must provide several concrete examples on how their growth plan could be executed, from digital ads and landing pages to content ideas and actual growth and customer retention strategies, for example.
At the beginning of the course, Visma representatives provide a description of one of their current business problems or goals (which changes every year) and provide a short introduction to SaaS-business. Visma Solutions provides a dedicated Q & A session to guide students, and finally the students have to pitch their growth plans to Visma representatives and verbally defend and justify their choices, strategies, and recommendations. Visma representatives will evaluate the presentations based on their content and implementation potential. The winning group will get a chance to visit Visma's premises and enjoy a dinner with Visma's people afterwards.
What's next for companies?
By collaborating with LUT University, corporations get the opportunity to work together with the next generation of future leaders, who are specialized in sustainable value creation. The B2B Marketing course, in particular, is focused on understanding and communicating the business and societal value that corporations can create to their customers and broader stakeholders.
For collaborating corporations, this course offers concrete ideas for offering development, new value-based selling and marketing arguments, as well as customer acquisition strategies.
The opportunity for providing a B2B marketing Hackathon is offered to one company per year and participation is free of charge. If you think that this would suit your company, please feel free to reach out to joona.keranen@lut.fi. Each Marketing Hackathon is possible to tailor specifically for the host organization.
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