Project Neo: Launching a Self-Service IoT Commerce Platform

Aeris Communications |  Director of Demand Generation

 

The Problem

When it comes to IoT connectivity, not all customers are created equal — and Aeris learned this the hard way. The company's sales team was burning time and resources servicing a long tail of small-volume buyers: engineers, inventors, and entrepreneurs deploying fewer than 1,000 SIMs on projects ranging from smart parking meters to livestock trackers to oilfield sensors. The cost to serve these customers was nearly identical to enterprise accounts, without the enterprise revenue to match.

 

The solution was Project Neo: a purpose-built self-service ecommerce platform that would let small-scale IoT builders buy, activate, and manage SIM connectivity without ever touching a sales rep.

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My Role

As Director of Demand Generation, I owned the go-to-market and marketing launch strategy for Neo end-to-end.

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The Approach

Before running a single ad, we did the homework. I led a thorough audit of Aeris's existing customer database and surfaced more than 8,000 contacts who matched the Neo buyer profile — a solid foundation with real purchase history behind it.

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From there, I built a lean, digital-first campaign designed to reach technically-minded buyers where they actually spend time. The channel mix included targeted email to the identified database, retargeting ads to recapture engaged visitors, and social media outreach across LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and Reddit — all three of which index well with engineers, developers, and the maker/inventor community.The campaign kept costs low by design. Rather than broad awareness plays, we focused on precision: the right message (self-service, no friction, built for your scale) to the right audience at the right moment in their project cycle.

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Results

• Within 90 days of launch: 31% of the 8,000+ target contacts converted to Neo — roughly 2,400 customers migrated to a self-service model, freeing the sales team to focus on higher-value accounts

• Net-new customer acquisition came in strong, particularly via social media, where the engineer and inventor communities proved highly receptive to a product built explicitly for their use case

• The sales cycle for this customer segment compressed from 280 days to 72 days — a 74% reduction

• Conversion rates jumped from 8% to 25%

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Why It Worked

Neo succeeded because the marketing matched the audience. Engineers don't want to talk to sales reps — they want to evaluate, decide, and buy on their own terms. The campaign respected that. By meeting buyers on Reddit threads and LinkedIn feeds rather than flooding them with enterprise-style outreach, we built trust with a notoriously skeptical audience and converted them at a rate that exceeded expectations.

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The project also demonstrated what happens when marketing and product are genuinely aligned: Neo didn't just move a metric. It changed how Aeris thought about its customer segments entirely.