The ExLibris story: The leader that needed to speak to a different room

At a glance

A note on context: Ex Libris was acquired by ProQuest in 2015, which was itself acquired by Clarivate for $5.3 billion in 2021. The work described here took place during Ex Libris’s period of growth as it expanded its product footprint across higher education.

A dominant position in one part of the university, invisible in another

Ex Libris was already one of the most recognized names in academic library technology, with platforms running inside dozens of the world’s top universities. In the library, it was the incumbent. The trusted name. The default choice.

That success, however, had a boundary. Cross the corridor from the library to the research office, and Ex Libris was largely unknown. Not because the product couldn’t serve that buyer, but because the company had never really spoken to them. Research administration teams managed grants, tracked research outputs, reported on institutional performance, and navigated compliance. They had their own workflows, their own pressures, and their own language. And Ex Libris wasn’t part of their conversation yet.

The opportunity was sitting inside the same institutions they already served.

Same campus. Different buyer. Different conversation entirely.

The challenge wasn’t product development. Ex Libris had already built capabilities relevant to research services. The challenge was that research office buyers don’t think or talk the way library buyers do. A VP of Research or a Research Office Director doesn’t care primarily about resource management or discovery services. They care about institutional research performance, grant tracking, compliance reporting, and how the university demonstrates the impact of its research activity.

Getting into that room required a different story, aimed at a different set of priorities, delivered through a different go-to-market approach.

Forabilis worked with Ex Libris to map the segment properly: who the buyer actually was, what they cared about, where they spent attention, and what would make a new vendor credible in a space where Ex Libris had no existing reputation. The positioning and messaging were developed specifically for that buyer, not adapted from the library narrative. The go-to-market plan was built around how research offices made decisions, not how libraries did.

Nine months from strategy to market entry

Within nine months, Ex Libris had a working market entry. A positioned offering, a targeted go-to-market motion, and a credible way into the research administration conversation.

That timeline matters in a competitive institutional market. Universities move slowly and tend to favor incumbents. Getting in early, with a clear and relevant story, creates an advantage that compounds. The institutions Ex Libris reached in those first nine months weren’t just early customers. They were the reference points that would make the next conversation easier.

Why adjacent markets require their own approach

It’s tempting, when expanding into an adjacent segment, to assume the existing story will carry. The product overlaps, the institutions are the same, the brand is established. Surely the buyer will make the connection.

They usually don’t. Adjacent buyers have adjacent problems, not identical ones. They need to hear themselves in the narrative. They need to feel that whoever is speaking to them actually understands their world.

Ex Libris had the market position, the product, and the institutional relationships. What the research office expansion needed was a story built for that specific buyer from the ground up. That’s what made the nine-month entry possible.

If you’re sitting on an adjacent market opportunity and the existing story isn’t translating, the gap is usually in the positioning, not the product. Let’s talk..