Company Background
Axios Systems is the world’s leading provider of ITSM solutions. For more than 25 years, Axios has been solely focused on ITSM and was the first adopter of the ITIL framework. Axios’ Assyst solution replaces legacy framework tools and helps organisations utilise the mobile and social capabilities of IT management. Offered as an on-premise and SaaS solution, A
ssyst improves service delivery, optimises IT infrastructure efficiency, and lowers total cost of IT ownership. Viewed as ITSM experts with 20 offices covering over 50 countries, Axios is hyper-focused on customer service and works with more than 1,000 organisations across the globe.
The Challenge
Prior to implementing Eloqua at the start of 2012, the lead generation process at Axios Systems was in a difficult state. Although the company had a good volume of incoming leads, they were not being properly scored, prioritised and nurtured in an organised manner. Conversion rates through the sales and marketing funnel were low and sales opportunities were being missed.
For example, before Axios implemented Eloqua, 38,742 leads were passed on to the sales team in a 12 month period. Of these leads, only 5 per cent (1,937) converted into sales opportunities. Basically, anyone who completed an online form was routed to the sales team as a ‘lead’. Because these leads were not ranked in any way, the inside sales team spent at least one hour following up on each lead try to ascertain interest and gather important information that would tell them whether there was real sales potential within an account. This created an unsustainable sales resource issue not to mention many lost opportunities that were buried under leads that were nowhere ready to buy.
Both sales and marketing teams were suffering. Sales began to complain that marketing was not providing quality leads and marketing felt that many leads were not being followed up properly as sales began to ‘cherry picking’ the best ones. This misalignment between the sales and marketing teams created a lot of tension.
In addition to the problems faced by the sales team, the marketing team didn’t have a programme in place to nurture the leads that were not hot enough to follow up immediately. A lot of marketing resources went into creating the high volume of leads yet a lot of future opportunities were being wasted in not nurturing the contacts they captured. The marketing team at Axios Systems knew that if they could better profile the contacts they were capturing they could use or create content to educate their potential buyers through the sales cycle and create additional opportunities for the sales team.
The Solution
It was imperative for Axios Systems to reduce the number of lost opportunities that the current sales and marketing teams were facing through poor process and a lack of marketing automation. In early 2012 Axios Systems made the decision to implement a solution that afforded advanced lead scoring and nurturing capabilities. After evaluating various solutions on the market, Eloqua was chosen, in part because of its ability to capture and use digital body language (DBL).
DBL, a term coined by Eloqua, is the aggregate of the digital activity gathered from an individual’s online footprint, including: each email that is opened or clicked, each web visit, each web form filled out, each search on Google, each referral from a social media site, and each webinar viewed – these are all parts of an individual’s digital body language.
Like reading body language in a face-to-face meeting, DBL provides insight into a prospect’s activity on a website and engagement with branded materials can be tracked and measured. For Axios Systems in particular, gaining insight into DBL as part of the marketing automation solution meant that the company was able to decipher precisely at which stage each prospect was at in the buying cycle.
1. Incorporating DBL into Lead Scoring
Eloqua presented Axios Systems with an intelligent and intuitive solution to lead scoring, complete with the ability to incorporate DBL into their CRM system to give sales an insight into the online trail prospects were leaving. To incorporate DBL into lead scoring, Axios Systems took the different stages in the buying cycle, mapped out each different type of marketing collateral available for each stage of the cycle, and introduced a score for each piece of content. Axios then worked out a mathematical lead scoring model based on this information via a bracketed number of points.
As part of the lead scoring programme development, sales and marketing teams came together to create an accepted definition of a marketing-qualified lead. Using the lead scoring system developed, the leads were then rated as ‘hot/warm/cold’. Axios Systems then knew which leads to hand over to sales and which needed to be nurtured. Once the sales team felt they were getting better quality leads, the relationship between sales and marketing improved significantly.
2. Incorporating DBL into Lead Nurturing
Once lead scoring was in place, the next step was to implement lead nurturing to make the most out of each lead, wherever it was in the buying cycle. By using Eloqua and its insights into prospects’ DBL, Axios was able to push the right type of content, at the right time, at the right stage of the buying cycle, in order to stimulate progression through the sales funnel.
To illustrate, if an email resulted in a prospect downloading a case study, this would indicate that they are on the ‘request for proposal’ track. Axios Systems would then respond to this insight by providing specific offerings targeted towards that particular state of engagement.
Results
Axios Systems saw an immediate benefit following the implementation of Eloqua. In just three weeks, Axios Systems managed to design, create and launch a 60-touch lead nurturing programme reaching out to 150,000 inactive contacts in their database. Not only did Eloqua enable them to build a complex marketing programme that increased reach by 500 per cent in three months, but it was wholly supported with streamlined email templates, updated landing pages, and a lead scoring model that was tied together with Revenue Performance Management (RPM) metrics for sales pipeline conversion.
Results in the first 12 months include:
• 1,165 marketing qualified leads passed to the sales team (an 88 per cent reduction in volume and time wasted following up on unsuitable leads)
• 60 per cent of leads handed to sales converted to an opportunity (five per cent the previous year)
• 50 per cent improvement in email open and click through rates
• A fall in unsubscribe rates to only 0.3 per cent
Overall, the marketing department predicts a 10 per cent increase in company revenue directly due to the implementation of Eloqua’s marketing automation platform. In terms of ‘soft’ results, implementing Eloqua has also paid off in dividends. Axios Systems has achieved marketing and sales alignment through establishment of common metrics, thus eliminating the frustration and breakdown of communication between marketing and sales departments. Most importantly, the sales team can now concentrate on selling, not filtering leads.
Scalable, forward-looking benefits of Eloqua include having a platform to test out ideas for template updates to both emails and landing pages – the data gleaned from the lead nurture programme can test these ideas before they are permanently implemented. Furthermore, Axios Systems will be able to maintain a steady stream of marketing qualified leads to the sales team and will be able to localise and implement Eloqua’s solution in overseas locations.
