Awards case study: CA Technologies generates huge pipeline with customer insight and ABM image

CA Technologies generates huge pipeline with customer insight and ABM

About

CA Technologies (CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate.

Around since the 1970s, and with clients spanning many industries, CA continues to be the driving force behind many companies’ future vision. Rally Software (now CA) sold agile solutions to businesses looking to keep pace with digital disruption. It’s not a product or service, it’s a change in philosophy for most businesses, and as such the buying committee can be quite large and span many functions.

Strategy

Previously, CA’s marketing focused on developers and IT operations within any company with more than 50 employees working on a low-ticket value, a volume-based approach. This meant it wasn’t always reaching the strategic decision-makers within its targets and the sales team were unfocused, changing the message depending on who they spoke to. Revenues and pipelines were strong, but they were low-ticket values and there was no chance they could meet the company’s aggressive growth targets on its current trajectory. It wanted to move to an enterprise account-based approach focusing on key decision-makers but was not sure how to do this, had no insight into who it should be targeting, and despite having a lot of content, it was very technical, suited to developers and not strategic buyers.

Objectives

It was important to transform CA’s whole strategy to an account-based approach, aligning sales and marketing. This meant increasing its digital footprint among a very targeted and focused list of accounts across all levels of the buying committee.

Specifically, the goal was to generate as many sales-qualified leads and BANT-qualified leads as possible within those accounts, as opposed to contact level details.

Target audience

CA was trying to reach decision-makers from a list of 391 companies across a variety of industries in EMEA. To do this, Pulse used intent data (through Bombora), which allowed them to see which organisations were in-market, meaning they could focus their efforts on those organisations while nurturing out-of-market organisations along the sales funnel.

The buying committees for these companies are quite large, spanning from marketing to IT, and CA had little experience working with some of these functions. While agile is fairly new to the market, there’s lots of information available on digital disruption and it can be difficult to cut through the noise to reach the most influential people in a meaningful way.

Content

Bombora
Bombora listens to over 2,500 B2B websites, combining their site data with firmographic, demographic and domain level data to help us understand what content on which subject organisations are trending for. Bombora allowed CA and Pulse to find companies that were in the market for CA’s services. This yielded a list of 74 companies from the original number of 391.

Persona workshops
Persona-building workshops which involved, not just the marketing team, but also sales and customer service, were launched with the goal of building personas that the whole organisation agreed to.

This started by running questionnaires with the CA participants to get the internal view which was then enhanced with social listening. The work done with Bombora married with the job title persona research allowed Pulse to focus on in-market organisations and the real individuals, finding out who they were, their personal habits, name, age, location, gender, which could then be averaged and apply back to the personas.

A vital part of the process was communicating the personas throughout the organisation. The information was condensed into five, one-page personas which were distributed and explained along with the process that was to ensue, to the whole organisation, uniting marketing and sales from the outset. This customer insight then informed all marketing communications activities.

Timescales

Phase one: September 2015
Persona frameworks, content audit mapped to persona frameworks and buying cycle built for nurture stream distribution.

Phase two: Ongoing but mostly completed by February 2016
Content creation and nurture stream creation.

Phase three: April 2016
Media planning to use content and distribute out to publishers, social, search and programmatically.

Phase four: April 2016
Reporting consolidation in Salesforce and Salesforce training.

Results

The success of the campaign was measured by the count of sales qualified and BANT qualified leads and appointments. We cannot publish the exact data for privacy reasons but it was the single most effective program run within the organisation at the time, which resulted in it being extended and rolled out within the US.

“I wasn’t expecting Pulse to challenge us on who our audiences actually were. They helped us identify the true nature of our ideal client base and their painpoints so that we could work together to create content that speaks to the right people to create engaged leads,” Kathryn McDonagh, senior marketing manager, EMEA, CA Technologies.

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