Cross Telecom embraces sales enablement tools to increase closed-won deals

About Cross Telecom


Arrow S3 (a merger of Cross Telecom and Shared Technologies) is an end-to-end integrator of telecom technologies. The company employs a direct sales model with account executives (AEs) located throughout the United States. One of the marketing department’s primary roles is to enable the sales team to be their own ‘marketing machines’ – to farm new business.
 

A more productive sales force


Prior to the merger, Cross leveraged Eloqua’s sales enablement tools such as sales email templates, weekly reports and real-time notifications of website activity to improve conversion throughout the funnel. The company doubled the productivity of its AE team and increased opportunities by 47% from 2010 to 2011. After the merger, widespread adoption and success with the Eloqua tools opened the door for increased use of Eloqua Profiler and Eloqua Discover for Salesforce.
Experiencing the benefits of Eloqua’s sales enablement tools and capabilities within the Salesforce platform has spurred AEs to improve their Salesforce usage. They are “living” in the CRM tool more, entering correct data and, in doing so, maximizing their results by the Eloqua and Salesforce integration. Eric Butterwick, senior marketing consultant, said, “Eloqua has been a huge catalyst in improving our Salesforce usership.”


Easy reporting means higher productivity


The Cross sales team used Eloqua templates to send invitations to their customers for events, to track RFPs and distribute branded materials to prospects. The team was enabled to be immediately responsive, rather than spend their time creating emails from scratch.
“They have the ability to engage their customer base at their speed and at the level they want,” said Butterwick. “We have revolutionised how our sales team contacts customers and prospects.”
A weekly report of email activity coupled with real-time website visitor notifications nicely bundled the information for the AEs at the start of each week. That single report made them more productive, because they didn’t have to look through each contact to search for buying behaviour.
Additionally, they found reassurance in seeing the scope in which their premium customers engage in webinars, customer events and weekly lead-nurturing emails.


Results


Cross Telecom’s marketing team contributed substantially to the company’s revenue growth and the number of opportunities. Year-on-year comparison from the first two quarters of 2011 vs. 2010 shows:


• Marketing funnel doubled in size
• Increase of 28% in closed-won opportunities
• Opportunities increased 47%
Those figures represent the results of a comprehensive best-practices use of Eloqua, with sales enablement tools playing a major role.


Client quote:


“The relationship between marketing and sales is very strong and has evolved over the past two and a half years largely because of Eloqua. Members from our sales force who have found success with our marketing tools are the best proof.”
 

Eric Butterwick, senior marketing consultant, Cross Telecom

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