About Concur
Concur is a leading provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions.
This case study looks at how a combined effort between Concur’s sales and marketing teams to build total alignment in strategy, process and systems – including Eloqua and Salesforce.com integration – increased the organisations’ ability to generate business.
Aligning for Efficiency
Concur suffered from common symptom of misalignment between sales and marketing teams. Investments made in marketing and sales were converting at sub-optimal rates due to inefficient communication and lack of alignment as well as gaps in technology infrastructure.
The symptoms:
-Complaints from the sales department about lead quality
-Frustration from the marketing department about lack of follow-up on leads
-Communications challenges in which everything was labelled a ‘lead’
-Poor visibility into the buying cycle and marketing’s impact on it
-Over-reliance on manual process to track lead/opportunity conversion
Working with Eloqua partner DemandGen International, Concur sought to align strategy, process and systems to ensure sales and marketing were speaking the same language and incentivised to achieve the same goals.
Marketing and sales paced through an exercise that included:
-Defining and agreeing on stages, definitions and process through facilitated workshops with sales, marketing and operations
– Agreed on demand funnel definitions based on Sirius Decisions recommendations
– Automating the demand funnel based on individual KPI triggers and lead scoring, automatically transitioning lead status through the stages and the communications they receive
-Extensive training to ‘even the playing field’
Results
As a result of the work, through integration of Eloqua and Concur’s CRM system, Salesforce.com, leads are scored according to agreed-upon definitions and the behaviour of those individuals is presented in a prioritised and real-time manner to the appropriate sales person for focused follow up.
Concur’s vision was to define a strategy and build an engine to make demand generation and prospect progression highly automated and effective. By completely aligning the sales and marketing teams, Concur ensures that the people, process and systems are now working together for total revenue performance management.
The results of this alignment:
-A profound cultural impact
-An impact on revenue: 20% year-over-year growth during the year in which these changes were implemented
-Marketing has assumed 100% responsibility for pipeline
-A predictive model and a united team
Client quote:
“All it takes is hearing one too many times ‘Where are the good leads?’ from sales, and ‘You don’t follow up on everything” from marketing, to know there’s an opportunity for better alignment.
“The results of this alignment have had a profound cultural impact on us as well as an impact on revenue. We now have a predictive model and a united team to drive the business every day.”
Greg Forrest, manager of marketing operations at Concur
