Learn how CRMT helped Aruba reach sales and marketing alignment while achieving $347m in a large account pipeline.
About the client
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, is a leading provider of secure, intelligent networks that enable customers to thrive and deliver digital experiences in the mobile, IoT and cloud era. Aruba sets out to change the rules of networking to make it simple for organisations to bridge the physical and digital worlds at the Edge.
The company was founded in 2002 and acquired by HP in 2015. Today, it serves customers in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific and Japan, recording revenue of more than $2.5 billion.
Specific issues or challenges to be addressed
As part of Aruba’s business expansion and KPIs within the HPE family, improving seller productivity is a key driver for profitable business growth to return shareholder value. In order to do this, a joint sales and marketing initiative was developed to focus the sales teams on 1500 target accounts that are actively researching products, across both third party and Aruba owned platforms. And then synthesise this data to provide insights that allow sales and marketing to proactively target individuals within these “active” accounts.
While Aruba already had a Domo Bl license and internal teams were creating funnel reporting and marketing activity dashboards, the EMEA marketing team identified the existing dashboards and datasets did not provide a omni-channel view into account activity and engagement.
The target audience
Internal audience: Field Marketing and Sales
External audience: 1,500 accounts in EMEA in UKI/DACH/Netherlands/Belgium targeting the following personas:
- Strategic C-level
- Mid-management director level
- Technical network manager
The core challenge was understanding when and what triggered an account to move from passive to active (non-engaged to engaged) and which channels the account is engaging with.
The martech solution
Aruba was keen to prove the concept without further investment in technology, so as part of the solution design, CRMT pushed the Eloqua data model to the maximum to ensure all activities could be captured across all channels and aggregated to accounts. CRMT used their own normalator technology and Eloqua workflow design for domain matching and scoring and then created a Domo Bl dashboard to enable presentation of the data in a way that was insightful for Sales.
In collaboration with the Aruba EMEA Marketing Team, CRMT designed and deployed a dashboard in Domo Bl that measures account activity across the core Aruba marketing channels to generate an Account Engagement Score and Digital Footprint Reporting. These channels included:
- Social (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook)
- Content Syndication (TechTarget)
- Email (Eloqua)
- Events (atEvent, C-vent, Eloqua)
- Webinars (BrightTalk)
- Content hub (Folloze)
- Intent (6Sense)
- Website activity (Aruba.com)
The dashboard allows for drill down into channel specific insights and provides contact level engagement details where known. E.g. If John Smith has downloaded an asset from Folloze, attended a webinar on BrightTalk and registered for the Aruba flagship event this data will be available via the dashboard if the contact is known in Eloqua.
Implementation challenges included global stakeholder availability for workshops and provision of data sources for integration with Domo BI.
The success measures were identified as:
- Visibility of all touchpoints throughout the buying journey that marketing and sales wouldn’t have had access to before
- Enablement and provision of marketing insight to sales teams
- Financial objective – identify accounts that have a propensity to purchase $1m over 2 years to develop $1.5bn in opportunities.
Deployment
The solution was built in phases to ensure value was achieved at each phase of development.
- Stage 1 (6 weeks) involved implementation of a domain matching service within Aruba’s Eloqua instance using CRMT’s Normalator technology to normalise the target account list and provide insight to sales into registrations at events within the top 1500 accounts. This solution runs in real time to look for new contacts to match them to accounts. This enabled Sales to send the appropriate resources to events.
- Stage 2 (8 weeks) included an evaluation of all Aruba Martech to determine what engagement data could be brought into Eloqua and measured in Domo Bl and also the design of the solution within Domo BI.
- Stage 3 (12 weeks) covered the build and deployment of the solution in Domo.
The Aruba EMEA Marketing Leader arranged regular insight calls between field marketing and sales to demonstrate the activity on relevant accounts using the dashboard, identifying and highlighting the key insights. This initial process ensured the most value was gained from the solution and doubled up as a training exercise for the sales team.
The stakeholders responsible for the success of the program were the EMEA Marketing Leader and the Regional Field Marketing Leaders. Initially, there was some resistance to change but once the sales teams realised the solution provided valuable insights, this objection was quickly overcome.
Impact on the business
- $347m in large account pipeline has been generated across 40 opportunities to date.
- 10 accounts having moved from passive to active for one segment have been identified.
- 10 large accounts identified as having responded to the campaign through a number of different channels. Marketing and Sales can now take a highly personalised approach to targeting those accounts compared to a more batch and blast approach which was employed previously.
- Visibility of all online and offline touchpoints across the buying journey.
- UKI Field Marketing Manager – “Great team you have at CRMT – the most influential piece of work I have seen for some time.”
ROI (and budgeting)
- $347m in a large account pipeline generated for $105k investment to date.
- Alignment between sales and marketing functions is now focused on business outcomes.
- Anecdotal Sales feedback: Working on an Aruba German account, discovered main IT decision maker is in Italy by analysing cross-channel activity and therefore the sales approach was adapted. The Aruba Sales team wouldn’t have known that without the Sales Insight Engine.
"With the Marketing and Sales Insight Engine, we can now highly personalise the approach to targeting our top 1,500 accounts. This in turns means we can use micro segmentation and utilise our marketing dollars more efficiently, with a specific focus."
