Find out how Quarry helped Windstream Enterprise achieve marketing and sales alignment to earn the award for ‘Best lead generation or nurturing campaign.’
About the client
Windstream Enterprise (WE) is the enterprise division of Windstream Holdings, Inc., a Fortune 500 company and one of North America’s leading providers of advanced network communications and technology solutions. The company was formed in 2006 and is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Quarry is a top-ranking demand marketing firm dedicated to B2B technology.
Strategy
As a network solutions provider targeting growing enterprises with big ambitions, WE was no stranger to using marketing automation to promote its services. But the company’s marketing campaigns suffered from a lack of integration between its sales and marketing teams. Sales reps were left out of the lead selection process that is crucial to running successful mid- to late-buying journey stage campaigns.
Objectives
We knew we had to bring WE’s people, and their data, together.
By involving WE Sales more closely in the lead selection and nurture process, we knew they could increase their appointment bookings—and their chances of success. Marketing could set up the campaigns, sequence them, provide the tactics and make them available to the sales team to execute. The challenge was to equip sales with a way to reach out to their preferred contacts while enabling marketing to offer support on who to target, based on analytics such as engagement scores.
The value to the business was clear. Higher sales happen when sales and marketing work together. According to SiriusDecisions research, B2B organisations with tightly aligned sales and marketing operations achieved 24% faster three- year revenue growth.
Target audience
WE targets IT decisions makers in a number of verticals, including retail, healthcare, banking and education. We looked to build an integrated system that could run campaigns for all of these verticals while respecting that a campaign for one might be significantly different from a campaign for another. (For example, strict restrictions exist on what prospects in the healthcare and education industries can receive as gifts.)
Media, channels or techniques used
MyCampaign is a series of sales rep-activated programmatic, multi-touch nurturing campaigns that feature targeted messaging within the emails, along with compelling direct mail (DM), thought leadership content and appointment-getter gifts. This “always-on” demand generation engine, designed in Marketo, accommodates new content and assets, engages prospects and customers with relevant content based on their buyer journey stage and interests, and progresses buyers forward in their journey to a point where they are ready to speak with sales. Marketing sets up the campaigns, sequences them, provides the tactics and makes them available to the sales team to execute. As prospects interact with content (typically downloads), leads are funneled to sales immediately.
Key to the initiative was making the programme user-friendly enough for sales to adopt. Lead selection and campaign initiation had to be easy, so sales reps would feel content enough to opt in leads. Using the API integration capabilities of WE’s Marketo solution—along with the solution’s native integration with PFL, Marketo’s print-on-demand partner—Quarry developed and incorporated a customized opt-in landing page that lets the sales team launch prospecting campaigns from WE’s Salesforce CRM solution. The opt-in page offers sales reps the contextual information they need to help them choose the right campaign for a given set of leads. It helps reps make more informed choices, including which campaigns to deploy, and advises them on what actions to take next.
The reps receive key prospect information to avoid entering invalid data, which helps WE eliminate the time and expense of troubleshooting campaigns downstream. The opt-in page even provides a visual reference for each MyCampaign, letting reps monitor where a lead is within a campaign, such as which emails have been sent and which DMs have shipped. Recently, we added a set of auto-notifications to alert sales reps whenever a prospect had interacted with a touch and cue the reps on which follow-up action to take.
Timescales of the campaign
The MyCampaign program was developed and activated in 2018. It has since been expanded and remains active today.
Results
In the first year of the MyCampaign program, WE attributed 804 booked appointments, 2,204 opportunities valued at $14 million MRR, and a total of 173 wins valued at $357,000 MRR to the programme. Altogether, MyCampaign deals have resulted in 5.6 times the opportunities WE saw before they adopted the program—and a 70% faster time to close. MyCampaign was also recognized as a 2019 Marketo Revvie Award Finalist.
Not only is the WE Sales team using the solution, they’re loving it. Said one sales director , “We love the campaigns. My new hires are fully engaged on adopting it into their prospecting efforts.”
Feedback from the reps bears this out. “I have been prospecting this customer for at least 5 years,” said one rep. “He has occasionally answered the phone but would always tell me he’s happy with what he has and not interested in changing. The [appointment-getter] is what finally got him to agree to the meeting.”
“My background is with HP and IBM and this is by far the best campaign resource and the most aligned I have ever seen in marketing and sales.”
