About Huddle
Huddle is a leader in cloud collaboration and content management for enterprise. Huddle is used by more than 90,000 organisations worldwide, including Disney, HTC and Kia Motors, to securely manage projects, share files and collaborate with people inside and outside of their business.
Working with Aprimo has helped Huddle take control of its sales and marketing processes and build a successful sales pipeline with sales now consistently working on 95-99 per cent of leads. Furthermore, Huddle changed its entire business model based on the business intelligence it gained from Aprimo Marketing Studio On Demand.
Working in silos, duplicating effort
Like many organisations, Huddle suffered due to its marketing and sales team using a variety of different applications, none of which talked to each another. As a result, sales and marketing were working in silos, duplicating effort, and finding it difficult to distinguish between prospects and marketing qualified leads.
Huddle needed to get a proper 360 degree view of its customers and prospects from the moment they first engaged with the company right through to the point of sale. The company’s vision was therefore to bring in a tool that could facilitate communication between all three existing marketing applications and talk to Salesforce.com, already used by the sales team.
The solution: Aprimo Marketing Studio On Demand
Huddle quickly established that Aprimo Marketing Studio On Demand had the flexibility and the depth of features it required. The team at Aprimo also spent time to properly understand Huddle’s goals and issues and to work with the business to find the most appropriate solution.
As a result, Huddle invested in Aprimo’s SaaS model for online marketing, lead management and advanced email deliverability as well as Omniture for sophisticated analytics, replacing its existing marketing tools. With the help of Dell Boomi, Huddle was able to tightly integrate Aprimo Marketing Studio On Demand as its new cloud-based integrated marketing management solution, with Salesforce.com and Omniture.
Integrating products in this way avoided the need to swap sales over to a new system, which would have required time and resources to train the sales team and inevitably resulting in a loss of productivity. At the same time, the integration of the three systems would, for the first time, allow sales to really make use of the data marketing could provide them, in order to identify a potential lead and ultimately to close the sale.
Far reaching results
The results of the new system were more far-reaching than anyone could have expected. Not only did using Aprimo make it possible to track revenue as a function of lead source, leading the company to make a number of changes in investment, but it has also helped Huddle to develop a new business funnel.
Ashleigh Casner, head of customer acquisition at Huddle, said, “Crucially, we have used Aprimo to help us build a proper business funnel, which we wouldn’t have been able to do before. Today, Aprimo Marketing Studio On Demand ensures that our sales reps get information on prospects as quickly as possible to allow them to really get their pitch right. For example, through the integration of Salesforce.com and our own customer database with Aprimo, our sales team can see what parts of Huddle the customer is using during the free trial. This ensures that they are far more informed about the customer’s needs right from the point of making that first sales call.
She continued, “From our initial engagement with Aprimo, the company has been tremendously supportive of the agile way in which we work. The team continues to provide support on an ongoing basis as we tweak the system according to our changing requirements. With internal process improvements and help from Aprimo, we are over achieving our sales targets and getting better every day. This has allowed us to start rapidly scaling the business and we’re currently hiring more sales reps in both EMEA and North America.”
A true measure of success
Today, Casner estimates that 95-99 per cent of leads are being worked on and the relationship between the sales and marketing organisation has gone from strength to strength as a result. She said, “The key has been to get both people and processes right. Working with Aprimo has allowed marketing to measure the success of everything we do and to give the sales organisation the kind of lead generation tools they’d been asking for. We’ve experienced some major successes off the back of the new system.”
