IBM develops a long-term sales pipeline with Slipstream

IBM’s Enabling Business Flexibility division required an ongoing lead nurturing programme, which included the following:

• Qualification of specific target companies that have engaged with IBM Identification and handover of short term qualified leads to sales
• Building and managing a dataset of medium and long term opportunities
• Communicate with prospects in the dataset using appropriate media and messaging to manage the relationship at each stage
• Handover of medium and long term opportunities once they mature into sales ready leads
• Full visibility of lead flow status across the end-to-end process.

Strategy

The broader objectives were to provide a continuous flow of new business through the sales pipeline, maximise effectiveness and efficiency of demand generation campaigns, and to integrate the sales and marketing teams. To achieve this, IBM partnered with Slipstream to build, execute, and manage a strategic lead nurturing campaign with the wider objectives of:

• Building pipeline which will contribute to short, medium and long term sales targets
• Gaining visibility and maintaining engagement with customers at all stages of the buying cycle
• Ensuring effective handover of leads between marketing and sales
• And ultimately driving revenue through sales

The target audience

The target audience for this campaign was organisations that had already engaged with IBM in some way, such as events and webinars.

For each of the target companies, Slipstream performed a contact acquisition and cleaning exercise, to cleanse IBM’s data. Roles to be targeted by IBM for this campaign included the following key decision makers and influencers, including CIO, IT director/manager, CFO, head of operations and procurement director/manager.

Methodology

Slipstream pioneered the development of lead nurturing campaigns to enhance their existing Demand Generation activity. This enabled IBM to maximise return on investment (ROI), through a programme that identified and nurtured longer term leads until fully qualified and ready for effective sales engagement.

The nurturing programme was based on IBM’s ‘Learn Scope Select’ methodology, championed by IBM’s Pete Jakob. This nurturing activity has been developed to assist IBM by:

• Identifying suspects, prospects and customers with a project or business pain related to the EBF propositions
• Building relationships with them in the early stages and throughout their purchasing cycle
• Monitoring and influencing their progress towards selection and purchase
• Notifying IBM that they are ready to buy.

This process involves allocating long term opportunities into one of three categories – learn/scope/select – depending on where they are in their buying cycle.

Learn:

1. Potential client at the initial stages of a project
2. Looking at the concept as a whole
3. Looking at how adoption could help the business in general

Scope:

1. Looking at how other businesses have benefitted from the solution
2. Looking at white papers
3. Looking at case studies and conducting research
4. Interested in attending vendor events

Select:

1. Interested in engaging with vendor
2. Interested in discussing how vendor solutions compare
3. Has budget available

Slipstream continually engaged with those in the ‘learn’ and ‘scope’ stages as they move through the sales cycle, using targeted collateral and promoting IBM’s solutions and awareness of the IBM brand. Once opportunities reach the ‘Select’ category they are handed over to the IBM sales teams for direct sales engagement.

Results

As well as achieving full visibility of leads across the pipeline, IBM has typically reported an ROI of 4500 per cent throughout the ongoing campaign and achieved around 50 per cent uplift in leads progressing through to sales stage.