Find out how the TMF Group was able to upskill its in-house team, increase campaign complexities and achieve its business transformation goals.
About the TMF Group
TMF Group is a global provider of HR and payroll, accounting and tax, corporate secretarial, global governance and administration services for companies looking to expand into new geographical regions. Since 1988, TMF has been helping businesses expand internationally by using in-country expertise and knowledge to operate both within and beyond their home markets.
Their independent experts understand the local market and its associated legal, financial and regulatory compliance requirements to allow their clients to do business in any country and maintain compliance with local and international regulations.
TMF operates across 83 countries providing 15,000 clients, of all sizes and across a range of industries, with on-the-ground, business-critical financial and administration services.
Specific issues or challenges to be addressed
Working with Really B2B since 2017, a prospect campaign was devised to:
- Scale up the UK prospecting activity
- Increase presence with US and APAC multinationals expanding overseas
- Increase database and targeting complexities
- Align their disparate technology stack
- Create a nurture programme to tackle the 24 month+ sales-cycle
- A proof-of-concept marketing automation (MA) strategy was developed into a business case for the board.
Using this strategy, TMF achieved:
- 121% increase in MQLS
- 1,768% increase in pipeline ROI
- Winner of ‘Best Use of MA’ at the B2B Martech Awards
Following this success, 2019 needed to take the activity to the next level.
Focus and grow:
- Aligning with the business’ change in direction: Over the past three years, TMF has acquired 300+ professional service providers across the globe, and each acquisition brings their own client rosters. A board-level decision was made to focus on customer engagement and growth over prospecting throughout 2019 and the marketing strategy needed to align.
- Account-based marketing automation: To take the customer campaigns a step further and grow larger accounts, TMF wanted to explore an account-based marketing approach, supported by MA, to target key growth opportunities within the client base.
Empowering the in-house team:
- Create a robust training plan to upskill TMF’s internal marketing team: Whilst working with Really B2B, TMF cultivated their sales and marketing resources internally and have the desire (and now the resources) to take more ownership of the MA programme.
- Continue to innovate: Although TMF were taking the activity in-house, they understand the value of continuous improvement. A clear roadmap was needed to ensure new approaches, campaigns and initiatives were being created by Really B2B at the same time as TMF’s in-house team were being upskilled on the previous and current activity.
The tech stack:
- Align the spine: Although using Marketo for the UK activity, each regional marketing team (APAC, EMEA and the Americas) were still operating across multiple platforms. Consolidation of email sending platforms, CRM and databases was required, with Marketo being used as the central tool to manage all marketing activity.
- Increasing the sophistication: To utilise the technology, additional functions and plug-ins needed to be reviewed to tie the entire marketing strategy together.
Existing martech infrastructure
Prior to the project starting, no marketing automation tools were currently in place. The strategy called for unification of multiple channels and martech, pulling back and triggering from one central tactical and operational platform. Using industry standard, well-developed APIs, the Sitecore forms, LinkedIn LeadGen functions and webinar data capture were integrated, using Marketo as the central point for all contact and behavioural data to be processed and stored.
Strategy and deployment
To achieve the objectives and combat the challenges outlined, the technology roadmap originally created for the pilot was built upon using both the lessons learnt and successes achieved.
Data integrations:
Marketo: Marketo was chosen due to the platform’s complex data management tools, proven track record with API integrations with other technologies, and the robust and fully-featured campaign delivery capabilities to support a range of marketing activities. Additionally, due to Marketo’s powerful results tracking and reporting, it was deemed the perfect fit to calculate ROI and results effectively.
Agency CRM (Vortex): Vortex ensured complete data transparency. With data from Marketo feeding into Vortex, this meant the Really B2B client services team had live updates of individual actions (email opens, links clicked, responses, web page views etc.) by contact and company level.
Microsoft Dynamics: TMF uses MS Dynamics globally to manage potential opportunities, control their sales process and centralise their customer and prospect data in one single customer view. The decision was taken to connect Marketo to MS Dynamics to streamline the data management process and allow all data to be available across all systems, without manual intervention being required.
Merit: Merit is a third-party data management platform used by TMF. The data team can use the Merit system to update, append and replace contacts, ensuring that the data is as accurate as possible. It allows for a clean and error-free contact database to be maintained and fed into the Marketo/MS Dynamics infrastructure.
Training: Full training was provided to TMF by Really B2B.
- Initially the fundamental Marketo setup and knowledge was shared with the TMF UK team.
- Super-user and data management training provided to key TMF personnel to teach them the skills required to start to take over management and delivery of the complex nurture programs and associated data preparation.
- Training delivered to a wider UK marketing team and Netherlands.
- Training expanded to regional marketing teams including EMEA, APAC and the Americas in order to align and standardise the marketing strategy globally and allow them to use Marketo to deliver their field marketing campaigns in each region.
Really B2B continues to develop the next 12 months’ campaign advances and complexities whilst handing over previous years’ advances to the TMF team in a scalable and managed fashion – allowing TMF to maintain continuous improvement both in their marketing activities delivered and their own internal team growth.
ABM strategy: An ABM strategy was developed to run in line with the core activity in order to grow larger accounts. TMF had identified the biggest account growth opportunities, however, with them already being large spenders, there was hesitance around being perceived as ‘pushy’.
To overcome this, a nurture programme was initially created using Marketo, to first serve content-led emails, pointing to dedicated landing pages. This triggers IP based display ads. Using Marketo’s ABM module, intent listening and collaboration with client directors, a scoring process has been developed to trigger ABM sprints when the accounts are highly engaged.
Business Impact
Business focus: By utilising the knowledge and learnings from the pilot prospecting activity, TMF has been able to seamlessly switch to a customer-led focus in its demand and lead generation. This has increased customer awareness, revenue growth from cross-sell and upsell opportunities and business transformation through marketing capabilities.
The data segmentation enabled TMF to offer a higher level of customer service through aligning and assigning dedicated client directors to all newly acquired accounts.
The introduction of an ABM strategy identified the highest revenue drivers and has given TMF the opportunity to reach these accounts at a more focused level. This strategy will continue to be rolled out across look-a-like businesses with the propensity to increase spend.
Team empowerment: Not only have the agency training sessions empowered the UK marketing team to continue the success of the current activity, it has aligned all regional teams, training them up to the same level and expanding the successful UK programme to a global level.
Results
Over the last 2 years that project has generated:
- 2,101% pipeline ROI for 2019 (1,261% in 2018)
- An increase in MQLs of 121% in 2018 and a further 82% in 2019
"This activity has supported both our prospecting and customer marketing strategies, aligned our global marketing teams and provided the tools, processes and technical set up to allow us to achieve our business transformation goals. The team at Really B2B are professional, focused on providing brilliant customer service and continuously add value to the marketing automation strategy."
