McAfee reaps the benefits of ‘lead temperature’ with Eloqua

About McAfee

Delivering proactive and proven solutions and services that help secure systems and networks around the world, McAfee protects consumers and businesses of all sizes from the latest malware and emerging online threats. Solutions are designed to work together, integrating anti-malware, anti-spyware, and virus protection with security management features that deliver unsurpassed real-time visibility and analytics, reduce risk, ensure compliance, and help businesses achieve operational efficiencies.

The challenge


McAfee, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation, is the world’s largest dedicated security technology company delivering solutions and services to end-users, private sector enterprise, the public sector and service providers. With more than 100 competitors, McAfee realised that its sales and marketing teams had to work closely together to drive revenue growth. Agreement and alignment between the two departments was crucial to creating marketing effectiveness and improving the sales pipeline.

Over the years, the marketing team had become very good at creating responses to their multi-channel marketing programs. So good in fact, that the top of the sales funnel over-flowed with leads to the point that it was creating a negative reaction from sales. Sales felt that the quality of the leads generated by marketing was poor and following up was sometimes a waste of time. Marketing realised that although the volume of leads was good, they needed a way to automatically evaluate responses so only the best leads made their way into the hands of sales.

Once leads were evaluated, or scored, the remaining leads were ideal for nurturing. McAfee’s marketing team decided the best way to continue marketing to leads that were not ready to buy, was to create a journey. Prospects should be put through a segmented nurturing program giving them the right information at the right time in the buying process to enable leads to becoming sales ready over time.

The solution


McAfee was already using Eloqua to create landing pages and forms, as well as upload assets. Although McAfee had been using Eloqua for three years, it was only using about 50 per cent of the service’s capabilities. In order to address its key challenges and evolve its own marketing automation processes, McAfee realised it could take advantage of the greater breadth and depth of Eloqua’s technology. The two specific new areas McAfee addressed with Eloqua were lead scoring and nurturing.

In order to create the lead nurturing program for Europe, McAfee worked closely with CRM Technologies, an Eloqua partner based in the UK. CRM Technologies assisted in the design and implementation of the nurture program. They began by setting up a best practice workshop with the local McAfee marketing and operations team along with the external creative agency. CRM then worked with McAfee to design and build the workflow and provided input to the content mapping and creative look, as well as the messages and the tactics to ensure the target prospects would find it easy to get the information they needed and move through the sales stages at their own pace.


1. Lead scoring


McAfee wanted, at a very basic level, to address the lead volume and lead quality issue. With Eloqua’s lead scoring proposition, the company is able to analyse and assess both the profile fit and level of engagement of each lead. On the profile fit side, the leads are assessed according to job role, company size and whether or not they are already an existing customer; on the engagement side, leads are analysed on the basis of a number of elements, including the number of email clicks they make; whether they have previously downloaded any assets; whether they have completed a trial download; and whether they have attended an event. This level of analytics based on both the individual themselves and their respective level of engagement helps to differentiate the warm leads from the cold leads. Leads that score highly enough are routed through an inside telemarketing team before the very best are handed over to sales for follow up.


2. Lead nurturing


Lead scoring is relatively simple to set up but the essence of a good nurture programme is to really focus on the target audience or the ‘persona’ you are trying to reach, and the journey you want to create. Setting up a good nurture program is a process that takes some analysis and planning.

McAfee wanted to reduce the volume of cold leads wasting the precious resource of the sales team and prevent such leads from being triggered to the CRM system. At the same time, it wanted to increase the ‘lead temperature’ of certain prospects while also gathering more valuable information and insights to ultimately aid the sales team’s conversion efforts.

Eloqua’s automated lead nurturing program helped McAfee to address this challenge of overall ‘lead temperature’ by providing the capability to develop a bespoke strategy for each individual lead which would ultimately increase overall lead quality. Eloqua’s intuitive workflow simplifies the development of ongoing lead nurturing campaigns. In this instance, all McAfee had to do was assign rules to initiate a communication and determine the path that they wanted their prospect to take.

Fundamental to this approach was the rationale of taking the prospect on a journey, rather than just talking to them about a product. The success of this strategy was based on the mantra of ‘sending the right asset at the right time to the right person’ and was underpinned by the following elements:


– The message: identifying what McAfee wanted to communicate to the contact


– The visual identity: personalising the content and assets to match the needs of the contact


– The three ‘nurturing stages’ of early, mid and late: identifying which stage of the nurture the lead was at and tailoring the content accordingly at each different stage (e.g. direct marketing in the early stage, newsletter in the mid stage and webcast in the late stage) to ensure the people continued to move along the pipeline


– Flow: taking the prospect on a journey but giving them the opportunity ‘to raise their hand’ with secondary calls to action to empower them to dictate the pace and direction of their journey


– Balance automation and marketing: engaging the services of the local marketing team, monitoring both the behaviour of the contact and which assets it had downloaded


The Result


The implementation has successfully enabled McAfee to address its lead volume and lead quality problem. By implementing a lead scoring solution, McAfee has reduced the number of leads by 35 per cent while improving the overall quality of the leads. Meanwhile, its lead to opportunity conversion rate has increased four-fold, highlighting a clear return on investment.

This high level of success led to implementation across multiple geographies around the world. In January 2011, only North America was using Eloqua’s Co-Dynamic Lead Scoring but this has now been rolled out across EMEA, APAC and LATAM. Eloqua’s automated lead nurturing program has also been deployed across McAfee’s North American and EMEA offices, with LATAM and APAC set to follow.

In addition to these tangible benefits and high adoption rate, a better relationship between the sales and marketing team has also been established. The implementation has provided a better understanding of the ‘temperature’ of leads and in turn, given the sales team more insights and analytics to effectively prioritise leads and convert opportunities into sales.

Customer testimonial


“The implementation of Eloqua’s lead scoring and lead nurturing programs has really moved us forward in our marketing evolution. Eloqua has delivered value-added insights that are crucial in turning prospects into customers in today’s increasingly competitive market.”
 

Alexandre Papillaud, EMEA marketing operations manager at McAfee EMEA

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