Challenges
The marketing team had become very good at creating responses to multi-channel marketing programs. So good in fact, that the top of the sales funnel overflowed 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 they needed a way to automatically evaluate responses so only the best leads made their way to sales.
Solution
McAfee marketing decided that the best way to engage leads that were not ready to buy was to create a journey. Prospects went through a segmented nurturing program giving them the right information at the right time in the buying process so leads became sales ready using lead scoring and nurturing.As the world’s largest dedicated security technology company, 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.
McAfee also wanted to reduce the volume of cold leads wasting sales team resources 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 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 it wanted their prospect to take. Fundamental 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 message, visual identity, nurturing stages, journey flow, and marketing automation balance. By implementing lead scoring, McAfee reduced leads by 35 per cent while improving overall lead quality.
Lead to opportunity conversion rate increased four-fold, highlighting a clear return on investment.Now McAfee can analyse and assess both the profile fit and level of engagement of each lead. Leads are assessed by job role, company size, relationship, email clicks, downloaded assets, trial downloads and event attendance. Analytics based on individuals and their engagement level help differentiate warm leads from cold. Leads that score highly are routed through an inside telemarketing team before the very best go over to sales. Lead scoring is relatively simple to set up but the essence of a good nurture program is to really focus on the target audience or the persona you are trying to reach and the journey you want to create.
Results
This high level of success led to implementation across multiple geographies around the world. At first, only North America was using Eloqua Co-Dynamic Lead ScoringTM. Then it was rolled out across EMEA, APAC and LATAM. Eloqua’s automated lead nurturing programme was deployed across North American and EMEA offices with LATAM and APAC to follow. In addition to the tangible benefits and high adoption rate, a better relationship between the sales and marketing team was established. The implementation gave the sales team insights and analytics to prioritise leads and convert opportunities into sales.
“The implementation of Eloqua’s lead scoring and lead nurturing programmes 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,” said Alexandre Papillaud, director of McAfee’s Global Demand Center.
