The challenge
As a market leader in the red hot category of on-demand talent management software, SuccessFactors was faced with a challenge common among organisations that experience explosive growth — how do you continue to fuel your current pace and get out ahead of it with a relatively small marketing team?
With a rise in the number of competitors vying for market share, and a rapidly growing sales team to support, David Cain, VP of marketing communications, knew he needed to automate the company’s marketing processes to keep pace with organisational growth. An increasing customer roster and mounting demand added strain to an infrastructure that couldn’t support the rapidly growing organisation in some key areas:
Event management: existing processes for driving event attendance and managing registration were cumbersome and time consuming, but the number of events marketing was responsible for was rapidly escalating.
Segmentation: the database they invested in heavily to grow risked being depleted because the team lacked the ability to segment marketing contacts and send targeted campaigns rather than one-size-fits-all messages.
Lead routing and prioritisation: leads weren’t prioritised and the right leads didn’t always get to the right sales reps due to limited lead routing and scoring capabilities.
Automation: manually executing and measuring campaigns consumed valuable time that could be spent trying new approaches but the team had no way to automate their best performing marketing programmes.
SuccessFactors needed to do more with less and build confidence in marketing programs so the team set out to find a more effective way to leverage the resources they had.
The solution
Automating manual processes and integrating on a common platform would enable SuccessFactors to support the added demand created by rapid organisational growth. Key to the selection of a marketing automation vendor was a platform that could address the challenges they faced today but scale for their continued growth and evolving requirements.
“When we went with Eloqua, we looked at many vendors. Eloqua had, by far, the best functionality. Their solution has really helped us succeed in bridging the gap between sales and marketing at SuccessFactors,” says Cain.
Reet Mand, senior email marketing manager, cites the excellent service and support as one reason they have been able to rapidly address so many of their business challenges. “My customer success manager has been instrumental in helping us achieve our goals. He helps me set up new programmes, figure out how to report on different campaigns, and show the impact of email marketing. It’s like an extension of our team — someone with a lot of knowledge and experience that we can bounce ideas off.”
Cain echoes that sentiment, “Two years ago, we switched CRM systems at SuccessFactors. Eloqua was a tremendous partner in helping us do that very, very quickly. In just two weeks, they helped us get four hundred sales reps over to a new system and up and running very smoothly.”
The Eloqua marketing automation platform has helped SuccessFactors operationalise their most successful marketing programs and develop repeatable processes that save hundreds of hours. Now the team has more time to focus on program innovation and driving customer value.
Conclusion
The marketing team has fully automated the event lifecycle for everything from their global user conference to regional user groups and webinars. The streamlined process sends email invites, manages session registration, and delivers pre-defined reminders and follow up communications. Eloqua has helped the team support more events than was possible before and turn around a declining ratio of delegates who register and actually attend events. Using automation — particularly automated reminders — they successfully increased the ratio by 20 per cent.
SuccessFactors has leveraged sophisticated segmentation and lead routing to send personalised, relevant communications and improve sales productivity. When someone fills out a form on the website, an auto-responder email is triggered based on prospect profile data and online activity history. The prospect gets a targeted communication immediately after filling out the form and the lead is automatically routed to the correct sales representative based on pre-defined territory rules.
The results have been impressive — the automated program assigns leads to hundreds of sales reps from over 3,000 outbound auto responder emails per month and generates a 56 per cent open rate. “In most organisations, there’s a big divide between sales and marketing,” commented David Cain. “With Eloqua, we’ve been able to reduce that significantly. We’re now passing information to the sales reps that they can use to make much more effective calls and be much more effective in their jobs.”
The marketing team also collaborated with sales on the implementation of a lead scoring programme, contributing to an environment of trust and accountability. “That was really important,” commented Reet. “We have always involved the sales team in our marketing programs. With lead scoring, we got their input on what a hot lead was and the program was well received because the sales team was bought in.”
The sales reps can’t recall how they lived without lead scoring because before they had no way to prioritise who to call. Now the best leads bubble to the top and appear right in CRM. It has had a profound impact on lead quality and improved sales’ ability to reach and convert prospects in a shorter time.
Reet added, “The depth of the application and the level of service Eloqua provides are very powerful. The application is incredibly robust so we never feel limited by what it can do, and Eloqua support is wonderful. They know the answers to all our questions and are always available. Knowing these experts are behind us and we can get the answers we need –that’s the real difference.”
