It has been said often enough, but is worth repeating: Implementing marketing technology alone is not going to drive business results. The key to success is leveraging that technology to drive impactful communication and align Marketing and Sales to create the customer experience that delivers higher conversions and customer loyalty. But where do you start with that? The most important thing in the process is to take the first step and learn from it.
I was working with a customer who migrated from a traditional ESP to Marketo earlier that year. The Marketing team was successfully running campaigns and building a decent database of interactions. However, this information was not available to Sales and, as the project was a pilot, no great investments were going to be made in the short term to set up a custom integration to help remedy that. The team had a strong desire to make an impact with the pilot project, so it was decided to implement OneInsight and test this add-on with the Lead Qualification team. With a simple Launchpoint service this was far easier to set up than a full data integration. The aim was to provide easy access to information about marketing touchpoints a lead interacted with, in order to foster more meaningful conversations and improve conversion rates. Of course, we did not expect that to negatively impact call duration, or leads contacted per day.
Over the next eight weeks, we ran the pilot and spoke to the individual team members about their experience. The results were mixed…
The tool was easy to access and use, but for most leads they were planning to call, they found very few if any meaningful interactions to use in conversations. Whenever there was engagement data, it made for a much better conversation though and that would often result in a conversion. Also, following up with leads they were unable to contact by sending a Marketo email meant they could track when the lead was interacting with the email and try reaching out again at the right time, also pushing conversion up. But without enough leads to prove the value of the process, interest among the Lead Qualifiers fizzled out.
Based on these insights, two things happened:
- The Marketing team took the message to heart that the prospect and inactive customer base needed more reasons to engage. They got to work building nurture flows targeted at this group.
- The Inside Sales team heard about the pilot and figured their existing customers and prospects would have had much more opportunity to engage with Marketing content, yielding better conversation starters. A small pilot with this customer audience was a lot more successful and was soon extended to a broader group of sales people.
The moral of the story? Start small, define a hypothesis and test it. Evaluate, learn and adjust and test again. This will help you figure out how your tech stack will work in your organization, as there is no ‘one size fits all’. Once the flywheel is in motion, you will keep driving success in your Marketing efforts.
Want to read more about this project? Read the full case study here.
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