Marketing automation has been a critical part in my ability to be effective in my role as VP of Marketing here at Qvidian. We upgraded to Marketo from an older system about two years ago, and the difference has been night and day. Marketo’s capabilities and user experience is far superior to our previous marketing automation system. Being able to manage and score our leads, run powerful nurture email campaigns, and measure the performance of our marketing programs makes it a tool my team can’t live without!
One of the other great things about Marketo are the insights it provides on the customer. But, as I’m sure many of you can relate, our Sales Development team wasn’t taking advantage of the insights provided by Marketo. When a lead responds to a marketing campaign, we provide the salesperson with a wealth of information about the lead, including their demographic information (company, job title, industry, company size, etc) and their behavioral information (email clicks, website visits, content downloads, etc). This information is neatly displayed to the salesperson in Salesforce.com; however, our salespeople weren’t using the insights to tailor their follow-up conversations. They were using the same follow-up approach for all leads.
As a marketer, I was concerned that the data we work so hard to collect wasn’t getting put to good use by Sales. And I knew our Sales Development team would be more effective if they leveraged this data to tailor their follow-up approach. However, after further inspection, I realized that our salespeople didn’t have easy access to the content & messaging needed to tailor their conversations.
We used our Sales Playbooks application for our field sales team already, but what our team needed was a Sales Playbook to use early in the sales cycle – a playbook that was customized based on the insights collected by Marketo. In less than a week, we created a Sales Development Playbook that ‘changed the game’ for our team. The playbook interprets the data sent to Salesforce.com from Marketo and then prompts the salesperson with the appropriate messaging and content to use in their follow-up conversation.
As a result, our salespeople are having more focused conversations and our lead qualification rates have improved by 15%. Our salespeople have a new-found respect for the data we collect using Marketo—all because we found a way to turn those insights into action.
Come See Us at the Marketo Summit!
I’m excited to be attending the Marketo Summit with my team next week, and would love to share not only our story of how we turned Marketo insights into action with you, but how other customers have as well.
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