Case Studies

© 2019 DemandGen International, Inc. All rights reserved. All other product and company names may be trademarks of their respective owners. SOLUTION To address these shared sales and marketing goals, Concur engaged with marketing automation consultancy DemandGen International to develop a comprehensive plan to organize marketing and sales tasks more clearly and efficiently, and to deploy a lead scoring model that would better characterize lead types. Concur also sought to develop engaging and educational nurturing content that would appeal to target audiences' pain points and, in turn, guide them through the sales funnel. Before implementing any solutions, however, DemandGen recommended that the first priority be extensively educating sales and marketing personnel on the new processes and how the two teams would work together in the future. "When we first met with the Concur marketing team, we discussed their alignment between the sales and marketing teams," said David Lewis, CEO of DemandGen International. "The conversations focused on gaining an understanding of the quantity and quality of leads, how the systems were set up to enable marketing to pass leads to sales, and what sales was doing with the leads that were being passed to them." Lewis explained the results of DemandGen's analysis. The team found room to improve the systems that passed leads to sales, and determined that a common language was needed to describe each stage of the sales funnel as well as how leads would be handled at each stage. At the beginning of the alignment process, DemandGen helped Concur implement a variation of the Sirius Decisions Demand Funnel Taxonomy for its lead nurturing and scoring model. Based on individual KPI triggers that push leads through three stages—the suspect stage, the inquiry stage, and the MDR-working stage—this taxonomy enables sales and marketing organizations to "speak the same language" and create a model for reporting on pipeline velocity. Before adopting the new taxonomy, however, Concur and DemandGen made company education and training a priority to guarantee optimal implementation: scheduling a series of workshops so that the sales, marketing, and operations teams could define and agree on process stages and lead taxonomy. THE ROLL OUT Once a common language was established to help categorize each stage of the funnel, the new lead scoring system was designed and implemented. By integrating Concur's marketing automation platform and Salesforce.com, Concur was able to align its sales and marketing teams by developing a new lead scoring model that would effectively measure definitive interest of a lead. As a result, the company could direct attention towards hot leads instead of focusing on false positives. "If marketing is doing its job well, it produces a steady flow of leads for the sales team," Lewis said. "But because of the various tactics that marketing uses to capture leads, some leads are simply more qualified than others. Depending on the call-to-action for a campaign or the type of content being used, it's quite common that marketing generates a fair number of leads that aren't even leads at all, but rather are people who are interested in the particular item or content being promoted by marketing. The approach we use surfaces leads who align to their customer profiles and have a high level of interest." Concur's new scoring and prioritization method is based on two key dimensions: qualification level and interest level. Qualification level measures a lead's fit based on factors like title and industry, which the lead provides by filling out a form. Interest level tracks and analyzes "digital body language" through website visitation, download activity, and what forms are being filled out, among other online factors. The intersection of the two scores determines a lead's rating. Lewis explained that this new method improves efficiencies and increases the quality of leads that are being pushed to sales. "By using these two dimensions together to form an overall lead rating, we are able to take complex algorithms and produce a very simple A through E rating system to present to sales within the CRM," Lewis said. "If the system didn't incorporate these two dimensions, and measured on interest alone, a number of false positives would be produced. By incorporating the fit criteria we're able to show sales how well a lead meets the ideal customer profile, as well as how interested they are. In our experience, lead scoring systems that incorporate these two dimensions are the most effective predictors of the likelihood that a prospect will be converted to a sales opportunity." With the new rating process, Concur sifted through more than 1,000 database contacts and implemented a rating system of one to five stars—similar to ones seen in movie reviews—to determine overall interest level and sales readiness. The team also implemented a coaching and assessment training program to improve sales and marketing knowledge of the terms and values used in the Salesforce.com CRM system. The whole process has engaged sales and marketing to produce an integrated sales and marketing process that is the product of both teams." " © 2019 DemandGen® International, Inc. All rights reserved. All other product and company names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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