DemandGen Honors Top 10 Firms Using Automation Tools To Fuel Business Growth (Part 2)

In this newsletter, we provide profiles of the next five winners. They are notable for their commitment to automated lead generation, definition and nurturing. And they all worked with sales and marketing measurement solution providers very closely. The winners profiled this week include:

COMPANY	INDUSTRY	KPIs
BearingPoint	Management consulting	78 % Increase in Qualified Leads
CenterBeam	IT outsourcing	Lead volume up 28.5%
Demand Metric	Market intelligence	300% increase in conversion rate
Jobscience	HR management	Closed 12 new accounts in 2007, 65 in 2008
TriNet	HR consulting	20% increase in conversion rate

IT and talent management are well-represented in part two of the DemandGen 10. It is also interesting to note that lead volume and lead conversion are tangible outputs that can be directly tied to automated lead generation efforts. Ultimately, measuring the only KPI that really matters – revenue – these 5 organizations have helped prove that lead management and demand generation works.

BearingPoint
As one of the world’s largest international management consulting firms, there’s not a lot that BearingPoint doesn’t do. From technology integration to information security to risk management to CRM implementation it operates in 60 countries. To say its lead management and generation needs are huge is an understatement.

Working with LeadLife Solutions, BearingPoint has seen impactful results by focusing on lead nurturing. By having a lead management system in place with behavior tracking and lead scoring, it has achieved visibility to leads for its inside-sales and it has identified the leads that need to continue to be nurtured. An example, according to the company, can be found from a prospect in the financial services industry, where it was able to see the lead's score change in real-time based on tracking the continued behavior. By being able to automatically capture, track, and score the prospect's interaction, leads were sent for further qualification. After speaking with the lead, Inside-sales can actually put the lead back into the system.

BearingPoints’ lead generation engine includes website downloads, email campaigns, search engine marketing, banner ads, and events. It has a disciplined process of feeding qualified leads into the marketing pipeline, and then parsing those contacts into leads that should be nurtured by sales and marketing. Key considerations to defining a lead are the segmenting the database, scoring the activity surrounding the lead and then finding the right technology to nurture and close.

Lead tracking and nurturing has helped BearingPoint decrease the overall sales cycle from months to weeks and a 10% decrease in the overall cost of sales. It also also measured an increase in Qualified Leads (78%) improved Conversion Rates of those leads (1.5 - 3.0x), increase in quality of leads going to sales, increase in Transaction Size and increase in marketing ROI. Its average sales Opportunity/Pipeline Conversion rate is up 59.3% equaling $379K per opportunity.

CenterBeam
IT can be a nightmare in terms of cost and executive management for even the biggest companies. CenterBeam provides outsourced IT services, but in order to find and follow through on the best prospects it needs to reach very high up on the executive food chain. Its sales process begins with an executive call with the CFO of the prospect organization to discuss the outsourcing alternative to their current IT infrastructure. For the past five years, CenterBeam has partnered with PointClear to drive the best leads for that first appointment as well as the market development, database management, and lead generation analysis that follows.

The company has been able to continue to generate high quality CFO level leads that result in orders in spite of an extremely difficult economy. CFO’s have become even more challenging to engage as a result of the financial distractions affecting them in their role. To engage these decision makers, PointClear relied on a multi-touch, multi-media, multi-cycle process and over the last three years, has grown the percentage of leads generated from a response to a voicemail or email from 19% in 2006 to 24% in 2007 and over 28.5% through September of 2008.

The CenterBeam lead management process begins with the PointClear outbound email solution, and a disciplined 7 step process to engage CFOs in a business level dialogue about outsourcing. In addition to identifying CFOs and companies who were ready to enter the sales cycle, PointClear captured market intelligence on those companies qualified but with no current interest. This information was used to nurture these companies with relevant and timely information, including developing case studies, email campaigns and direct market contact, all designed to keep CenterBeam top of mind when they were ready to explore alternative strategies to managing IT infrastructure. CenterBeam, Inc. has experienced 34% compound annual revenue growth from 2003-to mid 2008. Typically in any year our revenue generated from our Lead Generation program (outsourced to PointClear) delivers 55% of CenterBeam’s annual revenue. For 2008, 74% of sales revenue has been driven by this program.

Lead nurturing is a critical plank in our overall lead generation strategy. As an example, in the 3rd quarter of 2008, the CenterBeam sales force closed 9 orders, achieved 142% of CenterBeam’s revenue target and 50% of the leads that closed were engaged previously.

Demand Metric
In order for companies to be successful in the information age, content and collateral needs to be consistent. Demand Metric provides that consistency with access to best practice reports and other industry specific research. Its customers include the San Francisco Chronicle, Toshiba, and Citizens Business Bank. But the Vancouver-based firm needed better intelligence to guide its sales and marketing staff to expand its roster of clients. By focusing itself on strategic planning, product management, lead generation and sales/CRM effectiveness, the company’s top line revenue has grown by over 80% year-over-year and it has won 340 accounts in less than two years in business. Paid-subscribers to its services have grown 300% from 350 in June 2007 to over 1,100 in September 2008.

Much of this success comes as a result of the company’s implementation of online lead generation through Pardot’s Prospect Insight solution. Demand Metric has seen a 300% increase in conversions within the first few months using the system. Email marketing has grown from a base of approximately 5,000 records to 12,500 based on using demand generation techniques. Web site traffic has grown to an average of over 6,000 unique visitors per month. Email open rates have improved from 8-10% to 15-20% on key drip campaigns. Click through rates, which were previously unknown, have improved to an average of over 8% on nurturing campaigns.

Before Prospect Insight, it took an average of 328 calls to make one sale. With more qualified leads through Prospect Insight, conversion increased dramatically, average one sale every 70 calls. The team is now doing less work but producing the same amount of sales or more, greatly improving the quality of life for team. With the company’s previous model, about one in twelve product demos would result in a sale. Now it’s one in three.

Jobscience
Jobscience applies Web 2.0 solutions, social media and software as service options to recruiting and talent management. Its marketing campaign urges potential clients to “recruit like a rockstar.” The San Francisco-based company offers best-in-class technology designed to streamline recruiting processes while reducing costs. Since implementing the email marketing solution from GeniusConnect, sales associate’ productivity has skyrocketed as the close rate grew from 12 new accounts of their on-demand product in 2007, to 65 in 2008.

With Genius, Jobscience sends out email campaigns that can provide instant alert of prospect email and Web site activity to sales representatives, via the Genius Tracker, an instant-messaging like component. It instantly alerts reps to prospects that have opened the email, click through to the site, and what pages they have navigated to. Conversion time has been reduced from 3-4 days in the Jobscience cold calling era, to a matter of hours by prospecting with Genius emails. Jobscience now runs regular emails to cold leads in the nurture category, which have resulted in re-engagements and wins.

Since implementing Genius as part of their strategic outbound marketing initiatives, the company’s average cost per sale has decreased by approximately 20%. Sales and marketing departments are more tightly aligned, and marketing can send personalized Genius email campaigns on behalf of the individual sales rep though MarketingGenius. Sales no longer has to initiate the email marketing activities, but instantly receives the practical results. Marketing can focus on creating email campaigns and sales can spend more time following up, in turn, shortening the sales cycle and decreasing the cost-per-sale.

TriNet
Especially in a tough economy, people are a company’s most important assets. TriNet, a leading provider of HR outsourcing and consulting services, helps companies improve connections to its people. But TriNet needed help connecting to its most important prospects. It has deployed the Eloqua Conversion Suite to automate and integrate its key marketing and sales functions. TriNet relies on Eloqua to deliver dynamic and personalized marketing content via e-mail, generate activity-driven content through hypersites, leverage decision rules within Program Builder to funnel contacts through a nurturing flow, create and send direct mail via Eloqua PrintMail, and verify physical mailing addresses.

In addition, the company leverages Eloqua to manage its customer database and streamline customer communications, providing its customers with timely benefits and payroll updates. TriNet now has a more holistic view of customers and prospects, and a greater ability to monitor an individual’s Web site visits, downloads, Webinar attendance and more. In a recent campaign orchestrated through Eloqua, TriNet realized a 20 percent increase in its conversion rate and more than 1,000 percent return on investment (ROI) when measured against the cost of the campaign.

“We are thrilled with the success of our integrated campaign and our use of Eloqua’s turnkey solution to handle multi-channel marketing communications,” said Ian Brown, senior Internet marketing manager, TriNet. “With Eloqua, we are able to maximize campaign results, maintain and cultivate our prospect database, as well as organize, execute and measure the efficacy of our marketing programs.”