Sant Corporation Stimulates Pipeline Opportunities With Segmented Lead Nurturing

Just as the company’s software is designed to streamline operations for its BtoB clients, the marketing team at Sant was tasked with restructuring and optimizing its own lead nurturing process. Prior to the restructuring, the company’s marketing team had to manually enter prospect data into a spreadsheet for lead nurturing campaigns. “We were managing spreadsheets of people at different steps of our lead nurturing process and trying to make sure they were getting the right communications at the right time,” said Brian Vass, Director of Marketing, Sant Corporation. “It became an effort too daunting for us to continue.”

Sant Corporation implemented Silverpop’s Engage B2B solution toward the end of 2008 for all its lead nurturing campaigns, customer newsletters and maintenance announcements. The marketing group supports three nurture campaigns that include a series of emails offering white papers and articles that promote Sant’s value proposition.

“We knew the value of putting together a lead nurturing campaign, and we wanted to do some nurturing but we weren’t able to do that because Salesforce.com does not have nurturing built in,” says Vass.

The company was also using Constant Contact for its email campaigns, and sought out a way to supplement a nurturing program for these emails, as opposed to working manually with Excel. Vass said the company wanted to drip this information to people at different time intervals, which became very difficult to manually detract in Excel.

Tapping into Lead Qualification
“When someone else joins the nurture campaigns you want them to start at the beginning of the process, so that would get out of control when you have people at all different steps on the nurturing campaign trying to keep track of which prospect should be getting which type of communication [because the emails were sent in order],” he says. “So we wanted to do nurturing but we didn’t have a way to automate the process.”

Vass says the company did not previously have any notion of lead scoring or the ability to track individual Web activity. The Engage B2B solution has enabled Vass and his team to develop several different industry specific, multi-step email campaigns, with language tailored to the recipient. By combining nurturing campaigns with industry-specific content, Sant has seen open and click-through rates triple.

Vass says the company has taken full advantage of lead scoring, and warming up leads with the Engage B2B solution enables the sales team to sell more efficiently. Based on recipients’ response to emails, the lead score increases or decreases. Once the score reaches a particular level, the lead is then assigned to a sales rep.

Additionally, Sant Corporation is using Engage B2B to push into several new vertical markets, tailoring message content for each. Vass says the solution enables a more personal touch. The emails go out as if they’re sent through Engage B2B system, but with a sales person’s email address so recipients can reply directly to sales person. The company uses Salesforce.com for CRM and tracking sales opportunities. Because of the integration with Salesforce.com, individual Web activity is available and sales reps are notified via email if a lead returns to the site.

Vass reports that there is about $4 million worth of opportunities in the pipeline that are related to nurture campaigns, and he is hopeful that by this time next year he will be able to attribute precisely how much revenue came from the lead nurturing efforts.

“Nurture campaigns influence quite a bit of opportunity revenue,” he says. “With a sales cycle that long, there’s often multiple marketing programs that touch a person throughout their lifecycle so the challenge is to figure out which program caused people to buy.”

Another benefit Sant Corporation has received from using Engage B2B is the ability to better understand the impact of marketing activities on sales revenue. Vass said before they didn’t have the right information to do a proper analysis on the impact of their campaigns. “Now we have the ability to look backwards from a sales opportunity and see which marketing initiatives had the greatest effect,” says Vass. “Being able to tie revenue back to the campaign justifies our investment.”