DemandGen Honors Top 10 Firms Using Automation Tools To Fuel Business Growth

However, another more telling competitive advantage among the current crop of fast track companies is the early adoption of lead generation and lead management tools and practices. By closely aligning their sales and marketing organizations, leading organizations have realized a go-to-market efficiency edge on their competitors by targeting their outreach to specific segments and then prioritizing the prospects their sales team pursues.

To highlight those organizations which have successfully utilized sales & marketing automation to fuel corporate growth strategies, DemandGen Report is honoring 10 firms who have optimized their sales and marketing pipeline. In this newsletter, we will provide profiles of the first 5 winners, followed by snapshots of the remaining 5 honorees in next week’s edition. The winners profiled this week include:

COMPANY	INDUSTRY	KPIs
Acteva	Online Event Registration & Payments	Increased marketing volume by 300%
AccuRev	Software Configuration Management	Grown at 70% CAG
Globoforce	Employee Recognition Solutions	Up 28% in first 2 quarters of 2008
Management Dynamics	Global Trade Management	Exceeded sales plan for past 3 quarters
Varonis	Data Governance Solutions	160% growth over 12 months

Consistent with the early adoption curve of marketing automation solutions, the majority of this year’s DemandGen 10 honorees come from the technology sector. Other common traits of the winners include significant improvements in the output of their marketing department, a focus on providing qualified sales-ready leads, and also developing extensive nurturing programs that help to re-engage prospects.

Here is a look at the first five honorees:

Acteva
Despite the changing economic climate, corporate meetings and events continue to be a staple of most marketing strategies. Acteva makes it easier for companies to be part of that momentum. An event registration service provider for event organizers, Acteva automates the registration process and brings it online where it can be easily accessed.
While it was developing leads for its customers, Acteva had been operating in the dark in terms of tracking leads for its own business. It was unable to track the details of potential customers until late in the selling process. Earlier this year, the company deployed the Marketo lead management solution, and is now able to obtain a granular analysis of lead details on a customer-to-customer basis.

The biggest payoff for Acteva from the marketing automation deployment has been a dramatic increase in campaign output. Acteva’s Director of Marketing, Elias Terman, estimates the company has increased its marketing volume by 300%, through the ability to quickly create landing pages and email campaigns.

By automating previously manual processes, Terman says the technology has acted as an extra arm in the marketing department, For example, Acteva recently launched a sophisticated email marketing campaign when they entered a new vertical market. In addition, Acteva has been able to create a custom landing page on the and develop ad-hoc lead nurturing campaigns enabling them to track, score and nurture every lead that comes through. This has resulted in a drastic increase in high-quality, sales-ready leads. Due to the landing pages and lead nurturing campaigns that Acteva creates through Marketo, the company expects to see a 100% improvement in landing page conversion rates for the year.

By using marketing automation technology, Acteva has been able to create comprehensive sophisticated media campaigns in a matter of hours. Marketo allows Acteva to radically increase sales-ready leads in a short amount of time. To demonstrate the ROI of their marketing automation investment, Terman points to the Acteva Referral Program (a new channel marketing program launched in late 2007) which has already generated $100,000 in gross revenue. By tapping into the automation email and landing page tools, Acteva is signing up to five new partners per month – allowing them to grow the business at a faster rate than ever before.


Accurev
Recently placed in Gartner’s “visionary” quadrant, AccuRev is one of the hottest software firms in the area of process-centric software change and configuration management (SCCM). With AccuRev, software development teams can update code, graphical interfaces and global software management with little or no scripting required. It is designed for today’s complex and changing software development environments, including geographically distributed and offshore development teams working on multiple releases in parallel.

The Lexington, MA-based company’s conversion rates have been consistent over the past two years, even though lead volume continues to grow. The privately held company has grown at a 70 % revenue rate for the past four years.

As that lead volume grew over the last year, Accurev has integrated both email campaigns and Web analytics, by deploying Manticore Technology’s automation tools. The reporting from different campaigns had been siloed and required manual data loads for information to be shared. The company has shifted its lead gen model. That shift has moved from one in which sales had to review all leads, to one where marketing begins the nurturing process and sales steps in when the leads are qualified through multi-touch email campaigns or by evidence of prospect behavior on the website or opting-in for events or white papers. Accurev has achieved an increase of over 300% for marketing productivity for email campaigns, and maintained its 70% compound annual growth rate.

Globoforce
Globoforce’s mission is to transform the way companies engage, motivate and empower their workforces across the globe. The ambition is to improve customer employee engagement levels across divisions, countries and cultures through their on –demand employee recognition solutions. The Southborough, MA-based company was ranked number 251 on the 27th annual Inc 500 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. and number 34 on its Top 100 Business Services companies list this past year.

Globoforce saw a year-over-year increase of roughly 28% in the first two quarters of 2008. During this time, the company signed several multi-million dollar contracts with Global 2000 companies and expanded several existing customer relationships with additional service deals in the first half of 2008.

In 2007, Globoforce was working on a point-based lead system which lacked the intelligence and analytics necessary to define lead quality and quantity. It was nearly impossible to tie these points to business measurement goals. In 2008, the company implemented Vtrenz marketing automation solution and moved to a process of defining target personas within targeted companies.

From that list, the company was able to properly segment list rentals and market to those personas more specifically. At mid-year, Globoforce saw 280 qualified actionable leads move into the system, a 25% increase in leads for this year. Market presence has changed as well, with a 50% increase over last year, from 54 media hits to 123 anticipated through September.

Management Dynamics
With so many companies looking to expand globally, expertise on strategy and logistics are at a premium. That’s where Management Dynamics comes in. It provides Global Trade Management (GTM) solutions for importers, exporters and logistics service providers, which help automate important and export processes, providing order and shipment visibility, calculating tariffs, duties and taxes, and advice on regulatory compliance for doing business overseas. Its impressive customer roster incldues: Amazon.com, Apple Computer, Boeing, Cisco Systems, Levi FedEx, GlaxoSmithKline, Verizon and Xerox.

With the growth in international trade estimated to reach $70 trillion by 2025, Management Dynamics needed to manage its own customer acquisition. It was not facing a dearth of leads. In fact, sales have exceeded their sales revenue plan, and for this year to date, the company is ahead of their plan forecast by 100 %. It was facing a challenge in lead management.

Frontline Selling, a provider of demand creation solutions, helped Management Dynamics engage all of their 1,000 target accounts and generate 240 meaningful interactions (MI), or a 24% response rate. From the 240 MIs, Management Dynamics has generated 53 qualified sales opportunities, approximately double the company’s qualification rate from other marketing programs. The company covered the cost of its lead gen program with two closed deals—a payback period of approximately 10 months. Frontline’s solution creates a transcript of every interaction, allowing Management Dynamics to analyze a customer problem, solution positioning and sales delivery.

Management Dynamics plans to implement Frontline’s Interactive Lead Nurturing (iLN) Solution in 2009 to qualify prospects and move the strongest to a more advanced stage in the sales funnel. iLn’s “Intelligent Dialogue and “Intelligent Response” deliver a more conversational format online, and builds a rapport with the prospect through warmth of interaction enabling sales representatives to maintain a discussion thread with the prospect through the lifecycle.

Varonis Systems
Varonis Systems has some enviable problems. As a provider of data governance solutions, it is designed to give organizations total visibility and control over their data, ensuring that only the right users have access to the right data at all times. Here’s their enviable issue: Its customer base grew 160% from 100 in Q3 of 2007 to 260 by the same quarter in 2008.

Through the deployment of Marketbright’s automation tools, Varonis has been able to monitor the performance of active campaigns daily or hourly, within the company’s marketing automation system, and make regular adjustments to the campaigns to improve response rates and the quality of leads. Over the past year, the number of simultaneously run campaigns increased from an average of six to 25, as well as a 500% increase in qualified leads to sales sources generated by marketing. In Q4 of 2007, Varonis’ marketing communications teaminitiated standardized monthly campaigns to existing leads to promote ongoing events and asset offerings. Through this, existing leads re-engaging with the company have grown from an average of 7% to 30%. These increased response rates from re-engaged leads have increased the number of A and B scored leads from 15% of total leads to 21% of existing leads.

Other results are just as impressive. In quarter two of 2007, Varonis Marketing implemented Marketbright’s marketing automation solution and established new lead management processes to speed up lead response rates, increase lead quality tacking and provide real-time campaign performance tracking. Its goal was to enable the company to manage a higher number of active campaigns, increase sales call volume, confirmed evaluations and, ultimately, attract more customers. With the integration of marketing and sales database and increased leads quality, sales now has total visibility into the history of every lead. The lead visibility and the transfer of leads from marketing to sales in minutes has reduced the sales cycle by 10%.