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WorkForce Software Sees 70% Sales Lift By Automating Marketing Interactions

Reaching prospects with widely varied business titles required WorkForce Software to qualify leads in a mass quantity, while still offering a personalized touch to prospects entering the marketing queue through its Web site.  Because similar job functions have different titles depending on the industry, WorkForce Software was tasked with automating their interactions without sending out mass messages.

A leading manufacturer of complex workforce policy and compliance management solutions, WorkForce Software specializes in automating interactions between an employer and its workforce results to lower payroll processing costs and increased productivity and employee satisfaction.  “It’s the same software, but [prospects and customers] are looking at it in a different way and [our marketing efforts] have to be able to accommodate that,” says Bob Gallagher, VP of Marketing of the Livonia, MI-based company. “I want to be able to quickly segment them and know who I’m talking to so that I don’t go into my payroll manager speak when I’m talking to an executive. I have a lot of conversations going on.”

“After reviewing our lead-generation process, we saw a huge gap in our knowledge about the readiness of prospects in terms of budget, buying intention, business challenges and timeline,” says Gallagher. “Due to the nature of our products and the vastly different buyers we do business with, it was critical to get these prospects engaged with our marketing programs on a mass-quantity level and start collecting the information needed to efficiently uncover a growing number of well-defined opportunities. We made the decision to look at marketing automation platforms to help achieve this goal.”

Automating Interaction
To address these inefficiencies, WorkForce Software selected Silverpop Engage B2B (formerly Vtrenz) in April 2008 and implemented the solution in June. Gallagher said the solution enabled the team at Workforce to create conversation scenarios with prospects ahead of time, and develop the proper touch points—but each one of those communications goes out as if it’s from a sales rep .The interactions are personalized to look like individual efforts but can be sent to large prospect lists. Prospects can then communicate with a single representative from Workforce, which is helping the company streamline its outreach operations, as there are only 12 outbound reps on the team.  

Responses to prospects are immediately sent to individual sales reps, who can review interaction with the particular prospect through the system, which makes follow up easier. WorkForce Software requires all its prospects to sign up for a WorkForce account in order to download premium content or participate in its marketing programs, such as a Webinar. “Using the Engage B2B Survey module, WorkForce Software asks prospects several qualifying questions at sign-up, such as type of system currently being used and size of organization, as well as follow up questions over time as additional premium content (i.e. white papers) is requested, thereby collecting important qualification information about its leads. The fields and information are readily available to the sales team via Salesforce.com,” Gallagher said.

The marketing team developed a lead-scoring method within Engage B2B based on prospect responses to the survey questions. Leads with higher scores, determined by amount and quality of prospect participation, are routed to sales via Salesforce.com, while those with lower scores are put into an automated lead-nurturing program in which additional survey information is collected.

Gallagher says lead nurturing campaigns are set up in both three and six month increments, with distinguished criteria on what the nurturing should look like for various prospects, including educational materials, press releases, etc., to keep Workforce top of mind.

“Best Ever” Year
Gallagher says Workforce Software has had its “best ever” year as the company saw a 70% increase in year-over-year sales. “Our marketing efforts are focused on efficiently uncovering a growing number of well-defined opportunities,” he says. “We are seeing improved productivity and dramatic year over year increase in opportunities using Engage B2B. Within 60 days, Gallagher says Workforce Software was able to completely reengineer its lead qualification process using Engage Bt2B so that incoming leads provide valuable, self reported information that is ultimately  turned into more sales opportunities.  

Through a combination of email campaigns, and an increased investment in pay-per-click advertising, Workforce Software experienced a four times increase in the number of “Contact Us” and “Demonstration Request” leads coming in through website.  In addition, Workforce Software’s ability to close these prospects has doubled. “Normally this type of increase would have overwhelmed sales,” Gallagher says. “However, now that we have put structure around how to identify quality leads, we can segment those leads by the information gathered during the lead-qualification process. Sales only acts on qualified leads sent to them via the Salesforce.com integration, which is saving both time and valuable resources.”