Core Security Drives New Business Growth By Building A Demand Generation Machine
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Core Security sells comprehensive security testing software solutions to help expose vulnerabilities, measure operational risk, and assure security effectiveness. The privately-owned company has about 1,000 customers and has increased 2009 bookings 20% over the same period in 2008.
Core Security partnered with Bridge Group to establish a new process by which leads are automatically ranked as they come in and are placed into an appropriate email marketing program. The company maintains an email database of 80,000+ security professionals and inbound trial and information requests. The company frequently targets lead nurturing promotions based on a number of variables, including industry, company size and title/job function, to ensure that offers are relevant and useful for the recipients, and to minimize email frequency and increasing conversions. As a result, unsubscribe rates for individual mailings range as low as 0.1%-0.2%.
Core’s direct sales model is supported by a marketing-driven demand generation machine. Historically, more than 90% of all sales are driven by marketing-generated leads. In the first half of 2009, marketing-created leads led to a 31% increase in the number of opportunities for sales, this despite a 25% decrease in the marketing budget. Furthermore, the dollar value of the company’s opportunity pipeline grew 51% in the first half of 2009 over the first half 2008. Core has doubled the conversion of leads to sales-ready opportunities: 6.4% in the first half of 2009 vs. 3.2 % in all of 2008). Core is tracking at a 9% reduction in average sales cycle time H1 2009 vs. 2008 averages.
Earlier this year, the company implemented a Pipeline Acceleration program designed to enable the Sales team to deliver “the right information, to the right people, at the right time.” The semi-automated program is implemented through salesforce.com. The program enables to track each customer contact’s progression though the program and report on the program’s impact on the sales cycle. This year the sales team is on track to deliver 20% of their revenue from sources not directly tied to a marketing campaign or lead generation activity.