One of the most critical elements of any successful demand generation program is a common set of goals, measurements and processes among the sales & marketing departments. To work cohesively, each team must align its efforts with one another to streamline the marketing and selling process. In this special DemandGen Report, we are profiling 6 leading organizations as part of our second annual Sales & Marketing Alignment Awards.

This year’s winners get kudos for their innovations and ability to step outside the traditional selling box. These companies have seized the opportunity to generate leads and close deals when it mattered the most. The winners cover an array of industries — from financial services to intelligent logistics.

The common ingredients among these firms is their success in using tools such as lead scoring, email/web tracking and social media tactics to increase the efficiency of their sales and marketing teams and demonstrate ROI.

© 2010 DEMANDGEN REPORT

Nortel (now Avaya)

CaseCentral

Dun & Bradstreet

Dematic

The Savings Bank Life Insurance

Company of Massachusetts

BreakingPoint

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Here’s a look at the winners:

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Sales Success: The Nortel sales team was not looking for new leads but to convert sales accepted leads to closed deals, as they aimed to hit Q4 numbers despite the headwind caused by the company’s bankruptcy filing earlier in the year. Close alignment between the Nortel marketing and sales teams was critical. “Our sales team told us: We need to close the funnel,” said Nortel’s Americas Demand Generation leader, Chris Waldo. Specific message tracks, lead scoring on profile and behavioral data, and playbooks for each type of message helped the sales team prioritize and engage for maximum impact.

Before Avaya would acquire the company, Nortel challenged itself to close as much business as possible in six weeks. The sales team tapped Bulldog Solutions to design the “Close the Pipeline” program, a multimodal, integrated approach to convert leads already in the Nortel pipeline within the short time frame. The company worked with Bulldog to establish a program that would engage and convert leads deep in the funnel. The program’s methods included in-person events, online events and social media tactics to reach prospects and customers. There were three message tracks: targeting prime accounts, select accounts and “other” accounts. The program impacted one-third of a $1 billion-plus pipeline.

The pipeline was about $1.6 billion when Nortel started the program. The marketing tactics were credited with impacting $365 million of that pipeline, according to Nortel. The company said more than $365 million in closed deals were in some way touched by the integrated Close the Pipeline activities.

Seizing the Moment: Driving Wins Before an Acquisition

Company: Nortel (Now Avaya)

Location: Toronto, Ontario

Fast Track Metrics: $365 million in closed deals in just six weeks

Market Positioning:Nortel took the opportunity to optimize its last minute revenue by designing a program to convert sales accepted leads to closed deals – with just six weeks before being acquired by Avaya.

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Sales Success: Case Central used Genius marketing automation integrated with salesforce.com CRM to send out marketing campaigns, prioritize leads and instantly track prospect history to net more qualified connections and conversions to sales.

For CaseCentral, generating leads was not a problem, but qualifying them was daunting because the company managed everything manually. The company struggled to efficiently sift through and qualify enormous piles of leads to uncover those that were ready to buy. The “smile and dial” lead qualification tactics needed an upgrade.

Marketing leveraged Genius.com to automate its efforts and send out trackable, personalized emails to their large database. Through the Genius Tracker and web replay functionality, marketing and sales could both instantly indentify which prospects opened the email, if they went to the web site and what pages they visited. CaseCentral reps could gauge which prospects had the highest interest — from cold to warm to hot. The cold leads were left in the marketing pool for further campaigns while the hot leads received immediate attention from sales via a personalized email or phone call.

CaseCentral’s marketing team now has visibility into prospect’s responses to campaigns — whether they opened the email, downloaded a white paper or visited the web site — what pages they went to on the web site, and how long they stayed there. With these timely updates the rep is equipped with information generated from marketing to understand which are leads are ready for a sales call or email.

“We are now making good headway in qualifying that growing bucket of leads, finding more quickly, those who are ready to buy”, said Joe Schwartz, Corporate Sales Manager at CaseCentral.

With Genius in place CaseCentral marketing was able to improve the industry standard email open rate from 15% to almost 20%. Genius intelligence also enabled sales to be more targeted in their follow up, increasing their live connections to 13 per hour, resulting in a remarkable 63% conversion rate from phone conversations to client meetings.

Ultimately the partnership amounted to an enormous increase in sales where they posted the best quarter in the company’s history.

Moving from Manual Standards to Making Sales History

Company: CaseCentral

Location: San Francisco, CA

Fast Track Metrics: Improved industry standard email open rate from 15% to almost 20%; increased live connections to 13 per hour with a 63% conversion rate from phone conversations to client meetings.

Market Positioning:A leader in secure, cloud-based eDiscovery software for corporations and law firms, CaseCentral reported its best quarter in the company’s history by aligning its sales & marketing efforts.

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Sales Success: By aligning their sales & marketing efforts, Dun & Bradstreet took advantage of its full Integration with Salesforce.com to allow reps to drive nurture process through new opt-in check boxes and special lead and contact views.

The company, which taps Eloqua for its marketing automation solutions, saw fast time to value upon aadopting the new technology. Their team was trained within a month and had their solutions fully up and running within 60 days. Within the first two weeks of adoption, the company’s lead nurture opt-in list reached over 2,000 contacts.

The company also takes a page from the strategic playbook of The Pedowitz Group. Via sales operations, technology and leadership, Dun & Bradstreet forged a deeper sales & marketing alignment using marketing automation as a trigger. The company generated 90 qualified leads in the first three weeks of implementation based on a lead scoring program sent directly to (70) reps.

The sales team adapted positively and quickly, to book over 10 appointments in the first week of following up on leads. The company also ramped up its email efforts and saw a 300% increase in open and click through rates compared to its previous email.

Marketing Metrics: Demonstrating Value with Hard Numbers

Company: Dun & Bradstreet

Location: Short Hills, NJ

Fast Track Metrics: 190 qualified leads generated in 3 weeks; 300% higher open and click through rates achieved.

Market Positioning:The world’s leading source of commercial information and insight on businesses.

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Sales Success: Over the last two years, Dematic had to completely overhaul its approach to lead management. While the company has always had the necessary market intelligence, they lacked the ability to leverage the intelligence for segmenting marketing data.

Dematic’s current lead qualification process came about as a result of a joint summit between sales and marketing two years ago. The goal of the summit was to work together in partnership to jointly define Dematic’s lead management process. Facilitated by The Annuitas Group, stakeholders from sales, marketing, and executive teams gathered for a 3-day summit to define lead management definitions, qualification rules and a lead scoring model. The model used today, supported by marketing automation, is largely based on the results of that summit.

Dematic had the market intelligence, but needed to leverage that intelligence as a basis for segmenting their marketing data, and subsequently, their marketing programs. Today, with a segmented marketing database, they can focus their marketing messages per segment, per industry, per “pain point,” etc.

Marketing is now able to nurture leads and be confident that the leads being passed off to sales are qualified. Today, Dematic implements multiple campaigns focused on target audiences. Those campaigns include pre- and post-tradeshow follow and monthly email campaigns. The key is that, unlike in the past, there is a synergy between marketing and sales whereby qualified leads are being identified and followed up in a more timely fashion than ever.

Tapping Intelligence to Drive Segmentation

Company: Dematic

Location: Grand Rapids, MI

Fast Track Metrics: Defined a business model to set management definitions, qualification rules and lead scoring.

Market Positioning:A global leader providing a range of intelligent logistics and materials handling solutions.

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With an integrated marketing approach, The Savings Bank Life Insurance Company of Massachusetts tapped social media technology to capture leads. The company created a simple sign-up for content program to increase its house list and establish a lead nurturing program to capture leads generated via search and the web site. The company collects more than 500 contacts per week, of which 1% are converting to sales qualified leads.

Utillizing Eloqua’s marketing automation solutions, the company also created email campaigns that automatically deliver consistent emails, personalized on behalf of the sales person, designed to further them along in the sales process or through Consumer Education Specialists for SEM and web traffic. The company wanted to capture leads from ad-spend on sponsorships, contests and events, so they implemented a social media tool that is integrated with the company’s marketing automation platform. This allows for entrants to participate via SMS Text or via a landing page registration.

Leads are now captured real-time and leverage the popularity of smartphone use. Prospects were forgetting the web site landing page URL; it was not as strong as real-time communications.

This implementation enables viewers of advertising to register for giveaways via text or web. Information captured in marketing automation and lead nurturing to promote conversion. Now the company sales team works more effectively, records data more accurately and more often.

All leads are now vetted based on where entry point began. This provides a higher quality lead to the sales team, which means they are delivered - deeper in the funnel.

Selling Socially: Leveraging Web 2.0 Tactics

Company: The Savings Bank Life Insurance Company of Massachusetts

Location: Woburn, MA

Fast Track Metrics: By integrating social media tools with marketing automation, the company can now deliver high-quality leads to its sales team.Market Positioning:SBLI has the largest amount of life insurance in force in the state of Massachusetts.

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Sales Success: One of the key drivers behind BreakingPoint’s leadership position in the cyber security space has been the company’s active role in content marketing and thought leadership. Despite having a small marketing team of less than five full time employees, the company provides an extensive resource library, including how-to guides, white papers and webcasts.

With the company re-launching its web site and stepping up its social media efforts to support the launch of the new products and services, BreakingPoint’s VP of Marketing, Pam O’Neal, decided it was time for the company to invest in a solution that could better integrate its various efforts.

“From an execution standpoint we needed the ability to automate some of the campaign functions our team had been performing manually,” O’Neal said.A veteran of marketing automation deployments, having used Eloqua at a previous company, O’Neal knew it was critical to find a solution that could easily integrate with the company’s Salesforce CRM system and also have a short learning curve for her team. “We had a limited budget and couldn’t afford an extensive training period or a lengthy rollout. We needed to be and running quickly to support the expanding sales team,” O’Neal said.

In February 2010, BreakingPoint signed on with Portland, OR-based Act-On Software, Inc., a provider of integrated online marketing services for the Fortune 5,000,000. O’Neal said key factors in choosing Act-On were the system’s ease of use and the built-in integration Act-On provides with Salesforce.com and WebEx.

While BreakingPoint’s marketing team had previously handled the invitations, reminders and registration reports for its webcasts manually, the Act-On tool integrates with the WebEx service platform and adds comprehensive pre- and post-event marketing capabilities around webinars. The solution sets up automated promotion and reminder programs to help drive attendance and then also simplifies the data management process on the back end with tools to provide prospect scoring and behavioral segmentation for follow-up.

Reaping the BenefitsIn addition to setting up the core registration forms for web events, another key benefit is the ability to easily build other custom forms to track and measure sign-ups from different channels. Since BreakingPoint is actively promoting their webinars, content and thought leadership via social networks, the company has been tapping into Act-On’s new Twitter Prospector application. The ability to measure and track the activity of prospects from social networks via Act-On has been a key benefit, the company said.

As BreakingPoint looks to continue its impressive growth streak, the sales team is focused on supporting growth by driving deeper intelligence and integration between Act-On and Salesforce.com.

Leveraging Social Technology: Segmenting & Automating

Company: BreakingPoint

Location: Austin, Texas

Fast Track Metrics: The company posted revenue growth of 280% in 2009 and marked its eighth consecutive quarter of record revenues.

Market Positioning:BreakingPoint recently doubled the size of its research and global sales organization by expanding its offerings with the launch of a new line of technologies, products and services.

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© 2010 DEMANDGEN REPORT

About DemandGen Report DemandGen Report is a targeted e-media publication spotlighting the strategies

and solutions that help companies better align their sales and marketing

organizations, and ultimately, drive growth. A key component of the publication’s

editorial focuses on the sales and marketing automation tools that enable

companies to better measure and manage their multichannel demand generation

efforts.

www.demandgenreport.com