Learning to Share: Marketing and Sales

Procuri had no way of tracking the success of its email campaigns or measuring the effectiveness of its Web site. The company, which streamlines the purchasing process and provides online tools to evaluate suppliers and to develop and manage a variety of contracts enterprisewide, has more than 300 customers, which represent thousands of users. The firm's email management system was extremely basic and didn't integrate with Salesforce.com, which caused headaches for the small staff. Employees had to constantly update leads, contacts, and prospects; export lists from Salesforce; upload that information into the email system; capture responses; and upload them back into Salesforce. "It was ongoing, which was the most frustrating part. We had to do it every few days [and] always had to monitor it, which was very time-consuming," says Andrea Soltysiak, vice president of marketing for Procuri. On top of the frustration, Procuri was not capturing information about who was visiting the Web site and from where they were being directed. Executives decided to search for a single vendor that provided both email management and Web analytics and integrated with Salesforce. In June 2004 Procuri deployed the Eloqua Marketing Conversion suite. Eloqua coordinates sales and marketing campaign information so salespeople and marketers can productively work together. Sales reps know what marketing campaigns their prospects have seen and how they responded to them. Marketing can measure how effective campaigns are in delivering prospects for sales to call and close. "From the first campaign, sales had great visibility immediately. Just logging into Salesforce, the sales team could see what campaigns were opened and also could track hyperlinks. The end result is being able to follow up much more intelligently. They can target their pitches more effectively," Soltysiak says. In Q2 of 2005, Procuri generated more than 900 leads with Eloqua's help. The average email open rate is now 34 percent with an average visitor click-through rate of roughly 6 percent. "Before we were never able to track it, which was a big problem given that the company is extremely metrics driven," she says. "Now I can go to the management team and tell them the leads and ROI. Sales can see what marketing is doing and how they're helping them and how money is being spent." Procuri also is tracking banner ads and offline marketing activities. Print ads have unique URLs so the company can measure their effectiveness. Twenty-five online forms including white papers and marketing collateral integrate with Eloqua, allowing the company to see leads generated from the Web site and notice trends. "Procuri is gathering more information, evaluating [it] and where they are getting the most success," says Paul Teshima, vice president of client solutions for Eloqua. "We're seeing a lot of this kind of usage--using Web events to generate leads." A salesperson can invite a current prospect to an event, leveraging the relationship with marketing by using a preapproved email instead of having to ask someone else to call that person. The open rate is closer to 50 percent from a known sender and all the salesperson has to do is change the message slightly to make it more personal, according to Teshima. This summer Procuri started using Eloqua's Program Builder, which automates multistep marketing programs so the company can recognize and immediately respond to buying signals and quickly follow up with prospects, helping Procuri's four-person marketing staff and equally small inside sales team. Program Builder sends sales reps a hot list of recent site visitors. "If I had been calling someone for weeks and I didn't know that information, I'd say 'This is a dead lead' and move on," Teshima says. "We'd never automate all the tasks, but we'd like to automate the lower level tasks and leave the high level tasks to individuals. The solution doesn't do the selling. It connects the salespeople to the people who are most interested." The Payoff By deploying the Eloqua Marketing Conversion suite, Procuri:

generated more than 900 leads in Q2 2005;

estimated an average email open rate of 34 percent with an average visitor click-through rate of roughly 6 percent; and

tracked the success of email campaigns and offline ads.

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