Governing Better Marketing

Varonis, a provider of data-governance software, understands the burden of companies trying to balance two approaches when it comes to data: the urge to be a packrat with it, and the desire to organize it so that it's actually useful. But following a surge in customers--more than doubling the number of clients within the last year--the company experienced its own data problems. Leads from any marketing activity were being entered into a master Excel spreadsheet. Each lead was then manually sent to sales through email, and upon receipt would be loaded into Salesforce.com--a process which, according to Wendy Yale, Varonis' director of marketing and communications, lagged for days. With so many new accounts to capture, Varonis knew it was time to shove the Excel database in the attic and open its doors to a better solution. During the initial shopping period, New York--based Varonis put four solutions to the test, but found that only marketing-automation solution provider MarketBright offered the comprehensive features to fit its specific needs without increasing marketing spend. After setting up MarketBright and integrating it with Salesforce.com, the marketing-to-sales process was reduced from days to mere minutes, Yale says, adding that MarketBright helped to facilitate five times more leads and actually quadrupled conversion rates. The set-up, she adds, now allows full visibility into the marketing system to see what leads have come in, what progress the sales team was making on them, and whether or not they converted. Given the benefits of automated efficiency, Varonis was able to save the cost of at least one full-time employee. Having granular insight into the lead lifecycle also allows Varonis to track and modify campaigns in real time. "I'm in the system probably every hour just looking at it," Yale says. The constant monitoring of her campaigns' performance allows her to keep marketing activities updated and relevant. Moreover, she can run multiple versions of a single campaign to perform a test in real time. Tweaking different components--such as subject headings, content, or images--she's able to see which campaigns are most successful, which ones to keep, and what should be pulled. "[This] is something we absolutely weren't able to do before," Yale says. The effectiveness of a campaign was only evaluated manually and after the fact--a slower process that forced Varonis to be reactive instead of proactive. MarketBright also helps Varonis handle its partner campaigns. Partners have access to what Varonis refers to as The Portal, which provides them with marketing and technical information directly, says Raphael Reich, senior product marketing manager at Varonis. Before, comarketing digital campaigns were sent via email, results were tracked and monitored through spreadsheets, and leads were manually loaded into Salesforce.com. By streamlining sales and marketing processes with its partners, Varonis has been able to increase sixfold the number of campaigns it could run, Yale says. And when partners register any potential deals they're working on, MarketBright helps Varonis gain visibility into--and capture all the information from--that partner's deal pipeline. Yale also appreciates the time she saves not thinking about the how behind creating a campaign, time better spent on the creativity behind the what of her campaigns. MarketBright allows users to store various templates, which simplifies the basic mechanics of creating a campaign. Now, campaigns that once took anywhere from two to seven days to put together are up and running within two hours. Templates also help partners build cobranded marketing campaigns on-demand, explains Erik Bower, founder and president of MarketBright, and The Portal helps partners track the progress of their campaigns. Essentially, Bower says, it's as if "you're giving them a mini marketing system." Varonis was also able to extend the reach of its offline marketing activities by five- or sixfold. Leads generated from Google AdWords, live events, Webinars, white paper downloads, and surveys are all captured by MarketBright and immediately acted upon, coverage that was once impossible to scale. "Whatever marketing channel there is," Yale says, "we're there." The Payoff By deploying MarketBright's marketing automation and integrating it with Salesforce.com, Varonis was able to: g handle five times more leads; g increase marketing activities sixfold; g quadruple the number of conversions; g reduce the marketing-to-sales lead-handoff period from days to minutes; and g reduce campaign-building from days to hours.