Perkbox doubles its sales efficiency over the last two quarters
How Perkbox improves sales and marketing alignment
Objectives
Flexibility and personalisation
Cleaner contact lists
Better sales and marketing alignment
Single source of truth for marketing effectiveness.
Results
Sales efficiency doubled over the last two quarters
For every pound marketing is spending it’s returning twice as much as before
Marketers have reduced their spend on performance marketing from 80% to 50%.
Key Benefits.
Flexibility and personalisation.
- leaner contact lists.
- Better sales and marketing alignment.
- Single source of truth for marketing effectiveness.
Perkbox is a platform that provides a unique employee experience, enriching the personal and working life of employees. It went multi-product last year, at which point it transitioned from an employee engagement to an employee experience platform. It now offers a suite of products including best in class Perks, Perkbox Medical, Perkbox Recognition and Perkbox Insights.
Perkbox serves companies of all sizes from SMEs to large businesses such as Whole Foods, Nando’s, Caffe Nero and Levi Strauss & Co. Headquartered in London, Perkbox also has offices in Sheffield, Paris and Australia. It ranked one of Europe’s 1000 fastest growing businesses by The FT this year and came fifth in the Sunday Times Hiscox Tech Track 100.
Perkbox decided to use Marketo and Bizible in 2017 to transform how marketing works with sales and boost its lead generation and nurture programme.
Why Marketo?
Perkbox has been on an ambitious growth and transformation journey, ever since it first launched in 2015. Due to this success, the technology the company was using to measure marketing and its impact on sales struggled to keep pace. When Marketo Engage first began working with Perkbox in 2017, marketing software was in place - but it wasn’t being optimised in the best ways.
As a result, Perkbox wasn’t aligning marketing and sales as well as it could be and had no single source of truth to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. Compounding that, Perkbox was not making the most of marketing automation software and (like everyone in 2017) was getting ready for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the changes it would force on the marketing department.
But beyond these challenges, Perkbox was thinking about opportunity. They knew that the right automation software could improve their marketing capabilities and help the business to grow. Marketo Engage stepped in to help Perkbox with all of this - which is where the relationship began.
Modern prospect marketing.
Implementing Marketo Engage introduced a number of modernising initiatives into Perkbox’s marketing to its prospect base. First among them was the ability to bring more personalisation into marketing and to be more dynamic and flexible around who is sent what and when.
This extends to channels, too. Since bringing Marketo Engage on board, Perkbox has been able to understand which channels (everything from email and content to events and webinars) work for which prospects and adjust their activity accordingly.
However, the biggest change - and perhaps the most transformative too - is in how Perkbox manages reporting and how that in turn has improved marketing’s relationship with sales.
Prior to Marketo Engage, Perkbox had no clearly defined marketing targets. That meant no behaviour scoring or lifestyle stages. And, as a result, no way to truly measure marketing’s effect on the sales cycle and the ROI of campaigns. Marketo Engage changed all that, with tools that have given marketers the capacity to create targets, then meet them. It’s also meant they can dive into channel performance metrics, understanding the ROI attached to each and where the best place for lead creation might be.
Unsurprisingly, this has had a positive impact on the marketing-sales relationship…
“Marketo Engage gives people more choice when they engage with Perkbox. It’s easier for them to sign up to things they want through Marketo Engage forms. And it means we don’t have to ask for lots of info or the same info twice. ”
Amy Humpleman
Marketing Operations Manager, Perkbox
Bringing marketing and sales together.
For Perkbox, one of the most important benefits of using Marketo Engage has been gaining a vastly improved understanding of how its marketing efforts are contributing to the sales process.
Whereas reporting and targets were once either scant or non-existent, today Marketo Engage data has become the single source of truth for all marketing success. And the seamless link between Marketo Engage and Salesforce has meant that the transference of data, leads and performance insight is easier than it’s ever been.
The upshot of this is more effective marketing, of course - Perkbox is now in a place where it knows what works for the business and so can do more of it. As well as a much improved partnership between sales and marketing, seen through bi-weekly sales and marketing sessions, marketing targets becoming aligned with sales targets and salespeople are able to focus their time on the right leads.
All of which was achieved while Perkbox was working with Marketo Engage to ensure marketing activity remains GDPR compliant.
Navigating GDPR and beyond.
For some businesses, GDPR was a huge source of concern - and perhaps even a reason to downsise marketing efforts in a bid to become compliant. Working with Marketo meant that Perkbox was actually able to use GDPR to its advantage, rather than seeing it have a detrimental effect on how they were marketing and who to.
As was the case for many, Perkbox’s contact lists became smaller after GDPR. But they also became more focused and valuable. Marketo meant GDPR could be an opportunity for Perkbox to clean house. Now, there are subscription preferences for marketing communications and extensive testing before and during campaigns. Vitally, this has improved the quality of leads Perkbox has coming through - if not the quantity.
This has made marketing far more efficient and saved time on the sales side (not to mention the effort once expended chasing up the wrong leads). Marketers are now regularly discussing lead scoring with sales and putting in place SLAs (Service Level Agreements) around follow up.
Rather than a problem, GDPR has been beneficial to Perkbox’s marketing. All because it was handled in the right, strategic way.
“It’s good to have a balance between quality and quantity of leads. We’d always rather have a smaller amount of quality leads rather than a lot of useless ones. ”
Amy Humpleman
Marketing Operations Manager, Perkbox
A growth journey and a bright future.
Perkbox had a list of requirements when it was changing its marketing automation software. They wanted something well-reviewed by peers and other companies. It also had to be flexible for usage across different areas of the business and be able to support growth ambitions - particularly as it went from being a single-product, single-nation company to a multi-product multi-national.
Marketo Engage provided all that and more. The initial objectives Perkbox set for the solution were met, with marketers now scoring leads, tracking lifecycle status and using campaign landing pages as a matter of course. It also helped them to unify all marketing efforts under one platform.
Perhaps the clearest demonstration of the value of the Marketo Engage and Perkbox partnership, however, is that Perkbox has roughly doubled its sales efficiency over the last two quarters. For every pound marketing is spending it’s returning twice as much as before. Marketers have also reduced their spend on performance marketing from 80 per cent to 50 per cent, enabling Perkbox to make more intelligent decisions around spend and invest in other areas such as demand generation and content marketing, due to data from Bizible and Marketo Engage.
“We are growing. Implementing Marketo Engage has allowed us to expand our acquisition channels, improve our returns on campaigns and processes and the attribution side lets us invest more in certain areas of growth. Around a third of our team use Marketo Engage. We’ve become very reliant on it and it’s unified our marketing. ”
James Arnall
Marketing Director, Perkbox