Interactive lands more sales with next-level lead scoring.

When Interactive took on the challenge of reinventing their tech stack by integrating Marketo Engage with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, as well as launching a new-look website and all with a 3 month deadline - Marketo Services were the team they turned to.

Interactive is Australia’s largest privately-owned IT company, serving over 2,800 customers nationally. Since starting over 33 years ago, they expanded their range of services to data centres, as well as cloud and managed service, hardware maintenance and business continuity. Their portfolio of services has helped double the company’s revenue in the past five years, and they set an ambitious goal to reach $500 million in revenue in the next five years. To hit their target, they needed to refocus their marketing and sales capabilities.

Darren Reid, Director of Marketing and Alliances at Interactive, was tasked with uplifting marketing’s ability to support sales and drive revenue. Although Interactive already used Marketo Engage, it was only in a limited capacity focused on email marketing. They weren’t tapping into Marketo Engage’s beneficial features around lead routing or scoring.

“The very first thing that I aimed to achieve was to support the sales organisation with outstanding quality marketing in a way that the organisation could understand,” Darren says. “There was a genuine belief in sales that marketing wasn’t contributing to what the business needed. Likewise, marketing had no view back from sales in terms of what was happening with leads.”

Along with improving lead quality, they needed to improve the customer experience across the company’s website and service offering. Interactive’s website was its primary digital property, with all marketing activity focused on driving traffic. Along with improving lead quality, Darren needed to build a website that better reflected the company’s brand and innovative, service-oriented spirit. It also needed to deliver personalised content and relay information to Interactive’s marketing and CRM systems. 

Best-practice, hands-free lead scoring.

A primary objective of the new solution was to automate the lead process between the Marketo Engage, Interactive’s website and the CRM, supported by a robust lead scoring system. The first step was to work closely with Interactive’s sales team to understand how marketing could best help them, defining what qualified as a Sales Accepted Lead. Each lead would need to pass a threshold that met specified criteria, following the BANT model: budget, awareness, need and timing. 

After a three month implementation, Interactive transformed from a marketing and sales function that manually passed over leads to one that was fully automated. As prospects come to Interactive’s new website, they accumulate points as they visit different web pages, download content, open emails and request information. “Having automated lead paths from the website to the sales rep and back again is an incredibly valuable piece of the puzzle for us,” says Darren. “Having Marketo jump in front and validate data means we’re putting better quality leads in front of our reps, along with high-quality data into our CRM.”

Demographics and firmographic scoring take implicit and explicit data across all marketing efforts including social media and content marketing and looks at a prospect’s job title, industry and company size to help identify how interested they are in Interactive. Marketo Engage also differentiates between business emails from personal ones (like Gmail), to help create a more accurate lead score. Interactive enriched the two-way flow of data between Marketo Engage and their CRM by adding extra functionality with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

For a business like Interactive, nurturing prospects requires a long-term outlook. Each touchpoint with a potential client needs to maintain engagement throughout the nurturing process, which can take months or years. Behind the scenes, Marketo’s Web Personalization capability helps Interactive create a personalized customer experience when visiting their website, their most significant marketing asset. With all outbound activity directing traffic to their website, the data feeding into Interactive ensures visitors see relevant content that’s based on their interests. This is critical when you service a diverse client base across multiple services. A visitor to Interactive’s website sees what’s important to them, whether they are a procurement manager from a large enterprise interested in data centres or a franchise owner looking at business continuity. Beyond providing a curated customer journey, Marketo Engage’s templates ensure a consistent brand look and feel across every marketing touchpoint.

Uninhibited growth.

Today, Interactive’s tech stack supports the marketing team’s activities across the lifecycle of prospects and customers. Web personalization ensures potential customers see the most relevant content on their engagements. Lead scoring identifies when a prospect is a Sales Accepted Lead, hitting the team’s BANT objectives. Marketo Engage’s integration with Microsoft Dynamics ensures a smooth, fully automated process, with a flowing pipeline that also provides campaign attribution. Sales and marketing work collaboratively to ensure nurturing campaigns run smoothly. Leads are no longer squandered, as sales see marketing’s contribution to business growth: 90 per cent of leads are picked up within 24 hours of landing.

The data feeding into nurturing streams delivers leads at the prime opportunity: Interactive now enjoys between 200 and 400 Sales Accepted Leads each month, a significant increase from the 50 they used to handle manually. The integration between Marketo Engage and Interactive’s webpages means they now see 6,000 visits to Marketo landing pages each month, contributing to 18,000 prospects in their nurture streams. And it all adds up to new business and improved revenue, with the Sales Accepted to Won ratio up to 8.3 per cent, up from less than 2 per cent before the new Marketing Engage implementation.