Marketing transformation helps Schwab Advisor Services drive marketing-qualified leads and close deals worth over $100 million.

Westlake, Texas

schwab.com

$1.1B

Asset value contribution to pipeline

Products:

Adobe Marketo Engage ›

Objectives

Personalize interactions and deliver content relevant to each advisor’s stage in the lifecycle

Align marketing and sales to improve acquisition and retention and strengthen advisor relationships

Continuously enhance data integrity, inbound lead generation, and web engagement

Results

$1.1B asset value contribution to pipeline

$100M+ in closed business via nurture programs

500% engagement rates

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“Marketo Engage is enabling marketing and sales to work as a team, building a highly effective program that is delivering exceptional business results.”

Paige Lubawy

Senior Manager, Demand Generation, Charles Schwab

Schwab Advisor Services’ network of independent investment advisors provides specialized guidance and personalized attention for people with complex wealth management needs. The Advisor Services marketing team plays a role in expanding the business. According to Paige Lubawy, Senior Manager on the Data Driven Communications Team, the marketers were hampered in the past by an obsolete marketing platform that was cumbersome to use and provided no visibility into leads or campaign effectiveness. Marketers reinvented the way they get things done. They established Demand Generation expertise and implemented Adobe Marketo Engage to automate marketing efforts. The results are remarkable.

According to Lubawy, “Marketo Engage is enabling marketing and sales to work as a team, building a highly effective program that is delivering exceptional business results.”

“We went from a very traditional marketing organization to a digital marketing team running an incredibly successful nine-touch nurture campaign. The immediate result was $1.1 billion in asset value contributed to the sales pipeline and help in closing deals representing more than $100 million of net new assets for Schwab.”

Paige Lubawy

Senior Manager, Demand Generation, Charles Schwab

Marketing automation investment delivers results

It typically takes two to three years to establish an independent financial advisory business. That means the buying cycle for bringing new advisors into the Schwab Advisor Services network is a long one that requires a continual focus on engaging prospects and advisors with relevant content and visibility into where they are in the business lifecycle. In the past, the marketing team struggled with batch-and-blast email campaigns and a lack of insight into advisors’ needs at various lifecycle stages.

Since that time, marketing has undergone a major transformation that involved establishing Demand Generation expertise and implementing Marketo Engage to enable automation, personalization, and targeted content that helps new advisors get their businesses off the ground and current advisors run the back office efficiently and grow assets under management.

“We went from a very traditional marketing organization to a digital marketing team running an incredibly successful nine-touch nurture campaign,” says Lubawy. “The immediate result was $1.1 billion in asset value contributed to the sales pipeline and help in closing deals representing more than $100 million of net new assets for Schwab. I’m convinced our success is a direct result of driving buy-in for Marketo Engage across our organization. Twelve marketers across four Schwab teams and two external agencies worked together to develop our nurture campaign.”

“Since the initial install, we expanded from a team of two people with no Marketo Engage experience to a Marketo Engage certified team of six people who are using standardized processes and tools, increasing productivity by more than 900%. Consequently, we’ve realized dramatic gains in the efficiency of campaign design, execution, and list management.”

Paige Lubawy

Senior Manager, Demand Generation, Charles Schwab

Expanding Marketo Engage use drives productivity

Today, Marketo Engage supports approximately 40 marketers and more than 125 salespeople. Together they are leveraging marketing automation to cultivate prospects at scale. Marketing is capturing inbound leads for the first time, which yielded a 500% improvement in engagement. Moreover, by tracking and scoring the behavior of prospective advisors during the lengthy sales cycle, marketing is helping sales identify the hottest prospects so business development can engage them directly.

“Since the initial install, we expanded from a team of two people with no Marketo Engage experience to a Marketo Engage certified team of six people who are using standardized processes and tools, increasing productivity by more than 900%,” says Lubawy. “Consequently, we’ve realized dramatic gains in the efficiency of campaign design, execution, and list management.”