Melissa Day understands why big companies in more traditional industries might rely on Rolodexes and the decades-long sales relationships they represent. Day started with Chemours in 2017, excited to help the company prosper after spinning off from DuPont in 2015. With an aim to help drive sales by introducing marketing automation, she needed the right tools to help her accomplish this goal.

Chemours is a different kind of chemistry company driven by its purpose to create a more colorful, capable, and cleaner world through the power of chemistry. Bringing solutions that are better, safer, more reliable, and more sustainable, Chemours manufactures industrial and specialty chemical products for customers in 120 countries, served by a direct sales force, third-party agents, and distributors. Traditionally, Chemours’ marketing activities revolved around large tradeshows, in-person events, and product specification sheets. Until recently, the company had limited ability to measure marketing impact in terms of qualified leads and connecting sales opportunities to marketing programs.

In support of its Corporate Responsibility Commitment (CRC), Chemours advanced responsible chemistry through resilience and responsibility despite a challenging 2020. In addition to these CRC goals, like reducing environmental footprint and creating an inclusive and diverse workplace for employees, the company also challenged itself to reach higher digital marketing expectations.

To help manage marketing automation, Chemours chose Adobe Marketo Engage for its robust capabilities as a single application to support all four of the company’s primary businesses that house its power brands, including Opteon™, Ti-Pure™, Nafion™, Viton™, Krytox™, Freon™, and Teflon™. Today, as Chemours’ Global Digital Marketing Leader, Day sees great opportunities on the horizon. “Since gaining new online marketing capabilities with Marketo Engage, we’ve built a sales funnel with a 20% qualified lead conversion rate,” she says.

Winning champions through small victories

At first, Marketo Engage was only used to send occasional emails to contact lists pulled from Salesforce CRM. Day set out to unleash the application’s full potential by proving small wins, then sharing best practices across the organization. “We made a lot of small tweaks — changing a subject line or resending an email to people who hadn’t responded the first time — and webinar registration numbers started to climb. The conversations with sales and marketing started to change after they saw the results,” Day recounts.

Chemours now uses data-based filters in Marketo Engage to determine who to target, with more personalized messaging. For example, corporate procurement managers need different information than industrial design engineers or distributors.

Introducing MQLs to improve salesforce efficiency

Day and her team established lead scoring for both key demographic factors and behavior activity. Every time prospects engage with the Chemours website, an email, third-party content, or an event, they are assigned points in the lead scoring program, managed with Marketo Engage.

Once prospects meet a determined point threshold, they are passed on to sales as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) for follow up. MQLs are flagged based on data in Marketo Engage and then the CRM carries out the alert task, automatically opening a new activity record. The full lead lifecycle process is centrally managed within the Marketo Engage Revenue Cycle Modeler, which Day launched in 2021, and relies on the comprehensive integration between Marketo Engage and the company’s CRM.

“With Marketo Engage, the process is nicely streamlined,” says Day, “giving us more time to develop more refined, targeted communications.”

Day reports on the outcome from the MQL activity assigned based on feedback directly from sales. “It’s rewarding to deliver qualified leads to sales that they agree are valuable. Digital marketing has earned greater respect up to the executive suite,” Day says.

Now sales team members can easily view details about a lead’s recent interactions with Chemours and what may have tipped the scale to convert them. On the digital team’s side, Marketo Engage unlocks valuable marketing intelligence and analysis. The company can also make sure every lead is being looked at and handled appropriately.

“We can produce more detailed analyses based on engagement, rather than just measuring the number of lead records,” says Day. “It’s exciting that our analytics include data from the CRM, so we can see how our efforts help impact the sales funnel.”

Fast ramp-up to accelerate the prospect pipeline

Day has since added an existing Chemours employee from another role to manage the day-to-day marketing automation. The new lead was digitally savvy from a campaign management perspective but didn’t have prior experience with Marketo Engage.

“It’s a lot easier to train somebody on Marketo Engage than to teach them about the nuances of our company and industry,” Day says. “Adobe makes training a breeze. Within a month my new team member was up to speed.”

Whereas in the early years, only a handful of Marketing Communications team members used Marketo Engage, today more than half the team use it. Chemours has created customized permission settings for a variety of user roles, including by business line or function.

“I love how flexible Marketo Engage is. You can adapt it to fit any need you have, enabling different user experiences within the same tool. There’s no other solution on the market that offers such a robust set of capabilities with minimal limitations,” Day says.

Copywriters who used to develop content in more of a vacuum can work in Marketo Engage and see what campaign flows and layouts look like. “This accelerates marketing asset development timelines and improves the quality of the creative work,” says Day.

Day credits Adobe resources for helping ensure Chemours’ success. “We took advantage of enterprise level support for Marketo Engage. The customer service team and our customer success manager were extremely helpful in keeping us moving forward,” Day says.

Some of Day’s early accomplishments with the team include building out segments in Marketo Engage to mirror the available languages launched with Chemours’ new websites. Similarly, Chemours looked to dynamic content when GDPR took effect. With a core value in customer-centeredness, paired with complicated privacy regulations across markets where it operates, the company established data compliance practices with utmost respect for customer privacy. The best-in-class approach now uses content that will adapt based on whether the viewer opted into company communications or not to keep the experience personalized and relevant.

"I’m thrilled we have more granular insights to refine the full customer journey and then connect those changes to revenues. I look forward to next year’s planning and budgeting conversations with sales, marketing, and leadership because we are fully armed with data-driven insights through our work with Marketo Engage,” Day says.

Recommended for you

https://main--bacom--adobecom.hlx.page/fragments/customer-success-stories/cards/11afd9ed2dfdaa117de1c022818eafba

See all customer stories

https://main--bacom--adobecom.hlx.page/fragments/customer-success-stories/contact-footer