Accelerating growth through disciplined engagement

While Kelly Pronek didn't set out to run a center of excellence for a global software company it is easy to see the throughline back to her early career. Starting as a sales associate, she moved to sales operations, and then ran demand generation for large businesses. With a passion for turning analytical insight into sales, Pronek is perfectly suited for her role as Pricefx vice president of revenue generation and enablement.

Pronek joined Pricefx at a critical time in the company’s growth. With a goal to increase sales of its sophisticated pricing software globally, the company needed a steady pipeline of quality leads and opportunities to ramp up revenue. Target companies were huge and sales cycles long, requiring ongoing multi-channel interactions with dozens of stakeholders and many more influencers and future end users.

Pronek’s first action was to take stock of the company’s tech stack, starting with its marketing automation platform. As Pronek assessed current processes and technologies, three dominant requirements emerged: transparency, measurement, and efficiency.

Both sales and marketing teams needed deep insight into account and lead activities to drive tactics. Gaining that insight requires measurement and analysis, plus integration with common sales and marketing tools like CRM, conversational marketing, webinar software, and lead data sources like ZoomInfo.

Marketing automation captures data on who is visiting the website and how they interact with content

With the company’s existing solution, Pardot, too many campaign-related processes were manual and the loose integration with their Salesforce CRM meant duplicate work between systems. Pricefx needed a new solution that would efficiently manage separate campaigns for buyers, influencers, and end users, spanning a long sales cycle, and also make all the details readily available to the sales team.

Already familiar with the range of marketing automation software, Pronek quickly determined that Adobe Marketo Engage and Adobe Marketo Measure were the best fit for their needs. The combined solution manages complex workflows, enables efficient campaign cloning, connects with dozens of marketing and sales applications, including Salesforce CRM, and quantifies marketing results.

“To meet our growth targets, we either had to hire more people or come up with better technology and processes to enable our existing team. Marketo Engage and Marketo Measure allow us to act bigger than we are and move faster than our competitors,” says Pronek.

Committing to data-driven operations

After tackling marketing automation and attribution, Pronek joined forces with the company’s CMO to create a center of excellence (COE) that unifies all revenue operations and works to instill a data-driven mentality. The COE brings together demand generation, business development, sales operations, and sales enablement.

Selecting and connecting technologies to streamline processes, the team now covers the complete data and tech stack for the revenue team. Data-based insights drive marketing content and campaign focus, and the sales team has visibility into account and lead activities.

“Our center of excellence transforms ad hoc marketing and sales into a repeatable process,” says Pronek. “With our organization and technology, we know how, when, and where to get in front of customers, all while maintaining sales and operations alignment.”

Pricefx targets multinational enterprises with complex pricing practices that can benefit from a data-driven pricing solution. These billion-dollar enterprises make buying decisions by committee, so dozens of people interact with Pricefx’s marketing materials during the buying journey.

“With a 400-day sales cycle and multiple contact types to nurture per account, Pricefx needed a technology stack built for complex campaigns and easy integration,” says Pronek. “Marketo Engage and Marketo Measure enable us to engage with our customers and prospects with the right message at the right time.”

Marketing automation front and center

As part of the implementation process, the team created best practice templates for consistent, efficient campaigns. These can be cloned for almost instant use in new acquisition or intent-based campaigns including ‘always on’ campaigns that align with specific roles, industries, and use cases.

As contacts send buyer intent signals, the team uses ZoomInfo workflows to identify people in specific roles at the same company. These contacts flow to the marketing automation platform where they are enrolled into nurture campaigns driven by industry, title, maturity with Pricefx, topics of interest, and web pages visited by coworkers. A similar process is used with buyer intent data sources for intent-based sequences.

For conversational marketing, Marketo Engage connects seamlessly with Drift, a chat solution, capturing data on who is on the website, how they are interacting with content, and enabling people interested in finding out more to book a meeting with a member of the sales team. The operations team then re-targets these leads or puts them into nurture campaigns.

Customers can subscribe to Pricefx learning center emails and schedule a meeting with a member of the sales team.

First-party data from Metadata paid media includes details on the ads and keywords that triggered action. The operations team enrolls these leads into nurture campaigns or sets up a sequence that launches a particular playbook from Drift on the next website visit. Smart lists of target profiles are also used for greater precision in paid media.

The sales team has instant visibility into all these activities through the tight integration with Salesforce CRM. Marketo Sales Insight and Marketo Measure make it easy to track new contacts and recent engagements to see what content individual contacts consumed and tailor conversations to their interests.

Marketing attribution also helps the operations team make data-driven decisions on tactics and where to best spend marketing dollars. For example, if the data insights show that Pricefx has a strong opportunity pipeline but is light on leads, the operations team might shift media budget to demand generation.

“With Marketo Engage and Marketo Measure, we have clear insight into which information people engage with at different buy cycle stages, so we can provide meaningful content at the right moment to achieve better results,” says Pronek.

Full-throttle revenue generation and enablement

To support the streamlined operation, Pricefx brought all content, media, and design in-house. As a result, revenue operations are able to move faster than ever. The operations team actively measures engagement to keep Pricefx operating at the optimal nexus of time, place, and content. “Marketo Engage and Marketo Measure improve targeting, scoring, response time, retargeting efforts, and routing of leads,” says Pronek.

With the insight gained, Pricefx’s business development and sales team are able to book more meetings and gain more opportunities and reach into accounts. These teams can spend additional time on qualified accounts and are more proactive with these accounts with insight into behaviors. In the 18 months following the Adobe rollout, revenue increased 2.8x with a 201% increase in deal volume. The sales pipeline grew 24x with a 222% increase in opportunities and 304% growth in contacts.

In the same period, leads from revenue operations grew by 131%, with 80% converting to sales contacts. This was up from 30% in the prior period and a strong indicator of improved quality. “We want our enterprise sales team selling, not hunting,” says Pronek. “Revenue operations built a reputation for serving up qualified companies, and now 99% of opportunities are sourced by us.”

With marketing attribution, Pricefx learned that webinars are a critical milestone in the last stages of the buying cycle.

Marketing attribution provides actionable insights into the buying cycle. As just one example, learning that webinars are a critical milestone in the last stages of the buying cycle, the team built a robust library of on-demand webinars segmented by industry, role, and buying cycle stage.

"With Marketo Measure, we know how people get to us, how they engage, where they are in the buying cycle, and their buyer intent signals," says Pronek. These insights validated that paid search plays a prominent role in obtaining net new contacts and nurturing emails are essential in lead to opportunity conversions.

Pronek joined Pricefx to build high-functioning marketing operations. She stayed to pursue her passion for excellence. “With Marketo Engage and Marketo Measure as the backbone of our operation, we are excited about what we can achieve,” says Pronek.

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