Most people look to Silicon Valley for innovation in software, but Australia has its own success story: TechnologyOne.

Since starting in 1987, TechnologyOne has grown to become one of the country’s top 150 ASX-listed companies, pioneering the software industry as a leader in delivering software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solutions. They serve over 1,000 customers in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, focusing on government, higher education, health and community services, asset and project intensive industries, financial services and corporates. To best manage their customers’ needs, TechnologyOne offers a suite of products and preconfigured solutions, which are developed in their Australian R&D centre.

As part of their own digital transformation, TechnologyOne wanted to align their sales and marketing teams and improve online content. However, marketing lacked the tools to track customer behaviours or interactions. They handled all data manually, which drained valuable resources. Events and webinars took days to organise, using spreadsheets and data downloads from multiple systems.

TechnologyOne needed to innovate and automate their marketing function to manage data better and support sales to grow their pipeline. To achieve this, they sought to streamline marketing processes across customer touchpoints, introducing visibility across the customer lifecycle. James Gunn, Marketing Operations Manager at TechnologyOne, was brought in to develop best-practice marketing automation across lead generation, lifecycle management and campaign execution.

Empowering marketing and sales through lifecycle visibility

James was tasked with expanding and strengthening TechnologyOne’s pipeline and marketing capability by developing a best-in-breed tech stack with Adobe Marketo Engage. With Adobe Marketo Engage’s integration with Salesforce CRM, centralised data management, ecosystem and an array of features, they started an ongoing programme to support TechnologyOne throughout their digital transformation and beyond.

Adobe Marketo Engage acts as the pipeline engine, integrated with Salesforce CRM, Squiz CMS and On24 for webinars. As a result, TechnologyOne enjoys a centralised, scalable data source for marketing, improving productivity and resources. They’re now well-positioned to weather changing economic conditions and add new functionality with little technical assistance, as they’re able to support future growth.

Building long-term relationships at scale

In the five years since James joined TechnologyOne, Adobe Marketo Engage continues to play an extensive role in understanding and addressing customer behaviours as they move through the pipeline. Pivotal in this process were working with the sales team to identify and define metrics throughout the funnel and developing a lead scoring system to improve marketing and sales alignment.

As a lead visits the website, attends webinars or downloads content, they accumulate points as they move through the buying journey. Once a prospect or customer hits a threshold in their lead score, Adobe Marketo Engage fires off an alert through Salesforce for follow-up by the relevant account manager. Each threshold is predefined, from Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Accepted and Sales Qualified Lead (with a few more in between), reflecting the nuanced approach required for the software company.

Lead scoring and automation have empowered James and his team. “We now see marketing’s affect on how we manage prospects and customers throughout the lifecycle, which we lacked before. We have a view of where customers sit in the cycle at any time. We know if they’re new to TechnologyOne, if they’ve downloaded content from our website or if they’re an active customer interested in one of our other products.”

A window into the marketing world

Adobe Marketo Engage Sales Insights has fostered alignment between sales and marketing by helping sales understand a prospect’s online interest.

“It gives our salespeople a window into the Adobe Marketo Engage world: how a customer has been interacting with our Adobe Marketo Engage marketing material,” says James. “It offers talking points for starting conversations with leads, as the salesperson has access to all that marketing information at their fingertips.”

Every marketing campaign now includes an email component for salespeople, relating to a particular cross-sell or new business campaign. “We set up these emails using Adobe Marketo Engage Sales Insights to send to selected customers to drive better engagement.”

Delivering better digital events

As more customers look for online events and relationship-building opportunities, TechnologyOne understood the need to move towards digital with their webinar and events integrated into Adobe Marketo Engage. Although they were running online events before COVID-19, TechnologyOne was positioned to scale quickly and get ahead of the competition.

“Through integration with On24, we can measure and observe prospect engagement before and during the event,” says James. TechnologyOne also significantly saves time now that Adobe Marketo Engage manages all the communications, including registration and attendance data. It interprets webinar data to determine whether someone should be passed on to sales for action through Adobe Marketo Engage Sales Insights.

Creating a feedback loop with NPS

To keep customers happy, businesses need to understand what they’re thinking and feeling. TechnologyOne introduced Net Promoter Scores (NPS) to improve and develop new products. A three-way integration between their survey tool, CRM and Adobe Marketo Engage drives the feedback loop by targeting relevant customers and driving communications. That data is integrated with the survey tool, which then sends it back to CRM.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make a significant impact. TechnologyOne’s marketing team value tokens and templates for their ability to drive brand consistency across all marketing collateral, quickly and easily. James and his team simply create a campaign, test its effectiveness and clone future iterations. If there’s a change of event date or speaker, they only need to edit the token and all relevant content will be updated instantly.

The results

Delivering complete lifecycle management and lead automation with Adobe Marketo Engage has improved the marketing team’s perception and value within the organisation. An 8-figure increase in pipeline is attributed to Adobe Marketo Engage, backed by a 10-fold increase in marketing qualified leads (MQL).

TechnologyOne ramped-up webinars while saving time: What used to take three days can now be completed in less than three hours. James and TechnologyOne now run user groups in Brisbane to share their best-practice approach and further nurture Adobe Marketo Engage’s ecosystem. Next, they aim to identify new areas to use Adobe Marketo Engage’s features.

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