LEVERAGING MARKET OPPORTUNITY

OVERVIEW

We helped the leader in next-generation networks for communication service providers (CSPs) improve their global lead conversion and maximize market opportunity.

CHALLENGE

The marketing leadership was faced with a need to increase their marketing sourced opportunities. Looking to break away from its existing resource framework of using an in-house SDR team, the team knew to meet their business goals in real time, that outsourcing was the obvious choice. As they thought about the most cost effective and least time-consuming approach, they acknowledged that the risk associated with training, ramping up, and managing a brand-new team of unproven SDRs with a knowledge of the telco industry was too high. Leadership weighed this risk against the immediate needs of their globally dispersed business before deciding on a strategic partner.

CLARITY

How do you build the right sales support team to increase marketing-sourced opportunities worldwide?

With the marketing leadership doing all that it could to leverage its existing in-house team of SDR’s, they were unable to handoff sufficient opportunities to contribute towards a significant sales impact.

When the opportunity arose to repurpose the existing inhouse team through an organizational restructure and improve the inbound lead management of 200 MQLs each month, but with the ability to scale to 400-500 with little lead time — the leadership team decided to bring in a proven and safe bet —and ELEVATE’s best in class team went to work.

Our objective was to develop an inbound lead management strategy that would improve lead response-time and reduce the unattended marketing qualified leads and enquiries.

Having worked together for many years to provide high-impact outbound demand generation, ELEVATE was the natural choice.

JOURNEY

Leveraging our Inbound Lead Management methodology, we commenced a journey to design and deploy a team of experienced, dedicated SDRs that would work alongside the Account Executive (AE) teams, and seamlessly within Salesforce, to follow up and qualify marketing generated enquiries & contact request forms within agreed SLAs.

We conducted a Messaging workshop briefing on the nuances applicable to each product offering, and then socialized an understanding of the company-specific BANT criteria that each lead should be qualified with, and how they should be tracked and segmented in Salesforce.

A Foundational training using a reverse engineered approach was used to instil this information at a foundational level within the operational SDR team, adding competence and fluidly around the offering capabilities whilst developing human-to-human rapport with each prospect.

Proper Process documentation was created on the criteria for handling leads from different campaign sources and for different offerings. A cadence of email and phone calls was then drafted, using best practice email templates.

To ensure SDR scalability, multiple experienced SDRs were briefed on the offerings and process and assigned geographic territories so follow-up SLAs could be met.

An Immersion into the martech stack was required to gain full understanding of the lead scoring mechanisms in Marketo that constituted a score threshold MQL, before it was assigned to the ELEVATE SDR team in Salesforce.

Lead queues and 24-hour SLAs were assigned and measured on a weekly basis to ensure the program was meeting the needs of the business.

We worked with their tech stack through Salesforce to ensure data integrity. We improved the integrity of the lead data on an ongoing basis, ensuring missing data points were captured to enable future segmentation, personalization, and marketing nurture.

ELEVATE’s Business Insights team developed a series of real-time salesforce dashboards to illuminate marketing’s contribution to the pipeline- segmenting the results by region, product offering and other KPI breakdowns.

RESULTS

After only 6 months from the start of the program, 1,400 MQLs were assigned to the ELEVATE team of SDRs, and an average of 11% conversion to BANT qualified SLAs. SLAs were consistently met or exceeded, and no leads were left unattended. The leads that were not BANT qualified were kept on campaign mailing listed and continued to be nurtured with the out-of-scope duplicates being disqualified.

“Having ELEVATE as a strategic partner has helped us to increase our sales opportunities in a way that exceeded our expectations. With ELEVATE we saw a significant ROI within the first few months and are on the path to continued business growth”.

– CMO, Leading Global Technology Company

IMPACT

ELEVATE bridged the gap between marketing and sales in real terms, strengthening their relationship through the identification and hand-off of over 150 opportunities representing $117m potential pipeline.

This allowed marketing to demonstrate their influence on revenue contribution with ROI to closed and won opportunities in just the first 6 months.

The business saw:

• Less unattended leads
• Greater sales team efficiency
• Greater market coverage and penetration
• Improved brand experience by timely follow up