Enterprise Software Company doubles login and conversion rates while reducing cost-per-qualified-prospect by 61%
ASSIGNMENT: A Fortune 100 enterprise software company needed to gain control of its Go-To-Market (GTM) product launch programs. Massini Group discovered it was paying more than five times the industry average per qualified prospect. The challenge was to review the way the company managed accounts, sites and contacts to determine how to re-engineer B2B database marketing processes for better performance.
MEASURE: Reduce average cost per qualified prospect from $354 to the normal industry range of $30 to $120 for initial prospect touches and $10 to $30 on subsequent touches.
KEY STRATEGY: Identify opportunities for process improvement by comparing current practices with the best marketing practices of other world-class companies.
ENGINEERED PROCESSES: Massini Group reviewed a sample set of GTM data (approximately 500,000 records) and identified a key problem: the company was communicating with people in roles outside of their stated target job functions. The database used to select GTM targets had several critical flaws that led to this lack of precision:
- Inconsistent attributes: A majority of the records in the sample data had contradicting attributes. For example, titles and roles didn’t align. Joe Smith, CEO for a large corporation, would be treated as a Technical Decision Maker rather than a Business Decision Maker. In another example, roughly 80% of IT directors were mislabeled as Business Decision Makers while only 20% were correctly categorized as Technical Decision Makers.
- Incomplete information: Not all attributes were available for all prospects, making target selects difficult or impossible. There was no proactive effort to determine the appropriate attributes based on information available. For example, 28% of the records had not been assigned a role, e.g. Business Decision Maker.
- No source defined: The company was not able to distinguish which targeting attributes were supplied directly from the prospect versus attributes that were assumed.
Over a three week period, Massini Group stripped the attributes down to the core and rebuilt them so confidence in the data could be restored and, more importantly, so that GTM performance could be improved. Here’s how:
- Made attributes consistent: Massini Group reduced prospect attributes to the job titles provided by prospects. Then, key players were assigned roles, such as “Head of IT”. This eliminated the contradictions in attributes mentioned above.
- Assigned appropriate attributes to remaining prospects: Massini Group took a sample of each key player category (using title, company revenue, vertical market and other attributes). Based on known information about that population, Massini Group built a profile (such as product interest, purchasing role, etc.) and applied it to the rest of the prospects in that category.
- Recorded source information: Massini Group developed a source coding system captured in the database to provide both a clear view of the sources of prospect attributes and the age of that information.
Based on these changes, the company was then able to select targets from a list of prospects with complete and correct attributes, which made marketing programs more efficient and led to better response rates.
RESULTS: The first GTM test doubled the number of logins (4.9% test vs. 2.5% control) and doubled conversion rates (1.9% test vs. 0.9% control) compared to the controlled data. The test also showed a 61% reduction in cost-per-qualified-prospect ($130 test vs. $333 control).