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 Download Benchmarking Drives the Success of Marketing Campaigns
Background
A client recently engaged Winn Technology Group, Inc. to assist in promoting a portion of its world–renowned user conference and largest annual event. The client is a Fortune 500 software company that provides enterprise applications for database management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, application development, and collaboration. It was the first software company to move its application products to the internet, leading a revolution in enterprise computing.
The client's event marketing team had been using a single vendor to promote its user conference for several years, and decided to put marketing best practices to work by benchmarking the vendor against Winn Technology Group, a leading marketer of business–to–business technology products and services. Benchmarking — although not as widely accepted in marketing departments as in information technology — is the practice of creating a standard against which the performance of a particular product or activity can be measured or judged in order to refine, and ultimately improve, business performance.
According to Gartner, Inc., "Benchmarking studies provide a quantifiable health check by comparing performance metrics with peer group organizations, best practice firms and outsourcing services. Benchmarking also can provide recommendations for performance improvements from benchmark findings*."
Benchmarking serves as an effective negotiating tool as it forces outsourcing companies to keep their costs reasonable and increases the productivity of marketing programs through healthy competition.
Objectives
Winn Technology Group's primary goal was to generate as many registrations as possible in a two–month timeframe to create a standard by which both vendors could be measured. Although a cut–and–dry project on the surface, numerous issues were raised which needed to be addressed properly, and in a timely fashion, to ensure the success of the program.
Appropriate marketing messaging was a significant factor since the client's customer base now comprised an eclectic group of Information Technology, Sales, Marketing, HR, and Operations professionals, many of whom had inherited the company as a software vendor through its purchases of "Acquisition A" (who had previously acquired "Acquisition B") and "Acquisition C" in 2005. The diverse backgrounds of these new customers, joined with the enormity of the client's existing customer database, also presented considerable data integrity challenges.
Through both process and technology, it was also necessary to prioritize outbound calling based on location. Furthermore, new and more immediate business opportunities surfaced during the course of promotional calling and needed expeditious handling.
Methodology
The client's customer base consisted of four primary groups, each requiring a unique message — existing database and application customers, former "Acquisition A" customers, former "Acquisition B" customers, and former "Acquisition C" customers — so Winn Technology Group developed a custom call guide for each group. For existing customers, the marketing message focused on the newest generation of products and their roadmap to the future. For the latter three groups, the themes were integration and product support.
Handling the customer lists provided by the client proved to be a worthy challenge. There were four different data sources, and the size of the database totaled in the six–figure range; even a 1% duplication rate could result in thousands of wasted phone calls and squandered marketing dollars. Winn Technology Group source tracked the lists, allowing for accurate reporting, and ran the lists through its de–duplication software prior to making the first dial. As a value–added service, Winn also mapped the resulting databases against its WinnEnterprise Database to provide additional intelligence and new potential registrants.
Now that the databases were in an optimized format, it was necessary to prioritize Winn Technology Group's outbound promotion efforts so that customers who were located in points furthest away from the event location in San Francisco were called first to allow ample time for planning. Winn addressed this issue by starting in the eastern and southeastern states and progressing to the western states in a "calling wave" across the country. As with all of Winn Technology Group's programs, referral names were gathered along the way.
As the promotional calling commenced, new lead opportunities surfaced for the client and were subsequently source tracked and sent in real time to allow for prompt follow–up by the sales team.
Hence, in approaching the promotion of this user conference, Winn Technology Group fused methodologies from three of its four primary service lines — Event Marketing, Database Solutions, and Demand Generation. This breadth of offerings, flexibility, and quality of service is matched by few organizations in the outsourced marketing industry.
"Outsourcing deals are not static. They must be flexible and change as the business and technology change*."
Results
One of the obvious benefits of this event was a more unified customer base for the client. Part of this unity can be attributed to Winn Technology Group's custom messaging, which spoke the language of each individual group and stressed the benefits and importance of the event.
Winn Technology Group's decision to map the client's customer database to its WinnEnterprise Database, and its process of generating referrals when calling, proved to be fruitful as well. Winn conducted a post event analysis and found that a significant percentage of the registrations it generated were a result of the combined data mapping and referral collection process.
This benchmarking program can be viewed as a success based upon the client’s internal gap analysis, which showed that Winn Technology Group generated a 33% higher registration rate than the competing vendor. A new standard has been set for productivity in the promotion of this client's annual user conference. Furthermore, a solid sales pipeline has been developed for the client's sales team through identification of "low hanging fruit".
Benchmarking is a process that should be considered, practiced, and refined by every savvy marketing department. "Benchmarking is an important part of evaluating and managing the relationship between the service recipient (SR) and the external service provider (ESP). To be successful, both parties must agree, in principle, to the use of benchmarking as an integral part of the management of the relationship*."
* Source: Gartner, Outsourcing Strategies, Markets, and Best Practices, July 2004
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About Winn Technology Group, Inc.
Winn Technology Group is a privately–held marketing solutions company headquartered in Palm Harbor, Florida. Focusing exclusively on the technology marketplace, Winn has earned the respect of over 600 technology companies, many of whom continually subscribe to its B2B marketing services including Demand Generation, Event Marketing, Database Solutions, and Channel Marketing. For more information, call 800–444–5622 or visit www.winntech.net.
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