The Challenge

Detrie Zacharias, Director of Global Operations for Data Management, noticed this his data analysts were fielding a wide scope of ad-hoc requests including list-loading, list-building, data cleanup and more to support the growing needs of its internal clients. With the influx of requests, Zacharias explained that there never seemed to be enough time, talent or resources to meet the demands.

“We simply could not allocate enough time to the value-add tasks because we had too much data and not enough solutions,” he noted. “It would take us three days to just load one list.”

Growth and expansion from on-site and virtual events, increased marketing campaigns and demand generation projects and broader reach to new audiences meant Zacharias’s team needed a way to pivot from being perceived as reactive to a proactive, strategic “data facilitator” to the business.

The Solution

After searching the market for a solution that could help the team deliver extraordinary, they found and selected Openprise. Openprise’s RevOps data automation (RDA) cloud — and its out-of-the-box solutions — were adopted by the team to automate the manual and low-value, time-consuming tasks that took up their workdays.

Through the partnership with Openprise, Rimini Street built self-service automations for business users to load and build lists independently, further freeing up the data team for more strategic projects. Due to the data transformation, Rimini Street’s data management team has secured stronger support for broader data initiatives like the data governance committee, which oversees projects and serves as an advisory board. This success also enabled advanced projects, such as data attribution modeling and contact acquisition, with more in the pipeline.

Additionally, it empowered Rimini Street’s go-to-market team to continue to capitalize on the company’s rapid growth and expansion from on-site and virtual events, increased marketing campaigns and demand generation projects and broader reach to new audiences.

The Results

When Rimini Street initially leveraged Openprise’s built-in data quality recipes (out-of-the-box solutions), it cut days of manual work to a few keystrokes, and in just a few weeks of becoming an Openprise customer, list processing time went from three days to a single day or less. Since collaborating with Openprise a year ago, Rimini Street’s data management team has reduced review cycles and service desk tasks, saving 108 hours per week.

Specific results of Rimini’s Openprise integration include:

• Reducing the time to clean, normalize and load a list from three days to a single day — and in some cases, minutes;
• Reducing review cycles and service desk tasks, saving 108 hours per week; and
• Cutting days of manual work to a few keystrokes by leveraging Openprise’s built-in data quality recipes (out-of-the-box solutions).

“In just a few months, Openprise has allowed us to look at our data processes more strategically,” said Zacharias. “With the help of the Openprise RDA Cloud, our data team has focused on delivering accurate data, in near real-time, enabling the GTM team to make smart, data-based decisions to help achieve our aggressive growth goals.”

The post How Openprise Helps Rimini Street Save 108 Hours Of Service & Review Tasks Per Week appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The Challenge

Driving Kreato’s work is the desire to develop close and long-lasting relationships with its customers. However, fragmented data, dispersed ownership and lack of a centralized system for sharing business intelligence topped the list of challenges for Kreato to achieve a complete picture of the business.

“Before I joined the company, Kreato used Excel to handle everything,” said Sandra Ramírez, Commercial Coordinator at Kreato. “All the information was stored in the minds of commercial reps who had direct contact with the client. The company felt it did not have all the information it needed.”

Further, Kreato was struggling to quantify the clients and the opportunities. Although it had worked with tenders in the public sector for over a decade, the company still found it challenging to identify key opportunities in advance. As construction projects take time and leads need to be nurtured for years, Kreato needed to foster those opportunities for years to understand its clients’ purchasing behavior.

While sales reps had deep knowledge of Kreato’s clients, there wasn’t a centralized system for sharing business intelligence. Any information Kreato had was managed through spreadsheets and limited what the company could do with its sales data. Sales reps had to manually create charts, graphs and pivot tables to generate meaningful insights.

In addition, with data in spreadsheets or sales reps’ memories, Kreato couldn’t integrate its sales information with other tools, like marketing automation platforms or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. This limited the company’s ability to synchronize data across systems, automate data entry and streamline processes. Moreover, critical information was lost every time a sales rep left the company, which created difficulty in maintaining continuity with clients.

The Solution

Kreato started looking for a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to serve as a home for its customer data and quantify everything sales-related to gain an accurate projection of its pipeline.

Kreato deployed Sugar Sell, the AI-powered sales automation solution from SugarCRM.

Sugar Sell empowers Kreato to develop close, lasting relationships with customers, including some of Colombia’s biggest names in construction such as Constructora Bolívar, Constructora Colpatria and Amarilo. Kreato enlisted the CRM expertise of Sugar partner SASA to implement Sugar Sell to meet its business and industry needs.

With Sugar Sell, Kreato now has intelligent account management. With more than 700 active customers daily, Kreato relies on Sugar Sell to manage customer data and interactions, empowering its sales teams with valuable sales insights key to building stronger relationships and delivering personalized experiences.

Predictive analytics capabilities enable the company to measure sales performance, identify key opportunities and make data-driven decisions to drive business growth and success. Additionally, Sugar Sell’s user-friendly interface streamlines Kreato’s sales process, allowing sales representatives to manage leads, monitor opportunities, and track sales outcomes efficiently and accurately.

The Results

Sugar Sell does the work to integrate Kreato’s CRM and ERP data to supercharge sales success, drive intelligent account management and deliver personalized experiences to every client. As a result, Kreato has uncovered more than 8,800 new sales opportunities, while revolutionizing its sales processes and driving business growth.

“Sugar has provided invaluable support to Kreato to transform our sales processes and achieve our business objectives to build customers for life and ensure no opportunity is missed,” said Ramírez. “With Sugar, we now have a centralized sales automation tool that integrates our CRM data with our marketing automation platform and ERP system. This allows us to synchronize data across systems, automate data entry and significantly streamline processes. Moreover, critical information is never lost. With Sugar, we have identified more than 8,800 new opportunities and with intelligent account management through comprehensive insights into our business and customers.”

The post How Kreato Unlocked 8,800 Growth Opportunities With SugarCRM appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

To help support its growth, the company planned to increase the number of scheduled prospective meetings and facilitate multi-threaded meetings that would involve multiple representatives from the client’s side to lead to more fruitful discussions and successful outcomes.

The Challenge

AffiniPay wanted to implement an account-based strategy to support its meetings-focused endeavors but faced uncertainties in the execution, primarily due to a lack of alignment among operations, sales and marketing teams. That misalignment produced a lack of trust and inefficiencies, which included misunderstandings of marketing qualified accounts and platform integrations within existing workflows.

Moreover, foundational data issues in AffiniPay’s CRM plagued its systems across 6sense, Salesforce, Gong and Adobe Marketo, which contributed to lower conversion rates, prompting AffiniPay to seek ways to maximize its ROI.

The Solution

AffiniPay turned to B2B Fusion, a B2B sales and marketing performance firm, to facilitate the transformation of its operations, team cohesion and training processes and guide its shift from a transactional B2B approach to an account-based experience (ABX) motion strategy.

First, B2B Fusion helped AffiniPay develop a model qualified account (MQA) framework for consistent organizational management and established fundamental segments in 6sense for accurate targeting to boost conversions. B2B Fusion assisted with this by getting all parties in a room to align definitions and processes and, once that buy-in was achieved, the firm then installed that philosophy into the systems.

AffiniPay also wanted to reset its 6sense pilot program, so B2B Fusion crafted tailored marketing campaigns within the platform to streamline the sales funnel and devise a comprehensive omnichannel outreach plan. Following this, the sales and marketing performance firm developed a cohesive messaging framework for AffiniPay to help the company land more meetings with relevant stakeholders in prospective accounts. Then, B2B Fusion assisted in pinpointing and rectifying core challenges within the initial 6sense pilot program.

Next, B2B Fusion helped develop a full-funnel demand generation campaign framework focused on cross-selling opportunities among AffiniPay’s diverse product lines. By analyzing customer data and insights, B2B Fusion helped customize marketing campaigns for 6sense, including operationalizing the sales funnel and creating an omnichannel pilot plan. This enabled AffiniPay to create targeted campaigns to address specific customer needs and interests, thereby increasing the relevance and appeal of cross-selling propositions.

Other strategic contributions from B2B Fusion included:

• Designing seamless business processes that allowed marketing and sales to act effectively on MQAs;
• Conducting a thorough 6sense keyword audit for enhanced performance;
• Implementing integrated campaigns across various channels to optimize the full sales funnel;
• Enhancing the usability of 6sense to align with operational needs, which is still a work in progress; and
• Reporting assistance in defining ABX pilot launch criteria and objectives for future success.

The Results

Collaborating with B2B Fusion positively impacted AffiniPay’s operations, leading to significant growth in its business outcomes.

“We’re in early stages of the rollout but see some promising early results already,” said Paul Hernandez, Director of Lifecycle Marketing at AffiniPay. “This includes a nearly 70% MQA acceptance rate by sales, with an extremely high sales qualified lead-to-win ratio of 33%, which is indicating ABM is much more effective versus traditional lead generation techniques on a per-unit basis.”

Other key benefits from the partnership include:

• Strengthened sales and marketing alignment;
• Improved data quality across all departments and streamlined decision-making processes; and
• Cohesive processes and campaigns that moved beyond traditional lead generation and focus on high-value accounts; and
• Expansion into new markets and industries.

Looking ahead, AffiniPay wants to increase the model qualified account volume to make an even greater impact on revenue heading into 2025.

The post How AffiniPay Unlocked 70% MQA Acceptance Rate Via An ABM/ABX Framework appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

Created by senior marketing technology executives and leveraging machine learning, Audyence RTD analyzes more than 17.5 billion firmographic, behavioral and technographic data points to help reduce the operational and capital expenditures associated with planning, purchasing, selling and executing demand generation campaigns.

“The global B2B lead generation industry is already a $21 billion market growing more than 15% per year, but it’s still too dependent on manually managing campaigns and a troubling lack of transparency,” explained Audyence Co-founder and CEO Karl Van Buren in a statement. “That’s where Audyence RTD comes in. To buy leads before our solution, marketers had to work with five or six or more brokers, negotiate with each separately by email or phone call and then manually manage those separate campaigns. We’re automating that entire process from end to end for as many publishers as they want to work with through our marketplace, reducing agency labor costs by 20X.”

The post Audyence Launches Real-Time Demand Platform To Refine Demand Generation appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The Problem

Revenue professionals understand the significance of selling to existing customers rather than acquiring new ones: It cuts down on acquisition costs, enhances overall efficiency, fosters enduring customer relationships and maximizes the value of each customer. With that in mind, Avalara wanted to uncover new ways to deliver greater value to its customers and optimize revenue opportunities based on their existing contracts.

“Avalara’s customer account teams handle a high volume of interactions, driving roughly 3,000 deals to close each month,” said Sean Flynn, SVP of Global Sales at Avalara. “We put great emphasis on providing best-in-class customer service to make compliance less taxing for our customers.”

The Solution

In 2021, Avalara’s customer account management (CAM) team adopted revenue intelligence platform Gong to capture customer interactions — such as calls, emails, video conferences and more — to surface insights that would help teams boost engagement and increase efficiencies to drive more revenue. Leveraging Gong Insights, the CAM team was able to identify the behaviors that contributed to growth and those that hindered opportunities.

“For customers like Avalara that have a large and diverse customer base, automated insights that uncover opportunities for account growth can make a big difference,” said Ben Brownlee, Gong’s Chief Customer Officer.

These insights allowed CAM leaders to provide personalized coaching that would improve customer interaction quality. They could also communicate the value of their solutions more effectively and assist their sales teams in achieving better results.

The Results

After seeing the widespread adoption of the platform throughout the CAM team, Avalara decided to extend the use of Gong to other departments, including customer success, customer development, product marketing, sales development, new business sales and support. Gong rapidly became integral to these teams’ most critical workflows, enabling Avalara teams to:

• Achieve a better understanding of their customers, which enabled them to build robust sales pipeline and identify potential opportunities;
• Close new business deals more effectively through data-driven insights into customer needs and preferences;
• Provide a more personalized and value-driven customer service experience; and
• Analyze customer interactions and behaviors to identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities to maximize revenue from Avalara’s existing customer base.

“With Gong, we have accurate, market-driven insights on how to deliver the best possible experience for customers on every transaction, which has been instrumental in helping us develop a culture of value in every customer interaction,” concluded Flynn.

The post How Avalara Drives Lifetime Value For Customers With AI-Enabled Insights From Gong appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The Challenge

Perceptyx’s focus on customer success and innovation has led to rapid growth. Over the past two years, the company made three strategic acquisitions to deepen its continuous listening capabilities, expand market share and cement its leadership in enterprise-class employee experience. Those acquisitions include:

• Waggl, an employee feedback solution that crowdsources comments/ideas in real-time;
• CultureIQ, a research-backed solution for assessing current culture and closing culture gaps; and
• Cultivate, an AI-enabled platform that provides text and sentiment analysis, coaching, nudges and proactive feedback.

While these acquisitions presented growth opportunities, they also brought a challenge: How could Perceptyx align disparate sales cultures while maintaining the momentum demanded by a growing organization?

The Solution

The company decided to align its GTM function around one principle: The value it brings to customers. Leadership needed a reliable way to drive sales effectiveness and productivity at scale, sell higher and expand customer relationships. Most importantly, leaders needed to transition from a transactional mindset to value-based selling.

“We wanted to grow the business profitability by consistently and effectively demonstrating the value we can bring to customers to help them solve unique business issues,” said Jason Hahn, Chief Revenue Officer of Perceptyx. “We chose ValueSelling Associates because they gave us a very simple, yet very powerful, methodology to work from.”

Hahn — alongside the company’s SVP of Enterpise Sales, VP of Customer Sales, VP of RevOps and Growth Enablement Manager — launched a sales transformation to enable sellers to uncover and share the unique value Perceptyx could provide customers. The transformation included four components:

1. A ValueSelling Framework, which included ValueSelling workshops to align the revenue engine across internal teams, tailored resources to apply the methodology and implementation of the eValuePrompter (eVP) tool in Salesforce with eVP user trainings;
2. A sales training program, featuring a bi-weekly sales training program for the entire revenue team, monthly individual team trainings, instructor-led ValueSelling workshops and multiple live onboarding trainings per new hire;
3. Marketing collateral in the form of customer-facing materials aligned to the ValueSelling Framework to ensure consistent messaging and build brand trust; and
4. Sales assets to drive adoption of ValueSelling, including revenue playbooks, sales proposals and a growth enablement charter.

“Two things really stood out for us around ValueSelling,” said Sarah Stites, Growth Enablement Manager of Perceptyx. “The first was the customization of the program. The content was highly focused on our buyer personas and their unique business issues. Second, the ValueSelling sales methodology supports multiple customer-facing teams. Having a marketing workshop and a revenue leader workshop in advance of the sellers was key to aligning teams and fundamental to our success.”

The Results

Within a year of implementing its value-based sales approach, Perceptyx realized:

• A 56% increase in ACV; and
• A 30% increase in multi-year contracts.

Additionally, the new approach helped Perceptyx close the largest deal in the company’s history and secure two of the most valuable logos in their marketplace.

By training everyone from marketing to revenue leadership on the ValueSelling Framework, Perceptyx created an ecosystem to drive adoption. Specifically:

• Marketing created standardized, customer-facing collateral aligned to the methodology;
• Sales gained the skills to have more impactful business conversations at the CHRO level, transform their qualification process and sell on value;
• Revenue leadership gained more accurate data and was equipped to have more productive coaching sessions; and
• The company implemented a mentorship program that provided veteran sellers with a framework for replicating best practices and communicating that information to new hires.

The shift to value-based selling has transformed Perceptyx’s sales culture. It’s equipped the sales team with a common language to more effectively communicate deal strategy and provided selling tools that reveal why they win, why they lose and how to differentiate from the competition based on a client organization’s unique business challenges. Enabled with a consistent, proven way to approach opportunities and the supporting collateral to integrate ValueSelling into their daily routines, seller confidence is at an all-time high. This sales culture of collaboration and consistency has also enabled Perceptyx to significantly decrease new seller ramp time. 

The post How Perceptyx Transformed Its Revenue Engine & Increased ACV By 56% appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The Challenge

Lionsgate leaves no stone unturned in its efforts to connect with movie-goers ahead of movie releases. The highly successful North American film company uses various channels, including physical promotional materials such as posters and print graphics.

However, evolving marketing competition highlighted a need for broader ad interactivity capabilities. Many companies in the entertainment industry rely on QR codes to direct scanners to online resources, such as a website that lists showtimes or movie trailers. Given how QR codes proved themselves as successful content gateways, Lionsgate wanted to incorporate them into their marketing, but they needed essential functionalities, such as dynamic editing capabilities, better tracking and stronger data analytics collection.

The Solution

Lionsgate committed to finding a QR code platform that would provide the necessary functionalities its team couldn’t get from their current solution, including:

• On-demand destination edits; and
• Robust location tracking capabilities.

After experimenting with various QR code vendors, Lionsgate quickly identified Beaconstac, a QR code management platform, as the ideal solution to meet its needs.

“I created accounts for the top-three QR code solutions that came up in my research, one of which was Beaconstac,” said Mike Cabellas, a Digital Marketing Consultant at Lionsgate. “I found that the other two solutions weren’t as easy to use. I couldn’t test many dynamic QR code functionalities on the other platforms.”

Entertainment marketing campaigns are prone to multiple pivots, and Lionsgate needed a versatile platform that allowed modifications on demand. Beaconstac’s dynamic QR code offerings, which provide flexibility in link destinations and other customizations post-deployment, enabled Lionsgate to change the links in their preexisting QR codes without having to reprint entirely new material.

Given its breadth of creative offerings, Lionsgate caters to a wide variety of demographics. The company needed a reliable ad-tracking system that gave accurate insights into whether it was reaching the right audience or not. Beaconstac provided the necessary tools to set up an extensive tracking system and helped Lionsgate home in on exact geographical areas to monitor engagement.

The Results

By providing the Lionsgate team with the tools required to improve QR-code-enhanced movie marketing activities, Beaconstac helped significantly bolster engagements worldwide. Using these features, Lionsgate measured more than 12,000 engagements across 65 major cities nationwide.

Through unlimited dynamic modifications and the ability to pinpoint engagements by location, Lionsgate accurately determined whether its marketing messages were hitting the right demographic and adjusted accordingly.

“The platform has performed great,” said Cabellas. “Based on our ROI, it’s been terrific. It’s definitely one of the better purchases we’ve made since I’ve been here. As I’ve said, it just works!”

The post How Lionsgate Boosted Engagement By 12K Impressions With QR Codes appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

The Challenge

Megan Verkamp, LHP’s Director of Content Strategy, explained that “historically, we’ve dealt mostly with internal combustion companies for traditional gas vehicles, but as we transitioned into more autonomous and electronic vehicle (EV) startups and mid-level companies, we needed effective ways to reach them.”

To start building awareness in the EV space, LHP adopted a simple approach to ABM — some paid social, email and display — but the company quickly realized it needed something more robust. In its first stab at ABM, the marketing team relied on a combination of paid social and retargeting through the company website with mixed results and uneven ROI.

The Solution

To gain more visibility into ABM activities — and build more predictable revenue plays — LHP partnered with RollWorks in 2021 with three core strategies in mind:

• Target and advance accounts in EV space;
• Reach $1BN+ companies in EV space; and
• General retargeting.

The first step for LHP was connecting RollWorks with its CRM, HubSpot.

“The data has been incredibly useful, from intent topics to who’s playing on our website or engaging with our ads,” explained Verkamp. “We track leads coming from RollWorks weekly. From there, dashboards in HubSpot show us who came in, and we’re able to pass that along to SDRs to follow up.”

In keeping with their goals, the LHP team primarily focuses on how many leads move down the funnel in a given month or quarter, which is a significant shift for LHP.

“If we didn’t have the integration, we’d just be tracking vanity metrics like click-through rates, impressions and clicks,” said Verkamp. “Because marketing was never seen as a lead generator until a few years ago, we must show the return for any investment we make. Being able to do that from the connection between RollWorks and HubSpot is fantastic.”

To encourage better alignment with sales, the marketing team also instituted monthly meetings to share metrics and trends.

The Results

Since choosing RollWorks as its ABM partner, LHP has increased leads, brand awareness and lead quality tenfold.

“Since introducing RollWorks over the past 16-18 months, we’ve seen an incremental jump in the quality of leads we’re reaching, as well as the value of those leads,” explained Verkamp. “This year alone we’re already seeing 3X the value of leads year on year.”

In 2022, the company saw so much ROI with RollWorks that the marketing team decreased Google-direct spend and cut back significantly on LinkedIn and Facebook advertising.

“We were doing the same thing on LinkedIn but spending 3X as much and not seeing nearly the same results,” added Verkamp. “RollWorks is getting visibility to customers we otherwise wouldn’t for a relatively low cost.”

The new investment strategy is working. With three recently closed $1M deals under its belt, the marketing team can confidently attribute these wins to the brand awareness and retargeting plays that RollWorks enables.

“Partnering with RollWorks has been incredible for our pipeline,” Verkamp explained. “It would never be on that list to cut the budget. We’re putting more into RollWorks because it benefits the business.”

The post How LHP Grew Average Lead Value By 3X appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

To help increase engagement and promote more consistent monitoring, Stack Moxie’s marketing team envisioned a customer success campaign that delivered a single view of weekly statistics about the product activity to each user — specifically the account admin.

The Challenge

As a product-led growth company with legacy marketing automation, Stack Moxie faced challenges in executing its weekly digest. Compiling and pulling in product activity data for all users from an organization became a mammoth, manual task for its lean marketing team. Additional challenges included:

• Bottlenecks due to dependency on developers; and
• Friction in personalizing emails and scaling up its manual effort to cater to Stack Moxie’s growing customer database.

To show the value of Stack Moxie’s product, the marketing team spent a lot of time identifying the right product events and extracting relevant data. That challenge came with its own complexities, such as dependency on engineering resources to get the data from a product analytics tool or writing SQL queries that fetched data from a database table.

The company was also struggling to:

• Identify users from the same organization or team;
• Target the account admins; and
• Personalize the weekly or monthly metrics to each account.

One person from Stack Moxie’s marketing team would spend nearly 50 hours every month compiling a list of all organizations from its database, dedupe and extract a final list, match and group users by the organization, fetch their email addresses and run a compilation to match the org IDs in product statistics with the group IDs to generate the metrics matrix.

To summarize, Stack Moxie’s marketing team encountered hurdles in translating the right product events to personalized metrics that visualize value to customers. Additionally, dependency on developers or the data team was a huge clog in the wheel. To help alleviate those issues, the company turned to Inflection.io, a marketing automation platform built for B2B product-led companies.

The Solution

Stack Moxie leveraged Inflection in three key areas:

1. Fetching Product Activity

Stack Moxie tags and pushes its product events to the Snowflake database through Segment. Since Inflection connects with both Segment and Snowflake via an out-of-the-box integration, Stack Moxie can connect Inflection and product activity events quickly.

2. Embedding Value

With Inflection’s token editor, Stack Moxie pulls the product metrics relevant to its customers. At the same time, Inflection reads the person and account information from Stack Moxie’s CRM. The unified product data, user and account information provides a single view of the users to Stack Moxie’s marketing team. With that information in hand, the marketing team can then mobilize it into an email.

3. Scaling Campaigns

Inflection automates the previously manual process of querying data and matching it with account information. For the admin user, the digest email gives an overview of the health of their marketing, sales and revenue tech stacks while saving them from the pain of monitoring individual testing activity and their team’s progress.

The Results

Through those efforts, Stack Moxie’s marketing team was able to:

• Save more than 50 hours of manual effort each week;
• Showcase the value realized from their product to admins and organizations by summarizing the key data points;
• Drive product adoption through their weekly communication to admins with valuable insights and nudging them to log in to the product;
• Engage their users with a hyper-personalized customer success email digest;
• Reduce repeated, non-value-add time for Stack Moxie by automating the process and scaling it to their growing user volume; and
• Provide air support to their customer success (CS) team with deeper insights to identify early signs of churn and see hand-raisers among the accounts to upsell and expand.

“How Inflection enables us to do product-led growth is brilliant,” said Stack Moxie’s Lines. “Stack Moxie’s digest email has been a huge success in driving product adoption and improved customer engagement. We continue to grow and so does our ability to scale marketing and customer success with Inflection.”

The post How Stack Moxie Saved Its Marketing Team 50 Hours Of Manual Effort Per Week appeared first on Demand Gen Report.

It was critical for the marketing team to communicate that Walker & Dunlop was still alive and well. The company had to let clients and prospects know that financing deals were still getting done and that they could count on Walker & Dunlop to be a voice of clarity and confidence in a market that was suddenly facing uncertainty.

The Challenge

Given the large sums of money changing hands, commercial real estate finance is an industry built on trusted relationships. Historically, sales teams across the industry relied on face-to-face client interaction to showcase their expertise, build trust and close deals at conferences, on golf courses, over dinners and wine and maybe even cigars. So, how could the company build virtual relationships — at scale — to instill trust and client engagement when travel and events had come to a complete halt?

Marketing identified several key goals to solve this challenge, such as:

• Continuing to display a confident brand and extending its leadership in core markets;
• Building awareness and fueling expansion for high-growth start-up divisions; and
• Providing marketing and sales support for financing and property sales teams across the country, spanning 250 brokers and bankers.

Walker & Dunlop’s CEO, Willy Walker, saw an opportunity to create a high-visibility weekly webcast that would help establish the company’s reputation as a thought leader in the commercial real estate space. To that end, he tasked the marketing team with “building our brand as big and fast as we can.”

The Solution

After recalling that Walker wanted the webcast released “next week,” Zegal turned to Folloze, a buyer experience platform, to help his team build out a series of customer-facing webcasts featuring Walker and empower Walker & Dunlop’s 200-strong sales force to turn virtual relationships into revenue-generating opportunities.

The plan was to create an integrated, multichannel program with Walker on a virtual center stage, interviewing high-profile guests such as governors, NBA stars, Harvard professors and leading economists. The goal with “Walker Webcast” was to generate buzz for the company’s role in commercial real estate financing, provide fresh perspectives, create inspiration and foster education for all types of personal topics, including how to be a better leader, live a healthier lifestyle and become a better citizen.

The webcast series was launched in less than a week, with Folloze as the content and engagement hub. Walker & Dunlop relied on Folloze Boards, which are blank digital canvases that help marketers build content-rich destinations and campaigns across the entire B2B journey. The Boards are designed to transform customer data, such as firmographic, buying stage and intent, into memorable buying experiences that guide buyers through each stage of their journey.

Zegal said the proof of how easy it is to work with Folloze Boards is that no one on the team even talks about it — “it’s seamless: You create graphics, drag and drop and it’s done.”

Walker & Dunlop also built social media outreach programs around the webcasts, created a large YouTube following and turned the webcast into a podcast.

The Results

The webcast became a weekly engagement touch point with clients, investors, recruits and employees — keeping Walker & Dunlop top of mind.

“The weekly series has become the biggest webcast in our industry, with more than five million views across all channels — and we’ve surpassed more than 100 episodes,” Zegal said. “Folloze makes it easy to manage and showcase a huge amount of content every week.”

Key results of the collaboration with Folloze, the “Walker Webcast” and adjacent materials include:

• The podcast landing in the top 3% of all business podcasts, in terms of downloads;
• 1,500 registrations the first week of “Walker Webcast”;
• More than 5 million webcast views across channels;
• “Winning multiple awards and receiving several accolades,” according to Zegal;
• More than 100 episodes published and counting; and
• 150,000 visitors to Walker & Dunlop’s Folloze Board to date.

“People come to us for our expertise with something that’s pretty complicated, so there’s an element of trust and familiarity involved,” Zegal said. “Engagement is critical with this audience. Folloze helps us project that reputation as a company that our clients want to work with.”

Thanks to data from analytics integrated into the Folloze platform via partner Demandbase, Walker & Dunlop also discovered a high correlation between engagement with existing and net-new customers with the brand program: 69% of existing active accounts and 64% of new accounts participated in the Walker Webcasts.

“Most significantly, $7.5 billion of net-new transaction volume in 2020 came from companies that attended the webcast,” Zegal said. “So, we gained share, and we became No. 1 in our market in that year — while others were struggling, we rose to the top.”

From a CRM perspective, Zegal said the webcasts have proven to be great conversation starters and a powerful re-engagement tool.

“We had one client that watched 40 webcasts,” he said. “People are engaged, and engagement turns virtual relationships into real relationships and real monetary value. It also changes the dynamic with our CEO — when he walks in a room during a sales call, his presence has a halo effect.”

Zegal said he also plans to roll out Folloze to additional account teams across the business to create destination sites with personalized content for key clients.

“One of the reasons we went with Folloze was that we knew that it worked within our ecosystem, within our tech stack,” he explained. “There is a lot of potential to expand what we’re doing with Folloze, help build better relationships and cross-sell into our key accounts.”

The post How Walker & Dunlop Launched A Webcast & Generated 1500 Registrations In 1 Week appeared first on Demand Gen Report.