“If I have $5 million to spend, should I invest it in marketing or hire more salespeople?” When Tracy Earles, Sr. Director of Marketing Analytics at NetApp, was asked this question by the NetApp President, he saw it as a way to show the value of marketing’s contributions to the revenue organization.
Typical B2B sales cycles at companies like NetApp can run for a year or more, and the impact of marketing efforts may not be visible for months—or even years. To make a case for investing more in the marketing department, Tracy needed to figure out how to show marketing ROI and communicate the power of marketing touchpoints in generating pipeline.
Evolution from Lead-Based to Account-Based Marketing
In an enterprise environment, basing your revenue engine on leads is problematic. While leads can provide early indicators of demand, they have significant limitations. First, buying decisions are made by teams of individuals who serve different roles in the evaluation. The reality is that the contact who comes through as a lead is typically not part of the actual buying team.
More so, key decision makers are now skilled at avoiding becoming leads entirely. And like many enterprise companies, NetApp has pivoted to account-based marketing, which elevates the role of marketing by focusing on buying committees at the account level, rather than chasing up individuals at the lead level.
Tracking Accounts and Their Buyer Journeys
NetApp has tens of thousands of current accounts – five times as many prospective accounts – and must normalize hundreds of thousands of unique job titles in order to organize and support buying groups in manageable categories, such as departments.
For the marketing analytics team at NetApp, data collection and tracking have become key to building out buyer groups. Not only must NetApp collect digital engagement like web activities, including page visits and form fills, ad interactions, content downloads, and webinar attendance, they also need to store and measure offline engagement. Conference attendance and customer dinners are just as important for marketing ROI analysis.
Pipeline Attribution Complexity
While contribution to the pipeline is a critical responsibility for the NetApp marketing team, some elements of what influences pipeline generation have historically been extremely hard to measure. One element is the impact of brand marketing campaigns, which are part of the buyer’s journey but difficult to tie directly to revenue.
The challenge is amplified by the sheer volume of data that goes through the marketing department. NetApp’s data science team must analyze all marketing touchpoints to identify which ones impact the pipeline and should be measured against marketing ROI.
The goal is to identify low-volume, high-value touchpoints using attribution modeling. By visualizing ROI data in CaliberMind, Netapp can identify the highest-value campaigns. Email may have the highest ROI with near-zero cost, but it has limited elasticity and can’t infinitely scale. Events, on the other hand, are high-cost and low-volume but deliver the most attributed pipeline.
CaliberMind Surge Scoring
John Schoofs, Director of Data Science & Strategy at NetApp, wanted to “give the sales team a better tool than cold prospecting to build pipeline. Why not elevate the target accounts showing signs of life?”
Across thousands of marketing touchpoints, not all of them are meaningful. But when taken as an aggregate, they can indicate a warm account. NetApp and Calibermind collaborated to develop surge scoring as a way to push valuable engagement data to the sales team.
An email is delivered to each salesperson at the beginning of the week, showcasing accounts that they care about and that have actively and recently engaged with the NetApp brand, even if they haven’t reached the qualified lead stage.
In the first quarter of using the surge scoring email initiative (powered by functionality within CaliberMind), NetApp was able to identify engagement surges in 20% of priority target accounts, leading the sales team to open 733 new opportunities within the quarter.
Improving Marketing and Sales Communication with Ask Cal
Marketing and sales speak different languages, and salespeople struggle to understand the data that marketing sends their way. That’s why a strong partnership between marketing and sales is essential.
To do this, marketing must meet sales where they live, in Salesforce. CaliberMind breaks down silos and brings valuable buyer intelligence data directly into the Salesforce Account object using our embedded machine learning AI, Ask Cal.
When a salesperson prompts Ask Cal for insights about an account, they receive relevant and organized information about the account’s buyer journey, including the most important marketing touchpoints, right in Salesforce. Ask Cal helps by associating contacts into a buying team and providing guidance on follow-up actions and demos. With CaliberMind, NetApp can distill thousands of marketing touchpoints to reduce noise and help salespeople target highly engaged accounts.
Proving Marketing ROI with CaliberMind
CaliberMind uses advanced attribution modeling to help enterprises like NetApp improve their marketing and sales alignment by democratizing their marketing engagement data. With powerful tools like Ask Cal, marketing can deliver actionable insights directly to sales, improving speed to engagement and accelerating decision-making.
Read more customer stories to learn how they leverage Calibermind to prove marketing team success.
