NetApp needed more than just account engagement alerts.
They wanted signal clarity at scale, sales-ready intelligence in Salesforce, and a smarter way to bridge marketing and sales with AI-driven buyer journeys.
NetApp is a global data infrastructure company that helps businesses manage, store, and protect data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments with intelligent data services, storage solutions, and AI-powered operations.
Industry: Data Infrastructure and Cloud Operations
Employee Size: 12,000
HQ: San Jose, California
Netapp has over 1,000 salespeople, 250 to 300 marketers, and a data science team delivering $6 billion in revenue. Tracy Earles, Sr. Director, Marketing Analytics at NetApp, and his team faced big challenges in managing and pulling insights from a vast collection of marketing touchpoints. Figuring out how to scale operations—while also showing marketing campaign ROI—required more than existing revenue systems could provide.
Evolving Beyond Traditional Lead Models
At the same time, the limitations of traditional lead-based marketing became more apparent in NetApp’s enterprise sales environment. NetApp sells high-value capital equipment, typically purchased by buying teams made up of multiple roles. The people who come through marketing as “leads” are almost never the decision-makers. Contacts with purchasing power have become skilled at avoiding becoming leads.
Identifying Engagement Signals
NetApp needed a way to understand which accounts were engaging with their brand and campaigns before reaching the qualification stage. The marketing team needed to highlight early buying signals that weren’t opportunities yet but indicated future interest.
Tracy’s team had plenty of data, but separating valuable insights and signals from the noise required powerful and complex analysis. If NetApp wanted to automate sales alerts based on signal data, they needed a way to deliver the information to sales in an actionable way.
Developing Targeted Account Intelligence
To avoid overwhelming salespeople with low-intent signals, NetApp teams up with CaliberMind to create Surge Scoring. This reporting structure surfaced only the most engaged target accounts in a salesperson’s territory.
CaliberMind and NetApp built capabilities to track engagement touchpoints and measure the depth of the engagement. Instead of promoting one-off activities, the scoring model analyzed the aggregate of activities across accounts over a limited period and delivered valuable alerts for only accounts with significant and recent changes in engagement. Next, alerts are sent to the sales team with context about account engagement and suggested talking points.
Streamlining Sales Preparation Processes
Traditionally, SDRs received minimal information (name, phone number, last campaign engagement) and had to research on platforms like LinkedIn Sales Navigator. NetApp’s goal was to automatically attach engagement data to leads delivered through Salesforce, saving valuable preparation time. The team managed to reduce SDR lead pursuit time in half—a material improvement for the NetApp team.
Leveraging AI for Data Interpretation
With 160,000 job titles in their system (including 120,000 unique titles) and large volumes of engagement records, NetApp had to distill this data into usable insights. While many companies built rule tables for classification, NetApp experimented with large language models to interpret and categorize this data more effectively.
AI excels at data summarization, and by monitoring web activities, ad interactions, content downloads, and sales interactions, NetApp creates comprehensive buyer journeys and associates contacts together as buyer teams.
Weekly Engagement Reports for Sales Teams
Surge Scoring delivers email reports to each sales representative at the beginning of the week, highlighting accounts in their territory that are actively engaging with the NetApp brand, focusing only on accounts they care about, and showing meaningful engagement patterns.
Cross-Functional Executive Support
The Surge Scoring initiative received strong backing from leadership, with the CMO and VP of Digital championing the concept. NetApp’s President, who oversees sales and marketing, requested that Surge email usage be highlighted during quarterly business reviews, recognizing its value as a key metric.
Measurable Business Impact
In the first quarter of Surge email deployment, Surges were identified in approximately 20% of NetApp’s priority target account list. As a direct result, sales opened 733 new opportunities at those accounts within the quarter.
Buyer Journeys Delivered in Salesforce Using Ask Cal
The initiative recognized that marketing insights needed to be delivered where salespeople are already working—directly in Salesforce. Using Ask Cal, CaliberMind’s embedded machine learning model, Calibermind organizes relevant engagement and buying team data on the Salesforce Account object.
Ask Cal also provides guidance on follow-up actions and demos, reduces sales prep time, and improves targeting for prospecting. Thousands of marketing touchpoints are distilled into a comprehensive buyer journey report to reduce noise and help sales focus on the right accounts, at the right time.
Marketers have millions of lines of data, but without a way to translate touchpoints into insights, Sales is left in the dark, and Marketing can’t prove the ROI for their campaigns. For GTM alignment, revenue teams must build trust and collaboration through democratized data.
CaliberMind uses advanced attribution modeling to shine light on engagement insights by reducing marketing noise and meeting salespeople where they live—in Salesforce. Using Ask Cal, Calibermind’s embedded AI, sales teams can self-service insights about any account, receiving high-value data about buyer journeys, action items, and demos.
Read more customer stories to learn how our customers depend on Calibermind to prove marketing team success.
CaliberMind was made to help B2B marketers make sense of their data so they can make decisions with confidence and scale faster.
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