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Advent Surpasses Marketing-Sourced Booking Goals With Revamped Lead Management Strategy

Advent Surpasses Marketing-Sourced Booking Goals With Revamped Lead Management Strategy

Business-changing events, such as acquisitions, employee departures and the adoption of new technology, can hamstring any company’s marketing and sales efforts. For the portfolio management and accounting software company Advent, this was no different. The company turned to The Pedowitz Group, a revenue marketing consulting firm, to assess and formulate its lead management process, align its marketing and sales teams on those processes and formulate a true revenue marketing system.

The Challenge

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Advent’s initial Marketo implementation was done in 2016 on a tight, one-month timeline. The sales team could not be a part of any initial conversations on processes for setting up the basic Marketo instance. This led to severe misalignment between marketing and sales departments. The company stated that communication between the two groups was strenuous, with limited understanding and almost no common nomenclature between the groups.

In 2017, despite no real lead management system yet in place, the marketing team was tasked with sourcing 25% of total bookings. The company understood that this goal wasn’t feasible without reassessing its lead management process.

“Initially, there was this enormous lack of trust in the value of the leads we prioritized and passed along to the sales team,” said Nat Cramer, Senior Manager of Demand Generation Marketing at Advent. “There was not a lot of confidence in the demand gen team to target and score. We had a huge reliance on IT and sales ops for list pulls and data hygiene, and making sure things were passing correctly through our system.”

The Solution

The goal was to get Advent’s sales and marketing teams to agree on all lead management processes across Marketo and Salesforce. The company brought in The Pedowitz Group to review existing lead management process, including the definition of a sales ready lead, defined lead statuses, lead scoring and routing, lead processing, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and reporting and analytics.

The Pedowitz Group sat down with Advent’s marketing and sales team to:

  • Define the critical elements of the lead management process and create a guide for optimization in the marketing automation and CRM systems;
  • Confirm/define a qualified lead and lead (funnel) stages;
  • Document the life of a lead;
  • Confirm/validate lead routing and processing;
  • Validate lead scoring; and
  • Confirm/define standard funnel metrics.

“The key was trying to think of the internal teams that might be questioning, and think about what makes them tick,” said Cramer. “We had to understand what's in it for sales, IT and all the stakeholders to approve and go with Marketo.”

The Result

With the new lead management process in place, and by using Marketo programs and channels, Advent’s marketing team can attribute and track pipeline and revenue back to marketing programs and campaigns. With the implementation of a coordinated lead management process, the team is better positioned to track their lead funnel and see their impact on revenue. Cramer and his team ultimately surpassed their goal to source a quarter of the company’s bookings by 8%.

Once the lead management processes were in place, the team was able to better understand where leads were in the lifecycle and market to them appropriately. They could now automate nurture programs, which increased the number of deals in the pipeline. As a result of improved communication and alignment, lead scoring models and thresholds were refined, driving MQL accuracy and acceptance up to 80% from 5% within 90 days.

“We're feeling a sense of triumph,” said Cramer. “Sales ops has turned into our biggest fan; they see it working and they are happy we have an effective process in place.”

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