Transforming demand generation, boosting responses up to sixfold

Customers are more sophisticated and demanding than ever. Businesses recognize the critical importance of moving closer to their customers and anticipating customers’ emerging needs more effectively. According to the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, 95 percent of top performing organizations identified getting closer to customers as their most important strategic initiative over the next five years.¹ Inside IBM itself, this challenge is viewed with profound urgency. With revenues of nearly $100 billion and more than 400,000 employees, IBM’s approach to value creation requires an extraordinarily deep knowledge of customer business processes that can only be built upon intimate, trusted relationships.

To build these relationships, IBM recognized that it needed to transform the way it manages both responses and leads―accelerating its processes, improving visibility and performance evaluation and more effectively aligning marketing and sales. To select a new platform for its Marketing Automation Transformation initiative, IBM organized a team of more than 40 marketing power users, and IBM’s team identified more than 1,000 requirements. IBM also carefully reviewed and weighed industry analyst rankings for both campaign and lead management. Unica came out on top of this evaluation, satisfying all of IBM’s requirements. As implementation proceeded, IBM recognized that Unica fit its overall business and software growth strategy so well that it purchased the entire company in 2010.

Within IBM, Unica’s technologies help to automate demand generation with campaign and lead management. Unica’s technologies tightly integrate with these IBM technologies to provide a unified solution that leverages the experiences and insights of IBM’s most effective marketers:

• An IBM® Cognos® real-time operational reporting portal embedded in Unica’s user interface provides current information on clickthrough rates, campaign responses and responses sent to Unica Leads
• Centralized marketing databases running on IBM DB2®
• IBM WebSphere® Business Modeler for documenting improved business processes
• IBM Rational® ClearQuest® tools for managing project enhancements and defects
• IBM WebSphere Application Server with its integrated deployment manager for effective management of the entire application solution on both IBM System p® and System x® servers

Building trusted relationships

IBM has successfully implemented many integrated components of the Unica suite, from web analytics through lead delivery―and was ahead of schedule in doing so. “We’re at 300 percent of target,” says Melody Dunn, business leader, Marketing & Communications Operations, Automation. “We anticipated deploying Unica throughout five of IBM’s major geographical units in 2010. Instead, we deployed in twelve, and we brought China aboard two full months early.”

Says Zarina Lam Stanford, director, Software Group Demand Programs, North America, “We would be underestimating the benefits of Unica if we viewed this merely as a tool deployment. It truly is a transformational platform. It is helping us become not merely “market-driven,” but “individual driven” as we personalize messages for each particular responder. With Unica, the responder can guide where our conversation should go. That’s tremendously powerful. It’s already translating into more quality leads and better relationship building with buyers and prospects. And that is central to IBM’s value proposition: to build valuable, trusted relationships.”

Marketing automation slashes time-to-market from months and weeks to days and even hours

In many areas related to marketing planning, development and execution, says Stanford, “what used to take days, or sometimes weeks, can now be done within minutes.”

Content syndication offers one powerful example. With IBM’s older processes, it sometimes required 30 days to create response handling and landing page URLs. Using a new web-based registration page creation tool developed by IBM, demand programs professionals simply register the tactic into Unica. These stages of the process now take two hours or less. After asset syndication, loading of responses now takes one day instead of a week. The time then required to follow up with transactional emails has been cut from a week to an hour.

Marketing campaign delivery has seen similar improvements, says Liz Novakowski, database marketing manager, North America. “Tactic audience creation has always been tedious for us, involving many manual, loosely-connected efforts. Now that IBM Campaign connects directly to our contact marketing database, that process has been simplified. We can now see in real-time how our audiences develop based on criteria input for demographics, products, interests and suppressions, which wasn’t possible before. Previously, it could easily take us two to six weeks with many iterations and time lags to develop a tactic audience. Now, with standard, integrated processes, data and tools, we can achieve same day execution, from audience specification through actual tactic execution.”

Beyond pure speed, the new system is helping IBM marketers become far more agile and relevant. Says Novakowski, “By integrating Unica with our IBM contact marketing database, we get rapid feedback and tremendous insight into how various segments of our target audience are reacting to our communications. This is enabling us to fine-tune our overall contact strategy, refine who we converse with further, and improve how and when we interact with them.”

Taking timely action with real-time visibility

With IBM’s older systems, marketers often didn’t receive crucial information about campaign performance until the end of the quarter: far too late to make changes, or even to improve planning of future campaigns. Now, however, using Unica technology and IBM Cognos reporting, marketers can get nearly instant updates on campaign results―information that can be used to drive improvements almost immediately.

“With Unica,” says Stanford, “we lay out a paid search campaign, and nearly the minute after it goes live, we can already see the relative performance of each search engine. Wow. At IBM, we often talk about the importance of visibility. This is a perfect example.”

In one project, says Brian Mackey, director, BT/IT Marketing Transformation, “We’d paid three different search vendors to prioritize search words for us. Thanks to the new reporting, we could tell within hours that 90 percent of our responses were coming from one vendor. This is information we can use to adjust our current campaign and plan future spending.”

Nurturing the dialogue with customers to achieve better results

Response nurturing―guiding the dialogue with potential customers who aren’t yet ready to buy, and forwarding them to salespeople when they become ready―can significantly improve sales performance. While some IBM marketers had experimented with manual nurturing, IBM had no systematic or automated way to nurture potential customers. That’s changing: as the new system based on Unica rolls out, IBM marketers are gaining easy self-service ways to set up their own marketing campaigns and nurture streams. By doing so, they are helping to ensure that responders have the right conversation with the right IBM resources at the right time. Every responder guides his or her own conversation with IBM, and IBM replies individually. The responder gains more control, and the dialogs lead to better results.

“Unica technology allowed us to build nurture streams that can automatically react to responders, make sure they receive consistent messaging and offers, route them to the proper Lead Development Representatives and track them at every step,” says Mackey.

Six-fold increase in clickthrough rate

According to Stanford, “nurtured” touches have consistently outperformed “standard” touches. “By using more relevant content, we’re averaging twice the open rate, six times the clickthrough rate and three times the click-to-open rate. Even our lowest nurture email clickthrough rates are twice the best we’d achieved through standard email.”

As IBM has gained experience, its automated response nurture streams are becoming more sophisticated—and even more successful.

Partnership between marketing and sales

Unica creates automated routing and routing rules that pass records to Lead Development Representatives (LDRs), providing a consolidated view of customer and account information. This helps to reduce the time LDRs spend in pre- and post-call research.

“LDRs are now armed with insights about the responder that help them tailor call content,” says Lara Moliterni, senior software sales manager at ibm.com North America. “With valuable information at their fingertips, LDRs can have smart and meaningful dialogs with the responders, ultimately improving their productivity and extending the IBM trusted relationship value.”

With higher quality and credibility, marketing leads will generate higher sales accept rate and tighter teaming between marketing and sales. This common end-to-end visibility further enhances the integration and partnership between marketing and sales.


Solution Components

Hardware
· IBM® Power Systems™
· IBM System x®

Software
· IBM Cognos® BI
· IBM DB2® for Linux UNIX and Windows
· IBM Rational® ClearQuest®
· IBM WebSphere® Application Server
· IBM WebSphere Business Modeler
· IBM Campaign™
· IBM Distributed Marketing™
· IBM eMessage™
· IBM Leads™

For more information

Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit us at: www.unica.com

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