Communications systems provider realizes the power of marketing automation

The Company
Ciena is a leading provider of communications systems, software and services, and aims to solve network challenges for service provider, enterprise, government and research, and education organizations across the globe.

The Challenge
Ciena implemented a variety of marketing programs regularly; however, it faced several challenges in achieving successful execution including delayed follow-up, generic communications, costly outsourcing and difficulty in showing campaign results. New prospects were often buried in the database for months waiting for cultivation, because the marketing team had a difficult time creating relevant campaigns. In other words, the marketing team lacked the tools needed to efficiently nurture incoming prospects and measure the effectiveness of those campaigns.

Ciena's marketing managers realized the value of sending timely, personalized and relevant messages to every contact in their database. However, their existing database and marketing platform was difficult to use and manage, and gave them very little collective insight into their contacts. For this reason, Ciena often resorted to communicating with contacts based on their general interests or attributes in the database.

The Solution
Since implementing Silverpop, Ciena has automated follow-up communications so new contacts and potential leads receive timely communications that are most relevant to them. Each communication is now tailored to the specific need of prospects, enabling Ciena to build stronger connections with these individuals. In addition, marketing managers can spend their time creating automated cultivation tracks rather than one-off email blasts.

Based on business rules, key prospects are filtered out and automatically routed to telesales for further qualification. Said Daniela Szymczak, marketing cultivation manager, "Now we can spend more time strategizing and developing key cultivation campaigns and put them on autopilot. Using marketing automation allows us to nurture all of our leads while bringing key prospects to the surface."

The Results
Today, Ciena is using Silverpop for multiple automated lead nurturing campaigns that are both industry and product-specific. "The main value of the cultivation campaigns comes from the ability to increase the level of engagement of our leads and for further sales qualification. In fact, the cultivation campaigns we have built are responsible for 40 percent  of all of our white paper downloads. More importantly, nearly 40 percent of all requests for sales follow-up were made immediately after a cultivation event," Szymczak said. 

"Overall, our sales team has a better understanding of marketing and is in-tune with marketing programs as well as follow-up activities," Szymczak said. "This has led to further collaboration between Ciena sales and marketing teams, including working with sales to create nurture campaigns for cross-sell and upsell opportunities."

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Download the Ciena case study PDF on building key marketing cultivation campaigns