Global open source database provider uses Engage B2B to quickly create complex marketing campaigns and more effectively qualify and nurture leads

The Company
Ingres is the leading open source database management company. It is the world’s second largest open source company and the pioneer of the New Economics of IT, providing open source solutions at dramatically reduced cost than proprietary software vendors. As a leader in the New Economics of IT, Ingres delivers low cost and accelerated innovation to more than 10,000 customers worldwide.

The Challenge
Ingres is a growing company that needed to become more sophisticated in its marketing to better qualify and nurture its leads. While Ingres had hundreds of leads coming in through its Web site daily, only one person was responsible for qualifying them─an onerous and time-consuming task.  

“Our goal was to find a user-friendly solution that would help us easily identify the quality leads that were coming in through our Web site so that we could start nurturing them immediately,” said Jamie Crosby, director of business operations, Ingres.

The Solution
Ingres subsequently began its system selection process for a marketing automation tool. Led by Ingres’ CIO Doug Harr, a best practices team of people from marketing, IT and sales operations were brought together to define Ingres’ requirements. With its SaaS-based sourcing strategy, Ingres considered a fairly broad list of marketing automation providers before selecting Silverpop’s Engage B2B solution.  

One of the main reasons for choosing Engage B2B was Silverpop’s outstanding service during the sales cycle. “In less than four working days, we saw several Engage B2B demos, had questions answered regarding our technical requirements, and had on-site and Web meetings with Silverpop’s business and technical leaders,” Harr said. “There was a fast, personal rapport that developed between our team and Silverpop’s.”

It only took one month for Ingres to get set up and send out their first campaign using Engage B2B. Today, Ingres has fully integrated Engage B2B with Salesforce.com and is taking advantage of the lead-scoring and lead-nurturing capabilities to deliver the highest-quality leads to sales. To help qualify leads that come in through the Web site, Ingres launched an automated “triple-touch” campaign to help weed out unqualified leads early. Based on how prospects respond to a trio of emails and surveys, they are scored through Engage B2B and, based upon their accumulated point totals, either continue in Ingres’ 18-step nurture campaign for further qualification or are synched to Salesforce.com as a qualified lead.

Ingres also has a sizable international presence. Since Ingres has local offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France and Australia, half of its campaigns are dedicated toward its international offices in each of the local languages (English, French, German, Spanish and Italian). Future plans are to copy its entire 18-step nurture campaign into each of the local languages.

The Results
A key benefit for Ingres has been the ease of use of Engage B2B. “One of the major reasons we selected Engage B2B was the usability of the product,” Crosby said. “Because of Engage B2B’s Campaign GUI functionality, which allows users to easily create and visualize campaign flow, we have been able to on-board new users quickly and institute an impressive 24-hour turnaround time on creating all campaigns—even elaborate ones.”

Ingres’ triple-touch campaign and prequalification of prospects had an immediate positive impact on the company’s ability to efficiently handle the large volume of leads and need for rapid qualification. “We have a lot of visitors to our Web site that are solely interested in getting more information for their education,” Crosby said. “By implementing a triple-touch campaign for initial visitors, we are able to gauge real interest early on and weed out those leads that are not as qualified prior to placing prospects into our nurturing program. Not only does this allow us to pass better leads over to sales, but it has also made us more effective as a marketing organization overall.”

Download the Ingres case study PDF on making its marketing organization more effective with marketing automation