Sant

Software company uses automated lead-nurturing campaigns to engage prospects, deliver more quality leads and gain increased insight into impact on revenue

The Company
The Sant Corporation is a provider of software for sales proposal, RFP and document automation that improves sales effectiveness. Companies trust Sant to improve productivity, increase sales and deliver consistent sales documents to their customers. Sant is a privately held corporation headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The Challenge
Before deciding to implement a marketing automation solution, Sant had a very limited lead management program in place. The marketing group at Sant communicated with customers and prospects by using several cobbled-together email marketing solutions, and none were integrated with its CRM, which meant that sales had no insight into lead activity.

 “Our initial efforts at lead nurturing were entirely manual,” said Brian Vass, vice president of marketing, The Sant Corporation. “They involved managing spreadsheets of people at different steps of the campaign and trying to make sure they were getting the right communications at the right time. It became an effort too daunting for us to continue.”

The Solution
The marketing group soon came to the realization that Sant needed to implement a marketing automation solution to automate its nurture campaigns successfully and better engage with prospects and customers. “Our first step was to define our specific needs,” said Vass. “By the time we started looking, we knew we needed a tightly integrated solution that could accommodate multi-track lead-management campaigns with the ability to score leads and behavior over time so we could provide the highest-quality leads to our sales team.”

Vass looked at several marketing automation solutions, eventually selecting Silverpop Engage B2B. “It was the best fit for our business needs,” Vass said. “We selected Engage B2B because we had the greatest confidence in both the company and the product. Silverpop is a process-driven company that would provide us the best access to resources.”  

Today Sant uses Engage B2B for several modes of communications, including all its lead-nurture campaigns, its customer newsletter and maintenance announcements for its support organization. The marketing group is currently supporting three nurture efforts that include a general nurture and two industry-specific campaigns. All lead-nurturing campaigns include a series of emails that include value-added information such as links to white papers and articles that promote Sant’s value proposition. “We’d never be able to do sophisticated nurture campaigns without a solution like Engage B2B,” Vass said. “By integrating our data, we’re decreasing the likelihood of error and increasing the likelihood that we’re sending the highest-quality leads to sales.”

All leads coming through the Web site are scored automatically using Engage B2B’s Lead Scoring functionally and are then routed to Salesforce.com when leads have reached a certain score. A lead score will build up based on several factors, including title, Web-site activity and downloads. When a sales-ready lead is routed to Salesforce.com, the salesperson assigned that lead receives a sales alert to follow up on immediately. 

The Results
Sant uses Engage B2B to support its push into new markets by tailoring message content for each. “For us, the top benefit of Engage B2B is the nurture campaigns, especially now that we’re trying to break into several new vertical markets,” said Kimi Fowler, marketing systems manager, The Sant Corporation. “We’ve been able to take our general nurture efforts and mold them with the appropriate language to create industry-specific lead-nurturing campaigns. Once we put in the work up front, it really saves us a lot of time, and it’s bringing big benefits to our sales team.” Sant’s efforts in nurturing leads with engaging content have resulted in tripling the open and click-through rates.  

Another benefit has been the ability to understand the impact of marketing activities on sales revenue. “Previously, we didn’t have the right information to do a proper analysis of the impact of our campaigns,” Vass said. “Now we have the ability to look backwards from a sales opportunity and see which initiatives had the greatest effect. Being able to tie revenue back to the campaign justifies our investment.”

The sales force has reacted enthusiastically to Engage B2B. “Our salespeople are really positive about our Engage B2B activity because they see many more quality leads coming in,” Fowler said. “We started educating them about why it’s important to nurture leads and the value of these nurture campaigns. Before the economy took a downturn, sales had plenty of leads and didn't really need to worry about it. Now they understand that we need to nurture people to move them through the pipeline.”

Download the Sant Corporation PDF on the ability to deliver more quality leads and gain increased insight into impact on revenue