Gaining time and insights with Silverpop Engage B2B

The Company
Third Brigade specializes in server and application protection for dynamic datacenters. The company’s advanced software and vulnerability response service allows virtual machines and physical servers to become self-defending, keeping them safe from the latest online threats. This comprehensive protection helps customers prevent data breaches and business disruptions, enables compliance and supports operational cost reductions. 

The Challenge
Generating sales leads is job number one for the Third Brigade marketing operations team. To help ensure a steady flow of prospects, it employed a multilayered approach that included email marketing, personalized web URL creation tools and web forms to garner and track leads. However, its lead-management process was largely manual and required gathering scattered pieces of information from diverse locations and was excessively time-consuming. Large amounts of information had to be cut and pasted into spreadsheets to get an active view of campaign metrics like reach and opens, etc., and the ability to take a historical look at lead activity was a particularly daunting task. In addition, the company had no automated lead-scoring system, making it impossible to quickly identify those prospects likely to be most receptive to a sales presentation.

“If we wanted to know which activities a lead had participated in—downloading a white paper, completing a survey or registering for an online seminar—we’d have to manually go through each historical campaign and try to find and then relate the data,” said George McTaggart, vice president of marketing, Third Brigade.

Though the company used Salesforce.com to store lead data, it lacked an integrated and unified interface that effectively tracked and managed marketing activities on a real-time and lifetime basis.

The Solution
Third Brigade chose Silverpop’s Engage B2B marketing automation solution for its breadth of capabilities, including lead scoring and cost-effectiveness, as well as the responsiveness, agility and support the company provided. Engage B2B’s analysis component has given Third Brigade the power to track individual emails, surveys, opens and click thrus, making it easy to identify which campaigns are successful and which are not. In addition, the dashboard reporting feature, with its graphic summaries of key metrics, has given Third Brigade an efficient way to view important data. As an added benefit, the “right now” access of the Engage B2B community forum has been an excellent communication tool for exchanging ideas with others.

“The community forum feature is invaluable and a great way to connect with other Engage B2B users,” said McTaggart. “Through the community forum, we’ve been able to offer expertise on APIs and microsites to other users, and the assistance has been reciprocated. It allows Engage B2B users to learn new and creative techniques from each other.”

The Results
Silverpop’s Engage B2B marketing automation capabilities have given Third Brigade’s marketers a competitive edge by cutting at least two hours of laborious campaign-management activities each week, enabling them to focus on adding strategic value to their marketing efforts. And choosing the Engage B2B solution has also given Third Brigade marketers a clearer overview of their marketing efforts.

“Engage B2B saves us a lot more than time,” McTaggart said. “We get a much more cohesive approach to identifying and understanding the activities that are working and those that are not. It gives us the ability to really look at the complete user picture. We can now see how our prospects respond to certain campaigns, which was impossible before. We can pinpoint what needs to be changed and where we can afford to be a little risky. Also, the solution provides data that I can use to justify changes to campaigns or ways to develop new ones.”

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