ATLANTA, April 21, 2009 - In this economy, sales reps can feel like they're searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack when seeking qualified leads. USA Financial Marketing® changed that paradigm using Silverpop Engage B2B's powerful marketing automation solution to score and nurture leads, increasing the number of qualified leads sent to sales by 50 percent.

USA Financial is an independent marketing organization that wholesales annuities and life insurance, and provides independent financial advisers marketing and financial adviser tools. The company's marketing team was delivering hundreds of leads to sales every month, but it was unable to determine the quality of the leads. The marketing technologies USA Financial employed provided no insight into its marketing programs' effectiveness or ROI, and wasn't integrated with technologies used by the sales force.

"Both our marketing and sales teams were frustrated," said Raeanne Thompson, vice president of marketing services, USA Financial. "The sales team was spending too much time trying to determine if prospects were qualified, and most of the leads marketing turned over to sales were ultimately not converting into opportunities."

USA Financial worked with The Annuitas Group, a Silverpop Engage B2B strategic partner, to help it build a lead-management process that included database segmentation, lead qualification, lead scoring and lead nurturing. Using surveys powered by Engage B2B, USA Financial began to ask prospects questions that captured important qualifying data. As more information about each lead came in, Silverpop's Engage B2B lead scoring capabilities would automatically identify prospects that would benefit from a nurture program as well as those ready to be routed to sales.  

"Because Engage B2B is integrated with Salesforce.com, our sales team can feed reporting data back into the marketing solution," Thompson said. "This allowed us to implement a closed-loop system that gave valuable insights to both sales and marketing."

"Companies benefit from a closed-loop marketing system that helps ensure cross-organizational data consistency, aligns sales and marketing goals and provides a view into leads at each stage of the sales cycle," said Bill Nussey, CEO of Silverpop. "It allows marketers to send qualified leads directly to each sales representative's CRM view, allowing the sales team to focus its time and energy on leads that are ready to buy."  

In addition to helping marketing better qualify leads, USA Financial uses Engage B2B to communicate with prospects and increase attendance at its monthly Discovery Day event, a major conversion driver in which potential clients get hands-on training in the company's products and services.

"There is a 70 percent likelihood that once a financial adviser attends our Discovery Day event, the adviser will engage with USA Financial and implement the strategies and services we provide," Thompson said. "Because we are engaging with much more highly qualified advisers, the number of Discovery Day attendees has increased significantly, which has a considerable impact on the success of our marketing program."

Before Engage B2B, USA Financial would spend thousands of dollars to launch a program and not know how effective it was. Today, they can monitor the success and performance of their campaigns. "We can move forward with the marketing tactics and channels that provide us the most 'bang for the buck,'" Thompson said.

About Silverpop
Silverpop's Engagement Marketing suite helps turn prospects into customers, and customers into fans. Silverpop's Web-based solutions enable companies worldwide to build relationships with customers and prospects through the creation, automation and delivery of relevant, online messaging.

Silverpop's Engage B2B platform seamlessly scores sales leads, nurtures them through the pipeline and measures campaign return-on-investment. And Silverpop's strategic counsel, service and support helps clients with the precise level of training and advice needed to quickly improve campaign results and ROI. Silverpop makes it easy and affordable for marketers to create, automate and execute campaigns...from first click to lifetime customer. With offices in the United States, England and Germany, Silverpop's engagement marketing technologies are used by industry-leading brands around the globe. Best practices and white papers are available at www.silverpop.com.

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