Synchronized Customer Engagement: How Oracle Eloqua Can Streamline and Enhance Lead Management

A company’s success depends upon marketing and sales working hand in hand. Marketing essentially helps sales close more deals faster. This requires proper communication and sharing of both data and leads. In fact, lead management is essential to both marketing and sales. If your lead management is efficient and both your marketing and sales teams are working together and communicating well, then your salespeople can focus more on selling products to qualified customers rather than nurturing potential customers. They can leave that to marketing.

Relationship One spoke to Sarah Smith, Marketing Operations Manager at Thomson Reuters, on the Inspired Marketing Podcast about how marketing automation can clean up and enhance your lead management system. For 15 years, Smith has worked to improve in-house marketing process and the customer experience at Thomson Reuters via enterprise systems and technologies. Her current role sees her using Oracle Eloqua to help marketing and sales streamline how they qualify and communicate with prospects through the funnel.

Previously, her organization had adopted a format that created a new lead every single time someone submitted some type of form on their website. However, the same person could submit multiple different forms over the course of a single day or month. These forms could cross different product lines, which would create a disjointed customer experience, as these people might then get calls from multiple salespeople unaware of the other leads generated for the same person in the system.

One Lead Per Contact

In late 2017, her organization started moving to a more centralized demand center, so they thought it was a good idea to adopt a one-lead-per-contact format. By bringing everything together like that, they would have a sales workflow in place better able to:

• Support cold calling

• Build up a pipeline of leads for sales

• Handle inbound marketing communications, which qualify leads, so sales would only have to deal with prospects ready and willing to get on a call with them

Today, as a result, 90-95 % of all their leads go through their sales and business development teams, which has created a much cleaner customer experience, with customers only having one point of contact who reaches out to them. Even if someone has qualified for multiple products and multiple salespeople have become involved, they still only have one person as their contact.

Along with switching to this new format, they now make sure sales representatives can see people’s records as customers for Thomson Reuters. So, even with the format change, sales can still see if and when prospects submitted forms or did business with them before. They utilize tools such as Oracle Eloqua Profiler to do this. It is a sales tool designed to take the rich data captured by marketing and share it directly with sales.

With Oracle Eloqua Profiler showing previously submitted forms and proving valuable context and customer data, marketing can streamline and automate the process of reaching back out to customers with emails and call scripting. For Smith’s organization, with this already in place, the next phase will involve the marketing team taking that data and using it to help qualify leads and inform sales in how to engage with that person.

Checks and Balances

Her organization will also be building a system of checks and balances so that the same people aren’t contacted too many times in a certain time frame if they aren’t ready to move forward by talking to sales yet. This system will seek to strike a balance between giving them a breather period before calling them again but also trying to remind top of mind for them.

If they could do it all over again, Smith’s organization thinks they would:

• Get the groups with larger accounts on board earlier

• Look at more exceptions and determine if they are really worthy exceptions

Results

The overall benefits to moving to a one-lead-per-contact format included:

• Clearing up timing issues, as to when lead records get updated and being able to see what the true lead count is and track marketing-attributed sales

• Moving to multitouch attribution to track all touchpoints that could have influenced someone’s conversion in the funnel from the beginning to the end of their buyer’s journey

• A stronger, more efficient working alignment between marketing and sales

• A streamlined and more effective lead management system

• A cleaner and more satisfying customer experience

For organizations looking to make a similar move, Smith’s organization suggests:

• Having  executive leadership buy in right away

• Figuring how to adjust as other groups came on

• Making a point to have extra points to help support reporting for all this, as to easily track their results and know what is going on with the funnel

                                                

Proper lead nurturing does not mean sending out email blast after email blast. The modern marketer can show more finesse and skill. See what tools and tips you can bring to bear in “Leading Nurturing for the Modern Marketer.”

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