The Need For Power And Simplicity
Through its agency hubs in Toronto and Chicago, Starshot is a single source of marketing expertise and results optimization, serving companies like Intuit, Sonepar, and Dell and being a North American Agency of Record for Microsoft.
Starshot focuses on customer experience design. With expertise in event marketing, demand generation, and digital marketing, its client roster is a who’s-who of global B2B companies.
Sales doesn’t know about the behind-the-scenes work; they just love the results. They love that if someone requests a meeting, they actually get that alert instantly, so they can follow up right away.
Angie Anderson
Demand Generation Practice Lead
Challenge
In her role as Starshot’s demand generation practice lead, Angie Anderson looks beyond immediate client needs to anticipate long-term business objectives.
She had two objectives when choosing a marketing automation platform: To create and sustain demand for Starshot clients’ products and services, and to make the agency’s own marketing efforts more efficient and effective.
Starshot’s customers have complex, solution-based sales cycles and large, multi-national distribution channels, so the agency needed a powerful, sophisticated solution to use on their behalf.
At the same time, for its own team, Starshot wanted an agile, intuitive solution that could simplify complicated processes, be deployed swiftly, and be managed with a minimum of fuss. In both scenarios, the technology had to deliver measurable results. Angie and Starshot found what they were looking for in Act-On.
Solutions
Starshot’s marketing team uses the Act-On platform to manage an email program that not only sends personalized messages on behalf of 95 sales reps, but allows each email to be customized and segmented based on where the contact is in the sales cycle.
The key to success in such a dynamic environment is the sales team’s ability to quickly score leads based on their level of engagement with messages. Starshot’s team uses
Act-On’s precision lead scoring capability to automate the process, enabling them to focus on marketing-identified “hot” opportunities and move leads through the pipeline faster and more strategically.
Sales relies on marketing more now; we’re really working together.
Angie Anderson
Demand Generation Practice Lead
Highlights
- Customer since 2011
- Saved an average of 3 hours per campaign
- Saved an average of 96 people-hours per month
We nurture all those individuals for our clients, making sure that we’ve got the right decision-makers in the process.
Angie Anderson
Demand Generation Practice Lead
We can set it all up to run automatically, to take an action in reaction to the prospect’s behavior. The tool lets us provide what they’re looking for at that time, without necessitating interaction by an individual. But it’s still a personal relationship. At any point the rep can jump in because they know exactly what’s happened.
Angie Anderson
Demand Generation Practice Lead
Microsoft Dynamnics Integration
The team benefits further by the integration of Act-On with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Starshot’s customer relationship management system. Within Dynamics, sales reps can see the marketing data: whether someone clicked on the email, what pages they visited, and what assets they engaged with, to what degree. In addition, Act-On’s triggered alerts feature lets sales know, in real time, when a prospect or lead takes a specific action, which allows reps to respond within the window of opportunity.
By combining customized messaging, automated lead scoring, and real-time visualization, sales knows exactly what’s happening at all times. Angie has found that marketing automation has aligned the sales and marketing teams by integrating many functions. “Sales relies on marketing more now; we’re really working together,” she said. Starshot’s clients have lengthy sales cycles – the average is 18 months and some run as long as three years. Moving people through such a long funnel is both a long-term commitment and a formidable challenge, but success can often be significant to a client’s top line.
Results
Starshot nurtured one client’s leads for over three years, using a variety of Act-On tools such as segmentation and A/B testing to optimize engagement. And it worked. Of the sales that closed, a full 25 percent of them were leads who had been nurtured for at least 36 months. With average deal sizes of six figures – that 25 percent close rate equals real revenue. Starshot has been an Act-On customer since 2012, long enough to gauge performance, see measurable results, and ultimately increase its clients’ success. The numbers bear out Starshot’s ability to apply process and creativity to capitalize on marketing automation and get results.
It’s more than just the numbers. Really, Act-On is a partner to us, working with us to get to the other side, to solve the bigger crises of marketing and sales problems. Act-On helps us shine in front of our clients – which is awesome.