Our Journey to a Data-Driven Culture for Marketing Success
The marketing function is laser-focused on measurement — with the goal of demonstrating a clear tie between marketing programs and business outcomes and refining the ways we drive awareness, consideration and ultimately sales. That’s not easy for any organization, but for a company like Conduent, which was formed through numerous acquisitions, leveraging data from disparate systems for actionable insights was no small undertaking.
As a provider of mission-critical services and solutions for businesses and governments, Conduent has an extensive portfolio of more than 300 offerings enabled by over 80 platforms. As a marketing organization, our key priorities are: 1) position Conduent for consideration, 2) establish Conduent as the services and solutions provider of choice, and 3) accelerate the sales cycle in support of our overall strategic business goals and pivot to growth. It is imperative that we measure our marketing investments to understand the ROI of our marketing programs and their impact on advancing our strategic business objectives.
Culture change: shifting the marketing mindset to embrace data
Performance marketing relies on using data to measure the return on every dollar of marketing investment. But, shifting from a “gut” mentality to a “data-centric” mentality is easier said than done. We had to connect the data across various systems (SFDC, Marketo, Domo, etc.). The entire marketing organization had to standardize on a common set of metrics and measurement methodology. We had to transition from “data-novices” to “data-ninjas,” not just understanding the hydraulics of each metric, but also making connections across the data elements to gain insights on what’s working and what could be improved. We were able to accomplish this through repetition in weekly reviews, taking a learning approach that allowed people to “be wrong” as long as we learned and improved our understanding, and celebrating wins where we could draw a definitive connection from pipeline or revenue and a marketing initiative.
Building MarTech intelligence
Measuring integrated marketing campaigns that include program elements such as rich content, social media, paid search, email, and industry events across the campaign lifecycle required a well-thought out MarTech stack that was closely integrated with our sales systems. This includes four foundational components supported by additional tools and technologies:
- Website – track and capture visitors
- Marketo – automate lead and campaign management
- Salesforce – ensure lead attribution, campaign tagging and sales intelligence
- Domo – automate, aggregate, analyze and adjust
Together, these technologies enabled us to illustrate the clear value of our function across the entire company. We were able to highlight the revenue and pipeline influenced by marketing, but also drill down to the specific Salesforce record for wins to build credibility and partnership with the sales organization. It also gave us the insights for real-time optimization and better decision making to achieve strategic business goals and growth targets.
Domo – our partner for data visualization and automation
Even after centralizing the marketing function, data was largely in silos, including unconnected instances of CRM and marketing automation systems. To support quarterly reporting, we found ourselves culling data from numerous sources and manually compiling it into Excel and PowerPoint files for sharing. This was not ideal for many apparent reasons and certainly not aligned with an agile, performance-focused culture. We needed an automated data visualization solution that connected across Salesforce, Marketo, and our marketing touch point capture systems to provide a comprehensive, integrated view. After a great deal of diligence, we chose Domo as the Software-as-a-Service platform to enable our scorecard.
Operational impact
With Domo, individuals have access to both holistic and business unit specific views with the ability to drill into channel, tactic and campaign–level results. This is specifically beneficial when trying to understand the impact of marketing programs, how they compare to other campaigns and benchmarks and their status in the sales funnel, to empower informed decision making.
For example, Domo has allowed us to track the progression of leads from start to finish no matter what the channel of origination and number or type of program activations. So, if we captured a prospect at an event, then followed-up after the event with an email, then that person clicked on a link within the email to visit our website and download a piece of content — every “touch” of the journey would be accurately captured. While those “touches” are tracked through other supporting systems and platforms, they are all aggregated and visualized through a Domo dashboard to help tell a story, formulate marketing attribution, and ultimately provide a ROI.
Marketing results
With a single source of truth and intelligent insights, we’ve been able to realize significant improvement in key marketing metrics:
- 84% – increase in total leads
- 173% – increase in Sales Qualified Leads
- 14X – increase in marketing influenced revenue
- 22X –increase in marketing influenced pipeline
- 10 – point increase in lead conversion rate
This has paved the way for greater collaboration with sales as we are able to demonstrate the tight correlation between our efforts and the influence they have on moving opportunities through the sales funnel.
We’re excited about our performance marketing results and plans for the future, as we continue to transform our organization in lock-step with the business transformation we're helping our clients achieve. In October 2019, these efforts were recognized by the ITSMA (the Information Technology Services Marketing Association) when Conduent won a Gold Award for Marketing Excellence in the category of Driving Strategic Growth.
We will continue working as a collaborative, results-based team — supporting a company-wide, data-driven culture and making us better marketers and business partners.