Case Study – Oracle Partner Program

A large Oracle partner was trying to sell a product with a price below $5,000. Because many of Oracle’s products were closer to $250,000 and higher, these products sometimes did not receive much attention by their sales force. They also often did not get the dedicated marketing they needed to find get enough leads and opportunities to keep the revenue climbing.

Approach Taken & Lessons Learned

To gain focus on the product line, a group of sales people were spun out to focus only on these products. Additional lead generation programs were put in place consisting of email programs, webinars and follow up phone calls. While the sales force was used to this type of combined direct marketing and phone calls, they had not tried some of the nurturing techniques that were being promoted by B2B industry thought leaders. One of these thought leaders is Brain Carroll from InTouch (www.startwithalead.com). In this case, we implemented new nurturing processes, but it was done by inside sales, not a separate group.

Results

1. It was important to not only give sales access to responses, but also data showing who opened the email, who downloaded a case study, who signed up for a webinar, etc.
2. By observing all of the actions of a given prospect, inside sales people could have an intelligent conversation with the prospect and suggest some logical next steps
3. The sales force liked this “trusted advisor” approach as it gave them a reason to call or email the prospect
4. They previously had to make cold calls and repeat scripted messages
5. They found this approach ineffective and not well received by the prospect
6. The best approach, after trying many combinations of approaches, was to create an educational webinar, email the prospects, then use the inside sales team to get prospects to attend the webinar
7. This served as a polished presentation of the value proposition and as a way to demo the product
8. Next to the leads that came from prospects downloading a demo from the web, this program turned out to be the next best way to grow leads and expand revenue
9. Lead nurturing is an old topic that has renewed interest in the industry as we can no longer afford to work only leads with immediate interest