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The Oracle Case Study

Problem:

Oracle purchased a new company whose product pricing was below $5,000. Because many of Oracle’s products were closer to $250,000 and higher, these products sometimes did not receive much attention from the sales force. They also often did not get the dedicated marketing they needed to acquire enough leads and opportunities to keep the revenue climbing. They engaged Bellandi Group to help them with lead generation and lead nurturing until Oracle figured out how to merge them with rest of corporation.

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 that consisted of email programs, webinars and follow up phone calls. While this dedicated sales force was used to do phone calls, most of them were from MCI and were doing high-volume cold calling. They were not using Best Practice lead generation and lead nurturing techniques that were being promoted by B2B industry thought leaders. One of these thought leaders is Brian Carroll from InTouch (www.startwithalead.com). The graph above shows how leads are first nurtured and made sales-ready before being passed to sales. In order to improve their lead flow and conversions, we designed and put in place lead generation and lead nurturing programs.

Results:

  1. The sales force liked this “trusted advisor” approach, as it gave them a reason to call or email the prospect.
  2. They previously had to make cold calls and repeat scripted messages.
  3. They found this approach ineffective and not well received by the prospect.
  4. We put in place thought leader lead generation programs including webinars, white papers, analysis offers and Web-based demos.
  5. We used email to promote these programs to prospects, then used the inside sales team to monitor interest in the program (open rates, downloads, etc.) and nurture the lead to a webinar, demo or sales appointment.
  6. The sales force spent more time on nurturing, less on cold calls, enjoyed their job more and became more effective in progressing and closing leads.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. This group was eventually merged with the rest of Oracle and the separate lead generation activities turned off once corporate took over.

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