5 Dec 2011

CLIENT: Huddle, the leader in enterprise collaboration and content management in the cloud. The company describes itself as “the most comprehensive tool for managing projects and files in the cloud.”

PARTNER: Leading cloud-based global provider of marketing software and services, Aprimo. The company is owned by Teradata, the world’s largest company focused on raising intelligence through big data analytics, data warehousing and integrated marketing management.

OBJECTIVE: Huddle was keen to take far greater control of its sales and marketing processes and build a successful sales pipeline.

KEY CHALLENGE: Like many organisations, Huddle suffered from the fact that its marketing and sales teams were using a variety of different applications, none of which talked to each another. As a result, sales and marketing were working in silos, duplicating effort, and finding it difficult to distinguish between prospects and marketing qualified leads.
Huddle needed to get a proper 360 degree view of its customers and prospects from the moment they first engaged with the company right through to the point of sale. The company’s vision was therefore to bring in a tool that could facilitate communication between all three existing marketing applications and talk to Salesforce.com, already used by the sales team.

SOLUTION: Huddle quickly settled on Aprimo Marketing Studio On Demand, having established that it had the flexibility and the depth of features the company required to help it deliver on its objectives. According to Huddle, the team at Aprimo were also willing to spend the time to properly understand Huddle’s goals and issues and to work with the business to find the most appropriate solution.
As a result, Huddle invested in Aprimo’s SaaS model for online marketing, lead management and advanced email deliverability as well as Omniture for sophisticated analytics, replacing its existing marketing tools. With the help of Dell Boomi, Huddle was able to tightly integrate Aprimo Marketing Studio On Demand as its new cloud-based integrated marketing management solution, with Salesforce.com and Omniture.
Integrating products in this way avoided the need to swap sales over to a new system, which would have required time and resources to train the sales team and inevitably resulting in a loss of productivity. At the same time, the integration of the three systems would, for the first time, allow sales to really make use of the data marketing could provide them, in order to identify a potential lead and ultimately to close the sale.

RESULTS: The results of the new system were more far-reaching than expected. Not only did using Aprimo make it possible to track revenue as a function of lead source, leading the company to make a number of changes in investment, but it has also helped Huddle to develop a new business funnel with sales now consistently working on 95-99% of leads

FEEDBACK: “We have used Aprimo to help us build a proper business funnel, which we wouldn’t have been able to do before,” says Ashleigh Casner, Head of Customer Acquisition at Huddle. “Now our sales reps get information on prospects as quickly as possible. For example, through the integration of Salesforce.com and our own customer database with Aprimo, our sales team can see what parts of Huddle the customer is using during the free trial. This ensures they are far more informed about the customer’s needs right from that first sales call.
“With internal process improvements and help from Aprimo, we are over-achieving our sales targets and getting better every day, allowing us to start rapidly scale the business. The key has been to get both people and processes right. Working with Aprimo has allowed marketing to measure the success of everything we do and to give the sales organisation the kind of lead generation tools they’d been asking for.”