Case Study Overview
The customer
Rural Sourcing provides an interesting alternative to offshore outsourcing for software development and IT.
The challenge
The marketing team was faced with how to generate a high volume of high-quality leads in support of aggressive growth objectives - and they needed a partner to help them gain more traction with as many high priority accounts as possible.
The payoff
Within one month, Rural Sourcing saw:
30-40% of new website prospects come from RollWorks
Strong alignment between marketing and sales
Read the full story >The challenge
Scale Up Lead Generation with a Lean Marketing Team
Make no mistake: the marketing team and Rural Sourcing was (and still is) in hyper growth mode. Its lean, three-person group relied heavily on inbound marketing and digital advertising to generate leads for the sales team. Of the team’s decision to bring in RollWorks, Digital Marketing Manager Alex Trammell noted a desire to go beyond traditional inbound to an account-based approach.
“We needed a way to not only help the sales team move more deals along, but to show how we were impacting their key accounts.”
Trammell added that this was the only way they were going to get buy-in from the sales team on the importance of focusing on accounts, rather than lead generation alone. While Trammell and his team were already creating content in support of their traditional lead generation strategy, key metrics, such as email open rates and reply rates on sales emails and calls, were flagging. Alignment between the two teams remained inconsistent, at best.
“We struggled with generic messaging geared to only part of our target audience. In our industry, a product development person just cares about getting help for an upcoming deadline. Whereas a C-suite person would rather see ROI statements and financial proof. We just weren’t hitting the right personas with the right messaging.”
Finally, the Rural Sourcing team had the long-term goal of shifting market perception around its brand. They wanted to position the company as more than just a tech staffing company, but a partner that provides consultative value to organizations big and small. To achieve this goal, the marketing team needed a lot more control over the messaging with these individual accounts to tell that story more effectively.
The HOW
REACH THE RIGHT ACCOUNTS THROUGH OPTIMIZATION AND TARGETED MESSAGING
To meet these objectives, the Rural Sourcing team needed a more targeted, account-based approach to digital ads, sales outreach, and content. They were already creating high-value blog posts, case studies, and even whitepapers. They were already invested in a robust AdWords program. Now, they needed to find a more effective way to reach the right accounts.
The first step in incorporating ABM was looking at existing engagement in their target accounts. The team then used Account Targeting in RollWorks to ensure that those accounts were seeing their message in display ads across the web, in addition to hearing from sales. “We weren’t able to do that before,” said Trammell. “Now we know that we are reaching the right accounts even if we’re not seeing the perfect conversions, and we can tailor our creative with more accuracy.”
Indeed, the next step was to segment creative to get even more personalized and targeted for this more refined list of target industries and personas. As Trammell pointed out earlier, the key decision makers have unique pain points depending on their role and function within the company, so they needed a way to serve different messages to different personas (the executive in the IT department, for example, versus the CEO at a small SaaS company).
To do so, Trammell and his team built RollWorks playbooks and campaigns specific to each target vertical. “We have a bunch of playbooks and campaigns that are specific to SaaS, Enterprise Fortune 500, Healthcare, and Logistics. Within each of those big buckets, we have a c-suite persona that we're trying to communicate with, a product development person, and so on—a bunch of little campaigns that are segmented and personalized.”
Now, as the sales team worked on the top 150 accounts, marketing used RollWorks to surround contacts and key decision makers within those accounts with relevant digital ads. Here’s an example of this more personalized ad creative:
Looking forward, Trammell and his team plan to make more use of the RollWorks LinkedIn Connector, account intent (to surface accounts that are showing a surge in intent topics of interest), and web personalization for campaign landing pages.
The payoff
Give Sales Warm Prospects They Can Really Work With
Today, 30-40% of new prospects to the Rural Sourcing website come from RollWorks.
Thanks to a powerful new combination of ABM-based marketing tactics and sales outreach, alignment between marketing and sales has never been stronger. “They [Sales] get a sense that we’re actively working on these accounts,” says Trammell. “And that we actually have something to show to them. Now they have confidence that marketing is reaching those people. As a marketer, it’s always nice to get an email from sales saying, ‘Hey, we see you. Keep it up!’”
The Rural Sourcing team has effectively leveraged RollWorks to build awareness and increase engagement on their top accounts, turning cold calls into much warmer ones. The joint effort of digital ads, personalized emails from sales, and phone calls keeps Rural Sourcing top of mind for high priority accounts.
As an experienced and savvy digital marketer, Trammell himself has become proficient with the RollWorks platform dashboard. He’s quickly able to gain insights on impressions, engagement, and revenue. And if there’s something missing, or he needs help, he’s counted on support from the account management team at RollWorks.
“Just taking the advice of my account manager and working to optimize the account has created a lot more reach. I just don't have time to learn everything about the platform. It was really helpful to have help during the whole onboarding process. I would say it's some of the best customer support that I've had.”
