In the dynamic realm of marketing, where change is the only constant, navigating the landscape has become increasingly complex. As a seasoned marketing executive, you are no stranger to the challenges posed by rapidly evolving technologies and buyer behaviors. One area that often demands your attention is Marketing Technology, or Martech, and ensuring that it aligns seamlessly with your overarching business objectives. Martech alignment with customer journey One critical question to ponder is: Is your Martech stack effectively aligned with your customer journey? As the custodian of the company's marketing vision, it's imperative to ensure that every piece of technology in your arsenal plays a role in enhancing the customer experience. The journey from awareness to advocacy should be seamless, and your Martech stack needs to be a cohesive force, not a collection of disparate tools. Supporting marketing use cases Does your Martech have the right capabilities to support your diverse marketing use cases? In a rapidly changing marketing landscape, where channels and strategies evolve swiftly, having the right tools for the job is paramount. Your Martech should be versatile, capable of adapting to the unique demands of your various marketing initiatives, whether it's a social media campaign, a personalized email outreach, or an immersive digital experience. Integration across technologies Integration is key. Can your Martech integrate seamlessly with existing and new technologies? In an era where data is king, the ability of your Martech stack to communicate and share information with other business-critical systems is non-negotiable. Siloed data is a roadblock to effective decision-making. Your technology should be an integrated ecosystem, fostering collaboration and ensuring a unified view of your marketing efforts. Evaluating license costs License costs can be a significant pain point. Are you getting the best value for your investment? As a seasoned leader, you understand the importance of optimizing budgets. Evaluate the costs associated with your Martech stack and ensure that the functionalities align with your needs. It's not just about cutting costs but maximizing the ROI on your Martech investments. Scalability for growth Is your Martech scalable to meet the growing needs of your organization? Your role is not just about meeting today's objectives but envisioning the future. Your Martech should be scalable, adapting to the evolving scope of your marketing strategies as your company grows. What serves you well today should seamlessly transition into a tool that propels you towards tomorrow's goals. Pro tip: Scalability is indeed important, but before scaling it's critical that you prove the martech and its supportive elements are positioned to be sustainable - if not sustainable, your scaling efforts will more than likely fail. Many see this as a failure of the martech, and while this might be the case, we typically see this in approaches that don't consider sustainability before scaling. People and enablement Having the right Martech is crucial, but do you have the right people and enablement strategies in place? Your team needs to be equipped with the knowledge and skills to harness the full potential of your Martech stack. Training and development should be a continuous process, ensuring that your team remains at the forefront of industry trends and technological advancements.  In a landscape marked by change, it's not just about addressing these challenges but turning them into opportunities for growth and innovation. As you steer through the complexities of the digital age, consider partnering with a consultancy that understands your unique challenges and offers both strategic insights and hands-on expertise. Tailoring solutions to your unique profile Given your background, goals, and pain points, a Marketing Operations consultancy can serve as a strategic partner in your journey towards marketing success leveraging your martech stack. A focused approach, when aligned with your vision, can provide innovative solutions to complex challenges, leveraging their deep understanding of market trends and buyer behavior. When selecting a consulting service, focus on their ability to align marketing operations strategies with your business objectives. Look for evidence of expertise through success stories and a consulting approach that resonates with your company's vision and values. Emphasize a partnership that not only solves problems but contributes to your strategic marketing success. The challenges you face in the realm of Martech are not obstacles but opportunities to evolve and excel. By ensuring alignment, embracing integration, optimizing costs, and fostering scalability, you pave the way for a marketing ecosystem that not only meets today's demands but anticipates and shapes the future. Questions? Let's talk! Contact us  or email us directly  today to get a conversation started. Update: In late 2023, Thomson Reuters (TR) and Sojourn Solutions (Sojourn) began an ambitious project to optimize the Thomson Reuters marketing technology stack, seeking to create an effective, efficient, and centralized operating model for long-term stack management. The project concluded in 2024 with great success - learn more: A StackTastic Project: How Thomson Reuters Transformed Its Martech Management and Performance.

In today’s digital-first world, the landscape of marketing is constantly evolving. Businesses are increasingly relying on a diverse array of marketing technologies to streamline their operations, engage customers, and drive growth. As the number of tools in a company's MarTech stack grows, so too does the complexity of managing these tools effectively. This is where a marketing technology audit, or MarTech audit, becomes crucial. Basically put, a MarTech audit is a comprehensive evaluation of all the marketing technologies, platforms, and tools that a company uses. The purpose of this audit is to assess the effectiveness, efficiency, and alignment of these tools with the company’s overall business objectives. Here we’ll explore what a marketing technology audit entails, why it’s important, and how it can benefit your business. Understanding the Marketing Technology Stack Before diving into what a MarTech audit is in detail, it’s essential to understand what constitutes a marketing technology stack. A MarTech stack refers to the collection of software, platforms, and tools that marketers use to execute, manage, and analyze marketing activities. This can include tools for email marketing, social media management, content management systems (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM), analytics, advertising platforms, and more. Over time, as companies grow and their marketing needs evolve, the MarTech stack can become unwieldy, with redundant tools, outdated platforms, and underutilized software. This is where a MarTech audit comes in. What is a Marketing Technology Audit? A marketing technology audit is a systematic process of evaluating and analyzing the MarTech stack to ensure that it is optimized, efficient, and aligned with the company’s strategic goals. The audit involves taking inventory of all marketing tools, assessing their performance, evaluating integration and data flow, identifying redundancies, and uncovering opportunities for improvement. Key Objectives of a MarTech Audit The main objectives of a MarTech audit include: Inventory and Categorization: Identifying and categorizing all the tools within the MarTech stack, including their functions, users, and costs. Performance Evaluation: Assessing the effectiveness of each tool in achieving marketing goals, including its impact on ROI, customer engagement, and campaign performance. Integration Assessment: Evaluating how well the tools integrate with each other and with other business systems, such as CRM or ERP platforms. Cost Analysis: Analyzing the costs associated with each tool, including licensing fees, subscriptions, and hidden costs, and comparing these costs to the value delivered. Data Flow and Management: Reviewing how data is managed across the stack, including data accuracy, consistency, and accessibility. Compliance and Security Review: Ensuring that the tools comply with relevant data privacy regulations and that security measures are in place to protect sensitive information. Strategic Alignment: Determining whether the MarTech stack aligns with the company’s broader business objectives and marketing strategy.   Why is a Marketing Technology Audit Important? Conducting a MarTech audit is essential for several reasons, all of which contribute to the overall efficiency and effectiveness of a company’s marketing efforts: Optimizing Tool Utilization One of the most significant benefits of a MarTech audit is the ability to optimize the use of existing tools. Often, companies invest in sophisticated platforms with numerous features, but only use a fraction of their capabilities. A MarTech audit can identify underutilized tools, enabling the company to either maximize their use or switch to more cost-effective alternatives. This optimization can lead to better resource allocation and improved marketing performance. Reducing Redundancies and Costs Over time, as companies add more tools to their MarTech stack, redundancies can occur. Multiple tools may be performing the same or similar functions, leading to wasted resources. A MarTech audit helps identify these redundancies, allowing the company to consolidate tools and reduce unnecessary expenses. This not only saves money but also simplifies the management of the technology stack. Enhancing Data Integration and Flow Data silos—where information is isolated within different systems—are a common challenge in many organizations. These silos can lead to inefficiencies, inaccuracies, and missed opportunities. A MarTech audit assesses how well the tools within the stack integrate and whether data flows seamlessly between them. By improving data integration and flow, companies can gain a more comprehensive view of their customers, make better-informed decisions, and deliver more personalized marketing experiences. Ensuring Compliance and Security With increasing data privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, ensuring compliance is more critical than ever. A MarTech audit reviews whether the tools in use comply with relevant regulations and whether adequate security measures are in place. This helps protect the company from potential legal risks and ensures that customer data is handled responsibly. Aligning Technology with Business Goals Marketing technology should support and enhance a company’s strategic objectives. However, as new tools are added, it’s easy for the MarTech stack to become misaligned with these goals. A MarTech audit ensures that all tools are working towards the same objectives, whether it’s increasing customer engagement, improving lead generation, or enhancing brand awareness. By aligning technology with business goals, companies can ensure that their marketing efforts are both effective and efficient. Facilitating Continuous Improvement The digital landscape is constantly changing, and so too are the needs of businesses. A MarTech audit is not just a one-time activity but part of a continuous improvement process. Regular audits help companies stay up to date with the latest trends, technologies, and best practices. This continuous evaluation and adjustment ensure that the MarTech stack remains relevant, efficient, and capable of meeting the company’s evolving needs.     The Value of a MarTech Audit A marketing technology audit is an essential process for any business that relies on digital marketing tools to drive growth and engage customers. By evaluating the effectiveness, efficiency, and alignment of the MarTech stack, companies can optimize their resources, reduce costs, improve data management, and ensure that their marketing efforts are aligned with their strategic goals. In an increasingly competitive digital landscape, the value of a well-conducted MarTech audit cannot be overstated. It’s an investment in the future success of your marketing efforts, providing the insights and direction needed to stay ahead of the curve and achieve lasting business success. Schedule your MarTech stack review with us today.

The biannual (twice per year) CMO Survey has just been released, and it offers some eye-opening revelations about the state of marketing operations. Almost 300 marketing leaders participated in the survey, and the topline findings are not good. In fact, the surveyed CMOs say that: Only 56% of the martech tools they’ve purchased are being used at all , Only 34% of martech tools are meeting expectations in terms of delivering on anticipated results, and The biggest challenge cited by the CMOs, related to the two data points above, is "integrating marketing technologies across other data systems in the organization." That last problem around integration, as every MOPs professional knows, is a foundational one. Most marketing orgs are currently exploring how to leverage artificial intelligence in order to drive marketing ROI. But a lack of martech and data integration has a huge negative impact on any marketing organization’s ability to access the benefits of AI, now and/or in the future (more on this key challenge below). After we’ve fully explained the key findings of the CMO Survey, we’ll offer a few recommendations for how you can drive improvement in how you optimize your martech stack. CMO Survey: 6 Key Findings Martech investments continue to increase Most companies plan to increase their martech budget annually, from the current 19% of the marketing budget to 23.5% next year. Martech investments are expected to be 31% of total marketing budgets in 5 years, so the “spend trend” is clearly upward.  But as martech budgets continue to increase, there’s growing pressure on CMOs to deliver a seamless integration of newly-purchased martech tools in order to drive a sufficient return on their martech investments. 2. AI is making an impact The marketing leaders surveyed say that AI is beginning to drive significant impacts. In fact, they say AI has:  Improved sales productivity by an average of 5.1%, Enhanced customer satisfaction by an average of 6.1%, and Decreased marketing overhead costs by an average of 7.0%. Impressive results, yes, but we’ve only just begun to integrate AI into marketing workflows. AI must be built on top of a firm foundation of (1) integrated martech tools and (2) martech tools that share data with each other and across the entire organization. 3. A disconnect between martech purchases and organizational goals Martech purchases have little or no value unless they’re supported by strategic goals and connected to specific use cases (such as enhancement of customer experience). When purchases are not clearly aligned with business goals and specific use cases, organizations are tossing their money out the window.  The CMO Survey shows that one of the root causes of martech underutilization is a lack of connection to any strategic focus on specific use cases. “Buying stuff” doesn’t necessarily drive ROI. 4. Martech tools are going woefully underutilized CMOs may be purchasing more martech, but a failure to maximize their value is the rule, not the exception. About two-thirds (66%) of purchased martech tools are not delivering on expectations. When CMOs were asked “how well is your company performing on each of the following marketing technology activities?,” on a scale from 1 (poorly) to 7 (very well), CMOs responded as follows: “Designing the broad architecture of our marketing technology systems” rated 4.4. So CMOs seem to be just bolting on parts to a machine that’s disjointed and increasingly difficult to manage. “Generating ROI from marketing technologies” and “Developing capabilities for using marketing technologies” both rated 4.5. So CMOs understand that they’re not maximizing martech value, not enabling their people to use it, and not driving sufficient ROI. “Integrating marketing technologies into our customer funnel,” “Leveraging data for tactical decision making” and “Leveraging data for strategic decision making” all rated 4.6. Again, failures around integration lead to a fragmented funnel and an inability to implement AI. 5. More focus placed on top of the funnel, and not enough on full funnel The CMO survey clearly shows that the main focus of martech tools and investments are on lead generation (top-of-funnel) activities, while bottom-of-funnel (e.g., customer acquisition and nurturing) and driving long-term customer value are viewed as secondary concerns.  Meanwhile, marketing leaders and marketers know – at least in theory – that all steps in the buying journey matter to customers, not just the moment of closing. Therefore, connecting your current tech stack to all the stages of the customer journey is foundational.  Focusing on lead gen and neglecting the rest of the funnel journey is like having an incomplete map to where you’re headed – it’s a great way to get lost as you seek to optimize your martech stack. 6. Martech effectiveness metrics misaligned with full funnel focus Related to the point above, marketing organizations are also using internal metrics that are skewed towards the top-of-the-funnel and fail to map the entire buying journey. The most common metrics cited by CMOs to measure martech effectiveness are lead generation, sales, and lead conversion, which are all (of course) relevant indicators. But the three least common metrics cited by the CMOs are also important ones: lifetime customer value, customer loyalty, and pipeline acceleration. 5 Recommendation for Optimizing Martech Every MOPS and marketing organization is different, and confronts a different set of problems. With that said, we suspect that every organization struggles to optimize its martech. As such, and based on the challenges described above, we’d like to offer you a few recommendations for improvement: Audit your martech stack regularly. You can’t improve what you don’t monitor and measure. We at Sojourn Solutions know from long experience that some marketing organizations don’t even know what martech tools they’ve purchased, let alone understand: (1) the strategic focus of each purchase and (2) the specific use cases the purchases were/are intended to support. Start by auditing what you have, and then map each listed martech tool to a strategic focus and its specific use cases. Dump whatever isn’t aligned to a marketing strategy or use case. Once you’ve mapped each tool to a strategic focus and/or specific use case, you can begin evaluating what tools are actually delivering business value and which ones are just taking up space and wasting budget. If a martech tool isn’t earning its keep, move on from it as soon as you can. Evaluate the level of integration within your martech stack and across all your systems. This is a big one, because tools that aren’t connected and sharing data with each other make your stack impossible to optimize. That’s especially true when it comes to a present and future featuring AI. Map your existing integrations and identify areas where you need to integrate. Evaluate your marketing metrics, especially those around martech efficiency. The CMO Survey showed an overemphasis on top-of-the-funnel metrics like lead generation and a relative neglect of metrics related to the full customer life cycle.  Customers expect you to add value at every step of the customer journey. The marketers who focus on the entire funnel are the ones who succeed in good times and tough times. Get outside help, if and when needed. If you don’t have the internal resources to implement the first four recommendations above, consider bringing in outside expertise to help. You can read the full CMO Survey for Spring 2024 (free). If you’d like to improve your marketing operations and maximize the ROI of your martech investments, Sojourn Solutions can help.  Reach out to us today!

Undertaking a marketing technology (MarTech) audit can offer several significant advantages for a large company. Key benefits include:   Enhanced Efficiency and Cost Savings Identification of Redundancies: A MarTech audit can reveal overlapping tools and platforms. By eliminating redundancies, companies can reduce costs associated with licensing and maintenance. Optimization of Usage: Audits help identify underutilized tools. Companies can either eliminate these tools or optimize their use, ensuring they get the best return on investment (ROI). Streamlined Processes: With a clear understanding of the current MarTech stack, companies can streamline processes, reducing complexity and improving overall efficiency. Improved Integration and Data Management Better Integration: Audits help assess how well different tools and platforms integrate with each other. Improved integration leads to better data flow, reduced data silos, and more cohesive marketing operations. Data Quality and Management: A thorough audit highlights issues with data collection, storage, and usage. This allows the company to address data quality issues, ensuring that marketing decisions are based on accurate, up-to-date information. Increased ROI from Marketing Efforts Alignment with Business Goals: By understanding the effectiveness of the current MarTech stack, companies can better align their tools with strategic business goals, leading to more targeted and effective marketing efforts. Improved Campaign Performance: With a clear understanding of the tools available and how they are being used, companies can refine their campaigns, leading to better performance metrics such as higher conversion rates and improved customer engagement. Enhanced Decision-Making and Strategic Planning Informed Decision-Making: A MarTech audit provides detailed insights into the performance and capabilities of existing tools. This information is critical for making informed decisions about future investments in technology. Strategic Planning: The audit helps identify gaps in the current technology stack, enabling the company to plan strategically for future MarTech investments that align with long-term goals. Compliance and Risk Management Regulatory Compliance: A MarTech audit can identify potential compliance issues related to data privacy and security, helping the company avoid legal and financial penalties. Risk Mitigation: By identifying outdated or unsupported technologies, companies can mitigate risks related to security breaches or system failures. Enhanced Customer Experience Personalization: By optimizing the MarTech stack, companies can deliver more personalized and relevant customer experiences. This can lead to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. Omnichannel Consistency: An audit helps ensure that the marketing tools in use support consistent messaging and customer experiences across all channels. Competitive Advantage Staying Ahead of Trends: Regular audits keep the company informed about new technologies and trends in the MarTech landscape, allowing them to adopt innovations before competitors. Differentiation: A well-optimized MarTech stack can give the company a competitive edge by enabling more effective and innovative marketing strategies. In summary, a marketing technology audit enables large companies to optimize their MarTech stack, reduce costs, improve efficiency, enhance decision-making, and ultimately, drive better marketing outcomes that are closely aligned with their business goals.

Marketing Operations and Operational Process blog series Series introduction: Marketing Operations is a complex mixture of people, processes, and technology all working together to prove - and improve - the value of marketing to your company, your customer, and your employees. While the technology and people components of this “Marketing Operations Triangle” get a lot of attention, Operational Process deserves much more focus as a driver of value. In this blog series, we’ll be giving it the attention it so richly deserves. The UK telecommunications company O2 is a great example of how improved operational processes can not only drive efficiency but also enable a marketing team to free up time for higher-value marketing tasks. O2 went from having non-standardized approaches to campaign management that were creating many problems (more on those later) to a streamlined process that resulted in: a 27% increase YoY in the number of campaigns executed, and 100% accuracy in campaign execution. Campaign management challenges O2 had a small team managing all sorts of operational requests – campaign execution, peer reviewing of campaigns, building out assets and campaign flows in Eloqua, changing lead management processes, and much more. The team did anything and everything related to campaign execution, data, marketing operations, and automation. They’d receive requests from two different business units, typically via email or a quick phone call saying, “can you just do this for us now?” The problem was that these requests didn’t have a structured process behind them to ensure: (1) a clear direction and time frame for executing the brief and (2) all the information and resources needed to execute the request were included with the brief. “The briefs they received were so dramatically different. Some requests came with lots of details and relevant resources/assets,” says Rebecca Clark, Customer Success Manager at Sojourn Solutions, who worked with the O2 team on improving the process, “while others did not. The timeframes for delivery could be all over the place too.”  The O2 team simply didn't have the resources to manage it all, and they lacked enough budget to outsource the work. In fact, the team’s budget was being reduced. O2’s campaign management, especially in light of how requests and briefs were being handled, just wasn't working as efficiently as it could have. Setting expectations with the business units making requests was a massive and time-consuming challenge, and so was managing the team’s budgets, priorities, and schedules. The team would sometimes run out of budget for the month in the middle of the month and then had to seek authorization to spend more. Their operational processes clearly needed to change around campaign management. The change: Streamlining campaign management Due to the sheer volume of the O2 team’s work, much of it unplanned for requests, the team just weren’t able to prioritize work and schedule campaigns  effectively. They finally decided they needed a new process and a more supportive infrastructure around campaign management.   Fortunately, O2’s Campaign Program Manager, Nicky Clarke, had a solid background in project management so she understood the need for and challenges around driving improvement of operational processes. O2's Clarke sought to implement a streamlined process that not only allowed the team to see how their budget was being spent, but also ensured that the briefs and requests coming in had a specific process and quality standard supporting them.  “We introduced the O2 team to Smartsheet, which is a project planning tool,” says Sojourn’s Clark. “You can have forms and attachments within a Smartsheet, and the form is submitted by the person requesting the work.” The requester has to fill in certain fields and then complete a detailed brief that's attached. So it’s an automated process where updates get made, and where each request gets allocated to the right resource with a realistic time frame for executing the work. “That approach with Smartsheet gave the O2 team a more structured approach to requests and briefs,” says Clark.  Adoption of the solution took some time, as the people making the requests were used to just picking up the phone or sending quick “request” emails. They were told to make requests using the new process. “The O2 team became really good at telling business units that they needed to follow the new operational process in order to make a request,” reports Clark, “and it made the team’s workflow so much easier.” Results: Campaign efficiency & enhanced capabilities  With the new process in place, and despite a decreasing budget, the O2 team was able to increase the number of campaigns it executed by 27% YoY. The effectiveness of those campaigns increased too, some of that due to better briefs that helped inform more effective asset/content creation. There was also a huge time saving by having everything in one place and not having to chase down missing pieces of a brief. The team could actually plan their days and their weeks, because the requests were coming from one place with one standard process. “The new, streamlined campaign management process freed up the O2 team’s time to actually consider how they could manage their workload even better,” says Sojourn’s Clark. “They started asking, ‘are the processes behind the things we do as good as they could be?’” The streamlined process freed up some of their budget too, so they could analyze their tech and consider bringing in more effective tools. O2’s Nicky Clarke summarized O2’s operational process improvement journey this way: “We saw a huge increase in the volume of work coming into our team and our budget decreased by 50% at the same time, so this meant we had to optimize the way we worked in order to prioritize what we were doing and deliver more with less. We re-organized our team internally and upskilled their capabilities. We worked with Sojourn to introduce Smartsheet for brief logging and workflow management within our team and cross-functionally with our external agencies. It’s made a big difference. Now we’re constantly reviewing processes and optimizing ways of working in weekly collaboration sessions.”  If you’re interested in learning more about how to increase the efficiency - and effectiveness of your campaign production or other marketing operations related processes,  contact us  today. Next post in series:   How holistic Project Management optimizes Operational Processes in Marketing Operations (post 5 of 5)

A strategic focus across S&P Global is LEAN efficiency and process, and efforts like this contribute significantly to our strategic business goals, as well as helping to ensure Marketing is operationally streamlined. Zoe (Lowther) Mol, VP Global Marketing, S&P Global Platts Introduction Data in its raw, unfiltered form offers no insights to drive great business decision-making (it’s simply “more information” in a TMI world). It takes skilled, experienced professionals to make meaning and provide strategic, actionable insights from data. Enter S&P Global Platts, in business for over a century and now the leading independent provider of information, benchmark prices and analytics for the energy and commodities markets. The London-based business intelligence company has over 1,000 employees spread out over 19 offices worldwide, all of them with one goal — to leverage data to bring clarity and transparency to the energy and commodities markets. Challenge: Work differently Keeping up with the fast pace of global change has now become a core organizational capacity. Call it agility or adaptability or whatever you want (this isn’t buzzword bingo), but change happens fast today and individuals and organizations had better be ready to accommodate it. Well, S&P Global, the 17,000-people strong, global parent company of S&P Global Platts, decided that the entire global operation would migrate its marketing automation to the Marketo platform. Solution: A 3-part migration To complete the planned migration from Eloqua to Marketo, S&P Global Platts worked with its partner, Sojourn Solutions. A three-part solution was co-developed that was structured around risk mitigation, campaign migration, and multiple integrations. We'll look at how each part of S&P Global Platts’ Marketo migration solution was developed and executed... Results: Savings, plaudits, awards S&P Global Platts finished its migration on schedule and without downtime or disruption of its MAP operations, as they’d promised their parent company. Perhaps best of all, S&P Global Platts saw huge benefits to their bottom line, including a 75% savings on campaign migration costs to Marketo. This was a true collaborative effort between Platts’ Marketing, IT, and Content teams, and executed by our preferred partner, Sojourn Solutions.  Melissa Thames, Global Head Marketing Operations, S&P Global Platts In the end, the S&P Global Platts migration project was recognized with a prestigious 2018 Revvies Award, in the category “The Transformer.” S&P Global Platts saw huge benefits to their bottom line, including a 75% savings on campaign migration costs to Marketo. In addition, as the Revvie Award press release explains, “after implementing the Marketo platform, S&P Global Platts automated their subscription and information distribution process, saving more than 15 weeks of people-hours annually” and gaining massive cost benefits. (include in section where award image appears to left of text) Since 2008, Sojourn has been our go-to marketing operations strategy and support team. They most recently helped us successfully move to Marketo from Eloqua which involved many integrations and complex use cases that required solutioning. We couldn’t have done it without them. Melissa Thames, Head of Global Marketing Operations

How does an enterprise organization go about scaling adoption of its new Eloqua-driven automated email renewal solution with its sales team? In this post, we explore how Naylor’s leadership team did just that, how it addressed strong initial objections from the sales teams, and how sales reps who had once been early objectors to automation eventually became passionate advocates for the technology. In a second post, we’ll take a deeper dive into Naylor’s solution itself. Naylor Association Solutions , with corporate headquarters in McLean, Virginia, works with trade associations across the nation, including the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA), the United Motorcoach Association (UMA), and many more, helping them maximize membership engagement and generate more revenues. Naylor’s services and business units include member communication (creating various publications for associations), event management, and association management. Naylor helps its association members develop various publications, including magazines, newsletters, and member directories. Naylor’s sales team also sells advertising space in these same publications to companies interested in engaging the association’s membership. So, hypothetically speaking, a medical device manufacturer might want to buy advertising space in a newsletter or directory from the American Medical Association. Naylor would develop the publication, working with the association, and then sell ad space to generate revenues. Naylor’s automated solution runs into initial skepticism Utter the word “automation” in almost any workplace today, and the people impacted start to get nervous about their jobs. Fears of robots stealing our jobs aren’t just fodder for science fiction, but represent a visceral concern for workers all across the global economy – especially as technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to improve.  As Naylor rolled out its automated renewal email solution to its existing advertisers, using that automation to quickly generate renewals and cash flow without the involvement of any sales reps, getting the sales team on board became an obvious challenge. Naylor’s Kent Agramonte , then Marketing and Research Manager, was tasked with getting sales rep buy-in for the change initiative. “There was early pushback from the reps,” explained Agramonte, “they felt threatened that automation was taking away parts of their jobs and commissions. They also feared we were ‘dehumanizing’ our customer service approach.” Agramonte carefully explained that “seeking renewals were taking a lot of time away from sales reps, and if they spent less time seeking renewals from existing clients (advertisers), they could spend more time upselling and seeking new clients, thus gaining higher commissions.” Many reps, understandably, took a wait-and-see stance. 3 keys to scaling adoption  Sales Reps soon recognized their liberation from routine, manual tasks.  Agramonte’s message was clear and consistent. The automated, scalable email renewal solution would give Naylor’s sales reps the gift of more time to perform higher-value tasks, like upselling existing clients and finding new clients, tasks that would actually help reps generate more leads and higher commissions. In addition, sales reps received training on how the automated application worked so they could effectively perform their follow-up roles, such as when customers opened an email but didn’t respond. Reps began performing more higher-value tasks.  Rolling the solution out slowly. The culture of any sales team can be a fragile thing. Naylor anticipated some objections from sales reps, and Agramonte rolled out the automated solution gradually, gaining buy-in from sales reps project-by-project, almost rep-by-rep. As the team observed success in these projects, they became more open to the blended “human + machine” solution.  Answering the “dehumanization” objection.  Sales reps were justifiably proud of the high level of service they were providing to customers, but they soon realized two things: (1) customers quickly grew accustomed to the automated approach, much like shopping online at Amazon, and (2) sales reps continued to be involved in higher-level follow up and upselling activities that drove superior customer experiences and higher sales commissions. “We explained to our reps that the automation would help them service clients more effectively,” said Agramonte, “while making it easier for them to go after new customers. We found that many customers actually preferred communication through the automated, DIY email approach managed by Eloqua.” Sales Reps move from objectors to advocates On average, it was taking our reps three calls to renew a client and after launching our automated renewals program we renewed 583 clients without a phone call. This saved our reps 1,749 phone calls since launching the program.  The sales reps recognized that the automated email renewal campaigns were achieving the results promised, and then some. As promised, the reps were indeed spending more time upselling and pursuing new customer leads, as well as generating more commission. “Sales reps who were initially against the automated solutions are now all for it,” said Agramonte. One of our projects reached a renewal rate of 78.6% – this was a 17% increase from last year. We also oversold our new sales target on this project by 7%. In one of the early projects, a sales rep saw that the renewals gained through the automated approach were massive, and he strongly questioned the system’s ability to accurately track results. “I carefully explained to him how the tracking worked,” said Agramonte, “and once the sales rep realized how accurate our tracking was, he quickly became an advocate for the automated email renewal.” One of our initially hesitant adopter’s has seen a 16% increase in new sales YTD over this same period last year. She attributes this increase to the time saved not having to call her renewal advertisers. In a telling adoption story, Agramonte explains that they’d planned to exclude the automated renewal email approach from a particular project. The sales rep associated with the project, who had earlier opposed the automation, “quite vocally demanded that we use the automation for it,” Agramonte chuckled. Nothing scales success like success What’s clear is that Naylor did a great job not only working collaboratively with IT, marketing, sales, and other departments to develop the automated solution, but they also did a brilliant job scaling adoption with their initially-skeptical sales reps. In the end, the solution worked: sales reps who started out as passionate skeptics of the automated approach ultimately became its strongest advocates and ambassadors. Stay tuned for our follow-up post where we look at what Naylor decided to do in terms of changing the way it emailed and interacted with its ad customers, leveraging the marketing automation power of Eloqua to work smarter in getting renewals and upselling via email. The solution was a blended approach where technology was enabled and deployed to do what it does best while sales reps were enabled and deployed to do higher-level activities they do best. Sound interesting? Reach out  to us today to learn how we can help you achieve similar results leveraging marketing automation.

We partnered with Sojourn Solutions to help us address the challenge of driving technological transformation to enable us to work smarter, including outlining processes for developing marketing campaigns, lead generation, and lead scoring across the organization. Our latest joint initiative, the automated email renewal solution, was a massive success – to the point that my CFO asked us to roll it out across our organization. Chad Lloyd, Director of Sales and Marketing Operations, Naylor Association Solutions   Naylor Association Solutions, with corporate headquarters in McLean, Virginia, works with trade and professional associations across the nation, including the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA), the United Motorcoach Association (UMA), and many more, helping them maximize membership engagement and generate more revenues. Naylor’s services and business units include member communication (creating various publications for associations), event management, and association management. Challenge Naylor’s challenge was on the technology side, because its previous outreach efforts to get renewals from existing advertisers, as well as its approach to advertising prospects, involved a high level of manual operations performed by Naylor’s sales reps. “It was basically an outbound telephone sales operation,” explains Lloyd, “and most of our existing customers were simply agreeing to renew on the phone without any upsell. We were paying sales commissions, but getting little ROI” from the sales-reps-on-the-phone approach.  Solution Lloyd and his team, working with Sojourn Solutions and Eloqua, developed an email automation system that helped them run their renewal campaigns. The application took customer data from Naylor’s MIS (management information system) and CRM and put it into the field merges within Naylor’s automated renewal emails in Eloqua. The integrations allowed for the sharing and accuracy of relevant customer data, making the automated emails personalized to the particular advertising customer. Results Renewals came in faster via the automated renewal campaigns, generating more revenue without any involvement from the sales reps. Prior to launching the renewal campaign, 95% of Naylor’s renewals were processed in an average of 87 days. After the launch, Naylor was capturing 95% of its renewal revenue in an average of 24 days (63 days faster). “We shortened the amount of time to get renewals, and therefore recognized those revenues much faster, which made our finance people very happy” explains Lloyd. A success story now being spread across Naylor. Naylor’s CFO recognized the efficiency and increased revenues that Lloyd was driving with the automated email renewal campaigns. Unsurprisingly, the CFO then asked Lloyd to help roll-out the successful automated email solution across the Naylor organization. “We’re bringing this new capability to other parts of the business, and also expanding it to our highest-spend advertisers and new advertisers,” he says.

Mike Comey  is the Head of Loyalty Insights, Loyalty Solutions at FIS , a Fortune 500 fintech company with about 55,000 employees operating in 200 locations throughout the world. FIS serves customers in 3 main areas: (1) merchant solutions, helping merchants process payments from customers; (2) banking solutions, helping banks with core processing, ATM networks, loyalty programs, and more; (3) capital markets, which means investing and financial transactions. Comey and his team at FIS (about 5 marketers) work to help banks promote and implement loyalty programs (giving bank customers points, merchandise, and/or cash back for using bank-issued credit/debit cards). Mike shared his Eloqua success story at a Sojourn virtual Eloqua User Group meeting, and this post spotlights his share.  On the marketing challenges FIS faced The FIS flagship loyalty product is the program of choice for over 3,000 financial institutions. If the scale wasn’t big enough, these loyalty programs also present massive operational complexities. As Comey explains it, “we do all the back-end from the scoring of the transactions, awarding the points, allowing for all the redemption channels and enabling our institutional clients to customize the programs as they see fit.” All the different program components add a great deal of complexity to what Comey’s team has to do in terms of dynamic content, program communication, and how they display program offerings. And since the end users of the programs are the clients of banks, FIS constantly confronts the need for accuracy and precision with information. “We’ve got a strong obligation to ensure we don’t make mistakes, and that we don’t display information that a cardholder shouldn’t see, “ says Comey, “our job is therefore quite complex and time-consuming as far as marketing challenges go.” Finally, Comey’s team is tasked with promoting the different redemption channels, communicating to cardholders what rewards (i.e., merchandise,  travel, etc.) are available to them. All of it represents a massively complicated challenge. How the FIS team deployed Eloqua and won an award Before deploying Eloqua in 2016, Comey’s team was using a rudimentary email platform. “We’d send about four emails per month and had virtually no customer segmentation. It was just very clunky, hard to use, and very slow,” explains Comey. “So when we launched Eloqua, it was life-changing. We were able to better manage all the complexities in our programs, but also open up new possibilities for how we reach out to cardholders, with different types of messaging and ways we track and analyze data.” The early gains FIS saw using Eloqua were so strong that the company won a Markie award in 2017 for rapid transformation. As Comey says, “We had lots of energy and we just built, built, built,” which led to its own set of problems.”  Confronting “the monster”  Unfortunately, FIS was creating a monster as it grew its utilization of Eloqua. “We were using these three main pieces — canvases, segments, and emails — to try to account for all the complexity we have,” says Comey. “We would create different canvases based on email content and based on bank clients that have different program offerings. Sometimes we’d create a different canvas for different product types or we’d do a lot of triggered emails. So if a cardholder has a certain transaction, then that would trigger a certain type of email.” FIS also developed customer segments using Eloqua. “We would try to do some sophisticated marketing segmenting around customer attributes and propensities,” says Comey.  Every time FIS faced an obstacle or hurdle, it would simply “build, build, build”  something new to overcome that challenge in the short-term. But it was done ad hoc, not in any systematic and standardized way. “Unfortunately, we weren’t operating with any efficiencies and we weren’t thinking holistically,” says Comey. “We would just take every problem and create a new canvas, a segment for it. And over time we’d created a monster.” What really changed the focus for Comey was when he started losing marketers from his team due to burn out and exhaustion, largely caused by managing the monster.  “The amount of time we were spending on Eloqua was just overwhelming,” says Comey. “We’ve got such a complex product so the learning curve for team members is a big challenge here. Being able to learn Eloqua is another challenge. When our people started leaving, we just knew we needed to change something.” Taming the monster: FIS works with Sojourn to develop solutions Comey reached out to Sojourn with one question: “how can we unravel this monster so that we’re not doing all this repetitive work that’s exhausting our people?” Sojourn analyzed the issue and developed a solution that helped FIS get away from all the one-off, ad hoc work it had been creating — and instead begin working more systematically, in standardized ways that would scale.  For example, Sojourn analyzed all the canvases and segments FIS had created and then worked to reduce them in number (by standardizing them). As a result, FIS was able to move from having 120 promotional canvases down to just a single monthly canvas.   “That single change saved us over 600 hours per year, just on the canvas side,” says Comey. When it came to segments, it was a similar story. FIS had 107 different segments in 2019, but Sojourn helped FIS bring that down to just 16, saving FIS even more time and work. Regarding emails, Sojourn helped FIS “trim the time it took for us to create each email from six and a half hours down to less than two,” says Comey. In total, Sojourn helped Comey’s small team save some 3,000 hours, reducing its workload dramatically. “Every hour that we spend doing operational work is an hour that’s not spent analyzing data, finding new ideas, and coming up with creative new campaigns,” says Comey. “I cannot emphasize enough how much Sojourn has helped make our operations more efficient,  so that we’re actually maximizing what we’re getting out of Eloqua.” FIS has allocated a lot of resources into its use of Eloqua — between the platform itself, the team hours, the vendors — “and we’ve got to ensure that we’re maximizing every dollar we spend,” says Comey. “Sojourn is helping us do exactly that.” Today, Comey’s team has more time for analyzing and leveraging data, as well as doing creative and high-level/strategic work. “We’ve also gained more time to think about how we can leverage Eloqua even more,” Comey says. “Being able to save a combined 3000 hours has been transformational for my team here at FIS.”   Check out our Campaign Execution Services  to help improve your marketing automation campaign efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance. Or,  contact us  to discover how your organization can get the most out of your Oracle Eloqua platform.

Multi-touch attribution  enables marketers to connect (attribute) touchpoints and marketing activities to revenues. Having this MTA capability not only informs better marketing tactics and decision-making, but also enables marketers to “prove” their value more effectively in the C-suite.  Progress Software , the leading platform for developing and deploying strategic business applications, has moved from a single-touch attribution model to MTA. As Carmen Gardiner , Progress’s Director of Marketing Operations, explains it: “A single touch model just doesn’t give you the visibility you need to make marketing decisions, especially in the enterprise buying cycle. MTA measures a wider range of buying touchpoints, not just around a single individual but also includes buying groups. MTA shines a light on the success of the tactics and channels that you’re investing in, giving you more insight into how those tactics, those campaigns, and that spend is really affecting the buyer’s journey.” The catalyst for change at Progress Progress’s MTA journey began with a change in C-level leadership a few years back. The new team “was used to getting multi-touch attribution,” notes Gardiner. “And we simply didn’t have it.” So driving MTA became a mandate for Gardiner and her marketing ops team.  What did leadership expect? They wanted Progress “to have the data to know what’s working and what’s not, and be able to show the reasoning behind asking for [marketing] spend,” explains Gardiner. “MTA would help explain why we might need money for top of funnel programs. You’d have data to show that it’s an integral part of the buyer journey and not just focusing on that last touch point.” Big challenges Whether it’s driving MTA or any other initiative,  change management  is all about dynamically integrating technology, processes, and people around the new way of working. “Technology was the hardest part for us,” explains Gardiner, “because MTA was a new concept at Progress,” which had been using single touch attribution. “We had challenges getting the scripts to play well with our CMS [content management system]. We even lost a vendor over that. We had to jump over that particular hurdle because you can’t get touchpoints without scripts on your website.” Getting the processes right was another challenge. “It’s so hard to change your thinking when you’ve been thinking for 20 years in terms of campaigns: we had to change to touchpoints. We just weren’t used to tying those touchpoints to spend and connecting that with our budgeting,” says Gardiner. Progress tackled technology and processes before the “people” part, which sounds eminently sensible. “If you don’t have your technology and your processes down, your people aren’t going to understand it, use it, and buy into it,” says Gardiner. Progress started its MTA journey with a small group. “We have three marketing groups,” says Gardiner, “and so we started the one that needed the visibility the most.” As Gardiner notes in our second post, Progress may have (in retrospect) been better served by bringing its people in even earlier, as Progress worked to get those challenging technology and process parts of the solution off the ground.  Bizible for MTA Bizible  was not Progress’s first choice for MTA but was its final choice. “It’s working really well for us. It’s given us greater visibility into the contribution of the top and bottom of funnel programs, the first touch, the pipeline acceleration. It’s opened marketing’s mind into the possibility of being able to report on things that aren’t last touch and allowing them to better understand which mix may lead to better conversion.” Bizible enables Progress to see where the gaps are: “When you do funnel conversion stats, we can see where we need to get people/leads in at the top or need something in the middle of the funnel,” says Gardiner. “It’s not ‘one-and-done’ tactics, but a mix that eases people through their buyer’s journey.” Progress can see that full-funnel journey, and where its funnel might be “leaky,” in order to plug those leaks. Impact of MTA  MTA has moved Progress, especially its enterprise team, away from campaigns and towards touchpoints. “Instead of doing events, because campaign reporting told them events were great, they now look at the touchpoint attribution models. They can see which channels and tactics are better at different parts of the funnel. So they get a better, multidimensional picture of the buyer’s journey and see how their combined efforts contribute to pipeline and revenue.” The way marketing decisions get made is now more data-driven, focusing on getting the mix of marketing tactics/activities right: “decisions are based on a multidimensional understanding of how tactics and actions are impacting every piece of the funnel. Marketers feel better, for instance, going to C-level executives and asking for more AdWords spend because they can actually show the impact of that spend,” says Gardiner. Marketers at Progress are also conducting more experiments because they’re able to pull the levers and tweak tactics/actions at different stages of the funnel, then measure and iterate upon results. They can “fail small” and learn during a data-driven process of continuous improvement. Examples of real MTA impact Gardiner points to Google AdWords as a good example of how Progress has used MTA to have a more experimental approach that leads to smarter marketing decisions and more ROI. “We were spending a lot of money on Google AdWords in places where we shouldn’t,” notes Gardiner, “but the MTA reporting allowed us to see where our sweet spots were, which investments were actually affecting top of funnel and converting into leads. And so we started spending our money in certain areas [that were working] and stopped spending our money in other areas [that weren’t working]. For some areas that were kind of in the middle, we figured out how we could improve results. We tweaked our ads and experimented. We didn’t just cut our AdWords budget: we increased its performance by about 30%.” Content, which is often deployed around the top of the funnel, is another area impacted by MTA. “Our content teams and product managers love that we can now show the impact that blogs, press releases, and content have on the buyer’s journey. Before MTA, they had no way of showing their impact on the business. So two whole departments now have a seat at the table, asking what kind of content resonates with people? And at what stages in the funnel? They can use MTA to better determine the topics to write about and what content people want.” All of that drives full-funnel ROI. In our next post , we’ll explain what lessons Progress has learned during its MTA journey, lessons that other organizations like yours might apply for themselves. Continue reading here . Interested in learning more about how your organization can begin a journey towards multi-touch attribution? Contact us  today.

As you may have read in our first  of two blog posts about Progress’s journey from single-touch to multi-touch attribution , the result of the change was a large improvement in the efficiency of its marketing function, which also boosted the credibility of marketing within the C-suite. In this second post, we’ll share the 10 key lessons Progress learned during its (still ongoing) MTA journey, as told to us by Carmen Gardiner , Progress’s Director of Marketing Operations. Here they are: C-level sponsorship is a must.  “An MTA journey isn’t a small initiative for a single department to do in a month. It’s got to have C-level sponsorship throughout, and it’s got to be prioritized,” explains Gardiner. “You’ll need to have resources tied to it, with stakeholders committed across the company, from marketing to sales, IT to web to finance and beyond.” Seek early buy-in across the organization.  “Every time you think you’ve got every stakeholder in the room, you’ll discover that you don’t. Seek to get everybody on board as soon as possible, because people have to feel a part of the process for it to work,” says Gardiner. “If I could go back, I would’ve brought people on board sooner rather than later. We felt that it was a good idea to have the technology and processes down before we bought people in, but [in retrospect] I would have brought them in sooner. It took some people a long time to wrap their heads around touchpoint attribution and not campaign attribution.” Select your vendor very, very carefully.  Progress went with Bizible as their MTA vendor, but only after some pitfalls with another vendor. “Keep in mind, from the start,  what you want to have at the end of the journey because, depending on the vendor, MTA can be defined differently,” says Gardiner, “There are a lot of MTA vendors that fall into different categories, that will give you different information, different results. So think carefully about what you want at the end of the journey and then find a vendor that’s going to deliver that.” Measure and celebrate key milestones along the way.  “The MTA journey is a long road and people are going to get tired,” says Gardiner. It’s important to stop and celebrate small wins. Measuring progress is also essential. “One of our product clients wanted to see multi-touch attribution and to know about Google AdWords. We showed them multi-touch attribution and then we tied spend to each keyword, each UTM campaign. So not only could they say they spent 10 grand on AdWords and this was what they got back, but they could dig into every little AdWords campaign, and then figure out what was working and what wasn’t. They were able to refine based off that level of reporting.” Self-service works.  Ideally, you shouldn’t need to be a professional data scientist with an advanced degree to use the tools. “We made it so anybody could go to the BI [business intelligence] dashboard and take a look at it from the different facets,” says Gardiner. “They could look at it from first touch, W-shaped, full path, and get the answers they needed based on the questions they wanted answers to. Self service is really, really important. If people are just allowed to go in there and play, they’re going to be curious, ask questions, and learn.” Expect resistance, work to mitigate it.  “There was some resistance to the change,” says Gardiner. “I was told by one marketer, ‘I don’t understand this, I’m not going to use it.’ We should have brought marketing in much earlier because it’s like walking into cold water.” Yes, people might resist at the beginning, so you should expect that, but be patient and keep communicating the why and the how of the MTA change initiative. Blend the new with the old.  Progress didn’t just eliminate the old way of working and introduce the new one overnight, which would have created massive confusion and frustration among end users. INstead, it rolled out the new while staying with the old. “We would run a team’s marketing metrics meetings for six months and show their campaign data that they usually have. And then marketing ops would give them the Bizible/MTA data and we would interpret that for them,” explains Gardiner. “So they could compare and contrast the datasets, because neither of them is wrong. And after a while, our users got used to the idea that neither was wrong. Neither one is going to give you the golden bullet,” but you can gain insights from both. That “blend of old and new” approach helped prevent confusion and drive adoption. You need a mixture of touchpoints.  “Multi-touch attribution,” says Gardiner, “is just going to help you answer specific, measurable questions like, is my Google AdWords spend helping me affect the top of the funnel? It won’t answer bigger questions like ‘how did my campaign go?’ MTA helps you decide what tactics are best for each stage of the buyer journey. You need a mixture of touchpoints, not just one. Events, for instance, are great but an event might be third base [in a baseball analogy], but you have to get to first and second base before that, right?” Don’t be afraid to fail.  “You’re not saving lives, you’re learning along with everyone else. Don’t tell people that MTA is going to give them some magic path. it’s a tool they need to learn how to use well, like any other tool.” It’s also important that leadership gives space for people to fail and learn from those failures, in a process of continuous learning. MTA is a journey, not a destination.  “You’re not going to be done, ever. There’s always going to be something more that you want to know, a gap you’ll want to fill. And I’m sure the technology will continue to evolve as well,” concludes Gardiner. Achieving peak performance is a bit like chasing the sun. You may never reach it, but the journey is eminently worthwhile. Reach out to us  to learn more about how your organization can begin – or optimize – a journey towards multi-touch attribution! Update: Listen to Carmen Gardiner share 5 of these lessons – and more insights – with Sojourn’s Dan Vawter via our (now) on-demand webinar “ 5 lessons learned: How Progress improved its marketing with multi-touch attribution. “

When COVID-19 struck in March, 2020, Quest Diagnostics wasn’t completely prepared (nobody was), but its marketing team had been collaborating with Sojourn Solutions to streamline its marketing technology. As a result, Quest was able to rapidly scale up its customer engagement during a global health crisis, when demand for its testing services skyrocketed. During a recent webinar hosted by Oracle - 5 Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Marketing Automation  - Quest’s Christopher Crowe, Director of Digital Marketing, and Karin Pindle, Senior Marketing Automation Consultant at Sojourn Solutions, told the full story. The Problem: Too much complexity, too many silos Crowe began by describing the disjointed, complicated state of their marketing ops prior to its collaboration with Sojourn, which kicked off in 2018. “Back then, Quest had multiple marketing automation platforms with minimal integration with our CRM,” explained Crowe, and all this complexity created a number of problems, including: Limited internal capability and a reliance on external agencies, which was costly and inefficient; Silos were limiting Quest’s ability to gain insights from its data and manage leads -- more cross-team sharing of leads and insights was needed; A multiplicity of platforms and silos were creating confusion and a lack of efficiency for the in-house marketing teams. Best practices and lessons learned weren’t being shared effectively. Things had to change, and they reached out to Sojourn to help streamline marketing operations in order to drive more integration (of tech and teams) and more efficiency. The chosen solution: One MAP (Eloqua) Quest and Sojourn examined where the diagnostics company was, i.e., an inefficient and confusing place, and mapped out where they wanted to go in the future. Crowe sketched out what they wanted: A centralized “center of enablement” that all in-house Quest Diagnostics' marketers could draw upon for resources and support, one that would support cross-team collaboration as well as sharing of data, leads, and best practices; A reduction in the time and the cost involved for launching campaigns, including less reliance on external agencies; Clear lead flows into the appropriate CRMs, helping Sales and Marketing alignment; Increased maturity to support more campaigns and more campaign complexity. What became clear after these discussions about goals was that Quest “needed a single MAP flexible enough to offer all this functionality and also integrate with CRMs,” said Crowe.  Quest and Sojourn agreed on migrating the organization to Eloqua , largely because, as Crowe explained, “Eloqua checked all the boxes for us in addressing our needs,” providing a single, centralized source of truth and customer engagement. Crowe noted that “the Eloqua campaign canvas is so user friendly that our people could get comfortable using it quickly.” In addition, healthcare companies like Quest must comply with strict regulations around patient privacy: Eloqua has great tools for HIPAA [the patient privacy act] compliance compared to other MAPs. Implementing the solution With the goals of the collaboration clearly defined and a chosen MAP in Eloqua, Quest and Sojourn began implementing the solution. They started migrating the multiplicity of data and campaign assets contained in multiple MAPs into Eloqua. As Pindle explained, this required numerous steps, such as the consolidation and streamlining of Quest's in-house marketing processes, bringing the entire, confusing array of multi-MAP instances into Eloqua (with just a few Eloqua instances) as “a single source of truth,” cleaning the data, and improving lead management so more and better leads could be funneled to Sales. Pindle explained exactly how Sojourn approaches MAP migrations with a clear 4-step process: (1) plan and organize to identify exactly what data/assets need to be migrated and when; (2) set up, with APIs saving clients 75% on time and cost to migrate data/assets; (3) testing -- “we use humans to test everything,” Pindle explained; and (4) go live -- “we monitored Eloqua for Quest to quickly resolve any issues that might arise.” Of course, the migration and transformation process took time, but by the time the pandemic struck in 2020, Quest was in a great position to pivot and scale up its customer engagement with Eloqua.  Results: Quest Diagnostics pivots & scales B2B Marketing during a crisis Crowe explained that the 3-year collaboration with Sojourn and Oracle has made Quest a more streamlined and more productive marketing operation. The newly-implemented Eloqua MAP “helps us get the right message to the right customer at the right time,” said Crowe. ”Even though we’re running a much higher volume of campaigns and we sent 40 million emails in 2020, our campaign costs have gone down, so we’re doing more with less.” Campaigns are now easier for our people to create and develop using Eloqua, said Crowe, and they were able to ramp up customer engagement at a time when customer demand for their testing service was surging. In the end, says Crowe, ‘we’ve seen significant gains across multiple revenue measures” and “we continue to use Eloqua to create rich customer experiences.” Today Quest has greatly increased its in-house capability, relying much less on expensive agencies to fill gaps in its capabilities (gaps that no longer exist). What’s next: Driving more efficiency Chris Crowe and Quest Diagnostics, with the ongoing help of Sojourn Solutions, continue to drive benefits and cost efficiencies using Eloqua, strengthening lead generation and alignment between marketing and sales, while enhancing personalization and CX in its approach to customer engagement. Quest has effectively navigated an unprecedented pandemic and is ready to handle whatever happens next. Want to learn more about how your organization can drive more efficiency and future-proof your marketing operations, just as Quest Diagnostics did? Reach out to us here .   About Quest Diagnostics New Jersey-based  Quest Diagnostics  (QD) is a leader in healthcare testing, offering an extensive menu of testing services that include COVID-19 testing. The Fortune 500 company has some 44,000 employees around the US, and engages a wide range of customers in both the B2C and B2B spaces.