ANNUITAS Case Study: Secureworks
As a global leader in information security, Secureworks protects customers with unparalleled visibility into evolving cyber threats. But the company didn’t have the same visibility into the state of its own sales and marketing—and no way to track how marketing contributed to the bottom line. Working with ANNUITAS, Secureworks not only completed a Demand Marketing Transformation to overhaul its demand process, but the company also improved the overall customer experience, driving $100M in marketing-attributed revenue.
The challenge: make marketing a strategic partner in revenue growth
As Secureworks charted the path for its next stage of growth, Global Marketing Director Kira Mondrus faced a daunting target for marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). At the same time, Secureworks had multiple, uncoordinated lead management processes— with no common definition of a qualified lead. Sales was ignoring nearly 30% of leads. Mondrus knew the challenge was bigger than simply generating more MQLs. She needed to instigate deeper changes in the way sales and marketing worked together to engage with customers and drive long-term growth.
“I essentially lost visibility right after marketing-qualified leads were handed over to sales,” Mondrus said. “I had no way of seeing what the marketing contribution to pipeline or revenue was.”
Beyond the lack of visibility, Secureworks needed to evolve the marketing program to become more buyer-centric. With no personas or buyer journeys to guide them, their marketing communications approach had been very inside out and product-centric. As Mondrus put it, “All of our content was ‘brochureware.’” Marketing success was measured mostly by website traffic and email sends—tactical metrics that could not be tied to revenue.
The solution: always-on, customer-centric marketing
Information security is a business-critical purchase, involving multiple influencers and decision makers. To engage more senior decision makers and position Secureworks in a more strategic way, the team needed to better understand customers and their path to purchase—and improve every aspect of that experience.
ANNUITAS conducted extensive research to understand the key personas involved in the buying process, focusing on their concerns and behaviors as well as content preferences and relevant marketing channels throughout the buyer journey. Then, instead of going to market with a series of campaigns with a start and end date, Secureworks launched a buyer-centric demand engine that is always on—with prospects setting their own pace.
This buyer-centric demand engine has enabled Secureworks to orchestrate the conversation with their target audience from initial engagement through to close. Customers now get the information they want and need when they are ready for it, so their experience is better throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
“The biggest transformation was having this always-on engine in place, and having the buyer in the driver’s seat of how they interact with the content and the campaign.” – Kira Mondrus, Global Marketing Director
The new demand process changed the relationship between sales and marketing, creating greater alignment and providing full visibility from lead to revenue. “It was huge change management, in terms of how the marketing team thinks about going to market, and how sales interacts with Salesforce,” she said.
The result: business growth, marketing ROI
By partnering with ANNUITAS for a Demand Marketing Transformation Secureworks has not only doubled conversion from leads to opportunities, but also provided end-to-end visibility into how marketing is contributing to revenue. They can now see exactly how every marketing channel performs, as well as the role of every single piece of content within the program. As a result, Mondrus says deal sizes are bigger, and she and her team can now talk business outcomes. And internally, it’s changed the perception about marketing’s impact on revenue.
Since launching, marketing has sourced over $100M in revenue. And for ANNUITAS, this the ultimate success metric. “We’re focused on driving growth for businesses— and ROI for marketing investments,” said ANNUITAS CEO Adam Needles. “Both are achievable when sales and marketing are focused on a singular KPI—revenue.”
About Secureworks
Secureworks® (NASDAQ: SCWX) is a leading global cybersecurity company that keeps organizations safe in a digitally connected world. SecureWorks combines visibility from thousands of clients, artificial intelligence and automation from their industry-leading SecureWorks Counter Threat PlatformTM, and actionable insights from a team of elite researchers and analysts to create a powerful network effect that provides increasingly strong protection for clients. By aggregating and analyzing data from any source, anywhere, SecureWorks prevents security breaches, detects malicious activity in real time, responds rapidly, and predicts emerging threats.
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