Leveraging Strategic Demand to Achieve High Growth Goals

The Challenge

Improving Lead Quality to Drive Revenue

The company had achieved huge growth year-over-year but was targeting even more aggressive revenue goals for the future. Faced with a need to achieve 400% growth over a three-year period, the company needed to transform its demand marketing to become the best-in-class enterprise DevOps testing providers.

While MQL lead volume was up, SQL lead volume and opportunity conversion rates were down, meaning that the company had been experiencing a steady decrease in lead quality. As revenue goals increased, marketing was compensating by increasing the volume of tactical campaigns. But without a revenue-driven strategy, these campaigns had no impact on the bottom line, and sales was feeling the effect. Tricentis was at risk of missing their growth target unless the company moved to a Strategic Demand state. 

The Solution

A Buyer-Driven Content Strategy to Target an Elevated Audience

The company engaged with ANNUITAS to build a Perpetual Demand Generation program with the goal of aligning content marketing, lead management, tech stack and data to enable complete insight, management and optimization of demand.

We began by aligning content marketing. Previously, Tricentis’ content had been targeting traditional software testers with product-focused, transactional offers. There was little support for buyers in early or mid-funnel stages and tactical campaigns weren’t offering valuable content for C-suite executives or for testers attempting to “manage up” and initiate conversation with leadership. As part of their growth goals, it was crucial that Tricentis bring these executive personas at larger companies into the buying process earlier on.

ANNUITAS created a new content strategy that addresses buyer pain points throughout the entire funnel. Shifting content to include business leaders in enterprise segments supported the company’s strategic growth strategy and enabled sales to have conversations with key decisions makers earlier on.

Once this new content had been created ANNUITAS was able to create a personalized customer experience via the Tricentis website and outbound nurture programs. Now, leads are perpetually receiving content that is personalized and valuable to their persona and their stage in the purchase path. 

Rebuilding a Demand Process to Support Organizational Change Management

Previously, no one at Tricentis had end-to-end visibility of the sales cycle. There was no way to prioritize leads so the sales team was wasting time chasing leads that weren’t ready to engage in conversation.

As a part of the Perpetual Demand Generation program ANNUITAS created and implemented a Lead Management Framework to track and score lead activity according to the buyer’s journey to ensure leads were sales-ready.

With sophisticated tracking systems implemented in Marketo and Salesforce, both marketing and sales can now track all lead interactions and prospect behavior for informed sales conversations from the very beginning. Additionally, we implemented a custom Tableau instance to enable end-to-end analysis and visibility into the lead lifecycle. With all of these systems in place Tricentis is now able to fully optimize its demand marketing engine.

And finally, as part of the Perpetual Demand Generation program, ANNUITAS helped Tricentis implement organizational changes to ensure that there is true alignment between marketing and sales’ goals, responsibilities and expectations.

“I partner with ANNUITAS because you can’t get there with just technology. MarTech is important, but without strategy, process and people the technology will only automate a short-term, tactical approach to demand generation”  Kira Mondrus, Tricentis 

The Results

Personalized Experiences and Improved Processes Provide Huge ROI

By implementing a Perpetual Demand Engine program Tricentis is now able to orchestrate people, process, content, technology and data around the target buyers. Leads are presented a personalized, always-on experience from the first point of entry all the way to closed/won and beyond.

With aligned goals, marketing and sales now work together to support the overall business growth strategy. Marketing teams can more effectively target key personas and sales can have more informed conversations with leads that are ready to directly engage with a salesperson.

Previously, marketing would have to wait until the end of a campaign to see and measure results, but with the optimization capabilities Tricentis now has, teams have real-time visibility into all initiatives, enabling them to make informed decisions that support a higher ROI on-the-fly.

This combination of informed decision-making, targeted content, and lead behavior tracking empowers Tricentis to overcome demand obstacles and achieve the aggressive growth goals that had been set.

After implementation, Tricentis recognized a 54% increase in end-to-end conversion rates and a 250% ROI on their initial spend and program build costs. Fifty percent (50%) of opportunities created in the first year were directly sourced by marketing and 54% of opportunities won in the first year were directly sourced by marketing.