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Automating Demand Generation: Leading High Tech Company Realizes the Power of Vtrenz

Industry: High Tech Website URL: www.ciena.com Customer Since: 10/27/2005

As a leading provider of communications systems, software and services, Ciena aims to solve network challenges for cable, telecom, enterprise and government organizations across the globe. Despite its success, Ciena faced several challenges related to marketing including delayed lead follow-up, generic communications, costly outsourcing and difficulty in showing campaign results. Ciena chose Vtrenz to implement an automated closed loop lead process– from lead generation to sale closure. In addition, the rules-based marketing engine of Vtrenz enables Ciena to communicate with prospects in their marketing database almost instantly while providing the information most relevant to each prospect.

Marketing Challenges
Ciena’s marketing initiatives include generating prospects through its website, online marketing initiatives such as web seminars and pay-per-click advertisements, as well as offline events such as tradeshows. With nearly 2,500 new contacts generated each quarter, Ciena’s marketing team lacked the tools they needed to efficiently process incoming prospects. In fact, importing the prospects alone consumed nearly 12-15 hours per week, leaving Ciena’s marketing managers with little or no time to actually qualify the leads. New prospects were often buried in the database for months waiting for cultivation because the marketing team had a difficult time creating campaigns that could reach the right contact with the right message at the right time. In addition, it lacked the tools needed to measure the effectiveness of those campaigns.

Ciena’s marketing managers realized the value of sending timely, personalized and relevant messages to every contact in their database, but their existing database and marketing platform was difficult to use and manage, and gave them very little collective insight into their contacts. For this reason, Ciena often resorted to communicating with contacts based on general interests or attributes in the database. According to Tom Berger, Director of Web Marketing, “Many times, when email campaigns were sent, they consisted of large email blasts to prospects based on loosely grouped interests. With this strategy, we just hoped to get bites. We had the right marketing messages and a great database of contacts, but we lacked the tools to really execute targeted campaigns in a timely manner.”

Solution
Working with Vtrenz, Ciena implemented Vtrenz Premier to completely automate its lead generation process. Using campaign specific landing pages, Ciena is not only able to capture the source of the lead and information that enables subsequent communications, but can personalize and automate follow-up campaigns to specific contacts based on the specific actions or attributes of each contact. In addition, once a prospect matches pre-defined qualification criteria, it is instantly routed to the appropriate marketing manager for timely follow-up. By integrating all aspects of its online marketing initiatives, Ciena no longer guesses which campaigns generate the most interest. Instead, the marketing team can view the results in real-time and set benchmarks for future campaigns using Vtrenz.

Results

Relevant, Timely Communications
Ciena experienced excellent results within the first six months of being a Vtrenz customer. Using rules-based marketing to automate lead generation, Ciena has automated follow-up communications so new contacts and potential leads receive timely communications when it is most relevant to them. Each communication is now tailored to the specific need of the prospect based on their preferences and behaviors. In addition, marketing managers can spend their time creating automated cultivation tracks rather than executing one-off email blasts.

More Effective Prospect Qualification
Based on business rules, key prospects are filtered out and automatically routed to telesales for further qualification. Berger states, “Prior to Vtrenz, we would spend too much time creating and building one-off email communications which were executed when it could fit into Ciena’s schedule – which often times just didn’t happen. We knew we needed to automate this process, which is why we chose Vtrenz. Now we can spend more time strategizing and developing key cultivation campaigns and put them on auto-pilot. Using automation allows us to nurture all our leads while bringing key prospects to the surface.”

Cost Savings
Additional economic benefits were also realized after implementing Vtrenz. Initially, Ciena planned to use Vtrenz strictly for email marketing efforts while using an outsourced contact database. After further review, it was determined that Vtrenz' central database would meet its needs and reduce complexities. By eliminating the outsourced database, Ciena has saved more than $10,000 in maintenance costs per month.

Additional Insight
Ciena also integrated Vtrenz with its lead management system in order to leverage additional information for future marketing activities. Future plans include extended integration with Omniture, Ciena’s web analytics tool, which will enable them to utilize metrics such as recency and frequency of web site visits in order to further target communications within automated campaigns.