Advantage Marketing Success Story

FOUNDATION SYSTEMS

About Foundation Systems
Foundation Systems are providers of financial management, reporting & performance management solutions to UK businesses. They are one of the largest SunSystems resellers in the UK and are part of the Systems Union Group, the authors of SunSystems.

Opportunity
In a highly competitive industry Foundation were looking for ways to improve their marketing efforts to help support sales meet their revenue goals by generating the correct quality and quantity of sales opportunities. This was the rational behind the project to review their marketing operations.

A key focus area was telemarketing. Foundation have an internal telemarketing team who are responsible for generating 50% of all their leads, as well as further qualifying all inbound enquiries from other marketing activity. The current telemarketing approach was product led opportunity identification, with limited opportunity qualification, resulting in a broad spectrum of quality of opportunity being passed to sales.

Campaign activity was very broad and the data did not exist to allow a focused approach to activity to be undertaken and there was no process for effectively managing the marketing pipeline and sales opportunities through to an ROI

Approach
In order to improve the quality of the leads they were passing to sales the following areas were reviewed:

• Marketing Activity Planning
• Data management
• Telemarketing operations
• Marketing Campaign Approach
• Lead Management Process

Objectives
The objectives of the project were to:

• Improve performance of the internal telemarketing team and recruit and coach a Direct Marketing Team Leader to continue team improvement.
• Develop a consistent style and approach to telemarketing
• Consider and make recommendations for the type of data that should be recorded on each 'lead'
• The experience necessary to recommend what sort of data:
  • Constitutes the 'base minimum' for high quality lead generation
  • Allows Foundation to perform meaningful analysis both during and after the campaign
• Develop the proposition, messages, goals, etc for campaigns covering core Foundation solutions and to develop high quality campaign briefs for those areas
• Define the number and mix of leads required to meet overall business goals
• Set up systems to manage campaigns
• Develop a lead management process
  • Work to define how CRM system supports lead generation
  • Develop reports required for accurate campaign and lead analysis to enable visibility of ROI

Solution
The follow activity was undertaken to meet the above objectives:-

• Regular coaching program undertaken to improve qualification skills of telemarketers and to help them take a “consultative sales” approach to their activity enabling them to begin to develop opportunity development skills. A process of “discovery” was undertaken during all calls and SCOTSMAN methodology was used to gather this information to help develop and qualify opportunities
• Definitions of leads were established along with stages of qualification and minimum criteria to be achieved before a lead is passed to sales
• A 28 page telemarketing “manual” was developed to help to provide a consistent style and approach to telemarketing at Foundation
• Sales Funnel calculations were undertaken to establish how many of what type of leads were needed to support revenue goals. This was then flowed down into a quarterly campaign plan of focussed activity to deliver those leads
• Campaign briefs were developed for each of the core solutions areas including the development of value propositions and the linking of solutions features to business benefits and business pains.
• A campaign and lead management process was developed as well as a set of reports that could be used to allow detailed analysis of marketing activity and ROI
• Process documented to enable consistent use of CRM systems for lead development and management

“Selene understood our requirements well and quickly developed a working knowledge of our business. She set clear objectives for the deliverables and met them all on time and the quality of her output was very high. She maintained a positive and constructive attitude throughout the project and our confidence in Selene is evidenced by the fact that we have contracted with her to continue helping us develop in these areas as we head into our planning cycle for 2006.”

“Thanks to her knowledge and experience Selene succeeded in establishing a positive working relationship with our telemarketing team and gained their trust. They are now able to apply better qualification skills to their work and develop the opportunities more fully. And what’s great is that our telemarketers also get more satisfaction and enjoyment from their work as a result.”

“I am confident that the work Selene has done will bring significant benefits to Foundation’s business. Not only within the Marketing function, in terms of better campaign development and execution, but also in other parts of the business as higher quantity and quality of leads ultimately produces more wins and increased revenue.”

David Smart, Business Development Director, Foundation Systems