case study: how pega used the changing b2b buyer journey and persona's to transform the way we...

© 2014 Pegasystems Inc. 2

A Bit of Background

20 years in hi tech B2B Marketing

UK and EMEA roles

Passionate about Sales and Marketing alignment

Currently Senior Director of Marketing EMEA,

Pegasystems


The New B2B Buyer


The Early Stages, late 2013 early 2014

Research

Educate

Enable

Excite


Implications for Pega

Marketing now owns a much bigger piece of the lead-to-revenue cycle

and must take responsibility for engaging with the customer through

most of the buying cycle.

Marketing and Sales are not effectively aligned against a common

model

Complexity of B2B Buyer Journey requires much closer than teaming than before

Pega does not know enough about our customers and prospects to

engage effectively and successfully

What we do know is not being leveraged in our approach to content and

marketing. We treat customers and prospects from all functions and all levels in

the same way

Marketing strategy remains predominately outbound when we need to move to an

inbound approach

We are Pega centric when we need to be Customer centric

We focus on content creation without understanding the role it needs to perform

and at which stage of the buyer journey it will be deployed


A persona is:

A representation of a user/customer

(their goals, attitudes, behaviours)

to provide a common understanding and

reference point to all those involved in

designing, building and marketing products

What Is a Persona


Why Personas?

Best practice demand creation strategy that includes more personalised and

customised messaging built on personas yields 2x the average sales pipeline.

SiriusDecisions, 2013

So What Does This Mean for You? • Engages buyer earlier and more effectively

• Focuses messaging; increases precision of targeting; ensures right message to right person at

the right time

• Instills shared understanding between marketing, sales and product

• Improves sales productivity

• Transforms marketers to be the subject matter experts on their customers

• Our Website and all Content & Programs are orientated to our Persona’s

Persona-based marketing sharpens your aim and helps craft messaging to entice the key

decision-makers and influencers. It allows you to define and target the relevant audience, with

compelling content that will trigger a response.

B2B Marketing blog Oct 2013


Agreement for Internal Pilot – Customer Service (April 2013)

Briefing calls and then internal workshop

3 Persona’s identified

Leverage external template to create Personas on a page

Existing content mapped to Personas and across buying cycle

Gap analysis


Findings – Phase 1

Developing Persona’s and mapping content to their Buyer Journey is time

consuming and complex

Content does exist for early stage Buyer Journey for the LOB Personas.

We need to validate whether this content is seen as valuable.

What is our strategy to ensure this is readily accessible by this persona where they

congregate?

We have a major gap in content across the Buyer Journey for an IT based

Persona.

Lacking relevant powerful content at each stage

Feedback from Sales is that they engage IT more frequently than we may think – are we

misaligned?

We need greater technical knowledge, skills and experience in Marketing to bring this into our

content

Case studies are light on both business and technical detail and we lack

significant content for the later stages of the Buyer Journey.

What did we achieve?, How did we achieve it?

We need to map the Buyer Journey to the Pega Sales model to make it

clearer for an internal audience?


Researching our Audience Further (June 2013)

Please rate the information sources

you consider the most influential when

making a corporate purchasing

decision:

Please rate the following tactics for

effectiveness when gathering

information:

Where do you congregate with peers

to learn about best practices or to

network?

Which social networking or other

online interaction forums are you

currently active professionally?


Phase 2 – Honing our Approach (August 2013)

Take best practice approach to Persona creation

Analyst (Sirius/Zambito)

External Reference

Engage 3rd party agency for additional expertise

Agree template for data capture


Phase 2 – Honing our Approach


Output – November 2013


Enabling the Broader Marketing Function and Beyond

Creation of assets to promote the Personas

PDF’s

Posters

Supporting documents from external analysts

Internal enablement

Positioning/Briefing document

All Hands calls

Email announcements

Lunch and Learn sessions

External analyst briefing calls

121 meetings and team meetings


Next Steps - 2014

Map existing contact Database by Persona

Counts, gap analysis, hot spots

Improve external analysis to further hone existing Persona

and validate

Watering holes, social media usage, influencers etc.

Content audit by Persona across the buying cycle

Where are the gaps, plan to close

Analytics by campaign on engagement, active contacts,

response etc.

Test and Learn, Test and Learn

Develop further Persona’s where gaps identified, rationalise

existing Persona’s if needed


Persona’s Can Drive the Realignment of Marketing for Greater Effectiveness and Efficiency

Persona’s

Researc

h

Industry

and

Product

Marketing

Strategy Content creation

across buying

cycle

Articles

Videos

Infographics

Case studies

Surveys

White papers

In-person events

Webinars

Data sheets

Corporate Marketing

Cam

paig

n F

ram

ew

ork

/

Key S

ell

ing

Th

em

es

. A

gre

e p

rio

riti

es

, m

ap

sto

ry

by

pers

on

a a

nd

bu

yin

g c

yc

le s

tag

e

Execution

Field Marketing

Marketing Ops

Database

PR

BG

R

Sa

les O

ps

Sa

les

Tele / Field Field Marketing


Business Justification/ROI

Marketing to engage in greater number of early stage discussions within our target accounts

Number of interactions increases 20%+. Target net increase of 300 per month

Number of Marketing generated leads into the pipeline 10%+. Target net increase of 35 per month

Number of opportunities in pipeline and value of pipeline increases 10%+. Target net increase of 4 opportunities and pipeline value of $3m per month

Quality of leads passed to Sales and conversion to opportunity improves

Conversion rate of Marketing generated leads to opportunities increases to 40%+ from 32% currently

Increase number of marketing sourced opportunities in the active pipeline by 20%

Single model that both Sales and Marketing work to Consistency of language, improved alignment, improved engagement into SAPR

Ability to engage and leverage Pre Sales and Pega Consulting content to support relevant stages of the Buyer Journey

case study: how pega used the changing b2b buyer journey and persona's to transform the way we...

Marketing

pega marketing

marketing alignment

marketing products

content creation

mapping content

complex content

content programs

compelling content