Voice of the Customer: Tim Minahan, CMO, Ariba, Inc.* - Story From: Recent Ideas
This month's Voice of the Customer post comes from Tim Minahan. Tim is the Chief Marketing Officer for Ariba, Inc., the leading provider of on-demand spend management solutions. Tim talks about the challenges many CMOs face today and how he uses several solutions from the AppExchange to address them.
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In today's economy, agility rules. Businesses are operating leaner than ever before. And with uncertainty over when (or if) the rebound will come, most are gun shy about reinvesting in infrastructure or hiring back resources. To be agile enough to get stuff done in the face of rapidly changing market conditions and customer needs, more businesses are balancing internal capabilities with external solutions that fill gaps and enhance the internal infrastructure. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud-based service delivery models offer the agility and variable service models companies require.
As the leading provider in On Demand Spend Management solutions, Ariba practices what we preach. So when it came to developing an agile marketing model, we looked for Salesforce solutions and capabilities that could be assembled into an end-to-end best-practice process in the cloud.
Our Volume and Velocity ("V2") marketing method is designed for full visibility and measurability across the marketing and sales funnel – from initial customer discovery through lead conversion and sales cycles. While we use a wide variety of marketing approaches and channels (volume), all are funneled through our corporate website, ariba.com. This allows us to easily track and measure each prospect through a methodical lead vetting and nurturing program to speed opportunities through the sales cycle (velocity).
The entire V2 process is supported by a Cloud-based digital marketing nervous system. Salesforce.com is the backbone of this system, managing critical customer information and providing visibility into key tasks and metrics across the marketing and sales funnels.
Branching off from this backbone are a series of other SaaS-based solutions and information services that function as the nerves and muscles of our marketing system. For example:
- We use Google AdWords and Analytics to attract prospects to our site and offers.
- Omniture helps us analyze visitor behavior and measure site performance to understand the prospect attributes and monitor the effectiveness of our site.
- When a visitor accepts an "offer", such as downloading a whitepaper or viewing an online demo, our web to lead integration triggers a task in Salesforce prompting our demand management team to call the prospect within two hours.
- Integration with Ringlead helps keep our data clean with preventative, automatic, real-time de-duping of web forms, lists and manual entries.
- Ongoing prospect and customer interactions, including distribution of audience-specific newsletters, are managed through ExactTarget, our email marketing tool which is integrated with Salesforce.com.
- Finally, to ensure we can reach the total addressable market, we leverage tools like Jigsaw, Hoovers, and InsideView. Hoovers keeps our core global prospect database up-to-date and serves as the record-of-truth for account information. Jigsaw helps build and maintain accurate contact data by providing missing information such as title, phone, address, and email address. And InsideView provides additional insight into companies and contacts, including current news, key decision makers and tweet tracking. All this information is integrated and accessible through Salesforce.com.
This SaaS-based digital marketing nervous system has allowed us to quickly sense and respond to the changing market dynamics and adjust our marketing approaches and investments accordingly. This is the type of marketing agility we will need to remain competitive in the new economy.
*Originally posted by Sara Varni, Sept. 28 2009
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Voice of the Customer: Tim Minahan, CMO, Ariba, Inc.* – Story From: Recent Ideas
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