4Thought Marketing

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company.

We are an IT [information technology] service management provider. We service mostly mid- to large-sized companies across all verticals. We've been around for more than 20 years. Our headquarters is in Paris, but we have locations spread throughout the United States and Southern Europe.

What are your position and responsibilities?

I am the global marketing operations manager. I am responsible for managing the Eloqua database and the Eloqua campaign execution. I work with all the marketing field directors in executing their email campaigns out of Eloqua. I'm also responsible for the Eloqua assets, including emails and forms.

I also manage and work on the integrity of our email database, with regard to database cleansing. We use Salesforce as our CRM [customer relationship management] system, so I make sure that all the integration is there for the campaign management and that data flows from Eloqua into Salesforce seamlessly. I'm also the Salesforce administrator. I do a lot of reporting in Salesforce – a lot of dashboards for all our countries.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with 4Thought Marketing?

I'm new to the company as of January, but we have had Eloqua for about four years. We've probably had at least five different users or administrators for Eloqua. Marketing operations – the role I serve in right now – did not exist prior to my arrival, so the administrator of Eloqua was basically a part-time job for someone. But, the turnover in that position was high so changes were made and processes were changed, and they weren't completely 100 percent accurate.

Nothing was defined, none of our processes were well-defined, so when I came in as a new Eloqua user, we didn't have any documentation and nothing was working 100 percent according to plan. When we would have an event, I would upload the contacts into Eloqua and only half of their data would successfully migrate into Salesforce, when they all needed to go over. Our forms were not showing the correct picklists, the picklists were not mapped correctly, and there were varying picklists between Eloqua and Salesforce, so the integration was flawed and our program builder within Eloqua was flawed. The whole configuration was off.

I reached out to 4Thought because I knew I needed someone with deep expertise and knowledge of Eloqua's program builder to research the problems and find out what the missing pieces were so we could resolve them. Eloqua would then be accurate and clean data would be passed to our sales reps in our sales team. There wasn't a lot of confidence here in Eloqua before I started. It seemed to lack integrity, and most people here felt lack of confidence that it was the right tool for us. But that's slowly beginning to change. A lot of that has to do with the work of 4Thought Marketing.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

They've done a whole review of the program builder. They created a master exclude list for us, and then added that to the program builder for automatic exclusion, which saved me and others a lot of time so that we didn't have to remove our competitors. They went through an entire review of our field mapping and identified fields that were not mapped correctly in Salesforce, and we fixed those issues. Because I'm the Salesforce administrator, I was able to verify that, so we worked on that together.

They made configuration changes so that there were no duplicates being created. One of the major problems we had was with our event uploads – whether it was a webinar or a face-to-face event. When anyone would do an upload, duplicates were being created in Salesforce. There was no check to see if there was an existing record in Salesforce. They made changes to the configuration to prevent duplicate records from being created. That was a huge improvement.

They also helped improve our data quality, and this has to do with data integrity. They validated the country and state fields. They created a data washing machine that cleaned and standardized the existing data. Any new data that's being pushed through goes through the data washing machine to make sure that everything is clean and organized. For example, we had four different ways of describing that you were in the United States. We had "United States," "US," "USA," and "United States of America." As a result, if you wanted to pull a segment for your email that says, "I want to email everyone in the US," you had to add all four of those country codes. That is a good example of standardizing and validating our country and state fields. Again, they identified and fixed the inconsistency with the picklists, and that has been huge.

Just recently, they helped me with a WebEx cloud connector integration. WebEx is integrated with Eloqua, but it's not as simple as pushing one button and everything just follows nicely. It is so integrated, sophisticated, and intricate. It's one of those things that once you get it set up, you can just clone it and do it yourself the next time, but to set it up there are 25 little steps. If you don't mark this checkbox, if you don't identify that campaign, if you don't link every little thing … Every little step requires knowledge of what to do at each step to integrate and properly match the WebEx event with the Eloqua campaign, so that emails flow through, and Eloqua knows who's registered, who attends and who doesn't attend.

It's all based on that integration, which sends out the corresponding reminder emails according to the registration report, sends out the "Thank you for attending" or "Sorry you missed the webinar" messages. That's all based on the integration. That was a huge priority for us because we just started a new global webinar series. We had to rely on the expertise of 4Thought Marketing to set it up. Now that it's set up, the automation is such a timesaver – it's really added a level of sophistication to our processes and to the end-users.

How did you come to work with 4Thought Marketing?

Our U.S. general manager, who started right after I did, had worked with 4Thought in a prior life and suggested them to me. I thought it was an unusual name and so, for some reason, I remembered it. When I went to the Eloqua conference – their Modern Marketing Experience conference in Las Vegas a couple months ago – I walked into the vendor showcase area, and they were the first booth there. I thought, "Oh, 4Thought Marketing." I walked up to their booth and introduced myself. Right before that, one of their principals had introduced himself. He didn't know who I was and when he said, "I'm from 4Thought Marketing," I said, "I remember your name." I think it was all kind of meant to be, with them randomly coming up to me, and me being at that conference.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We've spent around $25,000 working with 4Thought Marketing.

What is the status of this engagement?

The most recent project was completed just last week [August 2015].

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics, metrics or other feedback from this engagement?

I don't have any statistics or metrics. There were words of encouragement at the corporate level, as they're finally starting to see the value of Eloqua, and they're finally getting some confidence in our database. At that level, they don't get into the details, so as far as them understanding what it takes to integrate WebEx with Eloqua. They couldn't really care less, as long as the emails are sent out properly, the WebEx instructions are correct, and the company is branded correctly.

But, the database is huge, so I'm constantly getting copied on emails that are from higher than me – director and above – that talk about the work that we're doing in Eloqua and how we now have data integrity, how we've never had that before, and that we need to continue on this path of making sure our data is clean and that things are being standardized. It's just little pieces of feedback like that, but no stats that I can quote.

What distinguishes 4Thought Marketing from other providers?

I do appreciate their willingness to help. I feel like the people who I've worked with really care about the quality of the work that they're providing for me, and I love that. Coming into this job and not knowing Eloqua, and having a ton of things on my plate, having people like that is really wonderful. They've been pretty much a lifesaver for me. They have given me their Skype address, so we communicate on Skype, which is awesome when you want just a quick answer to something. They are always readily available.

If 4Thought Marketing doesn't know something, they research it and come back to me. They follow up, they're responsive, and they're accountable – they've never missed a deadline. We had a tight deadline for this webinar WebEx cloud connector integration project, and they met the deadline. One of the people on the project went above and beyond to meet that deadline. I just feel like I'm a priority for them. I know I'm not the only customer that they have, but I don't feel that way. I feel like I am their number one priority. Every time I talk with them, every time I'm on the phone, they give me so much confidence.

In hindsight, are there areas in which they could improve, or things you might do differently?

Not that I can think of. I'm so green in this right now. Maybe ask me that question in a year. Right now, I'm still in the "Oh, they're so wonderful" bubble.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are an information security consultancy. We started out as a value-added reseller, probably about twelve years ago. Our services have really grown and now we are more of a strategic advisor for companies, to look at where their vulnerabilities are from an information security standpoint. Our job is to go in and look at a particular company, look at their vulnerabilities, look at what compliance standards they need to adhere to, and then offer recommendations on perhaps products or services, things that we could do to help them increase their protection.

What is your position?

I am one of the marketing operations managers. We recently merged with our largest competitor. We are very similar in terms of culture, design, size, and scope, so we doubled. Originally, when we engaged with 4Thought Marketing, we did not have this position available. There was not an operations function, and that has come about since we have engaged with 4Thought Marketing. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with 4Thought Marketing?

Originally, the company did not utilize a CRM [customer relationship management] solution. We had kind of a homegrown system that wasn't meeting all of our needs and was absolutely not meeting our needs when it came to marketing automation. There was nothing in place to track our communications, and there was nothing in place to track activity of our user engagement on that website. We needed to be able to provide some metrics to our partners around what their investment is bringing them.

We needed to implement an automation tool, and we needed someone that could come in and was very experienced with the NetSuite system that we were utilizing as a CRM system, and act almost as an arm of our company – a member of our team. That was part of the reason we went with 4Thought Marketing. They had intimate knowledge of NetSuite and its various functionalities and applications, and they had a team large enough that it could support our needs and really execute on the task at hand without a lot of directed guidance.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

We definitely expanded the scope of their involvement to include additional services. Since we've engaged with them, I go to them for pretty much all aspects of marketing automation, and they can help me perhaps implement best practices and organize more effective strategies. They've also produced a number of tools that are very useful to us. One that comes to mind is Four Segment, and that is a robust segmentation tool that can augment what an automation platform can provide, but it takes it to the next level. That's just an example of where we were talking to them about adding additional services.

They were also instrumental in helping us do an evaluation of a marketing automation platform for our new combined company, Optiv Security. They were great about remaining neutral, and really looking at our independent level of automation, and making a recommendation based on those findings.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

To be honest, I'm not entirely positive. I would say it's in the neighborhood of $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We maintain an ongoing relationship with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Not that I can think of, to be honest with you. We had no benchmarks because we didn't even have a real CRM system in place before hiring 4Thought Marketing. I guess the quantitative value there is we now have a benchmark, which we never did. Even appearing on the page is better than not appearing at all, so they helped us to get to that point.

We've always been very impressed with the responsiveness of their team and their ability to find solutions. 4Thought Marketing is not confined to a box, in a manner of speaking. They are very good at finding solutions, working around what would be a challenge to some organizations, and finding something that can work for us. They're comfortable creating something that is unique for us, and that's something that I very much appreciate.

Also, their leadership within the company is very hands-on, very involved, and offers a lot of insight into best practices or approaches – perhaps there's something we didn't consider. Some of the conversations that we've had with the president of the company [Mark LaVell] have been around how we should approach future acquisitions internationally. He had a lot of useful information that we could use there. Just having him available as a resource is extremely valuable to us.

One example that comes to mind is, we were mapping data between NetSuite and Eloqua. As I mentioned before NetSuite is not really a CRM solution. It's not necessarily a friendly system, so it wasn't a one-to-one comparison. There had to be some finagling around fields. Then, there was also an instance where they built programs to take in the kind of data that NetSuite would provide and scrub it, decode it, and deliver it into Eloqua in a more readily consumable form. They were able to deliver data that was more useful to us.

How did 4Thought Marketing perform from a project management standpoint?

They've been fantastic. They know how to manage and balance their workloads and how to establish an efficient workflow with their clients. Everything has gone very smoothly with them.

What distinguishes 4Thought Marketing from other providers?

For me, what really stands out is their customer service. I appreciate that they care about our business; they care about how well we're doing; and they're willing to spend the time needed to support me and offer solutions, or to step in and take over a particular initiative. To me, that's a huge differentiator. I don't want someone to come in and simply check off a series of boxes. I want them to care about the business as much as I do, and I feel like that is the case with 4Thought. They take real ownership of their work and strive to deliver the best possible solution.

I want to relay that I trust 4Thought implicitly, with everything. I trust them with my data and with my company. I trust that they're going to be honest about their billable hours. They're just a very forthright and honest organization.

In hindsight, are there areas in which they could improve, or things you might do differently?

I feel like their expertise is definitely spot-on. They don't need to do anything there. They've got it, they know their stuff, and they're great. One area that they might be able to improve on is training for their clients. It's not something that they're known for, so it can't be a knock against them, but it could be a service that they could provide in the future. I've utilized predominantly the Eloqua University to become more versed in the program's functionality. However, there were times that I've gone and asked for clarification around something, and I felt like it wasn't necessarily explained in the clearest form, and that might be on me. But, that might be an area that they could look into in the future.