Zimbra Improves Pipeline Efficiency By 50% Through Lead Nurturing Partnership

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Written by Amanda Ferrante

Tuesday, 23 June 2009 09:29

With a business model reliant upon driving large volumes of Web traffic, rummaging through the mass of prospects in search of quality leads is a time-consuming and tedious process. Zimbra, an open source email and collaboration software provider, needed a way to cost-effectively hone in on interested buyers and segregate leads.

One of the leading companies in next generation collaboration client that integrates email, contacts, shared calendar, instant message, documents with sharing capabilities, advanced search and VoIP into a browser-based interface. Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo! in late 2007. The company has accumulated over 41 million paid mailboxes worldwide.

By leveraging open source distribution and viral word-of-mouth media strategies, the Zimbra marketing team drives over 200,000 unique web visits a week to the Zimbra Web site. As with other BtoB marketers, it is a top priority for Zimbra to narrow their focus to only interested buyers. Offering free and paid trials naturally helps segregate leads; however, the company still receives thousands of leads a week. The Zimbra sales team typically manages hundreds of open leads weekly with a 60-day trial window to close business. The company estimated that if its sales representatives pursued each lead equally, they would have only eight minutes per lead each week.

Focusing the Pipeline
To minimize the cost of sales and help increase the close rate, Zimbra’s business strategy depends on an inbound focused sales team. Marketing’s responsibility is to deliver highly qualified leads for sales executives to engage. To help facilitate communication and reduce the sales team’s workload, Greg Armanini, Director of Marketing, and the Zimbra marketing team draft a series of automated emails that are sent to registered prospects throughout the course of their trial. “It is critical to establish a very well-timed email relationship with the prospect to raise the likelihood of the trial to convert to a sale,” said Armanini. “We need to have a personalized email, addressed to the registered prospect introducing their specific sales contact at Zimbra. In the course of a 60-day trial, it is important to balance this communication. It can’t come across as spam, and it must ensure the prospect knows who to contact and make them aware of when their trial is about to expire. The last email when the free service is about to be turned off is usually when we have the most engaged dialogue with prospects.”

In 2008, Zimbra partnered with LoopFuse, to deploy the company’s OneView on-demand marketing automation solution. Zimbra’s marketing team deploys several lead nurturing campaigns based on specific Web-form registrations and user activity. Registrations are immediately sent to Salesforce.com and updated with an assigned sales representative. The LoopFuse One View tool allows the marketing team to email the prospect with a personalized email addressed specifically to the contact, and addressed from the assigned salesperson. This correspondence is also recorded in Salesforce.com as are any email opens and subsequent Web site visits and registrations. When a sales rep receives a reply directly into their email inbox, they can see the complete contact history and instantly know how long the prospect has been evaluating the software, and gauge their interest. “[The platform] combines analytics, email marketing, drip campaigns, lead flows, reporting, and very important to Zimbra, the integration with Salesforce.com,” says Sean Dwyer, CEO, Loopfuse. “This process all works together to create a scoring mechanism.”

The LoopFuse One View solution also offers email alerts that sales can tailor down to the contact level. By reviewing visitor activity reports in LoopFuse, sales executives can identify organizations that are actively evaluating software, pricing and support information on the Zimbra website. Notifications can then be used to hone in on key accounts and alerts can be set so sales executives know when top prospects are on the Web site.

Armanini reported 100% participation, “When you have people fully engaged and behind the platform, it makes it easier for everyone, and that will indirectly translate to higher close rates because they’re using the software as it was intended,” says Armanini.

He adds that the system has already paid off in terms of efficiency and production. “Our sales and marketing efficiency has gone up 50% for reaching out to customers and closing business,” says Armanini. “If you don’t have sales and marketing automation that is as easy to use…it’s really hard to scale your business on the Web. As a business that is growing aggressively year over year, our sales team must be focused on the most likely prospects in order to function efficiently and profitably.”

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