A case study describing how one firm analyzed, decided and developed a well rounded lead management system

1. Best Practice Case Study on
Lead Management Automation
Company Background
McGladrey & Pullen traces its history to 1926, when Ira B.
McGladrey started his own accounting firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
RSM McGladrey, Inc. The I.B. McGladrey Company was formed when McGladrey
purchased a seven-person office from his employers, Billings,
Prouty and Tompkins. Shortly after, he added one-man practices in
Davenport, Burlington and Iowa City, Iowa.
During the next 40 years, the firm expanded into 29 offices in eight
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states and in 1966 began offering consulting services. Over the next
several decades, the firm continued to grow and acquire firms
across the country and for simplicity's sake, the firm changed its
name to McGladrey & Pullen in 1987.
In the summer of 1999, McGladrey & Pullen sold its non-attest
assets and business to H&R Block, Inc. RSM McGladrey Inc. (RSM)
was established as an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of the
Block organization. To ensure independence, McGladrey & Pullen
was maintained as a separate entity offering audit and attest
services. McGladrey & Pullen is owned and managed by McGladrey
& Pullen partners, independent of RSM McGladrey. Today, the two
companies provide assurance, tax and consulting services from
nearly 100 offices and have more than 7,000 employees with over
1.4 billion in annual revenue.
McGladrey's original concept of service, predicated upon the
personal attention of partners to the needs of our clients, has
remained unchanged.
Vision
McGladrey delivers “global capabilities with the “local” touch
that brings world class assurance, tax and consulting expertise
to their clients through enduring relationships built on genuine
understanding and trust”.
Client Promise
The company has a “Client Promise” which focuses on
“understanding their client’s business, aspirations and
challenges”. The company tries to “bring fresh insights and
tailored expertise to help [clients] them succeed”.
The culture of the company is built around letting smart people do
smart things. Individuals are encouraged to develop tools and
processes and then apply them in the workplace. The Firm believes
in a decentralized approach to getting the job done but is
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2. centralized in its management philosophy. The “power of being
understood” encapsulates the Firm’s position. The goal is to learn
as much about a client as possible including what is most relevant
to them in solving their business challenges, their individual needs
and provide insights and ideas from day one. Employees are trained
to take the time to learn the business of their clients, know the
industry and to search for opportunities and insights that clients
have not yet uncovered.
RSM McGladrey, Inc.
Client servers take a global perspective with their clients and spend
a considerable amount of time asking questions to understand the
business model of their clients and the market conditions they face
each day.
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This is a highly deliberate approach which can appear slow, but if
market and organizational research is performed earlier, the insights
developed during this collaborative session garners new
opportunities and ideas for clients. The premise is that executives
hire reliable providers but truly value advisors that bring insights
and uncover issues they may not realize are on the horizon.
The company emphasizes collaboration throughout the organization,
filtering important information and business intelligence throughout
the organization and then transforming this information and intelli-
gence into market research reports that can then be sent out to a
broader client audience, as well as client servers.
An area of focus for the company is to eliminate the silo effect that
takes place at times between the sales and marketing teams, as
well as other lines of business and industry groups. The company
is working toward a more integrated approach to attracting clients
and creating improved market messaging that is more relevant to
prospects and clients. The strategy for implementing a Lead
Management Automation (LMA) system was to help create this new
culture between sales and marketing where people are learning and
helping one another to develop integrated marketing and sales
programs that align to the buyer’s interest and timing, and provides
sales with leads that are “sales ready.”
Business Case
There are approximately 60 business development executives in the
field and a total marketing group of about 80. Although the
combined revenue of McGladrey & Pullen and RSM McGladrey was
over 1 Billion dollars, the Chief Marketing Officer felt that the demand
generation programs could perform better and be better measured.
The Firm was facing mounting competitive pressures and the ability
to find new clients continued to become more challenging and
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3. costly. The “Big Four” accounting firms, who traditionally targeted
companies outside of the Firm’s target markets began to market to
the Firm’s prospect base. The increased competitive environment
further emphasized the need to optimize sales and marketing
efforts. Like most companies, marketing management estimated
that nearly 80% of leads generated were going into a “Black Hole”
because they were not considered “sales ready” by the sales team.
These interested individuals had questions but were likely 6-18
RSM McGladrey, Inc.
months away from moving forward with a buying decision. There
was no system or process to deal with these “interested” individuals
or identify when their interest would change to the consideration
phase of making a buying decision.
There was a lot of demand generation activity – “thought leadership”
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offers, webinars, traditional event development, but it was
increasingly more difficult to determine whether any of these
activities were really accelerating sales. The number of sales-ready
leads as a percentage of the total number of leads generated by
marketing was low. This led to sales thinking that marketing leads
were, for the most part, unqualified and not worth the time
investment to follow up on them.
To compound matters, Sales was continually taking credit for sales-
ready leads by stating that the leads were already in their CRM
database. Marketing countered by stating that these leads were a
product of their mailing campaign efforts or other events. The
business development organization felt like they did not get support
and marketing felt like the business developers were not taking
responsibility with the leads they were given.
Beyond the sales and marketing alignment issue, there was the
issue of coordinating national and field marketing implementation.
With 18 regions, it was difficult to plan and implement a coordinated
effort because each region planned independently and there was
no easy mechanism for understanding who ran recent programs
and what their success was.
This created problems with clients that they were accidentally
receiving mailings that were meant for prospects or prospects were
receiving several different pieces from different parts of the
organization at the same time. The company was faced with a
growing dilemma: “How to integrate regional and corporate
inquiries and stop clients and prospects from being overwhelmed
by calls and mailings that may or may not be appropriate for them?”
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4. Marketing realized that there were looming issues for the
company:
The reputation of the company was being damaged by the
disjointed marketing campaign efforts and brand diluting
creative development.
Uncoordinated and duplicated efforts in marketing campaigns
were costly to say the least.
RSM McGladrey, Inc. The uncoordinated and duplicative marketing efforts were
complicating the regions’ efforts to implement effective
marketing campaigns.
Measuring marketing activity was a must to continuously
optimize demand generation efforts.
Getting sales and marketing to work together and support each
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other was needed to maximize opportunity development.
There was a large education element around direct marketing
best practices required in order to optimize demand generation.
Marketing knew it needed to create standardized systems for
managing their marketing campaign efforts. Implementing an LMA
system seemed to be the best solution to the increasing magnitude
of problems being faced.
The company had to make some big changes to begin the journey
for better marketing performance. The first change was to replace
the current lead management process provided by a national
solution provider. The solution provider was developing a custom
LMA system and also handled the call center needs of the firm.
Unfortunately, the development of a custom solution was becoming
very expensive and the field felt it wasn’t really helping them.
The Go To Market Services Director was tasked with the project of
evaluating the existing relationship with the national call center and
the system they were developing and determining whether it made
sense to continue with them. It was determined that there were
better solutions out there, and what was missing was education
around direct marketing best practices.
The decision to not continue with the existing vendor was a big one.
The company had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with this
vendor and stopping the existing development of a custom LMA
would mean the firm would have lost time.
After cutting ties with the existing vendor, a new call center was
found and kept separate from the search for an LMA vendor. The
company was now in a position to evaluate and select a new lead
management provider.
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5. Technology Strategy and Selection
The Go To Market Services Director and Demand Generation team
sat down and evaluated their current lead management automation
needs and came up with the following criteria for selection:
• Increase effectiveness and efficiency of the lead
management process
RSM McGladrey, Inc. • Provide customization to work in a decentralized marketing
environment
• Provide the ability to nurture and segment targets
• Provide analytics and measurement
• Aggregate leads across all channels
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• Centralized system that allows regional teams to see and
borrow the best demand generation programs from other
regions
A major initiative at the time was changing the mindset of the sales
and other parts of the organization in regards to online marketing.
The sales department did not see the value of online marketing
activities as an immediate tool that could capture prospects. The
marketing team knew this was not the case and wanted to prove the
value of online marketing, which they believed was the core to their
overall marketing strategy. They had spent the previous year
restructuring and redesigning the website so the emphasis of the
pages was “thought leadership” instead of brochure-ware.
The project team first reevaluated the offerings from the previous
vendor but the email engine the vendor provided would have left
continued integration gaps with their CRM platform
(salesforce.com), and while the email engine offered was
impressive, the cost for supporting the program was over one
million dollars a year and considered prohibitive.
The company underwent a rigorous selection process that
eventually narrowed the field to two candidates. In the end, Eloqua
was chosen to implement a new lead management automation
system for the Firm.
Key considerations for the selection of the application
were the following:
Level of technical support from pre-implementation to post
implementation
Ability to integrate with salesforce.com
Reporting capabilities
Customization to fit the organizational structure
Centralized control with decentralized implementation
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6. Implementation
The Firm developed their new lead management process during
their provider selection phase and continued to refine it through the
implementation phase. They also decided that education of direct
marketing and email marketing best practices had to be something
that was provided on an ongoing basis. The company felt that the
platform created a central point for all its lead channels and
RSM McGladrey, Inc.
provided a straightforward process for managing leads from these
channels.
The Marketing team used Eloqua’s strategic services and client
support groups to define the system requirements, provide training
to handle ongoing questions from the RSM McGladrey team. The
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Demand Generation Team set up a training program that included
an initial training by Eloqua, but monthly training for what it termed
“Power Users.” Power Users had to take training and pass a test in
order to be designated a “Power User.” Model Metrics, a
Salesforce.com Consulting firm, assisted in the integration of the
LMA system with their CRM, and Relationship One, a certified
partner for Eloqua, was hired to assist in the implementation of the
system itself.
The “Power User” group was a new role in the organization and for
many a dual role that aligned with their “data steward” role. The
Demand Generation team developed the ongoing training program
in such a way that the users learned and then mastered specific
features of the program before being taught the next feature set.
This allowed the user group to gain understanding not just technical
expertise.
The team affected by the LMA included:
• Database Management Administration
• Vertical Industry Market Research
• Custom Content Development, a team of writers
• Newsletter Production team
• Media planning agency as they learned new information
beyond click-thru rate
• Web and Digital Marketing teams
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7. Results
RSM McGladrey’s marketing strategy was based on the need to
drive marketing return on investment. The company at one time had
been experiencing an email and direct mail response rate of less
than 1%. The company relied upon nationally recognized research
benchmarks to help determine goals for “bounce-back” rates,
“click-thru” rates and the movement of leads to the sales ready
RSM McGladrey, Inc.
stage. The first year with the LMA system in place, the company
achieved a 3% click-thru rate, a jump they didn’t expect. Bounce-
back rates, while initially in the “red zone” quickly dropped as the
LMA helped clean out and qualify leads in the system that were not
responsive, or of poor quality. Currently the company is
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experiencing an overall response rate of 5% for its campaigns and
response rates for specific campaigns have reached well above
60% on a regular basis.
The ability for “Power Users” to see reports that showed what
programs around the country produced the best results drove them
to want to copy those same programs, so they not only learned how
to build better campaigns but quickly improved results.
Measurement and results were quickly adopted by the marketing
team; they finally had a consistent reporting and measurement
system, even across regions. Where once there was only the ability
to show anecdotal success, marketers were able to produce hard
numbers. Integration of the Eloqua scripts on the website also
allowed business developers to see what their prospects were
doing on the website, allowing them to have more relevant
conversations with those executives. No longer were they making
introductory calls but calling with insight and ideas based on the
behavioral data being provided by the system.
RSM McGladrey realized that only incremental changes were
needed in the way their lead programs were being managed to
show a significant enhancement in the company’s marketing return
on investment. With just the implementation of the system, the Firm
immediately achieved a 50% reduction in costs almost immediately
following the implementation.
The company also learned through its benchmarking research
efforts that, in general, a marketing team’s perception of a qualified
lead and sales’ perception of an acceptable lead led to less than
20% of marketing qualified leads being acceptable to sales.
RSM McGladrey compared previous marketing campaign perfor-
mance to the benchmarking information and set out to improve their
marketing qualification/acceptability rate for leads. Currently, the
company has reached an 11% acceptability rate – the highest in
the company’s history. While, anecdotal evidence points to improved
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8. win/loss rates which can be linked to marketing efforts, the company
is still tweaking its tracking to help identify consistent linkage. The
company’s plan of attack focused on three key areas to achieve
these breakthrough results:
• Create a lead scoring process
• Improve response rates
• Increase the number of qualified leads
RSM McGladrey, Inc.
Best Practices
Consistent reporting and measurement system – even across
regions
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50% reduction in costs
Improve their marketing qualification/acceptability rate – 11%
(Highest in company’s history)
Before Current
Email click-thru rate <1% <5%
Specific Campaigns <1% <60%
Post Implementation
RSM McGladrey has transformed its marketing and sales culture
through disciplined training. The Firm now has a more educated
and knowledgeable team capable of driving new performance levels
for the company’s marketing programs. RSM McGladrey partnered
with its LMA provider to train its team on the fundamental
importance of having a robust direct marketing process as part of
the technology implementation. The company emphasized in its
training that no one activity creates a client and that the integration
of marketing and sales activities to build relationships with
prospects is the only way to develop them into clients.
The LMA system has been in place for over a year and the
improvements the system has made in email campaigns and
Website traffic conversion rates have been impressive.
For example, improvement in the quarterly newsletter as a
marketing tool has evolved from no one understanding the potential
power of its effectiveness as a lead nurturing tool and a very low
percentage click through rate to now, where the newsletter is the
top clicked on marketing piece for the company.
Management at the Firm is quick to point out that this was three
years of hard work in developing the awareness and need for lead
management automation leading up to the LMA system implementation.
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9. RSM McGladrey continues to move to the next level of functionality
with the LMA application to assist the company with more strategic
objectives. Key initiatives for the company include:
• Another round of comprehensive training and education
• Optimize content strategy for all marketing materials and the
Web with greater thought leadership for web design and
content that is aligned to buyer behavior and timing
RSM McGladrey, Inc.
• Develop “micro-relevant” marketing programs to address
highly specific industry segments and buyer interests
• Improve lead scoring capabilities by creating a better flow of
information that provides more granularity for scoring criteria
• Enhance the lead stratification process in order to route
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leads to different lead nurturing programs depending on their
individual requirements
• Evolve their social media marketing through an online
community and other “social” channels, including a
successful survey that gains over 1000 responders annually.
The Firm would like to learn more about the 1000 responders
by treating them more exclusively than are prospects and or
clients.
RSM McGladrey continues to face certain challenges with its lead
management process. There is the occasional “batch and blast”
email campaign taking place, however, this is a rare occurrence.
The company is also diligently working to refine the use of its
LMA system.
Currently, the system counts every interaction with a contact as a
touch point. RSM McGladrey has enforced a regulated number of
touch points per contact to guard against sending too many emails
to a contact. The balance is that marketers need more touch point
occurrences added for lead nurturing to compensate for the system
counting every single contact interaction as a touch point.
Because of the systems inability to count a series of touch points
as one touch point from a campaign perspective, it forces the
system administrators at RSM McGladrey to increase the number of
touch points allowed for each contact. So a responder may receive
an invite and by responding also receives a “submission”
confirmation as well as a thank you. This would be counted as three
touch-points but most respondents would view it as a single event.
So the touch point count allowed per month is high which can be
detrimental if a marketer does decide to perform single email touch
points which are not associated to the same offer. These marketers
will be able to use the increased number of touch points to blast
out even more single touch point email campaigns which will then
run the risk of overloading contacts and undermining RSM
McGladrey’s entire campaign strategy.
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10. The Marketing team is also working with to improve their dashboard
layout and at times there are synchronization challenges with
saleforce.com.
Overall, the company is very satisfied with their LMA system.
Eloqua’s responsiveness, experience and expertise have helped the
Firm achieve its stated objectives. RSM McGladrey will continue to
explore enhanced levels of functionality to ensure that there is
RSM McGladrey, Inc. enough customization within their platform to meet the evolving
needs of the organization.
Smartchoice™ Insight into Best Practices
RSM McGladrey’s success story illustrates how the proper selection
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of a technology provider and platform in combination with a well
thought out implementation can deliver breakthrough results for a
company.
The following best practice tips should be considered for selecting
and implementing an LMA system in your organization.
• Develop consensus within your organization for
implementing LMA
• Develop a cost/benefit analysis for your LMA system
• Make sure to develop a comprehensive RFP process
• Have the vendor take you through a comprehensive
demonstration
• Use a consultant/certified partner during the implementation
phase
• Make sure IT is included in the process from beginning
to end
• Ensure everyone knows their role in creating a successful
implementation
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