Sybase: Process And Analysis Ecosystem

You would expect that Sybase, as a provider of some great analysis products, would have a good sense of how to analyze their marketing. They do, but under the hood, their great analytics is built upon a very well thought out approach to all aspects of the sales and marketing process. By focusing on the three main goals of sales effectiveness, campaign success, and coverage optimization, Sybase was able to optimize their overall marketing efforts, while providing rich insights into what was and was not working.

This case study is from Digital Body Language. Enjoy:

Sybase: Process And Analysis Ecosystem

As a billion-dollar enterprise software company, Sybase has a broad and complex sales and marketing ecosystem. For the Sybase marketing team, given that they a provider of some of the industry’s leading database and analytics products, and have highly analytical executives, this leads to a need to present a clear overview of what is happening within marketing to all levels of the organization.

To do this, the Sybase team focused on three key areas of analytics; sales effectiveness, campaign success, and coverage optimization. The first of these analytics efforts, sales effectiveness, became the focus of the bi-weekly pipeline review between sales and field marketing. For each region, a detailed review of marketing activity and prospect response would be performed for the key accounts in the region. Highlights of the prospects’ digital body language in accounts that had gone quiet would be used to trigger different account strategies for those accounts.

The second focus, campaign success, was a marketing-driven effort to analyze the effectiveness of campaigns against stated goals. Each campaign would be given different goals based on the call to action (ie, web seminar marketing campaigns would be analyzed on % registered whereas telemarketing campaigns would be analyzed on qualified leads captured). The campaigns were then analyzed against expected goals to understand where successes were being achieved and where ideas could be better shared. This analysis generally remained at the tactical level, as, given the length of the buying process in question, the macro analysis found marketing influence in over 90% of deals.

The third main focus, coverage optimization, was again done as a bi-weekly exercise. Top level marketing expenditure amounts were defined based on industry comparables, but within that overall framework, each expense item was coded by region and product. Comparing both marketing expenditures and prospect interest levels on a region and product grid allowed Sybase to identify areas in need of additional focus and reallocate investments quickly to the needed regions.

By leveraging its own analytics technology to better understand the digital body language of its prospects, Sybase was able to provide its sales team, its marketing team, and its executive team with a previously unavailable understanding of what was and was not working in the revenue funnel.