Madison Logic Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: B2B Intent Data Providers, Q2 2023!

Vanilla by Higher Logic more than Doubles Average Deal Size while Accelerating the Buyer’s Journey

Results

Pipeline contribution for target accounts increased by 50%

Account penetration within target accounts increased by 217%

Average deal size increased by 118%

The Opportunity: Improve Account Engagement and Pipeline Conversion

Vanilla dedicates a large portion of its budget to digital strategies with the goal of reaching more target accounts and increasing engagement with their content. The marketing team felt they could improve the engagement of accounts across the entire buying journey, where they saw opportunity loss at sales handoff. They believed having a more consistent experience with the buying committee would increase the volume of opportunities and improve sales win rates. To bolster their efforts, Mike Ellis and his team adopted an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy to maximize exposure for key accounts and create more opportunities for the sales organization.

However, their ABM strategy had some pitfalls. Vanilla was not converting MQLs to SQLs and received an influx of low-quality and cold contacts that hurt their sales win rates. Additionally, contacts were not responding positively to the automated drip messages in their lead (or account) campaign. Missed and dropped opportunities were hurting their marketing ROI.

As an organization that measures marketing success through demo requests from target accounts, marketing-influenced pipeline, and marketing-influenced revenue, the team knew they needed a better approach to prioritizing and engaging the right accounts.

The Solution: Full-Funnel ABM Activation

Mike and his marketing team partnered with Madison Logic to identify the accounts that actively researched community platform solutions through ML Insights. The combined data set provided Vanilla a holistic overview of the best companies and content to focus on.

As the team rolled out their new multi-channel ABM strategy, they began to use the enhanced visibility from ML Platform to validate the engagement on target accounts and demonstrate the pipeline and revenue influence the team needed across marketing and for the sales organization.

With the focus on marketing-sourced pipeline, these new account insights enabled Mike to understand the highest-engaging accounts and which personas performed the best across each channel with the ability to measure down opportunity volume, deal value, and sales velocity.

“Almost immediately after employing a multi-channel ABM strategy with Madison Logic, we were able to prioritize the accounts demonstrating in-market research and efficiently drive the type of engagement our sales team needs to fill their pipeline.”

Mike Ellis, Marketing Manager, Vanilla by Higher Logic

The Results: Accelerating the Conversion of Qualified Accounts into Sales Opportunities

By focusing on the target accounts that demonstrate the highest propensity to buy, Mike and his team were able to deliver the most relevant content to move accounts through the buying journey at a faster rate. Instead of cold contacts and dropped opportunities, the Vanilla marketing team was able to confidently hand off MQLs that turned into SQLs. Not only was identifying and prioritizing these accounts vital to Vanilla’s strategy, Mike and his team were also able to attribute revenue from these target accounts to the sales pipeline.

After the success of adopting ABM Content Syndication and the account and engagement visibility of the ML Platform, Mike and his team integrated their CRM as an early adopter of Journey Acceleration for stronger pipeline velocity and better account nurturing.

Using the data from their CRM and ML Insights to show the accounts with the highest propensity to buy, they were able to customize content and messaging for their target accounts at every stage of the buyer’s journey. “Madison Logic gives us the visibility we need to optimize our campaigns for stronger revenue performance and growth of our sales pipelines,” says Mike.

By working closely with Madison Logic’s Sales and Customer Success Managers, Vanilla was able to execute a comprehensive ABM strategy that not only proved marketing’s influence on revenue but also doubled the average deal size for the sales organization. As a result, Mike and his team no longer struggle with converting qualified accounts into sales opportunities and are able to target the right accounts with the right content at the right time.