Ashleigh Casner, Director of Marketing, Huddle

SuperNova Award Category

Digital Marketing Transformation

The Company 

Huddle is an enterprise content collaboration platform. The platform is revolutionizing enterprise content management by enabling organizations to store, discover, share and work on content with others securely in the cloud.

The Problem

• Marketing and sales teams were operating as completely independent entities, duplicating effort and not working collaboratively to drive closed business.
• Marketing was spending money without tracking ROI.
• Sales were frustrated by quantity and quality of leads.
• Measuring the customer journey via KPI's was nearly impossible.

The Solution

By implementing sophisticated marketing automation strategy, Huddle’s has consolidated its marketing and sales software systems, eliminating time consuming processes such as manually loading leads into Huddle’s CRM system. Additionally, this platform enabled Huddle’s marketing team to increase revenues and decrease its cost by having tools to measure ROI and KPI’s through every step of the marketing and sales funnel. 

The Results 

Measuring our KPI’s on a regular basis has enabled Huddle to make adjustments to our automation platform and marketing strategy. For example, marketing partnered with sales to deploy a new lead follow up procedure including an SLA mandating  sales follow up with new leads within one hour of assignment. Huddle's marketing automation platform enables both marketing and sales to measure, with agreed upon metrics, and monitor this process end to end. This was developed through weekly meetings between marketing and sales leaders to discuss which technology and business process tests were proving to be effective.
Huddle’s automation platform has successfully enabled marketing to deliver leads to the sales team instantly, track where leads are in their buying cycle, and what marketing channels are producing the best results. In just six months, Huddle's marketing team increased total MQL’s by 65%, increased in bookings from marketing by 48% as well as decreased our overall cost per acquisition (CPA) by 22%.

The Technology

Eloqua, Salesforce.com (SFDC), Google Analytics, Huddle internal reporting database

Metrics 

Before Metrics:
• Website traffic by marketing channel (PPC, SEO, etc...) but no connection to what happens to these visitors once sales engages with them
• Total Leads from Marketing (not broken down by marketing channel/ campaign)
• Total Opportunities Created
• Total Pipeline Generated
• Average Order Value
• Total bookings (no distinction between sales vs. marketing)

After Metrics:
Marketing Key performance indicators (KPI’s) at Huddle are as follows:
• Website traffic by marketing channel
• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL’s)
• Lead Score (LS)
• Company Size Leads (CSL) – help us target enterprise size companies
• Competitive Interest Leads  (CIL) – leads which have been researching our competitors or looking for features sets our competitors offer which we sell nicely to
• Pipeline Creation & Bookings from Marketing (BFM)
• 1 hour SLA Report - Sales lead follow-up time tracking how quickly they call/ process leads which are allocated to them
• Funnel Metrics by Marketing Channel/ Content (Leads, Sales Opportunities Generated, Bookings)

Disruptive Factor

By having sophisticated data available, Huddle is transforming its marketing efforts.  They aim to have every dollar invested in marketing meet expected lead, sales pipeline, and bookings targets. By measuring this at a very granular level they can determine precisely which channels and assets are most effective.

One example of this is Huddle’s content funnel metrics reporting. As a B2B software company Huddle generates a lot of content such as product sheets, research papers, thought leadership, case studies, etc… Creating these assets requires a considerable amount of time, money and resource. To ensure their investment results in a positive return of revenue, they  have created reports which show performance of each marketing asset and its associated funnel metrics (web visits, leads, sales opportunities, bookings). The Huddle marketing team reviews ROI for each asset to determine which are most effective in prospect engagement, conversion metrics and revenue.

Shining Moment

By reviewing data captured by Huddle’s new automation system, the marketing team discovered they were consistently receiving leads and bookings from SharePoint-related search queries. Leveraging this information, the Huddle marketing team organized an integrated marketing campaign, which centred around a guerrilla stunt that took on Microsoft on its own ground – the Anaheim SharePoint conference.  A 130 person marching band stormed the conference and the stunt coincided with billboards, digital banners and targeted microsites. Huddle received positive feedback from conference attendees, press and industry analysts while seeing a significant increase in web site traffic, inbound leads and closed bookings off the back of this marketing campaign.

This campaign was instrumental in increasing Huddle’s brand awareness against its competitor Microsoft SharePoint and helped successfully position it as the world’s leading Microsoft SharePoint alternative.

About Huddle

Huddle provides next generation content collaboration for government and enterprises. Its patent-pending intelligent technology ensures relevant content is delivered directly to Huddle users, with no need to search. Business units of any size work more efficiently by huddling together within a secure cloud service accessed via web browsers, desktop or mobile devices. Co-headquartered in London and San Francisco and with offices in New York City, Huddle's customers include 80 percent of Fortune 500 and 80 percent of UK government departments, as well as companies such as Kia Motors, SEGA, Unilever and P&G. The company is privately held and backed by leading venture capital firms in the US and Europe.