Xactly Corp., a provider of on-demand incentive compensation management and sales performance management tools and services, has started using Demandbase Stream tool to better focus its SEM, e-mail and online marketing activities.
Stream, a free widget released by Demandbase last week, allows marketers to see, in real time, which businesses are visiting their Web site. The Stream ticker connects to Demandbase Direct and serves business traffic information, company details and recommended contacts from within the visiting business. Xactly, which tested the beta version of Stream, has been using the tool for about a month.
“We do a number of campaigns and focus a lot on search — paid and natural — and a big reason why we’re using Stream and why it became extremely attractive was the ability to recover some of the spend we have on the search side,” explained Kirk Crenshaw, director of demand generation and marketing operations for Xactly. “We get people on the site, but they don’t register for whitepapers or webinars. Demandbase Stream made it really easy to launch a campaign and watch who comes into the site, where they go and find those people at those companies to start calling in with marketing.”
Crenshaw added that Stream also helped with list development. Before, Xactly had been using rental and opt-in lists with low response rates. Now, he said, contact acquisition has become a lot more targeted.
“Stream flips that model around because now we know who is coming to the site and which companies are interested,” he noted.
Demandbase Stream allows Xactly’s marketers to filter leads by sales territory or ISP and cross reference possible leads with contacts that are already in the Xactly CRM system before purchasing the name. The tool also shows marketers the search term that prospects used to reach a company’s site. Messages that Xactly salespeople send to prospects are more personalized and relevant now because the prospects lists have been narrowed down.
Xactly has already seen success with Stream: a recent e-mail campaign designed to drive people to a Webinar on the Xactly site used a list built using Demandbase tools. The Xactly sales team, which knew to watch for traffic from the 1000 targeted companies on the e-mail list, could then follow up with contacts that visited the Xactly site but did not go to the Webinar right away. Crenshaw estimated that 65 or 70 people were signed up for the Webinar using that approach.
“People are expecting to be marketed to in a certain way now,” Crenshaw concluded. “Consumer marketing is so highly targeted, and I think the expectation has gone over to b-to-b, where b-to-b customers don’t want to be a generic person anymore and the expectation is, ‘be specific to me, and tell me why I should be looking at the product on my terms.’ You have to be relevant and provide value or you’re gone, and the cool thing with Demandbase Stream is I can get much more targeted,” he said.
