honoring standout performance in marketing …...we considered our partnership with klm as a great...

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Honoring standout performance in marketing technology services and solutions

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© 2019 ITSMA. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents Building Reputation Through Brand and Differentiation

• Diamond Award | Tata Consultancy Services ......................................................................... 1 • Gold Award | Cognizant .............................................................................................................. 3 • Gold Award | IBM ......................................................................................................................... 5

Driving Strategic Growth

• Diamond Award | Hewlett Packard Enterprise ....................................................................... 7 • Gold Award | Conduent .............................................................................................................. 9 • Gold Award | ServiceNow ......................................................................................................... 11

Enabling Sales to Accelerate Growth

• Diamond Award | HCL Technologies ...................................................................................... 13 • Gold Award | Hewlett Packard Enterprise ............................................................................. 15

Engaging Executives with Thought Leadership and Innovation

• Diamond Award | Microsoft ..................................................................................................... 17 • Gold Award | PwC ...................................................................................................................... 19

Personalizing Marketing with Digital Tools, Data, and Approaches

• Diamond Award | Hewlett Packard Enterprise ..................................................................... 21 • Gold Award | Hexaware ............................................................................................................ 23 • Gold Award | IBM ....................................................................................................................... 25

Scaling and Optimizing Account-Based Marketing

• Diamond Award | Red Hat ........................................................................................................ 27 • Gold Award | Fujitsu .................................................................................................................. 29 • Gold Award | SAP ....................................................................................................................... 31

Strengthening Marketing’s Role in Customer Experience and Success

• Diamond Award | Cisco Systems ............................................................................................. 33 • Gold Award | Adobe .................................................................................................................. 35 • Gold Award | Unisys .................................................................................................................. 37

Small and Medium-Sized Businesses

• Diamond Award | West Monroe Partners .............................................................................. 39 • Gold Award | Acuvate Software, Inc. ...................................................................................... 41

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© 2019 ITSMA. All rights reserved. 01

Tata Consultancy Services | Diamond Winner Building Reputation Through Brand and Differentiation

TCS’ Journey from ‘Cost and Operations’ to ‘Partner in Growth and Transformation’ BUSINESS CHALLENGE At TCS, we wanted to build a stronger mindshare with CEOs and CXOs, hence we needed to tell a story which appealed with business benefits. We needed to break with tradition and run an ‘un-IT-like’ campaign that explained our thought leadership in a way that was accessible and appealing. How do you reach a new potential audience with your business proposition? With TCS’ business increasingly shifting towards being a business transformation partner, we needed to reach the decision makers—the C-level executives—in addition to IT decision makers, now that IT decisions are increasingly being escalated to the boardroom. OBJECTIVES With an overriding mission to further strengthen TCS’ reputation as a ‘partner in growth and transformation’, the objectives of this campaign were to:

• Reach new audiences outside the typical IT domain (C-level executive) in Europe and globally.

• Build our reputation as digital transformation partner.

• Increase employee awareness/engagement—and create digital transformation brand ambassadors.

EXECUTION When it comes to proving your credentials in a new field, what better example is there than a customer who has proudly worked with you for 25 years? We considered our partnership with KLM as a great story to articulate and illustrate our capabilities as a growth and transformation partner to C-level executives. Although initially starting as an outsourcing relationship, our collaboration with KLM has grown into a strategic value-adding true partnership. ‘Digital’ has—with TCS’ help—become a crucial element in KLM’s strategy to become a leader in airline customer experience.

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We decided to use the upcoming 25th anniversary of our relationship with KLM to celebrate the innovative relationship we’ve built together. In fact, this celebration—taking place at our biggest campus in India—was to become the central part of our entire campaign. To our delight, Pieter Elbers, CEO of KLM, agreed to take centre stage in communicating our story, not just offering a testimonial, but taking part in a video documentary of his visit to our biggest campus in India which was so extraordinary, so engaging that it captured the imagination of the media and our target audience. We decided to create a video documentary which would both highlight examples of how KLM uses new technology and share its journey with us in becoming a leader in customer experience—to truly showcase our evolution to become KLM’s growth and digital transformation partner. The film then premiered at our European customer event, the TCS Summit Europe—during Pieter Elbers’ keynote speech—an event attended by 350+ top C-level executives from Europe’s largest businesses. BUSINESS RESULTS This campaign stands out for its creativity and impact by using a customer (e.g. the CEO) as a hero to explain TCS’ growth and transformation journey. Thanks to the compelling nature of the video documentary, it has had very high ‘share appeal’—with over 250k views on social media already. And it continues to generate extensive positive engagement:

• 5,364 shares, 3,731 likes and 194,911 views on Facebook.

• 3,898 engagement and 159,485 views on LinkedIn.

• 465 engagement and 1,291 views on Twitter.

• 56 likes and 2,641 views on YouTube.

The story also earned extensive print and online press coverage in both the Netherlands and India, including the largest business magazine in the Netherlands, Elsevier, and Computable, the Netherlands’ leading IT publication—as well as some of India’s leading business newspapers, The Hindu, The Economic Times and Fortune India.

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Cognizant | Gold Winner Building Reputation Through Brand and Differentiation

Staying Human: An AI Interview Series BUSINESS CHALLENGE Jump the Competition in the Crowded AI and Automation Industry As industries worldwide are only beginning to realize the power of AI and automation in cutting cost, lowering risk, and improving revenues and efficiency, Cognizant has made a decided commitment to become a recognized leader in this burgeoning area of practice. We are not alone. The crowded field includes top brands such as Accenture, Deloitte, and IBM, with Google and Microsoft also looming among the well-heeled competition. Without a comparable marketing budget, Cognizant needed to think outside the box to gain mindshare in this emerging market. The challenge was to rise above the noise, given the proliferation of conferences, recognized speakers and webcasts currently flooding the media. Scarcely a week goes by without the Economist, New York Times, Forbes or other top industry newsmongers covering the topic. PROGRAM OBJECTIVE Combining Knowledge and Technology for More Intelligent Decisions Our groundbreaking Staying Human “Late Night” interview series supported our approach, with rich content onsite that continues to bolster our thought leadership in the AI and automation spaces. Bill Welser at the “news desk” lent our presentation instant credibility—with more than 20 thought leaders and external subject matter experts, from partner and competitor firms such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, BluePrism, UiPath, and others, all contributing. With the help of our social media agency, we perfectly executed a comprehensive, organic and paid social surround plan that increased awareness of the Cognizant brand, while also staging our first-ever, live Cognizant HQ Facebook broadcast featuring our own SVP and Global Head of Markets, Karthik Krishnamurthy as our industry spokesperson. The combined event, report, presentation of data and surrounding anecdotes and social shares continue to command attention, unquestionably separating Cognizant from the pack, eight months and counting. The recognition for this innovative approach went well beyond the actual results; it also gained attention from our competitors onsite. During the show, several competing marketers came to ask how we pulled it all together. When asked whom we worked with to develop and execute the idea, we explained that it was a joint effort, involving close collaboration among our own experts, valued partners and vendors.

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PROGRAM EXECUTION A Good Story Well Told Cognizant’s AI Summit presence leveraged our unique human perspective, flexible software solution and deep industry experience from the start. Our research paper emphasized our forward thinking on the topic, and our attention-grabbing “Late Night” video interview booth differentiated us from the crowded field in dramatic fashion. Leading into the event, a team of five internal project resources, supported by three external agencies, mapped out our brand story, matching “featured guests” to each branch of the narrative for maximum delivery, content relevance and star power. Our thought leadership team, AI subject matter experts, writers and social media leads honed the messaging for maximum quality and impact. Tactically speaking, our AI Summit promotional launch could not have gone more superbly. The “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” theme, complete with interview desk, featured guests and live video coverage, packed the aisles. For those beyond earshot, silent disco headphones were provided, so that the largest crowds could hear the message, snack on some popcorn and enjoy the show. Of course, our onsite experience was heavily promoted prior to the event, with multiple email campaigns teasing current clients and prospects about what to expect, as well as post-show emails promoting the research report and links to our video replays of every segment recorded. BUSINESS RESULTS As a general practice, Cognizant marketing efforts are measured on a number of fronts, including qualitative results based on comments received from internal and external sources. That said, our marketing results previously stated above can be summarized as follows:

• Research Paper Downloads: 4,200+ • Social Impressions: 1.6M+ • Total Social Engagements from Posts: 4,000+ • AI Summit Video Replay Views: 1,500+ • Number of New Contacts Acquired Onsite: 600 • Number of Qualified Sales Leads: 80 • Number of Sales Opportunities: 30 potential deals • Total Sales Pipeline Generated: $10M+ Potential Total Contract Value (TVC) • Total Revenue Generated from Leads: $4M TCV Deals Closed since event

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IBM | Gold Winner Building Reputation Through Brand and Differentiation

Influencing the Critical Influencers Global Call for Code, Code and Response, Driving Deep Brand Differentiation Through Global Cause Marketing BUSINESS CHALLENGE “Doing good and doing well are neither mutually exclusive, nor conflicting, endeavors.” Great brands think beyond themselves and their industry. Great brands think of their legacy and give back. In so doing, they can achieve an impact that goes beyond their temporal value to customers, and toward their lasting value for humanity. Over one hundred years, IBM has been in the business of solving some of the world’s most intractable problems with technology, setting IBM apart. Therefore, the specific business challenge was to drive interest, usage and differentiation among the increasingly important developer cohort while helping those impacted by natural disasters. PROGRAM OBJECTIVE Besides the obvious toll in human suffering, natural disasters have a cost to industry and the economy—including disruption to businesses and governments—which continues to grow. Insured natural disaster losses in 2017 were 38% of the Economic Costs of $353B1—and is likely to increase every year. PROGRAM EXECUTION This led IBM to launch the Call for Code, May of 2018, with a $30M initial investment. Partnered with David Clark Cause, IBM became the founding partner of this global initiative. IBM also launched Code and Response, which provides a platform to create and deploy open source technologies to tackle some of the world’s biggest challenges. What sets Call for Code apart from any other similar challenge is that it not only works to find innovative solutions, but through Code and Response, IBM deploys those winning solutions over months and years, making the aspirations of coders around the world real. The program was deployed globally with digital and social marketing with 8 IBM brands leading complimentary social conversation, and another 62 IBM brands contributing through supporting content or amplification. This made Call for Code unique in all the world, as IBM funds and deploys the innovative ideas from the global developer competition through its corporate service corps to the victims in need. 1 Insurance Journal https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2018/01/24/478246.htm

https://www.wraltechwire.com/2018/05/24/ibm-pledges-30m-calls-for-coders-to-join-global-effort-combating-natural-disasters/

https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2018/01/24/478246.htm

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PROGRAM RESULTS Within just a few months, there were over 100,000 participants across 156 nations—over 2500 apps were created in 2018 to help prepare for emergency situations as part of the Call for Code 2018. On World Humanitarian Day (Aug 19, 2018), more than 40+ celebrities influenced and promoted Call for Code through social media channels, which lead to more than 908+ million total reach for the effort. Local hackathons in communities around the world help developers engage with IBM directly leading to 1.1B total social reach, with engagement of the IBM master brand and 70 IBM handles around the world participating. Though IBM has a long history of charitable giving and in supporting important causes as a market leader, this was a first push into significant global cause marketing. It culminated in a glamorous Call for Code award ceremony that was broadcast globally and has been viewed by around 15,000 by 2019, either through the live stream or on YouTube. The winners were awarded over $200K at the ceremony and live broadcast, with appearance of first responders on stage and in the audience. The Call for Code global initiative was also recognized on January 6th 2019 by CES as an Honoree for Tech for a Better World Innovation Award. The award and Call for Code video was viewed by a foot traffic of 50,000 when it was featured in the 2019 Innovation Showcase.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6L6meu9ni60

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise | Diamond Winner Driving Strategic Growth

‘Gold Dust’—Mining Value through Insights: HPE Customer & Market Insights BUSINESS CHALLENGE HPE adopted a strategy to move from a transactional technology vendor to be a leader providing solutions to customer business problems. This strategic shift and following factors required account sales to pivot conversations around business transformation:

• Constantly disrupting technology landscape and complex business problems to address necessitated a ‘trusted advisor’ for HPE key customers

• Shift in customer sensibilities and choices over the past few years, that favored a solution based approach to technology implementations

• With technology buying becoming more complex and increasingly smarter, HPE needed to closely align its marketing and sales efforts to remain competitive

PROGRAM OBJECTIVE HPE Marketing’s analytics and insights function (CMI) launched Gold Dust program to provide our sales teams an intelligent account pursuit framework powered by data and insights. Key objectives of this program are:

• Enable HPE sales teams to proactively engage customers with contextual insights that addressed customer’s relevant industry challenges, transformation requirements and growth opportunities

• Empower account teams to effectively position a diversified product portfolio ranging from keeping the ‘Lights On’ to one that enables customer’s digital transformation journey

• Position HPE as a transformative partner of choice for key accounts and enable differentiated selling

PROGRAM INNOVATION Enabling this transformative selling needed CMI to constantly engage account sales teams and deploy best in class account advisory that is deeply rooted in:

• Principles of “Paradigm Innovation” powered by strong analytics and data driven insights • Leverage techniques such as “deep sentiment analysis” and “association network mapping &

semantic analytics” to help HPE customers identify apt technology for business transformation • This paradigm innovation approach is the critical ingredient of Gold Dust program and has

immensely contributed for driving solution selling in these accounts.

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PROGRAM EXECUTION Gold Dust’s intelligent account pursuit program pivots the customer in the center and overlays it with multi-dimensional data and deliver it through effective advisory. Key elements of program execution include:

Collaborative Platform • Consistent with HPE value of innovation through effective partnership, Gold Dust created a

collaboration platform for account sales and marketing to seamlessly partner for sustainable value creation

Intelligent Data Framework • This collaborative platform is powered by multi-dimensional ‘data framework’ that enables

360° view of HPE customer’s business and industry • HPE marketing has invested in a suite of modern technology tools that connect transactional

data, digital/social data to drive insightful customer narratives through AI-enabled analytics Proactive Advisory

• CMI combines the power of its intelligent data framework, ‘paradigm innovation’ and deep industry expertise to proactively advise account sales teams on customers’ business challenge and technology purchase intent

• Joint ideation workshops between sales teams and customers leverage inputs from the CMI Gold Dust advisory to help quickly identify appropriate solutions for pressing customer challenges

This approach of selling differentiated solutions against customer’s current business and technology landscape is far superior to traditional portfolio driven marketing/sales efforts. Gold Dust program ultimately positions HPE as a trusted technology advisor thus offering signification point of difference from competitors. PROGRAM RESULTS Gold Dust Program has been an indispensable part of HPE’s Top Accounts Initiatives. Since the time of its inception (in FY’17), Gold Dust delivered on many folds - improved pipeline, faster closing of deals, and transformative customer engagements.

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Conduent | Gold Winner Driving Strategic Growth

Driving Business Results through Performance Marketing BUSINESS CHALLENGE Demonstrating a clear tie between marketing programs and business outcomes—and the ability to consistently and effectively refine the ways marketing drives awareness, consideration and ultimately sales—is not easy for any organization. No matter how good the perception of the marketing function, without hard data, securing investment in marketing is difficult. But for a company like Conduent, which was formed through numerous acquisitions—leveraging data from multiple, disparate systems for actionable insights, and to authenticate the ways marketing positively impacts business success, was no small undertaking. PROGRAM OBJECTIVE Overall, we needed to transform our marketing function to take a performance marketing approach—using tools, analytics and new processes to measure every marketing initiative, so we knew definitively the impact each program had on pipeline and revenue. We had to transition from “data-novices” to “data-ninjas”—not just understanding the hydraulics of each metric, but also making connections across data elements to gain insights on what was working and what could be improved. So, we embarked on a data-driven journey to marketing success, made possible by rigorous team effort and powered by innovative thinking and advanced digital tools. PROGRAM EXECUTION We took a learning approach, which allowed people to “be wrong” as long as the situation improved our understanding. We built a foundation for real change through repetition in weekly reviews and celebrating wins where we could draw a definitive connection between pipeline or revenue and a marketing tactic. Our team had to become comfortable navigating our CRM and other MarTech systems to move from “I think this program made a difference” to “I know this program had an impact and here’s why.” Releasing data that previously existed in silos from its shackles is hard, and even harder when a young multi-billion-dollar organization is driving change through all departments. But through sustained, meticulous efforts—diving down to the granular level of where information resides—we created new rules and ways of working that drove to the core and illustrated the true value of the marketing function.

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Measuring integrated marketing campaigns that include program elements such as rich content, social media, paid search and industry events across the campaign lifecycle required a well thought-out MarTech stack that was closely integrated with our sales systems. This includes four foundational components supported by additional tools and technologies:

• Website – track and capture visitors • Marketo – automate lead and campaign management • Salesforce – ensure lead attribution, campaign tagging and sales intelligence • Domo – automate, aggregate, analyze and adjust

Together, these technologies enabled us to illustrate the clear value of our function across the entire company. We were able to highlight the revenue and pipeline influenced by marketing, but also drill down to the specific Salesforce record for wins to build credibility and partnership with the sales organization. It also gave us the insights for real-time optimization and better decision making to achieve strategic business goals and growth targets. By partnering with Domo and its agile platform, individuals have access to both holistic and business unit specific visualizations with the ability to drill into channel, tactic and campaign-level results. This is specifically beneficial when trying to understand the impact of marketing programs, how they compare to other campaigns and benchmarks and their status in the sales funnel, to empower informed decision making. BUSINESS RESULTS Technology is now enabling our team to harness the right data, deliver meaningful insights from initiatives, demonstrate actual ROI, develop our marketing talent to do world-class marketing and implement the right processes to advance Conduent’s business objectives. Today, marketing is setting a high bar and helping lead a data-driven culture:

• Analysis allows us to track the progression of leads from prospect to client. • We’ve established far greater collaboration with sales by demonstrating the tight correlation

between our efforts and the sales funnel. • We’re blazing a trail for attribution and automation—our dashboards help us tell a story, formulate

marketing attribution, adjust marketing programs and tactics based on data and ultimately provide a ROI.

• We’ve dramatically increased all our metrics year over year. • Our C-suite executives are impressed and have a new-found respect for the real revenue and

pipeline we influence.

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ServiceNow | Gold Winner Driving Strategic Growth

ServiceNow Global ABM Center of Excellence BUSINESS CHALLENGE ServiceNow, recently ranked first in the 2018 Forbes Most Innovative Companies list, had an ambitious growth target: namely, to hit a $4 billion in revenue for 2020. ServiceNow recognized that 30% of its revenue growth was going to come from a small number of strategic accounts. Established as a company imperative, not just a marketing imperative, ABM became a key driver of success in pursuit of the company’s vision for 2020. PROGRAM OBJECTIVE With a $4 billion revenue target to achieve in 2020, ServiceNow recognized that 30% of that revenue would come from a small number of strategic accounts. This growth would come from breaking into new large accounts, deepening relationships, creating relevance, and ensuring existing customers were getting the most from their investment with ServiceNow. Vital to this was expanding perception of ServiceNow beyond its ITSM heritage, and highlighting its ability to deliver an end-to-end digital transformation solution, which automates and orchestrates processes across core business units, HR, IT, Customer Service and Security. PROGRAM EXECUTION The team knew that 30% of their growth would come from a small number of strategic accounts. Hence, the approach was to take a deep focus on a group of accounts, and invest in creating relevant, targeted messaging that would speak to ServiceNow’s expertise within their industries, roles, pain points and aspirations.

An enduring model of cross-functional collaboration was fundamental to success, with over 47 individuals from different teams involved in the ABM steering committee.

Two levels of ABM ensured the right balance of investment and resources, enabling ServiceNow to prioritize and deliver value to their targeted accounts more effectively and in a much more informed way.

These levels were defined as follows:

• 1-to-1: Targeted accounts were treated as ‘markets of one’ with dedicated resources. • 1-to-few: Focused on small clusters of accounts that shared similar aspirations and characteristics,

with at least 30% customization applied per account.

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Following account identification, and aligning resources and investment accordingly, the team adopted the ITSMA 7-step engagement process to ensure consistency in their approach to ABM engagements globally:

1. Understanding the account imperatives and the challenges facing their success 2. Understanding and adapting to the accounts needs 3. Mapping and profiling key stakeholders and decision makers at each account 4. Developing targeted value propositions for each account or segment 5. Planning integrated sales and marketing messaging and executables 6. Executing integrated campaigns across a range of channels and approaches 7. Evaluating results and updating plans on an ongoing, iterative basis

Leveraging their 5 ABM-as-a-Service frameworks, global teams were able to leverage a range of media and channels to share the right message, with the right people at the right time. This involved carefully weighing when and where they would be most responsive and engaged. This included:

• Creating 180+ pieces of custom content in 2018: account specific business value reports, personalized account welcome packs, event summaries, roadmaps, whitepapers, videos, infographics and more. All of which were distributed both directly and digitally.

• Developing industry and account-specific thought leadership, created with and distributed by ServiceNow subject matter experts.

• Building tailored nurture strategies, which included calling, emails, and personalized invitations to executive events.

• Working directly with “customer-consultants” to create and validate ABM content that was relevant and would resonate.

• Leading regular insights research and analytical syncs with the account teams to review results, check relevance in real-time and continuously improve impact.

BUSINESS RESULTS The program has enabled acceleration of strategic relationships with existing customers and supported sales to break into net-new accounts, identifying and understanding the key business issues and building custom value propositions delivered through a series of 5 ABM services. It has also driven a change in market perception, repositioning ServiceNow as ‘the digital workflow platform for the enterprise.’

In 2018, the program was recognized for:

• Breaking into 3 out of 4 net new large enterprise target accounts • 120+ VP/C-level meetings • 70% target accounts engaged within 9 months of launching • $83.4M+ in sales qualified pipeline, with over 50% NNACV closed within 9 months

Since launching, the ABM team has grown to a central team of 7 dedicated practitioners, established a world-class ABM center or excellence to enable them to scale in the field, entered new and emerging markets and companywide investments have more than doubled.

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HCL Technologies | Diamond Winner Enabling Sales to Accelerate Growth

Eagle's Nest: Education & Enablement Program for Sales & Delivery PROBLEM STATEMENT The 21st century enterprises intend to achieve agility, scalability, and transform experience through IT infrastructure solutions that can be ‘reconfigured for API centricity’ and ‘automated for efficiency.’ Customers want IT infrastructure to act as the backbone of their digital transformation journey so that it can work well with the upper layer of technologies (such as business IT, applications operations, and applications developments). These changes are evolving fast. In this scenario, sales is expected to take a consultative approach. It’s essential for sales to upgrade their knowledge about customers’ new requirements and the fast growing new-age technologies. Nevertheless, regular sales enablement has become more critical than ever before. These changes are not only impacting sales but also delivery. Delivery teams are expected to understand new integrated solutions and deliver as per the integrated contracts closed by sales. It, therefore, requires us to educate and enable the delivery teams as well. THE FINDINGS

To understand the ground realities, we rolled out an online global sales survey titled NGIT Sales Survey to understand the point of view of the sales executives regarding the need for their enablement. To enhance our understanding further, we also interviewed 20 randomly selected sales executives responsible for cross selling and upselling in the existing accounts. Below are our findings:

• When asked about how marketing can help sales, 68% sales executives said that marketing can help them by producing customer-facing assets, 62% want marketing to share detailed information on products, offerings, and partnerships, and 58% want marketing to help them enhance their conversations with customers.

• Besides, 63% sales executives globally highlighted that they were ‘not aware’ of the propositions and solutions launched by the practice teams in the last 12 months.

• Interestingly, 64% survey respondents preferred physical events and classroom training. It was clear that we had to design a program that would include physical events.

THE SOLUTION

Based on the insights, we designed an enablement program, now known as Eagle’s Nest. The success of the program can easily be attributed to the involvement of cross-functional teams in the planning and execution phases.

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• Content creation and development was the most important part of the entire pre-launch phase. We first reached out to the practice teams. We requested them to provide one Single Point of Contact (SPOC) for each product and solution. With the identified SPOCs, we started creating the training assets. We converted all the collected information into videos.

With the help of SPOCs, we identified effective speakers and presenters who were given scripts. We created over 60 interesting 7-10 minute videos in two months. It was a remarkable achievement and recognized by the leaders later on.

• Securing Funds: The budget for Eagle’s Nest was divided between three teams (Sales, Delivery, and Practice). While we had to move fast, it took two months for us to convince three teams and secure funds.

• Integrated Campaign: As we wanted Eagle’s Nest to be an aspirational program and create a lot of pull for this, we ran an organization-wide campaign. The launch of Eagle’s Nest made heads turn across the organization. On the day of launch, every possible internal channel featured Eagle’s Nest advertisements.

• Regional Events: As our research revealed that participants found events as an effective channel, we conducted regional Eagle’s Nest events to educate sales and delivery. The advanced level of the training was delivered through events. It was highly important to keep assessing every participant’s performance so that they could improve themselves.

• Assessment & Certifications: We assessed participants’ performance during and after the event. The assessments were done through Eagle’s Nest website after attending the event and watching additional video-based training content available on Eagle’s Nest Video Channel. We realized that the launch of the program was much easier than the post-launch phase improvement. Therefore, we introduced ‘certifications’ for all. We learned that delivery teams were highly interested in adding a certification to their qualifications. We launched a certification program for them. Eventually, we reached a lot closer to our target.

RESULTS Eagle’s Nest has been an exemplary program for us. So should it be for all IT organizations that are witnessing similar changes as we are. The success of Eagle’s Nest can be attributed to detailed research, comprehensive planning, and meticulous execution. Early collaboration with cross-functional teams and early involvement of leaders acted as the key factor behind the success of Eagle’s Nest. Unlike a typical sales-enablement project, Eagle’s Nest targets sales as well as the key part of the sales ecosystem ‘delivery.'

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise | Gold Winner Enabling Sales to Accelerate Growth

Dynamic Micro-Segment Targeting for Precision Planning: Finding the Right Tree in the Forest BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Serving customers from the smallest startups to the largest enterprises, in multiple countries, with a multi-layered solutions portfolio, requires having a more dynamic means for identifying and matching the right opportunities across this complex matrix. Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Customer and Market Insights team (HPE CMI) applied data science modeling to develop a micro-segment targeting tool to address this requirement. Our solution—which is grounded in the corporate-wide directives set in each planning cycle—gives guidance to marketing and sales stakeholders who must define their micro contribution to the greater macro goals. PROGRAM OBJECTIVES

CMI converged three problem statements to set objectives for the design of a micro-targeting tool that could be applied to marketing and sales planning.

Portfolio Optimization A strategic shift in focus on HPE’s solutions portfolio model means ensuring high-touch resources are assigned to the solutions that are poised for high-margin growth, while low-touch methods are applied to lower-margin, transactional solutions. Micro-targeting would help leaders predictively match the ideal products and services to the right customers.

Account Prioritization HPE’s North America marketing team sought to streamline their media spend, in part by replacing broad spending to target a mass of accounts with a precise, insights-driven targeting strategy. Our micro-targeting tool would provide a solution for targeting prioritized sets of accounts, matched to the solution initiatives that would be most relevant to those accounts.

Digital Personalization HPE’s web development team wanted to use a data-driven approach to personalizing the digital experience on our corporate website. Our micro-segmenting tool would ensure more personalized experiences and solutions that reflect our understanding of the transformation challenges and needs our customers face.

To holistically addressing these problem statements, CMI set out to develop a scoring algorithm that would align the right accounts to our macro goals, ensuring that our resources and budgets would be hyper-focused on a targeting strategy that would deliver maximum payoff.

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PROGRAM EXECUTION

HPE’s CMI team leveraged our existing unified data model—a platform that offers automated access to account insights with prediction models for advanced sales, marketing and digital enablement. This gave us the means to develop a micro-segment optimization algorithm that puts the next level of account prioritization in the hands of regional sales and marketing stakeholders who were already using the platform to profile accounts.

Data aggregation to create micro-segments We started with an analysis of the unique combinations of segments across four key dimensions used for resource planning decisions and related investments: country; core infrastructure solutions; industry; and account size.

We then applied a scoring algorithm– based on total addressable market models, revenue, and market performance—to assign the thousands of unique combinations to four homogeneous micro-segment clusters.

Every customer account now has cluster assignments, and at the highest level, cluster membership gives us guidance on how to manage engagement with a particular account:

1. Primed Potentials: highest level of engagement with focus on new solution adoption and upsell opportunities

2. Mature Mainstays: moderate engagement with focus on nurturing initiatives, upgrade and cross-sell opportunities

3. Cautious Coasters: lower engagement with focus on upgrade and service/support renewal opportunities

4. Limited Legacy: lowest engagement with focus on transactional, volume, and eCommerce solutions

Intelligent self-service analytics interface Because micro-segmentation is integrated with our federated data platform, stakeholders now have flexibility to set their own account targeting priorities:

• Stakeholders specify the filtering criteria, based on the four key dimensions. • The output returns the narrowed subset of micro-segments relative to stakeholders’ objectives. • Each returned cluster contains a set of accounts that can be further analyzed with detailed

profiling insights that fuel prioritization strategies. BUSINESS RESULTS

The micro-segmentation targeting tool aligns marketing and sales targeting initiatives, and delivers: • Shorter prioritization and selection efforts • Maximized media reach and budget efficiencies • Engagement tracking for each account

This brings together the effective interaction of hidden patterns lurking behind multiple complex and disparate data sources. This solution is helping sales and marketing teams target customer accounts with opportunity analysis to support business growth goals.

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Microsoft | Diamond Winner Engaging Executives with Thought Leadership and Innovation

Executive Immersive Experiences BUSINESS CHALLENGE

In 2016, two years after our new CEO Satya Nadella took over, we were at cross-roads again. Faced with the $4.5T opportunity in the Digital Transformation (DT) space, we realized that despite having a solution-centric approach, our relationships (in Microsoft Services) had been with the customer Technology Decision Maker (TDM). The TDMs were not close to the forces that were disrupting their industries. To truly help our customers evolve and be successful despite the digital disruptions they were facing, we needed to connect with the customer Business Decision Markers (BDM) specifically at the C-suite and Board levels. To continue being relevant, we needed an initiative that could help us connect and learn from the customer C-suite, while driving a cultural shift to a learn-it-all culture so we could better serve our customers. PROGRAM OBJECTIVE

In 2016, we started the Services Executive Board (SEB) to build and inform Microsoft Services’ strategy and execution, outside-in, with direct guidance from our top digital transformation customers. The program is designed to create a cohort of global business leaders who are willing to learn from each other and are vested in each other’s success. The organizational design is heavily inspired by the experience undergone by elite startups from influential incubators like Y-Combinator with their legion of founders, successful entrepreneurs, and advisory board of VCs.

The SEB would have 20 C-suite customers (increased to 30 in 2018) who partner with Microsoft Services on their Digital Transformation journeys and are willing to invest their time to advise Microsoft Services’ executive leadership on current and future-looking business challenges. The SEB members would represent all of our 17 geographical areas and our six priority industries.

Our customers have found the way we run the SEB to be unique compared to our peers in the industry. They cite the transparency with which we share our business challenges with our SEB Members and ask for their guidance, which helps us craft our strategies or test our hypothesis before we start to execute globally to be the key differentiating factor. We also never pitch at the SEB—no marketing/sales decks or demos of technologies—it’s about listening and learning from customers. As a technology company, the “no demo” policy is a constant challenge for us to uphold, but it has helped us be on goal. PROGRAM EXECUTION

There were 7 key elements responsible for the continued success of the SEB Program: 1. A Clear Program Definition that differentiated the mission for the program vs other customer

advisory councils, clarifying the cadence and scope.

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2. Executive Sponsorship & Budget with engagement from the Corporate Vice President to unlock the budgets and have direct reports on board across Delivery, Technology, Operations, and Sales.

3. Recruiting through a multi-attribute, decision analysis model that evaluated customers across 18 proprietary attributes, scoring each nomination. Quantifying this helped us be objective in our decision making, track our progress while at the same time having an analytic language to push back on when potentially sticky political situations could arise when top customers, sales, executives, and quota come together.

4. Content Strategy created by a dedicated program team in tune with industry trends, Microsoft’s vision, and divisional strategies. We have gone from trying different modalities like normal presentation/feedback meetings, design-led thinking workshops, to using improv to explore behavioral changes and having immersive world-class inspirational tours.

5. Experience Design to help engage our SEB members to give us feedback, following three pillars that define the soul for SEB that we want our members to feel: Unique & Local, Creative & Inspiring, Unforgettable & Exclusive.

6. Engagement & Real-Time Feedback Mechanisms to capture feedback and use the data to drive the shift to a “learn it all” culture. Launched a dedicated app for the IOS, Android, and web that connects SEB members to each other, providing the next meeting agenda and past documents. An important feature of the app is its integration with real-time presentations, where the presenter’s questions display as a Poll, and as the SEB member types their feedback, a dynamic graphic (or word-cloud) appears in real-time on the main PowerPoint screen. This was a critical implementation innovation to hear the voice of every single customer while minimizing biases in answers.

7. Follow Up with SLT & SEB where, at the end of every meeting, the conversation is captured into a report that contains the dialog and all the data from the Polls. This report also enlists the insights and clearly identifies the accountabilities and the owner. This has helped track accountability with the leadership and report back to the SEB members, which they see as a huge indicator of their impact.

BUSINESS RESULTS

Over the last three years we slowly improved our culture, while expanding our membership, covering more than 60% of division strategies with customers before implementation.

The growth of revenue for customers since joining the SEB ranged from 98% CAGR to 355% CAGR, and the average deal size increased by a range of 2-10x, in some cases.

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PwC | Gold Winner Engaging Executives with Thought Leadership and Innovation

Digital Workforce Transformation BUSINESS CHALLENGE Upskill! Everyone says they want to, and 63% of business leaders cite lack of skilled teams as a barrier to their company’s digital transformation. Organizations face a challenge they can’t hire their way out of--transform themselves or fail to survive the ever-evolving competitive landscape. That means fostering innovation from within and upskilling the people they’ve got, while changing their culture to operate digitally. We know this first-hand from PwC’s own internal digital reinvention mandate. Reinvention was a journey with loads of challenges, but it’s one that’s never done. And we realized that if PwC, a 170-year old non-digital native, could upskill to build a digitized workforce, so could any company. PROGRAM OBJECTIVE Our own market research drove the point home that organizations across all sectors and market caps are wrestling with upskilling. That’s where PwC’s Digital Workforce Transformation and associated Digital Fitness Assessment app come in. Becoming more “digital” isn’t just about learning to code or understanding how to parse reams of data. It’s a way of working. It’s a mindset. It’s how you operate within your company, how you engage and lead others, and how well you steep your people in the digital-first mindset. It is also, via our Digital Fitness app, measurable. That’s intimidating to some executives. We aimed to show it didn’t have to be. So how do you convey to executives that upskilling is equal parts technology and leadership and entirely within their control? With a high-touch, high-tech hologram, of course! Our first-of-its kind interactive hologram launches executives on their Digital Workforce Transformation in an unconventional, fun way along the lines of “HQ” and “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” with a holographic host, that engages you in a series of digital fitness questions. Through this innovative experience we were able to connect with executives to share our POV on digital workforce transformation. PROGRAM EXECUTION We leveraged PwC’s own way of working, which draws on our expertise through three critically important lenses — Business, Experience and Technology—to think through challenges from new perspectives. We brought together editorial and marketing teams with design experts, production leaders and technologists to deliver a unique hologram that connects with executives in an unconventional way, and launched PwC’s

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Digital Workforce Transformation offering at scale beyond traditional marketing tactics---web, social, events, email, etc. Business experts zeroed in on the challenges executives need to fix—identifying skills gaps, and creating training vehicles to build out the gaps, while user experience experts designed a compelling creative experience that foreshadowed what we could help executives achieve on a larger scale. Technologists built in an introduction to the emerging technologies executives need to master if they’re going to enable their employees to serve their clients in more profitable, efficient ways. We couldn’t have done this well without breaking down silos, stripping titles and hierarchies, and creating a fast-fail environment where people thought creatively and tested solutions in real-time. We bypassed the corporate processes that bog down many transformations—the very same corporate processes we’re moving client’s away from. We told the story through 12+ pieces of content across multiple outlets, including an untraditional Buzzfeed personality quiz that targeted executives with a cheeky headline—This Quiz Will Determine If You're Living In The Past, Present, Or Future. We captured attention through our ad campaign showing the ideas of today and tomorrow (think cash vs. cryptocurrency, passwords vs. facial recognition)--urging companies to get their teams ready for what’s next. We launched the hologram at CNBC’s Talent@Work, a three part, half-day event series targeted to business leaders to help them manage their workforce and grow their businesses amid rapid technological change. BUSINESS RESULTS By showing up in unexpected ways (hologram, experiential market events, BuzzFeed article) we grew the pipeline by 1260%. Since launch, we’ve garnered:

• 20 media articles (including the likes of Cheddar, Accounting Today, Digital Journal, the Miami Herald and LinkedIn)

• 5.5M impressions on social media with an engagement rate four times higher than industry benchmarks

• 366K website visits and 53K emails opened • 15K editorial views (including a 92% completion rate of our Buzzfeed article--10% higher than the

industry standard) • 9 unconventional market events with over 100 buyers at 75 priority accounts

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise | Diamond Winner Personalizing Marketing with Digital Tools, Data, and Approaches

Periocular—A Personalization Engine BUSINESS CHALLENGE While most marketing organizations are striving for a one-to-one personalization experience, HPE recognizes that in the B2B space, personalization is not only limited to providing better web user experience but also needs to permeate through various touch points and seamlessly integrate both online and offline engagement channels for customers. This is a completely different ball game in the level of complexity that typical B2C organizations like a Netflix, Alibaba, Amazon have to deal with when offering a personalization experience. In B2B, we need to identify/predict & aggregate interests of multiple contacts/persona visiting & interacting with HPE from the same account across channels to provide relevant personalized experience.

From being data-driven to driving an Omni-channel personalization

Function/data silos—Integrate data spread across several silos of sources, functions, and types—online vs offline, internal vs external, structured vs. unstructured—into a Data-Lake.

Personalization strategy—Develop a modeling and automated execution framework which facilitates rapid response based on customer behavior (in most cases, real-time) by connecting data from multiple customer channels to our Data Lake + AI/ML Personalization engine in a hub-spoke manner.

Technology—Design and build a large number of state-of-the-art AI/ML models for various customer interactions on multiple channels, which not only requires a superior prediction performance but also needs effective maintenance process for future upgrade/changes, utilizing big-data computing infrastructure.

PROGRAM OBJECTIVE We at HPE Marketing have developed Periocular—a personalization engine that delivers on our vision of providing an Omni-channel user experience. Periocular integrates over 15+ offline sources (transaction, pipeline, contracts, firmographics, and competitor information) and combines it with the digital intent of customers (harnessing data from both HPE.com, chat, email responses and external web) to create a golden record of our customers. Over 60+ AI/ML predictive models utilizing 1600+ data attributes fuels the engine which successfully provides to the need of a personalized experience across the sales funnel such as:

• HPE.com, HPE B2B eCommerce & 3rd party web sites (media targeting). • Marketing automation tools where we digitally nurture our active contacts and send sales ready

contacts/accounts for field sales follow-up. • Online chat where we enable direct sales conversations through live chat.

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• Field sales agents whom we empower with the latest account insights & customer intent signals for effective campaigns & events recruitment.

EXECUTION Hub and Spoke Model We cater to a number of internal company functions and businesses (sales, marketing, hpe.com, media, marketing ops & eCommerce) across geographies. We are the hub of analytics offerings to various customer engagement channels across HPE.

True Omni-channel experience across Customer interfaces Brand HPE has been a leader in providing personalized experience to its customers across multi-channel interactions. We engage with a high volume of daily web visitors (>250K) on hpe.com, digitally nurture active contacts (>1 million) via marketing automation tools, provide account insights and recommendations to our sales teams for various sales campaigns/event recruiting, and provide ready assistance to customers (>450 conversations daily) directly through our chat agents. This engine thereby leverages data and intelligence to feed content into one or more of these channels, providing a holistic Omni-channel experience. BUSINESS RESULTS We have seen dramatic wins in each of the channels where Periocular is used. A few examples that we can proudly share are illustrated below:

Digital Nurture: • Our top 3% (contact and account) of recommendations resulted in 31% of revenue obtained from

digitally active accounts, which is a lift of 10X as against random targeting.

Chat Business: • Over the past few months, our AI engine has guided our presales chat agents in about 480 chat

conversations with visitors per day, affecting about $9M in sales conversion. • Compared to previous quarters, we have observed a 20% improvement in time dedicated towards

lead-generating chat sessions than non-lead chat sessions, thereby indicating enhanced productivity and customer experience.

Web Business: • The personalization guidance system provides the ability to choose the right experience at the

right time to the 250K visitors daily.

Demand generation through Sales Campaign: • So far, in FY19, across our Priority campaigns, we achieved total wins of $1.5B+ revenue with

84%+ revenue accounted to the top accounts suggested by the engine.

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Hexaware | Gold Winner Personalizing Marketing with Digital Tools, Data, and Approaches

Reimagining Customer Engagement using Futuristic Data Analytics, Tools and Approaches BUSINESS CHALLENGE Despite embracing many modern marketing methods, our communication approach showed signs of monotony and generalization. We were not able to personalize the messaging by addressing customer’s pain-points with relevant solutions. Though we had content that might appeal to different segments, the likelihood that the right user got access to the appropriate content was low. This led to increased bounce rates/exit rates for certain sections like the Homepage, the Resource Center page—for users to access gated assets/collaterals, blog sections, etc. BUSINESS OBJECTIVE Our objective has always been to implement personalization in an intelligent and scalable way to engage and connect with customers better. By personalizing our marketing efforts, we want to establish a personal connect with the user and their emotions, which is fundamental to building and nurturing brand engagement and shaping brand perceptions. With personalized communication, we will continue to address specific pain points for customers from different fields and backgrounds. We wanted to invest time and money based on buyer journey, as a lot of time was lost in targeting the 1st level content (awareness-related in the buyer-journey stage) when the user might in fact be a part of pre-purchase stage and need higher/ next-level content (like thought leadership content, whitepapers, events/webinars, etc.). PROGRAM EXECUTION We undertook the following steps to bring our personalization efforts to fruition: Segmentation of users: Used user profiling to have a 360-degree view of customers, learned about their pain points and why they chose to partner with us. Analytical tools enabled automated segmentation for more effective delivery of messages. Creation of relevant content: Post segmentation, we could distinguish and compare between different audience groups, thereby determining which type of content will likely lead to more engagement based on observed user behaviors.

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Powering the multi-channel personalization engine: The next step was to re-engineer channels to serve consistent, yet personalized experiences based on the segments. Setting up new personalization channels: We work towards mapping personalization through customer journey across all channels in order to encourage increased customer retention and loyalty across channels. External partners for web personalization, intent intelligence, subscriptions with external analyst and market research tools, marketing automation subscription, display ad personalization and programmatic buying partners were involved in our personalization journey. Some of the areas of personalization that have contributed to increasing website engagement and conversions from a lead-generation point-of-view are ticker icons, personalization in homepage, blogs, resource and blog landing pages, homepage banner, display ads, mailers, social post images and messaging. BUSINESS RESULTS With our personalization efforts, we were able to create compelling customer experiences that resulted in the following success numbers:

• Could optimize cost while increasing conversions and engagement. Observed ROI in terms of increased conversions (15-20%), increased time spent on page (Website engagement, etc.), decrease in bounce rates

• Increase in RFX conversions with personalized microsite, mailer, branding (20-30%)

• Increase in conversation points for sales with prospects

• Digital Personalization and personalized targeting (display ads, search ads—for specific intent keywords, LiveChat, webpage) - as in the Sales Qualified Leads and Opportunities identified from such channels were (50-100%) higher than other channels

• Witnessed a decrease in bounce rate by over 30% for our blog sections alone, by studying the user behaviour and showing them options for similar and other top recommended blogs

• Increase in page views for other blogs, i.e. number of other blogs consumed by 28%

• 10.6 k unique users from target accounts were served personalized website experiences, and a lift in conversion rates up to 15% from relevant RPCs from target accounts

• 30% increase in average time spent on the webpage

We are ensuring that our end users get a superior personalized user experience at all touch points in their digital interactions with Hexaware. We are not there yet, but we keep raising the bar in going the extra mile for all our users.

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IBM Global Technology Services | Gold Winner Personalizing Marketing with Digital Tools, Data, and Approaches

Driving More Pipeline with a Client Centric, Intelligent, and Always on Digital Engine BUSINESS CHALLENGE Global Technology Services Marketing was being challenged to drive more pipeline, engage new buyers, and help the business grow in strategic and highly competitive areas such as cloud. We knew that our clients were consuming more content digitally and doing online research before reaching to our sellers. They were being targeted not only by IBM but all our competitors, and drowning in a sea of marketing messages and content. In order to grow in double digits, we had to deeply rethink and optimize our digital marketing approach. Our tactics were being executed in silos, activity was deployed in bursts, effectiveness was low due to the use of broad messages targeting broad audiences and we were missing out as we were not always present at the right time in the right place. PROGRAM OBJECTIVE Our main objective was to improve the digital client experience, in order to compete for attention and engagement in a crowded space; and to grow the digital marketing source pipeline by 60% YtY to deliver the required return on the 2019 marketing investment. PROGRAM EXECUTION In order to stand out in the highly cluttered digital marketing space, and be able to engage and convert more clients, we had to understand their expectations and behavior with marketing tactics. We created a digital engine that is always running, continuously gathering insights and automatically adapting to the changes in client engagement. To achieve this we orchestrated: SEO: Given that 93% of B2B buying processes begin with an online search (Marketing Insider Group), we implemented a search-first approach to the core marketing website, optimizing our search performance. We simplified and enhanced the user experience and instrumented the website to monitor how clients engage with our content, and to A/B test for further optimization. Advanced planning: We eliminated adhoc execution and instituted advanced planning, to eliminate spikes and ensure the engine is always running. In the past media channels were activated independently and in bursts responding to ad-hoc requests. Today our engine orchestrates an audience first multi channel approach, to ensure the halo effect across channels and brands.

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MTA: To better plan and optimize we leverage proprietary tools with data models that test over 7,000 attributes, gathering insights across client touch points, and identifying the actions that are more influential and contribute to generating opportunities. A DMP-Data Management Platform: Enables us to collect first-party data from any source and leverage 3rd party data, to have one holistic view of our clients and deliver more relevant content at the right time. ABM at scale: We further segmented our audiences to focus more precisely on key accounts. We partnered with vendors to use their data bases and do ABM at scale continuously gathering insights to better target them through their online experiences. Automation: We powered continuous optimization through AI (e.g. DSP, Google automatic bidding) where powerful algorithms find the best audience, and shift investments based on performance. This is automated and continuously running improving conversion. Digital channels: We enhanced the digital channels for clients to interact with sellers, providing more options for the clients beyond the traditional live chat. We introduced “schedule a consultation”—Expert Advise—and are developing chatbots to offload the sellers from simple client requests so they can focus on high value interactions. BUSINESS RESULTS Our objective was to create an engine that would enable us to compete for attention and engagement in a crowded space and grow digital marketing source pipeline by 60% YtY. Year to date results show 70% YtY growth in number of validated opportunities, and 190% YtY growth in validated lead revenue. We are not only growing the volume of opportunities, but we are also engaging key clients in larger deals. In marketing creating a onetime innovative tactic is appealing, but what drives business value is when innovation, continuous optimization and client centricity become ongoing and engrained into the day to day operation. That is what the digital engine we built achieves. It is always on, its intelligent operating on client insights derived from sophisticated algorithms, it’s instrumented with leading edge tools, and supported by changes in process.

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Red Hat | Diamond Winner Scaling and Optimizing Account-Based Marketing

Building Communities and Fostering Cross-Organizational Collaboration: Keys to Red Hat’s Thriving ABM Marketing Program BUSINESS CHALLENGE

True to our mission "To be the catalyst in communities of customers, developers, and partners creating better technology the open-source way," Red Hat initiated an ABM program using the same principles. The successful scaling of the program was accelerated through our drive to foster communities within our customers, as well as within our ABM and internal cross-functional teams.

With leadership and a deep foundation in open source technologies, Red Hat has a history of strong relationships with forward-thinking technical contacts and central IT organizations within enterprise customers. Recently, however, customer technology budgets have shifted from centralized IT budgets to decentralized Line of Business (LOB) IT budgets. In addition, the Red Hat portfolio evolved into a broad set of enterprise open source software solutions, including hybrid cloud infrastructure, middleware, agile integration, cloud-native application development, and management and automation solutions. This provided a new revenue opportunity to cross-sell and upsell our portfolio of solutions and services to existing IT customers and reach new lines of business (LOB) within organizations.

As a result, Red Hat needed to extend its visibility and engagement with executives, LOB leads, and other strategic technology roles typically less familiar with Red Hat, while also building communities within our top strategic customers. PROGRAM OBJECTIVE

ABM is a channel to create awareness and uncover net new opportunities for an expanding portfolio, but also to reinforce existing relationships with strategic customers who found success with Red Hat’s Linux solutions. Aligning the ABM approach with Red Hat’s vertical go-to-market strategy and execution delivers additional scale through industry insights.

Red Hat established its ABM program in 2016 to address the following critical organizational needs:

• Build visibility for Red Hat’s cloud portfolio and drive net new opportunities for emerging technologies A key driver for ABM was to address the growth potential and expanding relevance of our portfolio of solutions. Our portfolio was evolving from Linux only into the cloud market, providing a new revenue opportunity to cross-sell and upsell products to existing IT customers and reach new LOBs within enterprise organizations.

Address shifting dynamic in customer purchasing from central IT to LOB budgets and drive sales conversations with industry-relevant solutions to solve their enterprise needs A strategic 1:1 ABM strategy provides resources to more effectively identify and reach contacts in

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the business lines. Alignment with vertical go-to-market improves the quality of the sales conversations with business-focused customers. It was determined that the target customers aligned predominantly with the most strategic vertical markets. A vertical alignment was added to the program mix, which created a highly scalable program that could be used to test vertical solutions and scale across all of Red Hat.

PROGRAM EXECUTION

In addition to executing a 1:1 ABM strategy with alignment with vertical go-to-market, Red Hat pulls from its open source culture to build communities of proponents within its customers with “Inside-In” marketing. Rather than passively market to customers, relationships are built with key customer contacts—internal champions—and nurtured to further build a Red Hat community within the account. To date, the program has established more than 85 customer champions within ABM accounts.

It is through these customer champions that Red Hat has been able to even more effectively reach net new contacts, including business line contacts, to promote our offerings. With the guidance of internal champions, Red Hat develops highly relevant account marketing and communication plans, hosts internal virtual events, webinars, hack-a-thons, global account road tours, and technology days—just to name a few.

Red Hat also established its ABM program with a central ABM program office to build and cultivate a global community of ABM practitioners, impacting the ability to scale globally. The ABM program office creates the foundation for enablement, execution, best practice sharing, training and certification, innovative program ideation and optimization, play development, and global reporting. BUSINESS RESULTS

Since the program’s inception in 2016, Red Hat has scaled it from six accounts to more than 80. Creating a central ABM program office to build a global community of ABM practitioners has been a critical factor in scalability. By aligning and integrating with vertical go-to-market strategy, and executing in collaboration across all field marketing teams, 27 dedicated ABM field marketers in 14 countries have been effectively delivering account insight-driven, strategic 1:1 ABM to our top global and vertical accounts worldwide. The program, with its community-based approach, drives account interaction and engagement scores at 3-4x company benchmarks. Internal champions also helped to host more than 160 internal events in a single fiscal year, and increased marketing sourced sales closed pipeline significantly. Achievements in 2019 fiscal year alone include:

• Nearly 100% coverage of all global and strategic vertical accounts • 4x the Red Hat benchmarks for monthly interactions and contact engagement • 20+% growth of marketable contacts in the active database • More than 85 internal Red Hat customer champions identified within our ABM accounts • 18 ABM customers speaking at Red Hat’s annual user conference, eight of which presenting

keynotes during the general sessions • Three Red Hat Innovation Award winners from ABM customer set

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Fujitsu | Gold Winner Scaling and Optimizing Account-Based Marketing

Adapting ABM to Ignite Customer Obsession BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Whilst Fujitsu has had a Strategic 1:1 ABM program for several years, it was 2018 when it truly became business as usual, with a strategic decision to take ‘ABM everywhere’ to ignite customer obsession. The sales organisation had fully embraced ABM, however the success of the ABM approach resulted in an interesting challenge for 2018/2019—the business wanted more, so we needed to respond.

We’d proven that ABM delivered that value, we now just needed to build on it. Our sales colleagues were asking for it, our marketing colleagues liked doing it, and our marketing management liked reporting on the positive impact to the business.

Increasing headcount was not an option, neither was increasing budget to potentially outsource to agencies. PROGRAM OBJECTIVE

The objective was to scale the ABM approach without increasing resources, whilst keeping it 1:1.

A different approach was required in terms of program structure and resourcing—we needed to devise, create, and make it happen. PROGRAM EXECUTION We scaled by moving from having a dedicated team of ABMers for the EMEIA region, to a distributed approach with a small Centre of Excellence (CoE), and enabled ABM Everywhere with all Field Marketing colleagues across 15 countries taking on ABM responsibilities as part of their role. It was almost a repeat of the original UK rollout back in 2014, but this time optimised with tested methodology, tools, process, capability, best practice and expertise in place.

The scope of the new CoE included policy, governance, coaching, guidance, training, adapting and evolving the approach including new flavours of ABM (such as ABM Lite), creating the supporting operational foundation, and senior stakeholder management across the business. The CoE managed budgets, reporting, portals and repositories to centrally store plans, assets, and best practice, with toolboxes with templates, checklists and starter packs, and How to Guides for just about everything, pulling in the expertise from across the marketing supply chain. We also created the infrastructure required to support a new ABM community such as an ABM Help Mailbox and a central ABM distribution list for managed communications. ‘Snippets of Goodness’ capturing best practice from the ABM-ers, created by them and

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shared with them, helped to continually build on knowledge, share best practice and create a cohesive community, which meet monthly to share and learn.

The account selection process was a continuation of previous years’ approach, which ensured sales and marketing were still 100% aligned.

Helpful governance for plan approval and budget release, and then with quarterly healthchecks enabled the CoE to gain a view across all accounts of any trends, options for collaboration and re-use, enabling optimization for common tactics as centralized services, for example a microsite wireframe and SLA of a 5 day turn-around; a virtual reality kit suite with core content and easily-tailored modules for bespoke content; a newsletter template service to use in Marketo, executive engagement opportunities at large events, and so on.

Furthermore, the CoE acted as a central hub to manage the integration of key business initiatives such as our Brand Engagement Program, Digital Transformation Centre (DTC) Program and I-CIO Program with ABM. BUSINESS RESULTS One major factor to measure the success of the ABM approach is the increasing demand from the business, which we count as achieved. Some elements of the program are easier to quantifiably measure, for which the data was gathered using a variety of mechanisms, from CoE trackers, from data from Sales Operations and Marketing Operations, from surveys of stakeholders, and others anecdotal: What Target Achievement Influenced pipeline as a % of total marketing influenced pipeline 30% 40% NPS score 10% < YoY 10% Win rate on deals over €40m 1:4 1:2 Number of field marketers taking the training and eLearning modules 80% 100% Training was useful 80% 83% useful

17% VERY useful

Increase in customer advocacy & # customers we can draw on 10% < YoY 20% ABM-ers are confident about dealing with Account teams 80% 100% ABM-ers are confident in creating ABM plans 80% 92% ABM-ers finding the CoE useful 80% 100% Plans re-approved and reviewed every quarter 80% 100% Community engagement : Monthly ABM community calls attendance (average)

75% 94%

Community engagement: Drop in sessions deemed to be useful Yes YES Snippets of Goodness shared n/a 32 Agency immersion in ABM n/a 6 Individual ABM plans have scorecards based on the 3 R’s—Relationship, Reputation and Revenue, and each is measured on objectives to achieve these.

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SAP | Gold Winner Scaling and Optimizing Account-Based Marketing

SAP: Taking “Market of One” to the Next Level BUSINESS CHALLENGE SAP needed to efficiently market to several hundred companies included in the portfolio of one of the world’s largest private equity (PE) firms. The companies managed by the PE parent are quite diverse and share only two commonalities: 1) they are under management by the corporate PE parent, and 2) they have a single, negotiated Master Services Agreement (MSA) in place with SAP that provides for substantial discounts on SAP software and services, and greater buying power than the individual companies could afford on their own. Using ABM enabled a more efficient go-to-market motion, saving SAP on sales and marketing costs and providing the customer companies with a better buying experience. PROGRAM OBJECTIVES

• Achieve SAP’s 2018 revenue objective of $7M across the PE firm’s portfolio;

• Increase awareness of the strategic relationship between SAP and the PE firm across all of their portfolio companies;

• Turn intent signals and new contacts into leads and sales opportunities;

• Provide a better buying experience for the companies within the firm’s portfolio

PROGRAM EXECUTION Major program execution steps included:

• Incorporating marketing into account planning: Members of our ABM program sat in on account planning discussions and identified value propositions for the parent private equity firm and for individual member companies. We also ruled out traditional marketing coverage models including geo-based and industry-based, as there wasn’t enough commonality throughout the portfolio companies to justify those approaches.

• Account intelligence and intent signals: We next moved to an analysis of the several hundred companies under portfolio, including comparing company data to existing SAP propensity-to-buy models, evaluating their current level of engagement with SAP via our website statistics, and

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capturing what we knew about the companies already based on sharing of unstructured data and internal account knowledge. This process enabled us to provide the Global Account Director with a stack ranking of accounts based on likelihood of responding to SAP outreach.

• Inbound marketing: The heart of our account-based approach, and what gave us the ability to scale, was an inbound marketing program through our company website. With DemandBase as our partner, the SAP Personalization team was able to recognize member companies via reverse IP lookup and welcome them by company name as they entered SAP.com and saw a custom banner. We had a dedicated, custom landing page that informed these visitors of the Master Services Agreement. We created a landing page that included ungated content aligned to our value proposition(s) and a video that featured the PE firm’s top procurement officer detailing the MSA. As a final step, we provided visitors with the contact info for their Global Account Director.

• Outbound marketing: Our IMR team called website visitors in order to nurture their interest and further qualify them. Outbound emails were sent, aligning messages based on industry and current software installations. The call to action was to register for a series of dedicated webcasts available only to members of this PE firm’s portfolio.

• Customer engagement: SAP also engaged with the PE member companies via direct engagement:

1) Promoting ourselves at the PE firm’s internal conferences (3) for their member company CIOs. SAP was the only IT vendor at these conferences.

2) We joined the Slack channel used internally at the PE firm for their member company CIO community. A member of our account team monitored the Channel in order to answer questions and post content.

BUSINESS RESULTS By applying personalization for visitors to SAP.com from the PE firm, we were able to lift click-through rates to 5.5%, up from 0.5% for the same group of companies. Our outbound marketing efforts yielded 15 new leads and 4 sales opportunities, as well as adding 564 new contacts to our database. However, as account-based marketers, our primary measure of success is revenue. Our Global Account Director was handed an aggressive 2018 revenue target of $7M from among these companies. She was able to close almost double that amount, with $13.5M worth of software sold across that firm’s member companies by the end of 2018. As a result, the program has been expanded to another PE company, our Global Account Director has been promoted, and a new GAD has been installed to cover the original PE firm described in this submission.

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Cisco Systems | Diamond Winner Strengthening Marketing’s Role in Customer Experience and Success

Cisco Digital Lifecycle Initiative Drives Customer Experience and Success BUSINESS CHALLENGE In 2018 Cisco embarked on a company-wide mission to fully support customers in choosing, using and loving both Cisco and their Cisco solutions. It transformed its entire business beyond being aware of customers’ needs, to anticipating their needs and taking the next-best action. Through hundreds of interviews and surveys, it found out how it could serve them better. And with artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is now harnessing data to work in real time to identify customer vulnerabilities, provide prescriptive solutions, remove roadblocks to successful adoption of its products and services, and eliminate barriers to software and subscription renewals. In close collaboration with its reseller partners around the world, Cisco is doing everything in its power to retain customers for life. PROGRAM OBJECTIVE In 2018 Maria Martinez joined Cisco as EVP and Chief Customer Experience Officer, forming the new Customer Experience group. The Digital Lifecycle Journey’s initiative supports specific business goals the group established including:

1) To deliver the best customer experience in the industry by accelerating success for customers and profitable growth for Cisco and its partners.

2) To unite various teams—from services to renewals to operations—into a combined organization that is accountable for the end-to-end customer experience.

3) To increase recurring revenue dollars—which are vital to Cisco’s success—and decrease the number of contracts expiring with Cisco.

The initiative focuses on redefining digital lifecycle customer journeys to significantly increase customers’ ability to expand, adopt and renew Cisco technology, recognizing that this would lead to more opportunities for recurring and supplemental revenue. PROGRAM EXECUTION Cisco shifted its entire culture (and its global partner community) to become customer obsessed. And it modernized and simplified the way its sellers approach and interact with customers. This enabled them to create a fully connected experience that improves customer loyalty.

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Cisco also put in place an entire ecosystem highlighted by personalized, optimized communications to each customer. The ecosystem fully connects the customer’s digital journey using analytics, machine learning, and data science to ensure they get the best experience possible from the company’s content and products. In FY18, 300+ always-on, highly complex campaigns—designed and implemented in 16 languages and 115+ countries—were executed. These campaigns reached 10M customers and partners at the right time, with the right message, on their preferred channel. All campaigns were built on data, and augmented and accelerated by data science, marketing automation, and artificial intelligence (developed by Cisco’s robust Data Science group). Cisco also broadly expanded its ability to support omni-channel digital customer engagement across the entire customer lifecycle by:

• Using natural language processing (NLG), a form of machine learning • Developing a recommendation engine that proactively predicts—and addresses—customers’

needs • Building a massive digital infrastructure along with more than 40 data science models to better

serve Cisco customers. BUSINESS RESULTS This year to date the initiative achieved nearly 526 million post-sale digital engagements across all channels and generated more than $6.2 billion in opportunities for Cisco and its partners. Other key success metrics include:

1) 20.89% of accounts who engaged via data-led strategies completed calls-to-action for that campaign. By comparison, only 7% did so without a data-led engagement with Cisco.

2) 65% of targeted “unhealthy” customers completed their product activation following post-sale adoption campaigns and made the transition to a “healthy” customer state.

3) A new version of the Cisco.com website has been personalized for Cisco customers and has quickly achieved a 5.8% conversion rate, demonstrating higher levels of customer engagement than all other Cisco digital channels. Additionally, when customers log into Cisco.com to view their personalized content, their time on the site increases by more than 66% compared to the non-personalized site.

4) A new data science-driven tool, iReply, has processed more than 70,000 emails; corrected 1,300 contacts; generated 300 contract reports; and saved more than 750 work hours, with responses to customers generated within 1-2 hours.

In summary, the Digital Lifecycle Journeys Initiative brought to life the idea that when our customers are successful, everyone wins—Cisco, our partners, and our customers.

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Adobe | Gold Winner Strengthening Marketing’s Role in Customer Experience and Success

Strengthening Adobe Marketing’s Role in Customer Experience and Success BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Adobe partners with its Strategic Accounts to develop and deliver personalized, data-driven customer experiences across multiple touch points. These efforts often dovetail with a larger business goal of total digital transformation, which require broader strategic advice from, and collaboration with, Adobe.

Adobe recognized that in order to evolve from being viewed as a solutions partner to a strategic business partner, it would need to change the conversation to focus on the customers’ corporate-level business objectives, challenges, and pain points, not just shorter-term technology objectives.

Adobe set out to offer a new level of customer engagement that would:

• Bring measurable value and business consulting expertise to the relationship with customers, positioning Adobe to help customers develop their overall digital transformation strategy;

• Help customers achieve the maximum impact and value from their investment in digital transformation solutions—both from Adobe and complementary providers; and

• Raise the level of trust and partnering in the relationship, positioning Adobe as a strategic collaborator in solving the customer’s key business issues to continually achieve overall business goals.

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

Adobe formed a new Digital Strategy Group (DSG) and staffed it with business experts who could serve in both a pre and post-sale consultancy capacity, to deliver true value to customers as a strategic partner. The DSG fills a unique role within the Adobe ecosystem by also helping the sales organization expand customer engagement beyond an Adobe-centric and solutions-based message to provide specific and prescriptive recommendations for a customer based on their entire technology stack and higher-level business goals.

Adobe customers frequently operate in siloed roles and functions within their organizations, which can inhibit their ability to approach their business objectives in a holistic manner. The DSG bridges this gap for customers, helping them tackle problems and objectives from an end-to-end, cross-functional (and often times, industry) point of view, leveraging industry best practices, and providing a thoughtful roadmap that marries insights from various disciplines and viewpoints.

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PROGRAM EXECUTION

The DSG operates as a management consulting group within Adobe and offers distinct services which include, but are not limited to: industry benchmarking, strategy and planning, value-realization assessments and reviews, maturity benchmarking, and more. The group works to understand customers’ business objectives, applies an assessment framework to measure specific hallmarks of digital leadership, with the end result of creating a roadmap to address future opportunities.

Each engagement from the DSG is a tailored, 1:1, complimentary offering that demonstrates Adobe’s commitment to its customers’ success and delivers true value as a strategic partner. The program also puts Adobe in the unique position to evaluate and benchmark its customers’ transactional and digital data by leveraging Adobe Analytics solutions to measure and demonstrate the value that the partnership achieves.

BUSINESS RESULTS

While the DSG initially launched in the Americas region to much success, it quickly grew to include branches in EMEA, Japan, APAC and India, with plans to continue scaling the teams in each of these regions due to high customer demand and interest. Anecdotally, the success of the DSG’s engagements has opened the door for more C-Suite-level conversations with customers about their business challenges and goals, and has solidly positioned Adobe as a valued partner, even securing some invitations to customers’ offsite strategy meetings.

As a key component of Adobe’s Strategic Accounts service program, the new DSG’s achievement further defines Adobe’s dedication to customer success, as demonstrated by the following metrics:

• Growth in revenue with accounts supported by the DSG: 318%

• Growth in DSG services: 272%

• Richer conversations (survey results as reported by Adobe customers): 94%

• Opportunities expanded: 87%

• Growth in DSG team, resulting from Adobe investment in staffing: 19%

In addition, in the past 18 months C-Suite-level conversations and relationships with customers have increased significantly, customer satisfaction and value realization (effective use) have risen, and Adobe has evolved from being viewed as a technology solutions vendor, to a strategic business partner. In addition, sales opportunities and revenue have grown as a result of these increased customer programs.

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Unisys | Gold Winner Strengthening Marketing’s Role in Customer Experience and Success

The Unisys Client Success Program BUSINESS CHALLENGE In 2017, after significantly refining the solution portfolio and restructuring the company, Unisys was ready to get our “marketing house” in order. A new CMO was hired and after limping along with minimal budget and even less authority, the Marketing and Communications group was empowered to create and effectively execute. One key area of focus was client references, where expectations were set that previously were impossible to achieve. PROGRAM OBJECTIVE

Our goal was effectively contribute to the company’s revenue growth by developing and promoting client advocates that are critical to attracting new clients and growing business with existing ones. PROGRAM EXECUTION Several important steps were necessary to elevate the Client Success Program.

• Remove barriers to success

o Example: when our new CMO learned that our legal department would not allow us to post client logos on the external website, she gave permission that an email from the client confirming approval to post their logo and success story to our website was sufficient proof and a formal agreement was not necessary. Hurdle removed! The previous approach of asking the client to sign a form was prohibiting clients from readily approving a success story because it included other possible reference-related items.

• Organize to encourage teamwork and collaboration among the client success, design, web, social, PR, demand generation, analyst relations and third party advisors, and field teams

• Stop rogue reference content development

• Make it easy for account executives to participate in reference development

• Establish process to ensure consistency and that no pieces fall through the cracks

• Keep track of all communication with account executives and follow-up during agreed timeframes (minimize “asks”)

• Be opportunistic and pursue client video interviews when they attend events

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• Leverage business outcome oriented success stories in Brand advertising, demand gen campaigns, and relevant web site pages

• Simplify finding current reference content

• Continually add new stories by following up on high CSAT/NPS ratings and nurturing Wins

• Manage reference pursuit for analyst-related activities and surveys to prevent reference fatigue

BUSINESS RESULTS

All of the elements of the Client Success Program contribute to successful development and nurturing of client advocates. From gaining awareness and comfort in Unisys and the value delivered to other organizations with similar challenges—to becoming a client, providing feedback where follow-up action is taken through the CSAT process—to becoming a Promoter and advocate based on continued delight in and innovation with Unisys… the Client Success Program enriches the client experience and ultimately drives revenue growth. Metrics that demonstrate the success of the Client Success Program include improvement in the overall company Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Total Contract Value (TCV) of wins represented by both renewal and expansion business. In other words, happy clients extend their engagements and buy additional services. Metrics that demonstrate success of the Reference Program include TCV of new logo wins, because client references are critical to winning new business. The increase in client advocates over the past three years is evident. The Unisys Net Promoter Score (NPS) increased from 35 in 2015 to 47 in 2018. Beginning in 2017, we produced and posted on the Our Clients page of Unisys.com 25 client videos and nearly 150 success stories, and we have generated a strong pipeline for more of both. Key analyst reports (i.e. Gartner Magic Quadrants, Everest and Forrester reports) now include Unisys and in many cases in the upper right quadrant. Our clients are recognized for their success through ISG Digital Case Studies, CSO50 Awards, and Forrester case studies. Our CMO, Ann Sung Ruckstuhl, presented to the Investor community in April 2019—the first time Unisys had anything other than financial updates for that audience. Feedback from one analyst included “Key takeaways from the CMO conversation were more streamlined approach to key areas of the Unisys marketing effort including: improvements to website … quantifying and listening to client feedback, and sending proactive visible peer testimonials. Client response to this messaging has been positive resulting in higher win rates, better retention and increased penetration.” Unisys’ success depends on our Client Success Program to develop and promote client advocates that are critical to attracting new clients and growing business with existing ones.

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West Monroe Partners | Diamond Winner Small and Medium Businesses

Driving an Issues-Based Mindset to Fuel Growth BUSINESS CHALLENGE West Monroe has enjoyed a consistent, double-digit compound annual growth rate. That said, we also operate in a very crowded and increasingly competitive field that includes everything from the Big Four firms to niche specialists. While we strive to continue growing faster than the market, we want to make sure that rapid growth does not negatively affect our ability to do three things for our clients: collaborate to solve their most complex challenges, deliver innovation, and create value. PROGRAM OBJECTIVE We commissioned third-party client and market research to help us determine how to maintain our success in this competitive landscape. Based on the findings, we formalized an initiative to amplify the value we can deliver through our uncommon blend of business consulting savvy and deep technology expertise. The goal of this program was to equip our consulting workforce—now more than 1,400 people—to lead productive discussion and exploration around several macro themes affecting many clients’ businesses. This was a bold undertaking because it requires significant behavior change among professionals with long track records of success. Now, we are asking them to come to the table with good questions and relevant points of view on key issues affect clients’ businesses—rather than PowerPoint decks selling solutions. PROGRAM EXECUTION We launched the program with a small core team, dedicated funding, and an aggressive timeline for delivering measurable impact within a year. Key program elements included: • Defining a finite set of themes (“issues”) that are of greatest relevance and concern to clients. We

interviewed various organizational leaders to surface ideas and then used additional discussions and secondary research to identify four initial areas of focus: digital, cybersecurity, talent, and productivity.

• Creating training that allows our people to explore these themes and practice approaches for developing and discussing points of view with clients.

• Devoting significant individual attention to helping our leaders through this process, including conducting 60-day check-ins with training participants to help sustain behavior change. Our CEO participated actively in these discussions.

• Producing high-quality thought leadership that helps consultants bring relevant perspectives to clients. This includes a redesigned editorial and PR calendar, signature research studies, and infographics.

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• Reinforcing principles through ongoing internal communications, including an email series, a six-episode podcast, and a cartoon series that highlights positive and negative behaviors.

• Integrating the approach with strategic growth initiatives, including our “Shark Tank” innovation engine.

• Establishing a process for scanning the market continuously to identify new or evolving trends.

• Establish metrics and quarterly scorecards to reinforce the right behaviors and monitor progress against program goals.

BUSINESS RESULTS During the first year of the program, our metrics focused more on education, awareness, and visibility than on revenue impact, although we did begin to implement relevant revenue metrics. Highlights include:

• More than 80% of directors and 30% of senior managers completed IBC training.

• 95% of our media relations pitches supported the four key themes.

• We produced 75 pieces of thought leadership aligned to the themes, representing 61% of the firm’s published content and up from 6% the previous year.

• Eight theme-specific research studies generated 170 million media impressions and 1,550 downloads.

As of March 2019, close to 35% of new fees were aligned with one or more of the four themes. These projects are nearly 30% larger (in fees) than average new projects. In our latest (2018) commissioned research, 55% of West Monroe clients said the value received was greater than the fees paid—up from 47% the previous year. Additionally, 95% of our clients said we know their industry at least as well as our competitors; 45% believe we know it better. In addition to qualitative metrics, we also assess behavior change. We have received numerous anecdotes from directors during our 60-day check-ins, including this: “I have taken the opportunity to not start (a meeting) with slides. There is a noticeable difference in client interaction as they pay attention to what you are saying instead of what’s in front of them. It helps us listen more, too.”

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Acuvate Software | Gold Winner Small and Medium Businesses

An SMB Achieves Exponential Growth with Integrated ABM and Inbound Marketing on a Constrained Budget BUSINESS CHALLENGE

Acuvate is a mid-sized Information Technology company with a diverse portfolio of products, solutions, and services. Their partnership with Microsoft was able to drive the majority of their business. However, the company obviously needed to move away from this dependency and be able to drive high value, large ticket customers from target industries within a constrained marketing budget.

PROGRAM OBJECTIVE

The company wanted to enable strategic and accelerated growth and diversify its marketing and customer acquisition approach. The company brought in The Smarketers as their extended marketing partner to drive strategy and execution of all their marketing and outreach campaigns.

This specific initiative is centered around using an integrated approach, aligning ABM and inbound marketing to drive highly-qualified, targeted leads for Acuvate’s Trade Promotion Optimization (TPO) software. Working under a stringent budget unlike any traditional ABM campaign was particularly challenging. This required out-of-the-box thinking, deep research, and execution of extremely well-crafted, cross-channel campaigns.

PROGRAM EXECUTION

Generating leads for the TPO solution from named accounts in the CPG industry was the end goal. Getting in touch with the right audience and bringing them into a conversation was a major challenge, primarily because there were $bil accounts and secondly because we needed to reach out to the C-Suite. To achieve this, The Smarketers worked with Acuvate to take a two-pronged approach. ABM on one hand and inbound marketing activities in parallel.

ABM Execution

The Smarketers took a phased approach to ABM execution:

Phase - 1 Account-Profiling The marketing partner worked with Acuvate’s sales teams to identify high-value accounts for both 1:1 and 1:Few approaches.

• 1:1 Approach: With the help of Acuvate’s sales teams, key decision-makers, influencers, target job titles (revenue management directors, VP of marketing, IT, etc.) were identified in each of the 20 1:1 accounts. The marketing partner conducted an exhaustive research for all the 1:1 accounts to

http://www.thesmarketers.com/

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understand the challenges, opportunities, new marketing and technological initiatives of each company and prospect. This research helped in creating a sharp and super personalized pitch and messaging for each account.

• 1:Few Approach: The 200 companies identified for the 1:Few approach were segmented based on the company revenue, existing technological stack, and marketing spend. This ensured the personalization in campaigns is not reduced even though the number of accounts is higher.

Phase - 2 Asset Creation ABM campaigns require various types of content assets to attract, engage and convert prospects throughout the campaign. The marketing partner created personalized content for both the 1:1 and 1:Few campaigns. These included a personalized microsite, thought leadership content (blog posts, videos, eBooks, webinars, podcasts etc.) and company-specific research reports.

Phase - 3 Cross-Channel Engagement The marketing partner orchestrated a cross-channel ABM campaign to enable simultaneous engagement of decision-makers in both online and offline channels. The content assets created were leveraged across all the channels to engage prospects.

a) Social Media: Company-specific reports created were promoted through LinkedIn ads targeted to the contacts identified within each 1:1 tier account. Personalized outreach through LinkedIn connects and messages from Acuvate’s leadership LinkedIn accounts. Prospects were also engaged through direct tweets.

b) Emails: Personalized 1:1 emails were sent manually to nurture and engage contacts in 1:1 tier accounts. Segmented email campaigns were sent to the prospects of 200 1:Few tier accounts

c) Direct Mailers: Sent company-specific reports as direct mail to contacts of 1:1 tier accounts

d) Events: Conducted and invited contacts in the 1:1 ABM tier to CXO round tables and workshops.

Inbound Marketing

Even though ABM is a targeted and successful approach to generate interest among decision-makers, its reach is limited to the accounts that were identified. This means that a majority of global companies looking for a TPO solution are being ignored. Hence, complementing the ongoing ABM campaign with a strong inbound marketing strategy was very important. The marketing partner executed the following inbound marketing tactics including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Influencer Marketing, PR, etc.

BUSINESS RESULTS

With an integrated ABM and inbound approach, overall engagement and conversions grew. Conversion rates increased from MQLs to SQLs by 80%. Acuvate witnessed an increase in traffic and social engagement of more than 75%. By creating highly relevant content and enabling multiple touchpoints, Acuvate has generated several SQLs from high-value accounts, accelerated its pipeline, and boosted its revenue.

Research Consulting Training Community

ITSMA’s Marketing Excellence Awards (MEA) program focuses exclusively on B2B marketing for services and solutions. It is based on a comprehensive, strategic approach to marketing, recognizing that business success requires marketers to move far beyond communications alone.

Beyond the gloss and glitz, our annual awards honor the pursuit of excellence in the four most critical aspects of success: strategy and planning, innovation, execution, and business results.

Learn more at www.itsma.com/about-us/marketing-excellence-awards/

www.itsma.comCall +1 888 ITSMA92 (+1 781 862 8500 outside the US)

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