CA Technologies may be best known for providing the tools to help enterprise organizations develop faster, better-performing applications, but an executive says its account-based marketing efforts are achieving a similar effect in the way its sales team is connecting with interested customers.

In a presentation at the recent SiriusDecisions Summit in Toronto, CA Technologies global account-based marketing manager Erica Short walked through the firm’s ABM program, which has already led to 31 per cent increase in visits to its web site from targeted customers.

According to Short, this was a big step compared to earlier approaches at the company, which fell into the old trap of marketing the same way to everyone — and therefore, marketing effectively to no one.

“In some cases we were completely ignoring where they were at in their journey and what they had already bought from CA,” she told the audience. “We acted like they didn’t know who CA was.”

Short and her team proactively approached the sales team with its ABM pilot program, which involved looking granularly at a set of activities it saw from site visitors and leads that suggested their interest or intent. This involved weeding out a lot of prospects, a process Short likened to “moving from a margarita glass to a champagne glass.”

Using ABM tools from Demandbase, CA has created a series of landing pages and other online content that speaks directly to the role of the lead or business outcomes in which they were most interested. This was all connected to a hub called “the Modern Software Factory,” where companies could learn about ways to become more agile, automated and security in the way they build and use software applications.

“We wanted the field reps to know the (key target) accounts as well as the directors,” Short said.

Over the two-week test period, CA’s ABM efforts led to a 237 per cent increase in completed forms and a 95 per cent increase in page views. Since then, Short says her team has noticed that online visitors who come from the ABM program are 17 per cent less likely to bounce and 32 per cent less likely to exist the site entirely. Overall, ABM has increased the sales opportunities each month from 131 to 288.

Short said her experience showed that a strong partnership between marketing and sales can really pay off, though it requires being doggedly focused on results.

“I didn’t convince them in the beginning,” she said of her colleagues in sales. “I had to run something and show data.”

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