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McAfee, Inc.
Business Challenge
McAfee, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation, is the world’s largest dedicated security technology company delivering solutions and services to end-users, private sector enterprise, the public sector and service providers. With more than 100 competitors, McAfee realised that its sales and marketing teams had to work closely together to drive revenue growth. Agreement and alignment between the two departments was crucial to creating marketing effectiveness and improving the sales pipeline.
Over the years, the marketing team had become very good at creating responses to their multi-channel marketing programs. So good in fact, that the top of the sales funnel overflowed with leads to the point that it was creating a negative reaction from sales. Sales felt that the quality of the leads generated by marketing was poor and following up was sometimes a waste of time. Marketing realised that although the volume of leads was good, they needed a way to automatically evaluate responses so only the best leads made their way into the hands of sales.
Once leads were evaluated, or scored, the remaining leads were ideal for nurturing. McAfee marketing decided that the best way to continue marketing to leads that were not ready to buy, was to create a journey. Prospects should be put through a segmented nurturing program giving them the right information at the right time in the buying process to enable leads to becoming sales ready over time.
Solution
Lead scoring
McAfee wanted, at a very basic level, to address the lead volume and lead quality issue. With Eloqua’s lead scoring proposition, the company is able to analyse and assess both the profile fit and level of engagement of each lead. On the profile fit side, the leads are assessed according to job role, company size and whether or not they are already an existing customer; on the engagement side, leads are analysed on the basis of a number of elements, including the number of email clicks they make; whether they have previously downloaded any assets; whether they have completed a trial download; and whether they have attended an event.
This level of analytics based on both the individual themselves and their respective level of engagement helps to differentiate the warm leads from the cold leads. Leads that score highly enough are routed through an inside telemarketing team before the very best are handed over to sales for follow up.
Lead nurturing
Lead scoring is relatively simple to set up but the essence of a good nurture program is to really focus on the target audience or the ‘persona’ you are trying to reach and the journey you want to create. Setting up a good nurture program is a process that takes some analysis and planning.
McAfee wanted to reduce the volume of cold leads wasting the precious resource of the sales team and prevent such leads from being triggered to the CRM system. At the same time, it wanted to increase the lead ‘temperature’ of certain prospects while also gathering more valuable information and insights to ultimately aid the sales team’s conversion efforts.
Eloqua’s automated lead nurturing program helped McAfee to address this challenge of overall lead ‘temperature’ by providing the capability to develop a bespoke strategy for each individual lead which would ultimately increase overall lead quality. Eloqua’s intuitive workflow simplifies the development of ongoing lead nurturing campaigns. In this instance, all McAfee had to do was assign rules to initiate a communication and determine the path that they wanted their prospect to take.
Results
The implementation has successfully enabled McAfee to address its lead volume and lead quality problem. By implementing a lead scoring solution, McAfee has reduced the number of leads by 35 per cent while improving the overall quality of the leads and its lead to opportunity conversion rate has increased four-fold, highlighting a clear return on investment.
McAfee, Inc.
The ROI that we have achieved in terms of lead quality and conversion rates is testament to the ability of Eloqua’s programs to deliver the value-added insights that are so crucial to bringing customers
over the line in today’s increasingly competitive market. 
Alexandre Papillaud
EMEA Marketing Operations Manager
EMEA Marketing Operations Manager
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