How Invoca Tripled Target Account Engagement
Invoca’s sales cycle is complex and high-touch. As a result, reps have a limited capacity in the actual number of deals that they can work in a quarter. So, they need to make sure all opportunities are large enough to help them hit their lofty growth targets. The inbound approach used in times past meant a high volume of inbound leads. As a result, the deals the sales team worked were okay, but not quite the right fit. Plus, the time reps spent on those lower value deals was too high of an opportunity cost.
Ari Echt, Director of ABM at Invoca, describes how his team overcomes this common B2B problem by using content to improve the buyer experience in this webinar:
Enter ABM
Back in 2016, Invoca transitioned to a more sophisticated model. They designed a strategic ABM program. One that helps reps avoid spending time on ‘okay’ targets and spend the majority of their time on the best ones. The accounts that would lead to deal sizes supporting Invoca’s goals.
Over the next two years, the average deal size increased by a whopping $70K. Clearly, switching to an ABM model is helping things trend in a positive direction.
In this webinar, Ari breaks down the exactly how they did this. And it all begins with fixing the foundation. If you don’t get these three things right, nothing else matters.
First, fix the foundation
Back in 2016, Invoca’s marketing team was doing one thing and sales was doing another. The teams were siloed and disconnected and the results reflected that.
To get more aligned, they went all in on an ABM program. With total executive buy-in, they launched an ABM program. Both sales and marketing were active in selecting accounts. Account selection was a laborious and manual task. They had to ensure each target account had the right contacts. It was hard, and took time, but was essential for success.
Rethinking the buyer experience
In 2011, there were about 150 martech vendors. Today there are around 7000. That’s a lot of competition for the same eyeballs! And the website experience across most of these vendors is often a generic, ubiquitous one.
An experience where people have to fill out a form to get to the information they need.
Then wait for a reply from an SDR and go through qualification.
And then wait for a follow-up call with an AE.
And only then do they finally get to see the product.
Compare this experience to frictionless B2C ones, like Airbnb. It seems ridiculous to make your most interested prospects jump through hoops, like forms and phone calls, before they even get a glimpse of the product. It’s no wonder B2B conversion rates are so low.
Enabling buyers in an ABM world
In an ABM world, you’re already starting with a small audience and large buying committees. So increasing these puny conversion rates is even more challenging. Especially when competing with so many other vendors for your audience’s attention. How do you cut through the noise and help make the most of every moment of attention you’re lucky enough to get?
As mentioned, the Invoca solution is complex and requires a lot of education. With an average web session of one minute, Ari and his team knew their prospects weren’t self-educating enough.
They set out to answer the question:
“How can we deliver a better customer experience to encourage more content consumption and bring more educated prospects into the sales cycle?”
The new-and-improved Invoca ABM buyer journey
To enable buyers to self-educate it’s important to remove as many barriers as possible. Invoca removed gated landing pages and replaced them with Content Tracks, using PathFactory. They use Content Tracks everywhere and for everything from webinars to events to account specific experiences to nurture programs. So, regardless of where a prospect comes from, they land in a form-free track filled with relevant content assets.
Ari and his team broke the customer journey into 3 major buying stages: Problem, solution, use cases. Once prospects move through a volume of content outlining the problem, they can move on to the next stage. Using PathFactory, they can tell when prospects spend a critical amount of time with content. This way, they only serve content when they know prospects are self-educated enough for it.
Shifting from gated landing pages to custom content experiences
This whole journey happens automatically. Without One. Single. Form.
Behind-the-scenes, campaigns, and workflows in Marketo are listening for engagement within these experiences.
Invoca’s previously gated average session time was 1 minute. Their new form-less experience yielded average session times of over 3 minutes–that’s a 3X increase! This represents a heck of a lot more time being spent with Invoca’s content and, as a result, a much more educated lead. And a more educated lead means a more sales-ready lead entering into a conversation with sales. These higher quality conversations lead to better sales and marketing alignment and the feedback Ari and his team receive from Sales is proof of this:
Creating custom content experiences at scale
Invoca always produced enjoyable customer experiences but it wasn’t a scalable process. They required a lot of time and resources to build. Now, using PathFactory, they drag and drop content assets from their content library to create Content Tracks within minutes.
For example, Invoca recently created a pre-show campaign for one of their biggest events. It included direct mail, SDR outreach, and emails driving to a series of content experiences. Before the show even started, they scored 130 meeting requests and 37 new opportunities, representing millions of dollars of potential pipeline.
At the event itself, they got feedback like, “I wanna compliment you guys on your pre-show marketing. It was a really nice experience.” That’s the stuff that makes marketers say “pinch me!”
In under a year, a small team of 4 marketers developed hundreds of content experiences made up of every type of asset such as infographics, keynotes, ROI calculators etc, saving about 200 hrs of their web designer’s time.
Tying content engagement into Marketo
Building the content tracks and collecting content consumption is important. But it’s only powerful when you can tie that data back to your CRM. Invoca’s PathFactory instance pushes information like Content Track name and time spent on content into Marketo. Whenever someone consumes content for set thresholds of time (2 minutes, 3 minutes, or 10 minutes), that visit gets tagged in Marketo. This way, Invoca gets program attribution and corresponding Salesforce campaign attribution without relying on forms.
Seeing the quality of engagement based on time spent with content experiences, as opposed to the number of form fills, is completely transforming how Invoca goes to market with their ABM program.
Watch the webinar for the full scoop.
