Thales Quadruples CTRs, Doubles MQAs, and Re-engages 50% of Targets. And They’re Just Getting Started

What’d They Do?

In a large organization, with legacy systems and traditional processes, change doesn’t happen overnight. For Elsa and her team, implementing ABM has been a journey and they are still in the early stages. Despite that, they’re well on their way and the initial results are exciting.

Demandbase One now sits at the center of their ABM strategy. They use it to drive account selection, monitor their target accounts’ intent and engagement, and activate, refine, and automate targeted ad campaigns.

They’re in the process of integrating it with Salesforce and that will be followed by integrating their direct mail gifting tool, Reachdesk, and a content experience platform to scale their personalization efforts.

The sales teams are part way through their onboarding and are eager for more. As Elsa summarized, “There’s so much room for growth. We’re only using a small bit of what Demandbase can do and that’s already so powerful.”

Why Demandbase?

How’d They Do?

With Demandbase One ABX and Advertising, Thales EMEA’s ABM program is driving massive results, and they’re just getting started.

• Saved a “ton of time” with ABX Certification
  As soon as Elsa accepted her new role, she signed up for the Demandbase Academy ABX Certification, which saved her “a ton of time” and was key to their early success. She appreciated the ability to take the course in bite-sized chunks, so she could apply her learnings and then go back for more.
• Saving time every day with higher quality ICP lists
  Thales is now using Demandbase to build all their ideal customer profile (ICP) account lists based on intent and engagement data, so they can home in on accounts that are most likely to be in market. Without that data, they’d have to rely solely on firmographics — company size, number of users, and location — and maybe technographics, but they’d be wasting a lot of time chasing accounts that are not really interested or ready to buy.
• Changed their targets’ perception and engagement
  With their first ABM ad campaigns, Thales set out to achieve two things: 1) to expand their target accounts’ perception of their brand as a complete security offering, and 2) to extend customers’ use of their platform to parts they were not yet using. The campaigns started as 1-to-many and 1-to-few programs, evolving into smaller clusters based on intent, engagement, and firmographics to move the accounts along their buying journeys.
  In just six weeks they saw impressive results. Their average click-through rate was about 30%, where the industry average is around 8%, and some of their ads were getting even higher CTRs. More importantly, about 50% of their account list has re-engaged, visiting their website after seeing the ads.
• Doubled MQAs
  One of the key metrics they set for themselves at the beginning of the campaigns was to double the number of accounts sitting in the marketing qualified account (MQA) stage. They achieved this handily, starting the campaign at 11% in MQA and ending with 20%.
• Won over sales with a smart onboarding approach
  Getting sales onboard is key to a successful ABM program and Elsa did a clever thing to build enthusiasm among their sales teams. She started creating reports that showed their accounts’ engagement and intent. At first she just produced these reports weekly and shared them with the sales leaders — not reps. She let that go for a month or two, and then they started asking questions. Now she does regular workshops for sales, and her team builds account lists for individual reps, making them as personal and relevant as possible, sharing things like how their campaigns and advertising are affecting their accounts. When they show the platform to a new rep, the response is pretty predictable, “Wow! This is so powerful…so great. We want to see more of that.”

What would they do if they didn’t have Demandbase?