Customer Story MarketSource Builds Brand Awareness and Exceeds All Advertising Benchmarks Using Demandbase One™ The Head Scratcher MarketSource is a managed sales organization specializing in B2B and retail verticals. Companies use them to expand their sales channels, complement their sales organizations, reactivate dormant accounts, manage product launches, and more. As a brand behind the brand, MarketSource acts on behalf of their clients, so their brand isn’t readily visible. As the Head of Marketing, Karen Salamone’s role is to support and drive the company’s brand and revenue growth. Knowing that visibility was a concern, her team recognized that they needed to expand their brand awareness, gain visibility across various personas and stakeholders involved in buying decisions, and give marketing a more integral role in driving revenue. IndustryCorporate ServicesCompany Size5,001-10,000 employeesLocationAlpharetta, GeorgiaSolutionDemandbase One™ and Advertising.
100%of accounts moved at least one stage forward in the pipeline "We knew we wanted a solution that natively had everything we needed. We didn't want to deal with separate technologies that required multiple integrations, and Demandbase fit that need because it offers everything from robust intent data and predictive capabilities to advertising, personalization, and channel orchestration, all in a single platform." Karen Salamone Head of Marketing Why Demandbase? Before bringing Demandbase on board, MarketSource did not have an ABM program and had been doing traditional B2B marketing. While their sales team worked well to close deals, they knew they needed a more sustainable approach to driving brand awareness and revenue growth, and building an account-based marketing program was the natural next step. MarketSource also wanted a technology platform that could both launch a program from the ground up and sustain that program in a meaningful and successful way in the future. With their goals in mind, Karen led an interdepartmental team of stakeholders from sales, marketing, and IT to evaluate several vendors. They compared the different ABM tools’ abilities to meet their specific needs. After thorough vetting, they concluded that Demandbase was the best fit. They chose Demandbase for several reasons, including the account insights and data, integrations, and multifunctional capabilities that eliminated the need for multiple tools, while improving alignment between sales and marketing. Karen also acknowledged that the level of customer service they received, both pre and post-sales, played a role in their decision. She shared, “Demandbase’s implementation services, the training, and the ongoing relationship with our customer success team have been critical to our ability to fully and successfully leverage the system.” How’d They Do? Since partnering with Demandbase to launch their ABM program, MarketSource has: Effectively onboarded their sales team Karen knew from the start that the success of their ABM program would depend on buy-in from the sales team. She wanted to get their input early, so she invited sales leaders from both of MarketSource’s central business units to help evaluate potential ABM platforms. Involving sales early in the process meant Demandbase was a purchase in which sales had a vested interest. Since launching, Karen confirms that both sales leaders have been incredible partners and outspoken champions of Demandbase within their organizations. Another deliberate step they took when launching Demandbase was to make sure that marketing fully understood the platform’s main capabilities so they could help drive adoption with the larger sales team. To accomplish this, marketing started with a pilot and included just a handful of sales users to help them understand what was useful to a salesperson and what changes to make before the full rollout. This strategy has enabled them to clearly and effectively onboard the larger sales team, leading to increased sales adoption. Launched advertising With Demandbase, they were able to start experimenting with display advertising. They started small for their first attempt, taking two priority segments and designing ads to drive clicks. Their first attempt was incredibly successful and exceeded their Demandbase benchmarks in all categories, including lifted, visited, clicked, etc. In some cases, their click-through rates were more than double the benchmarks. Impressed with those results, they expanded their advertising efforts to more segments. As their advertising matured, they aligned their ad campaigns to their journey stages. Soon after, they added orchestration to align their advertising and email marketing across segments and journey stages. Today they have comprehensive multichannel always-on campaigns addressing each of their segments. Used journey stages to monitor account progression Before implementing Demandbase, the MarketSource team made an effort to build out their content library, as one of their first ABM goals was to use their content for marketing to distinct segments based on their journey stages. Today MarketSource has a full complement of campaigns running while they monitor account progression. As a result, they’re seeing which marketing efforts move accounts forward in the funnel. During a recent review of their journey stage metrics in one segment, they saw that they had moved 100% of accounts from the qualified stage to the aware stage or beyond. They were so shocked and pleased by the results that they double-checked to ensure accuracy. Warded off the competition One of their sellers’ primary use cases involves looking at how engaged their prospects are with their competitors. Armed with this knowledge of who they’re potentially going up against during the sales cycle, they can frame their strategy to position MarketSource as the vendor of choice, strengthening their chances of closing the deal. Without Demandbase? When asked what would happen if MarketSource didn’t have Demandbase anymore, Karen laughs and exclaims that the world would come to an end. On a more serious note, she concludes this would be true from a Marketing standpoint, sharing that “If you took Demandbase away, we wouldn’t be able to dynamically segment our customers or have the insights to make intelligent decisions about our marketing and sales strategy.” She finishes by letting us know that the expectation of working without Demandbase going forward would mean having to proceed blindfolded and going back to an old process that no longer works. "Without Demandbase, we’d be blindfolded and forced to return to a very basic process that no longer works." Karen Salamone Head of Marketing About MarketSource MarketSource, an Allegis Group company, is a sales acceleration company focused on delivering better outcomes for many of the world’s most iconic brands. We design and operationalize managed sales and customer experience solutions in B2B and retail environments. Our solutions are purpose-built and tech-enabled to deliver measurable improvements in business outcomes. Curious how Demandbase One™ would work for you? Schedule a customized demo today. Book a Meeting View more Customer stories You’ve just seen the tip of the iceberg. There’s plenty more to explore. Back to Customer Stories
