The Challenge
When Billtrust first implemented Marketo, the marketing team integrated with Salesforce to share the most up-to-date information on all leads. Over time, however, Billtrust’s Marketo instance became bogged down with outdated programs, irrelevant and redundant data fields and legacy marketing campaigns. In addition, its Marketo instance had not received new product updates.
As a result, the two-way sync cycle between Marketo and Salesforce took approximately two hours, rather than the standard five to 10 minutes. Additionally, Marketo frequently hit its daily limit of 50,000 Application Programming Interface (API) calls and failed to sync entirely until the following day. All of this led to significant delays in sending critical responses to customers and timely marketing content to prospects.
The Solution
To get to the bottom of Billtrust’s Marketo issues, Walker Sands assembled a team of digital experts led by “Marketo Champion” Brooke Bartos, one of only 40 people worldwide to receive this elite designation from Marketo for her advanced knowledge and expertise in helping Marketo customers receive optimal benefits from the platform.
Marketing Automation Audit
The Walker Sands team began by conducting a Marketo-Salesforce sync audit and discovered that the two systems were syncing more than 1,500 data fields. Working collaboratively with Billtrust’s marketing and sales teams, Walker Sands identified which fields were essential to sync, which were nice-to-have but not necessary and which could be eliminated.
To further reduce the sync time, the Walker Sands team put a limit on the amount of calls that other tech stack systems could make against Marketo’s API. Previously, Billtrust’s ABM tool was struggling with sync issues as well – with an eight- to 13-day communication lag between the two systems.
Scoring and Lifecycle Modeling
Next, the team analyzed Billtrust’s lead scoring model to better align with the company’s marketing and sales strategies. Working closely with Billtrust, Walker Sands assigned a score for all prospect behaviors, then completely rebuilt the lead scoring model in Marketo.
To help Billtrust better manage leads moving through its sales funnel, Walker Sands analyzed its lead lifecycle and built a modeler within Marketo to give Billtrust full visibility into all database leads and let the company analyze lead volume and velocity across the entire funnel.
Optimized Email Templates
With the new lead scoring model in place, the Walker Sands team turned to prospect-facing content. They found that the email templates in Marketo had not been optimized for mobile or updated with Billtrust’s newly refreshed brand identity. In addition, Billtrust wasn’t utilizing Marketo’s advanced email editor, which led to unnecessary complications when creating new emails. While fixing these issues, Walker Sands also built and implemented fully tokenized program templates that would allow Billtrust to change information in one place and have it automatically flow across all campaign assets.
Improved Data Collection
Billtrust also needed to optimize its data collection and tracking, so Walker Sands created a series of new fields on hundreds of Marketo forms to improve the efficiency and standardization of reporting. The team also created new Urchin Tracking Modules (UTMs) so Billtrust could better track and analyze its web traffic from marketing campaigns in Google Analytics.
Finally, Walker Sands documented the new functionality built into Billtrust’s Marketo instance, and trained its staff on fully leveraging Marketo to better identify, nurture and convert leads.
The Results
- Decreased Salesforce sync time 96%, from 2 hours to 5 minutes and 12 seconds, helping Billtrust improve its responsiveness to customers and prospects
- Reduced Marketo data fields from 1,500 to 650, significantly cutting the amount of data being transferred between Marketo and Salesforce, and overall creating a cleaner, more streamlined database
- Established nearly real-time syncing between Marketo and Billtrust’s ABM tool, which previously experienced sync times of up to 13 days – causing huge delays in targeting accounts with up-to-date information
- Improved lead scoring and lifecycle modeling, allowing Billtrust to identify and prioritize high-value and high-interest leads and better nurture them through the sales funnel
- Streamlined campaign building and marketing responsiveness with tokenized templates that allow Billtrust to easily scale existing campaigns and quickly launch new ones that are mobile responsive and visually consistent with the brand’s newly updated identity
- Upgraded Billtrust’s data tracking and reporting capabilities so its marketing team can better measure the impact of campaigns
- Provided documented processes and training for all users to ensure proper usage and data cleanliness
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