How We Helped

Working with large public and private enterprises, Spinnaker has gained a reputation across five continents for helping companies create strategies to grow revenue, manage risk, reduce costs, and improve customer service by developing world-class supply chain capabilities. Spinnaker had a large population of current, former and prospective clients, but they didn’t have an effective way to evaluate or communicate with them on a regular basis. 

“Over the years we’d acquired many names and email addresses, but we didn’t know if they were buyers, decision makers or influencers. 

We couldn’t tell if our contacts were fresh, if they wanted to hear from us or if the content we were sending them was relevant

Paul Adamson

Director of Marketing

Challenge

We’d never profiled them.” Spinnaker realized they needed a marketing automation solution that could add context to their database of leads and allow them to more deeply understand and effectively communicate with their prospects. By identifying which clients were ready to embrace the changing marketplace, they could build intimate relationships through educational webinars and thought leadership programs, while introducing a wide breadth of services.

As a supply chain management services company, Spinnaker knew that the supply chain industry was in the midst of a radical transformation. What had traditionally been a supply-driven model was evolving into a demand-driven model, and that was posing serious challenges for businesses across many industries. 

Spinnaker’s marketing department was anxious to illustrate how their services could assist businesses through this transition and help them to respond to their customers’ evolving expectations. At the same time, they wanted to build credibility, promote the Spinnaker brand, introduce prospective clients to services and demonstrate the value of a boutique over larger, more impersonal agencies.

Spinnaker had a large population of current, former and prospective clients, but they didn’t have an effective way to evaluate or communicate with them on a regular basis. “We couldn’t tell if our contacts were fresh, if they wanted to hear from us or if the content we were sending them was relevant,” says Paul Adamson, director of marketing and business development at Spinnaker. “Over the years we’d acquired many names and email addresses, but we didn’t know if they were buyers, decision makers or influencers. We’d never profiled them.”

Spinnaker realized they needed a marketing automation solution that could add context to their database of leads and allow them to more deeply understand and effectively communicate with their prospects. By identifying which clients were ready to embrace the changing marketplace, they could build intimate relationships through educational webinars and thought leadership programs, while introducing a wide breadth of services. 

Solution​

Beyond rationalization of their database, Spinnaker was specifically looking for a marketing automation solution that would allow them to create automated funnel programs to support engagement with “untouched” prospects, create triggers to automate responses, introduce lead scoring to gauge buying propensity, and provide reportable, actionable metrics.

Prior to 2014, the company had been using multiple disparate systems at the center of which was an Oracle CRM tool. Hoping to streamline marketing efforts, they selected SugarCRM and complemented it with CallidusCloud for marketing automation. Once implemented, however, the company quickly realized that the two solutions were incompatible and began to search for another marketing automation tool that could provide deep integration with SugarCRM and high-quality customer service at a competitive price.

Once they’d identified Act-On as meeting their key criteria, references were contacted and within a week the company was leveraging the solution. “Within a short time, we were able to identify a marketing related project,” said Adamson. “Now, we can see that a prospect performed a Google search, visited our website, reviewed collateral in our resource library, requested more information, and inquired about their specific needs – and with each activity we see their lead score increase.”

Results

With seamless SugarCRM interoperability, Act-On today provides Spinnaker with broad-based, cross- vertical campaign performance data that has allowed them to increase open rates, maximize click-throughs and improve the company’s online forms performance by 250 percent. “Act-On has provided us with real intelligence. Seeing which pages a prospect visits allows us to push the conversation forward with the right content at the right pace,” says Adamson. “With Act-On, we can monitor the digital footprint of our prospective customers as they navigate our site to better understand their challenges and supply them with the best content to help them through the discovery process.”

Spinnaker has created an arsenal of targeted email templates with links to different website resources, depending on the customer’s interests, what pages they’re visiting, when they’re engaging, and their lead score. Messages are tested regularly and open and click rates are monitored to discover optimum scheduling.  The email templates are stored in the Act-On library and readily available to team members through the SugarCRM dashboard.

The company is also running drip campaigns at all stages of the funnel, with benchmarks set to trigger subsequent actions. Campaigns are segmented into the company’s four main service categories, each of which can be further divided by additional criteria for more targeted messaging. “Act-On allows us to look at the performance of our campaigns and use that data to optimize both the delivery and content of our messages,” says Adamson. “It’s a continuous improvement model that delivers the best possible outcome.”