An interview with technology sales and marketing innovators Kelly Michael, Marketing Director, and Jackie Joly, Marketing Operations Specialist at QTS
QTS is a leading provider of data center solutions. Through its software-defined technology platform, QTS is able to deliver secure, compliant infrastructure solutions, robust connectivity and premium customer service to leading hyperscale technology companies, enterprises, and government entities. Check out Kelly and Jackie on LinkedIn!
KM: At the beginning of last year we were given some very specific goals. One of those goals was to reach our Fortune 1000 companies, especially those that had never heard from us. This was a top-down approach that was not only a marketing directive, but it was also a sales directive, so our teams needed to be aligned. As a small company in a very niche industry, one of our major priorities is finding ways to get in front of the right people at those companies.
JJ: With Informa TechTarget purchase intent platform, we knew we wanted to focus on those Fortune 1000 accounts, as well as get in front of our strategic account lists as well. Another goal of using Informa TechTarget was for our sales reps to have more relevant and intelligent conversations with our prospects.
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[Informa TechTarget] has helped us provide Sales with the contacts and the intent data to better prioritize their outreach and tailor their conversations to break in.”
—Kelly Michael
Marketing Director
JJ: Originally, Informa TechTarget was intended for our Inside Sales team. After we rolled it out to Inside Sales, the rest of the organization was interested in trying it out, so we recently distributed to two new sales teams – our Hybrid Sales team, which are the regional sales folks, and our Federal Sales team.
The sales teams go into Informa TechTarget often. Depending on the sales team and preference of individual reps, sales uses Informa TechTarget a few different ways. For the most part, they go directly into Informa TechTarget and look at their account lists. They’ll check for who has been actively researching at their accounts and leverage the insights and installed tech data to tailor their outreach and conversations. They also use the activity to help prioritize their outreach efforts within their lists to determine which account is the hottest right now. Some of the reps also like to use the Informa TechTarget for Salesforce Widget to leverage those insights from Informa TechTarget directly in Salesforce.
KM: Historically, sales and marketing teams butt heads. In the past, we’ve provided contacts and leads that don’t go anywhere because they didn’t trust the data. Since introducing Informa TechTarget, we’ve really been able to align sales and marketing. We have a combined target and are able to provide them the contacts and the intent data to better prioritize their outreach and tailor their conversations to break in. Not only does this help them in their sales process, but it also builds trust between marketing and sales because we’re on the same page and working toward the same goals and we have the same set of data. Informa TechTarget has helped us tremendously to align sales and marketing.
JJ: With Informa TechTarget, we’ve been able to achieve our goals of reaching those Fortune 1000 accounts, as well as our strategic accounts. We’ve been able to identify the right people at our accounts and have gained that real-time data and intelligence that our sales team is able to leverage in their outreach.
KM: This year, we weren’t able to do the events and traditional marketing we had done in the past. Informa TechTarget has helped us get our content to the right people at our accounts. It has also helped us prioritize our content plan by seeing where we got the most traction and how many eyes were on the content and make an educated plan moving forward.
JJ: TechTarget is our main source of traffic for our content now, which is just an amazing value add.
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Our sales reps really like using Informa TechTarget and love how easy it is to use. It’s been a big factor in helping them book meetings and progress deals.”
—Jackie Joly
Marketing Ops Specialist
JJ: Our sales reps really like using Informa TechTarget and love how easy it is to use. It’s been a big factor in helping them book meetings and progress deals. With our main goal for Informa TechTarget being to help get our foot in the door, we look at how many conversations reps have been able to have with prospects from Informa TechTarget. We’ve seen up to 25 conversations per rep which is great.
Also, being in Marketing Operations, I really like that Informa TechTarget integrates with Pardot and Salesforce – it just makes it easy to track.
Tell us about your experience working with TechTarget’s team? How have they made it easy for you to see success?
KM: I love our TechTarget team! Working with everyone at TechTarget, and especially our customer success team, is like working with an extension of our own team. We couldn’t do half of the things we do without them and without their guidance. They’ve taken the time to understand our business and have really dug in and helped push us to the next level. I cannot say enough good things about the TechTarget team – It’s been a true delight, and you can’t always say that about working with other platforms. TechTarget genuinely wants the best for our company and want to see us do well.
Schneider Electric is the leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation with operations in more than 100 countries. Alexander works in the Secure Power & Data Center Business of Schneider Electric in Europe and is responsible for enhancing the customer’s digital journey using real intent and activation data.
What challenges were you trying to address when first choosing a solution?
When we first approached [Informa] TechTarget, we aimed to address two main challenges: we needed a steady influx of new, high-quality contacts into our database, and access to intent data to better understand what those contacts are focused on during their online research.
One of the significant benefits of partnering with [Informa] TechTarget is their use of first-party data, which eliminated our concerns about data brokering and ensured that the intent data we received came directly from them as a publisher, providing us with clear and reliable insights we could leverage for our marketing programs.
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[Informa] TechTarget’s powerful and precise intent data helps us personalize our outreach at both the account and prospect level to drive maximum impact.”
—Alexander Pasch
Digital Marketing Transformation Manager
What is your current marketing and demand generation strategy?
Our marketing and demand generation strategy is centered around account-based targeting, focusing on specific strategic accounts for our organization. We aim to uncover additional contacts from the buying groups of these accounts for effective contact mapping. Given our organization’s diverse product offerings, we want to identify IT professionals within very specific industry segments that align to our offerings, which can be challenging. To address this, we create various audiences and export groups in [the Informa TechTarget Portal] tailored to these segments and deliver industry- or account-specific content to each of those groups. We run smaller drip campaigns using marketing automation to engage these prospects, ensuring that the content aligns with their topics of interest, as identified by the intent data in [the Portal].
In addition to intent data, we leverage [Informa] TechTarget Lead Generation programs to fill our pipeline with in-market leads, including content syndication and Confirmed Projects.
[The Informa TechTarget Portal] is a crucial component of our marketing strategy. The platform enables us to acquire highly qualified, relevant and GDPR-compliant prospects for our database and precise intent data from specific accounts and segments. More specifically, we use [Informa TechTarget] Prospect Exports to uncover new prospects and prospect-level intent and [Informa TechTarget] Account Intent Feeds to deliver accountlevel intent into our systems. Before Account Intent Feeds, I used to manually aggregate account-level data myself. Now, we get account-level intent as a direct feed that helps inform our account targeting and marketing outreach.
In addition to uncovering new opportunities, [Informa TechTarget] helps us enhance our existing opportunities. We upload our existing opportunity accounts to [the Portal] so we can see what’s currently happening at those accounts, and we further leverage that intent to monitor progress and accelerate those opportunities. We also encourage our sales team to utilize [the Portal] to find valuable insights about their target accounts and support their outreach. Overall, [the Portal] helps us enhance marketing’s role beyond just generating marketingqualified leads (MQLs) to driving true business intelligence.
As a very data-driven person, Market Monitor is a goldmine to me. Market Monitor helps us better understand the current and near-future market interests, such as what the current research trends are within the market, especially around topics that are relevant to us, and which industries are showing a higher interest than others.
Market Monitor insights and trends are sourced from real people’s behaviors, so it’s a great resource for our content strategy. The tool can help us define and orchestrate the optimal customer journey and create the best content to map to those journeys. Plus, the data in Market Monitor is very easily accessible and downloadable.
Market Monitor is the next best thing to speaking with your customers directly to better understand what topics and content work best for them. I recommend spending time in Market Monitor to understand more about the market you’re in, your audiences’ buying habits, and the content consumption trends from buying groups in your target segments. It’s definitely worth digging into!
We track several key performance indicators (KPIs) related to our [Informa] TechTarget program, focusing primarily on digital engagement and commercial impact. One KPI we monitor is digital engagement: we assess how well the contacts from [Informa] TechTarget, whether from [the Portal] or our content syndication program, remain engaged across our digital platforms by tracking “returning active users.” Our goal is to have contacts engage with our content multiple times within a few months. Another primary KPI we track is commercial impact: how are these opportunities impacting our pipeline? Ideally, we want to create multiple marketing touchpoints over time to connect the contacts we have from [Informa] TechTarget to our existing business opportunities and measure that impact.
Our [Informa] TechTarget program, [the Portal] in particular, has positively impacted our pipeline, even when faced with long sales cycles. The leads we’ve generated are high-quality, and we see strong performance with them through our marketing programs and follow-up conversations. Notably, over 10% of contacts sourced from [the Portal] are “returning active users,” indicating high engagement, “stickiness,” and interest in our offerings, compared to our benchmark rate for returning active users from other lead sources, which is in the single digits. This success reflects our effective audience segmentation and contextual outreach, as these contacts engage significantly more than those from other sources. This is due largely in part to [Informa] TechTarget’s powerful and precise intent data, which helps us personalize our outreach at both the account and prospect level to drive maximum impact. I’m pleased to say that we’ve achieved a healthy ROI and maintained a robust pipeline for sales through our [Informa] TechTarget program.
A big thank you to Alexander Pasch for sharing this success story with us. We look forward to hearing about more of his wins using Informa TechTarget products in the future!
