Customers

An interview with technology marketing innovator Daniel Streeter, Channel Marketing Manager at 8×8

8×8 is a global provider of cloud-based unified communications solutions for businesses. Daniel works with the Channel Marketing team in the United Kingdom/Ireland branch of 8×8 to drive sales and marketing opportunities for channel partners.

Tell us about your role and how you work with 8×8’s channel partners

I work on the Channel Marketing team of the United Kingdom/Ireland branch of 8×8. Our goal is to enable our partners to generate sales-qualified leads. We help partners drive opportunities through different forms of marketing: multichannel, online, and social media. We do everything we can to create demand and generate new opportunities to allow our partners to sell 8×8 products and solutions. We also support our partners with retaining their existing customer base and increasing the wallet share of those customers.

What challenges do you face with the Channel Marketing program at 8×8 that led you to Informa TechTarget? 

As a marketing team working within the channel, we try to set ourselves apart from other vendors in the industry by adding value to our partners’ marketing efforts. We needed to find a solution that would create that value for our partners and their buyers, and at the same time generate new business and data we could leverage to create campaign-related content. We needed a solution that would help us drive tangible results from the campaigns we were running, and that led us to Informa TechTarget. The [Informa TechTarget Portal] platform gave us a whole new perspective on the information that we could give to our channel partners. Our partners see genuine value in the solution, which bolsters our relationship with them as well. 

How are you using the Informa TechTarget Portal (formerly Priority Engine) to overcome these challenges?

We use [the Portal] to add value to our channel program by helping our partners generate new opportunities, retain their current customers, and increase sales overall. To accomplish this, our partners first send us the prospect or customer list they are targeting for their campaign. Next, we upload that list into [the Portal] to generate insights for those targets and then send those insights back to our partners. With the data from [Informa TechTarget via the Portal], we’re able to tell our channel partners the top prospects or customers who are actively researching solutions and searching for keywords around our products. We’re essentially giving our partners an extra layer of data and insights to leverage on top of all the marketing they’re already doing. Our partners can then act on that data by creating a personalized marketing campaign to engage those prospects. They can also leverage this data to make decisions and take action to retain their current customer base or identify new upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

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The data [from Informa TechTarget] is up to date, the prospects are GDPR compliant, and you’re getting multiple people within a buying team.”

—Daniel Streeter

Channel Marketing Manager, 8×8

What makes Informa TechTarget’s Prospect-Level Intent™ data so valuable to your program? 

I think for any marketer, at any company, data is always one of the top priorities. Whether your goal is ensuring your customer data is clean, trying to build a bigger database, or identifying members of the buying team, [Informa TechTarget] will help you accomplish that goal and more. Other platforms will identify account-level data only, and then there’s a bit of work to be done to find out who the right person to contact is. The value that we’ve found from [the Portal], especially with our partners and the feedback we’ve received, is being able to identify different prospects at multiple companies and being able to drill down into what those prospects are actively researching. The data in [from Informa TechTarget] is up to date, the prospects are GDPR compliant, and you’re getting multiple people within a buying team. I’ve seen a lot of value in going after multiple people in the buying team as opposed to just one potential contact, and we see higher levels of engagement with that strategy as well.

Walk us through your process for enabling your channel partners to leverage Informa TechTarget data. 

It was very important to make sure the enablement piece was there before just handing data over to our partners. We’ve worked hard to enable our channel partners to understand the intent data from [Informa TechTarget] and use the [Portal] tool itself, so they know how to best target and follow up with prospects from the tool. We’ve driven value with our partners by showing them the power behind intent data. We also worked with our partners to generate and measure tangible campaign results using [the Portal], because if they see results and they see that our strategy is working, they are more excited to use the tool. The tool itself has loads of features and a nice 360-degree view of every account. When our channel partners engage prospects with the right content and the right data that they’ve identified in [the Portal], they have more success.  

How do you work with your partners to use the intent data from Informa TechTarget to enhance your marketing campaigns? 

[Informa TechTarget’s] intent becomes a baseline for our marketing campaigns because the intent data can be used at every stage of the campaign to make more targeted decisions. When we begin a campaign, our internal team determines which segment we want to target and our overall campaign goals, and then works with the channel partners in that industry to determine the context mix for the campaign. Next, we pull intent data from [the Portal] for the target segment and deliver that data to our channel partners, since they are the ones who will be actively driving these campaigns. We target people that are researching solutions online, potentially downloading our content, or looking at our website. The channel partners will leverage [the Portal] to tailor their marketing outreach based on the prospects’ content and topic preferences. The prospect insights in [the Portal] refresh every week, so our campaigns are “always on” to capture new prospects that meet the campaign criteria. 

What results have you generated with [Informa TechTarget]? 

Informa TechTarget has influenced over 10% of our recent closed/won opportunities. By working with Informa TechTarget and using [the Informa TechTarget Portal], we’ve generated new monthly recurring revenue opportunities totaling $1.5M for 8×8. Particularly, we’ve discovered strong enterprise opportunities and broken into new public sector opportunities. 

We’ve seen a much higher number of deals convert off the basis of the influence we’ve had from the tool. We’ve been able to leverage intent data from [Informa TechTarget] to better engage our prospects and push them down the funnel. We saw a 20% increase in the conversion rate for [prosects exported from the Portal], which has ultimately led to more sales-qualified leads for our channel partners. 

How has your experience been working with Informa TechTarget? 

It’s been great. Our relationship with Informa TechTarget has brought a lot of value to our channel marketing and sales strategy. When we first spoke with Informa TechTarget, we didn’t have a strong process in place for enabling channel marketing and sales. We worked with Informa TechTarget to build a lot of the content, best practices, sell sheets, nurture streams, etc., to enable our channel partners to properly leverage Informa TechTarget’s intent data. We saw the results coming in after we established that level of support for our partners. It’s really important to lean on the expertise that Informa TechTarget has in terms of intent data and marketing techniques. It’s been great to have the support of Informa TechTarget to make sure we’re optimizing our strategy and efforts.