Ciena Uses Salesforce CRM to Drive Sales and Marketing Alignment in the Cloud

Challenge

• Ciena—a global leader in communication network infrastructure, associated software, and professional services—wanted to drive better performance and alignment across its sales and marketing organizations.
• Sales and marketing relied on 7 different systems to manage lead conversion, sales assets, customer data, forecasts, and other activities. Marketing lacked the data to make informed decisions based on which campaigns generated the best leads and produced the greatest return.
• The company, which has a lengthy sales cycle, needed to track all of its customer touch points to better cultivate leads and plan efforts.
• Sales reps had difficulty finding relevant materials in a traditional document management system. Marketing and product management had no insight into which tools and content were used or deemed valuable by the field.
• Ciena wanted a single, easy-to-use platform that sales and marketing alike would embrace.

Solution

• Ciena deployed Salesforce CRM Sales  and Marketing to 180 users to consolidate all global campaigns and deliver leads consistently to sales on one platform.
• The company also rolled out a Salesforce CRM content library in two months to nearly 400 users in product management, training, engineering, and legal.
• Salesforce CRM Marketing with Silverpop Engage B2B from the AppExchange supports email, direct mail, and telemarketing efforts.
• Integrated Google AdWords lets Ciena manage and measure search engine campaigns from within Salesforce CRM.
• All leads are automatically captured in Salesforce aCRM nd a custom scoring tool keeps the best leads flowing. All touches tare tracked to keep a history of a prospect’s overall experience.
• The Salesforce CRM content library provides a user-friendly way to access up-to-date, relevant sales materials, while providing a feedback loop for marketing and product management.
• Updated documents are regularly and automatically pulled from Salesforce CRM for upload to Ciena’s public Web site.

Results

• Strong adoption of Salesforce CRM has helped Ciena align sales and marketing more closely than ever before, from lead management and analytics to sales enablement.
• Ciena has launched over 200 campaigns with Salesforce CRM, generating over 20,000 leads and more than 700 opportunities – increasing pipeline 25 percent.
• Ciena has almost 100 percent visibility into its marketing pipeline and can accurately track the success of individual campaigns and optimize marketing spend among different campaign types.
• Lead scoring helps Ciena cultivate leads more effectively and focus efforts on high quality ones. The company now captures a complete record of prospect experiences for more efficient marketing.
• Putting fresh, relevant materials in the hands of sales reps gives Ciena a competitive edge in deals.
• Marketing now gets feedback on which sales tools are most valuable, and can make smarter investments in content development.