Ciena Uses Salesforce to Drive World-Class Sales and Marketing Alignment

“Salesforce Content helped turn the elusive dream of marketing and sales working hand-in-hand into a reality.”


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.
  • As a result, marketing lacked the data to make informed decisions based on which campaigns produced the greatest return.
  • Sales reps had difficulty finding relevant tools and materials in a traditional document management system.
  • Marketing and product management also had no insight into which sales 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 SFA and Marketing to 180 users to consolidate all global campaigns and deliver leads consistently to sales on one platform.
  • The company also rolled out Salesforce Content in two months to nearly 400 users. 
  • Salesforce Marketing combines direct mail, marketing, and telemarketing efforts to deliver opportunities directly to salespeople for use in the field.
  • Salesforce Content provides a user-friendly way to access up-to-date, relevant sales materials, while providing a feedback loop for marketing and product management.
  • One platform for all key sales and marketing activities increases adoption, improves visibility, and simply makes everyone’s lives easier.
  • Ciena downloads and installs applications from the AppExchange marketplace to extend the advantages of Salesforce.

Results
  • Salesforce 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, 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 now accurately track the success of individual campaigns.
  • All the Salesforce applications were easy to deploy and are easy to maintain.
  • In contrast to frustration with prior document management solutions, end-user adoption of Salesforce Content has been strong - leading to the addition of nearly 200 “ Content-only users” across product management, training, engineering, and legal.
  • 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.
  • Updated documents are regularly and automatically pulled from Salesforce Content for upload to Ciena’s public Web site.
 
View All Snapshots