John Johnston

eBusiness Marketing Manager

Volvo Construction Equipment North America

Case Study: How Volvo Uses Advanced Automation to Deliver Relevant Buying Stage Content to Customers and Keep the Sales Force Advised

• The company: Volvo Construction Equipment

• The marketplace: Business-to-business relationship for manufacturer to dealer to customer environment selling heavy construction equipment

• The product: Started in 1832. Today, Volvo CE manufactures a wide range of heavy construction equipment and sells its products in 125 countries

• The channel: The primary sales method is through the relationship between local dealers and customers

• The campaign objective: To automate online marketing activities to customers and distribute relevant information to our dealers

Case Study Background

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• Customers engage the manufacturer’s online site for product information

• Leads were submitted through online forms

• Simple “thank you” messages were displayed on the website for customers

• Leads were stored in Excel files and distributed to dealers manually

• Extremely limited feedback from dealers on the results of leads

• Only KPIs were number of leads collected from website

Case Study Background

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The objective was optimize our online interaction with our customers, automate our communications, enhance our leads with relevant data and develop an opportunity management process for real-time reporting.

The Goal

In a slow economy, the project needed to focus on using technology to automate our processes with limited costs and employee interaction while increasing the speed of deliverability of leads.

The Challenge

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Strategy and Tactics

Tactic #1: Employ a new online marketing process

• Leveraging the benefits of analytics and a newly implemented CRM system with integration to various systems, Volvo CE created a process to consistently evaluate the customer lifecycle and online interactions.

• Immediately using the online data collected, the customer is sent relevant information and dealers and internal staff are sent consolidated reports.

• Tactic #2: Redesign the website for engaging lead collection

Strategy and Tactics

Online interactions were changed to be simple and engaging. In addition to integrated forms on our product pages with “thank you” messages at submission, emails were sent that complemented the lead request and led the customer back to the website.

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Strategy and TacticsTactic #3: Capture lead data in CRM and complement with relevant data

• Leads are complemented with D&B information and customer data is added or automatically appended to existing account data, as well as integrated with their online activities through analytics.

• System integration and continuous updates allow data to be relevant and create an enhanced customer profile to complement the lead data.

Customer

Sales (New)

Sales (Used)

Warranty

Credit Status

Industry Segment

Online Sales

Surveys

Social Media

Lead Results

Analytics

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Strategy and TacticsTactic #4: Automate enhanced lead data distribution

• Using the customer location and product request the CRM routes the lead distribution to the appropriate dealer/contacts.

• Emails are designed to provide recipients customer information, lead data and provide access to a consolidated customer profile, as well as link to the CRM or portal for opportunity management input.

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Strategy and TacticsTactic #5: Integrate new process across all online customer interactions

• With CRM workflows established, Volvo CE was able to use CRM and system integration to allow dynamic content and content syndication to enhance all online interactions and increase traffic to our websites.

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• Decrease in time spent matching sales to leads (~25%)

• Real-time reporting of campaign results and automatic

tracking of ROI (increased sales matches by ~15-30% …

dependent on campaign)

• Consolidated data from multiple systems for true holistic

view

• Dynamic list/campaign generation for email, Web and social

media

• Automatic identification of leads lost and proactive counter-

efforts (increased lost-sales reports matching by ~40%)

Results

Summary and Key Takeaways

Back end systems are important, but it is critical to use technology to enhance the customer’s experience through automated marketing.

Providing leads to dealers is important, but adding value to those leads through enhanced data is critical to any marketing success.

The use of a database is extremely important to your marketing success and that success is exponentially increased by leveraging existing system data for better analytics.

Speed of deliverability and simple feedback is essential for user buy-in.

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• The team:

o John Johnston, eBusiness Marketing Manager, Volvo Construction Equipment N.A.

o Margot Gorman, eBusiness Marketing Specialist, Volvo Construction Equipment N.A.

• The consultants: Customer Effective

• The eMail platform: ExactTarget

• CRM platform: Microsoft CRM

Credits

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