Everstring helped us identify wasted sales & marketing effort and shift focus on the most promising accounts.
July 19, 2016
Everstring helped us identify wasted sales & marketing effort and shift focus on the most promising accounts.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with EverString
We use Everstring to help us prioritize which prospect accounts we're most likely to close business with. Everstring combines our own internal sales data coupled with external buying signals to help develop a model so we can direct marketing programs and sales efforts toward the right target firms. We make the Everstring score and rating data available through our CRM to help guide our sales teams on how to invest their time, and we've even used it to help determine whether we should sponsor a particular event based on the attendees.
- Quickly and easily integrates with our CRM and marketing automation platform. This makes the data accessible throughout the organization
- Provides an integrated lead generation option to help us grow our database with the correct set of prospect leads. Documents
- In addition to the initial data model, included a re-calculation at various times during the year, enabling our model to reflect our most up-to-date sales data.
- Provided a customer success representative that walked us through each step of the implementation, helped us understand our results, and helped integrate with our marketing automation and CRM platforms.
- I would like to have a lookup capability for leads or accounts without having to add to our CRM system first.
- Would like to have a "quick rescore" feature for individual accounts or leads without having to rescore my entire database.
Everstring's customer success and onboarding was extremely easy and we were supported throughout the process. They met with us to understand our initial goals and expectations from our predictive marketing implementation, helped us integrate with CRM and marketing automation systems, and helped us develop the selection criteria for the demand generation services.
Everstring has helped us gain a better understanding of who our ideal customers actually are. Before our implementation, we held the belief that we had a good understanding of our customers and knew who would be a likely customer based on that. However, we found that more than half of our prospecting was done against the lower-rated accounts, while most of our opportunities were A-rated prospects. By incorporating Everstring scoring into our account selection, we ensure that the limited sales prospecting time is spent on prospects most likely to convert.
-- We use Everstring in our lead scoring models, accelerating high-scoring, high-engaging leads to a sales rep for direct outreach while routing low-scoring/low-rated leads to nurturing (or even unqualified) pools.
-- The Everstring score helps us prioritize who we include in demand generation marketing campaigns
-- We use the Everstring score to evaluate events--comparing the pre-registration lists with our score for those leads.
-- The Everstring score helps us prioritize who we include in demand generation marketing campaigns
-- We use the Everstring score to evaluate events--comparing the pre-registration lists with our score for those leads.
- When we first deployed Everstring, we saw that 55% of our prospecting activity was against C and D rated leads, which have a very low conversion rate and very little revenue. We determined that we could increase company revenue by 16% and more than double the opportunity pipeline if we simply switched the prospecting time on C- and D-rated leads to A's and B's and maintained the same conversion and close rates.
- We still have some fear that we may miss out on qualified leads that improperly score low, however, we have overcome our concerns by agreeing that any inbound leads will be routed to sales teams even if the scores are below the MQL threshold.
Fliptop was acquired during our evaluation period and therefore eliminated.
We saw Lattice Engines, 6sense, and Mintigo as being more expensive with capabilities beyond our initial requirements and beyond our budget limitations.
Everstring offered a flexible paid trial period, pricing that fit our budget, and had good integration with our CRM and marketing automation. We also relied on strong customer references.
We saw Lattice Engines, 6sense, and Mintigo as being more expensive with capabilities beyond our initial requirements and beyond our budget limitations.
Everstring offered a flexible paid trial period, pricing that fit our budget, and had good integration with our CRM and marketing automation. We also relied on strong customer references.
Using EverString
12 - We made Everstring data available and visible to all within our CRM system. The teams that use the data include:
- Field Sales/Business Development has used the data to help select target accounts for our ABM initatives
- Inside Sales used Everstring data to prioritize their outbound prospecting efforts
- Marketing uses the data to select contacts for marketing campaigns, invitation lists, and event evaluation.
- Field Sales/Business Development has used the data to help select target accounts for our ABM initatives
- Inside Sales used Everstring data to prioritize their outbound prospecting efforts
- Marketing uses the data to select contacts for marketing campaigns, invitation lists, and event evaluation.
1 - Your organization's salesforce admin and/or marketing automation expert can easily support Everstring.
- Prioritize sales prospecting efforts
- Select leads for event or campaigns
- Evaluate event programs based on attendee lists
- Evaluating events based on the Everstring scores of pre-registered attendees. We've shifted budget in our event program based on the scores of those attending.
- As we develop and refine our ABM target lists, we can use the Everstring data as a key factor in determining whether a company should be removed or added to our target lists.
- We are hoping to connect the Everstring data to an upcoming programmatic advertising trial.
Evaluating EverString and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Reputation
- Vendor Reputation
- Analyst Reports
- Third-party Reviews
Two factors that drove a trial included postive feedback from other Everstring customers and research reports from Forrester and Topo. The Forrester report positioned Everstring in a continuum that included our current data sources like Data.com, which made the internal sales process easier, as we already had a line item in the budget.
We may have asked for two or three finalists to run a trial--even if we had to pay for it--to compare the models from different providers.
EverString Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled - FIrst, include sales in the process. Our implementation was marketing led, but demonstrating how Everstring could improve sales efforts was key to our overall success. When sales reps saw that they could get more meetings, more conversions and more closed business out of the same prospecting time and effort, they bought into using the Everstring scores to prioritize their time.
- Getting the financial approval internally was the most significant issue. Our leadership thought we had a strong understanding of our most likely customers and that the results of the trial wouldn't show anything we didn't already know. The reality is that we found more than half our prospecting was against low-rated accounts that were unliekly to ever convert.