Company: SunGard Availability Services, Wayne, PA
Entry Submitted By: Edelman
Company Description: SunGard Availability Services provides disaster recovery, managed IT and information availability consulting services as well as business continuity management software. We help customers and organizations improve their mission critical systems by designing, implementing and managing cost-effective solutions using people, process and technology to address enterprise IT availability needs.
Nomination Category: Marketing Professional / Organization Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Marketing Team of the Year

Nomination Title: SunGard Demand Generation - Marketing Team of the Year

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since January 1 2012 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

The charter for SunGard’s eight-person Demand Generation team is to identify, qualify and nurture quality leads for the sales team. While the team was ready to exceed expectations for a new year, there was one small problem at the onset of 2012, too few leads. To compound the issue, the Demand Generation team was facing a substantial year-over-year lead increase, a foggy lead-pass process, poor marketing automation platform integration, disparate prospect databases and a shortage of quality marketing content. These challenges would be daunting to any marketer and fixing these issues while increasing lead flow required an aggressive approach that the team was ready to tackle.

The Demand Generation team quickly realized that content is king in the B2B realm. During a variety of collaborative sessions, the team identified topics and trends that would resonate among IT professionals continued to extend into the delivery of the collateral and created interactive slide presentations, infographics and assessment tools. The result was an arsenal of thought leadership content that was capable of gaining momentum and remaining memorable in the crowded IT services space.

With quality content being created, the next challenge was to disseminate it through the legacy marketing automation platform. Glitches in the marketing automation software resulted in delayed launch dates, while poor integration with the CRM system made it extremely difficult to track results. The decision was made to swap out the legacy system for a new marketing platform, within a month’s time to ensure minimal disruption to lead flow. The newly implemented tool enabled the team to create complex automated email nurture campaigns that were distributed based on prospect behavior resulting in a tremendous increase in both open and click-rates. Furthermore, it was decided to consolidate the four different prospecting databases into one master database within the marketing automation tool, which led to better segmentation and unlocked the ability to establish a lead scoring model for better reporting and lead routing based on the prospects engagement with all of SunGard’s digital marketing assets.

The team went above and beyond generating leads, by ensuring that sales is armed with the necessary information prior to accepting and further qualifying the lead. The Demand Generation team worked closely with Sales Operations to polish the legacy lead routing process and ensure that the lead lifecycle adhered to the industry standard model outlined by SiriusDecisions. This clean-up meant that leads were not just finding their way into the CRM, but they were finding the right sales rep and providing them with additional insight on the prospect’s engagement with SunGard.

The results from these efforts far surpassed what the team and the organization expected. Through a great deal of support from fellow marketing colleagues and executive management, the Demand Generation team was able to achieve:

• • 3X increase in direct pipeline contribution
  • 30% increase in opportunities from marketing
  • 30% increase in average deal size from marketing leads
  • 20+ new and truly creative assets

With a solid foundation created, the team will be able to focus on true marketing in 2013. Already, increased attention has been placed on strategic messaging, multi-channel distribution and continued creative delivery.

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Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated organization/department:

Christine Nurnberger is a proven marketing executive with over 10 years of leadership experience within business-to-business technology organizations. As vice president of marketing at SunGard Availability Services, her current role, she applies a broad array of experience to marketing projects while mentoring and managing a 35+ member team. Her more recent endeavors have resulted in a ‘Killer Content’ award as well as a Marketo Revvie.