Smart Profile has been a strategic partner of HPE for a number of years. Zsuzsanna Ferenczi, Enterprise Marketing Director Northern Europe at HPE, explains why Smart Profile is important to HPE’s success, and how Smart Profile’s Market Intelligence helped her to instill a culture of data discipline.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is a global market leader in technology which fuels transformation. They continually introduce new products and services, and their solutions help other companies to accelerate the journey from ideas to delivering value. HPE address a very broad market, with both global and local/niche enterprises as their (potential) customers. Combining the perspectives of evolving offerings and an ever-changing base of customers and prospects, it is of utmost importance to bring the right campaign information to the right decision makers, at exactly the right time in the customer journey.
Better Return on Marketing Investments
The mission of Smart Profile for organisations like HPE is predominantly to utilize market intelligence to increase the effectiveness and Return on Investment of their Marketing efforts. This is achieved through better resource utilization, supported by industry-leading services and the best data available on HPE’s target markets and audiences. Among the main achievements of the ongoing collaboration were the launch of an industrialised telemarketing service and an always-on data enrichment practice – the latter being the foundation for better Marketing. Today and for years to come.
When Zsuzsanna started in the Enterprise Marketing Director role in 2014, she discovered that while HPE had a lot of market data and many marketing tools at their disposal, there was room for improvement. This not only applied to data quality, but also in how it was manipulated and utilized. Furthermore, the valuable information resulting from campaigns was not captured. Some contacts were also approached multiple times while other, hot opportunities remained untouched. Zsuzsanna: “Smart Profile had a genuine commitment to a joint collaboration and wanted to help us discover how we could get more value out of our data and our efforts, while at the same time becoming more customer-centric. Smart Profile has an enormous passion for customers!”
Centralizing the data handling was the first challenge. Smart Profile removed duplicates and cleaned the available data. They helped to establish the processes needed to constantly improve the data and enrich the available information with input coming from the different telemarketing campaigns. Zsuzsanna: “While it may sound impressive to have for example 1 million contacts for Northern Europe, the sanity check performed by Smart Profile showed that only a fraction of these contacts were actually within our target market.”
“The greatest thing is that you can continuously enrich your data, and results follow automatically!”
Industrialized workflow for telemarketing
HPE continuously runs about 100 (tele-) marketing campaigns per quarter on their broad portfolio of solutions. The second challenge was to create an industrialized workflow around this telemarketing operation. Together with Smart Profile, Zsuzsanna implemented CLM, Smart Profile’s state-of-the-art Closed Loop Marketing platform service, to drive the workflow management in the telemarketing organisation. This allows HPE to run multiple (tele-) marketing campaigns simultaneously, targeting the right contacts, recording the outcomes and looping in the information acquired throughout the campaign. At the same time, it prevents calling customers or prospects multiple times in the same period. This results in increased efficiency while avoiding a negative customer experience or brand exposure at these contacts.
Today’s data culture in HPE Northern Europe is all about “the Art of Elimination”. A good telemarketing campaign needs to focus on approaching the contacts who are the most receptive to engage in a meaningful conversation. Together with the market intelligence of Smart Profile, HPE reduces the total number of contacts in their campaign database, so that only the relevant contacts remain. Zsuzsanna states: “We will eliminate data until we are just looking at contacts with the highest propensity to buy or engage. We may have contact data for someone who was relevant 2 or 3 years ago, but so many things may have happened meanwhile… we are just not capable of handling that fluidity. You need a specialized company like Smart Profile who keeps track of what is happening in the market.”
Data discipline
Thanks to the structured and disciplined way of handling data, the new data culture and the adoption of the CLM platform, HPE now has an extremely enriched amount of data. This gave HPE increased insight in the life cycle of projects and contacts, resulting in campaigns becoming much more quality driven. It also enables on to capture the recorded outcomes of individual campaigns for useful analysis. With the help of the structured workflow, this allows HPE to successfully plan ahead and focus telemarketing efforts on customers at exactly the right time in their decision-making process. “The greatest thing is that you can continuously enrich your data, and results follow automatically!”
Zsuzsanna has regular update meetings with Smart Profile to reflect on the collaboration. She appreciates the mutual passion for data and marketing, and above all the fact that Smart Profile manages to keep up with the requirements of large enterprises such as HPE: “I love the flexibility, but sometimes our expectations need to be managed too: Smart Profile are experts in their domain, and at HPE we benefited enormously from that expertise over the last couple of years. The partnership with Smart Profile simplified view on data, brought relevance and tangible results and significantly increased the overall ROI of our Marketing efforts.”
HPE finds new ways to use technology to have a positive effect on people, businesses, governments and society. HPE is the world’s largest technology company and provides a wide spectrum of printing, personal computing, software, service and ICT infrastructure solutions aimed at tackling our customers’ challenges.
