Workday is designed to unite finance and HR on a single AI-driven platform to help empower people, enable fast decisions and ensure flawless operations. The company features more than 10,000 employees.
The Challenge
Workday was looking to increase the conversion rate of its mid-market and enterprise accounts, with the hopes of increasing ACV from $25K to more than $100K, as well as accelerating pipeline velocity for large accounts. However, the company was faced with three primary issues:
- No technology in place;
- High lead volume in the wrong segments; and
- An “ABM allergy.”
“The No. 1 thing to drive revenue is for each salesperson to drive one more opportunity per month,” said Carolyn Wellsfry Cheng, Director of Global ABX at Workday. “We needed to identify the best-in-market accounts to drive that one opportunity per person per month.”
If the team was expected to cover thousands of accounts at scale, the Workday marketing team needed to solve for technology and automation.
The Solution
The marketing team at Workday partnered with Demandbase, an account-based go-to-market platform, to embark on a three-phase marketing strategy:
Phase 1: Set Up A Future Of Growth
In the first phase, the Workday team used Demandbase to find accounts that fit their target profile, and then packaged key insights to build an account list for every account executive. Then, the AEs scheduled 1:1 meetings and started account-based advertising and content syndication.
Phase 2: Optimize & Expand Demandbase Adoption:
The second phase focused on optimization and expansion, which included the implementation of Demandbase, the Workday team’s automated account scoring based on the “FIRE” model: Fit, intent, relationship and engagement. This reportedly enabled the Workday team to scale marketing programs by allowing the AEs to be on the Demandbase platform with the FIRE dashboards.
Phase 3: Scale Internal Partnership
Finally, when the company wanted to increase scale and broaden the internal partnership, it partnered with the RevOps team to scale the adoption of Demandbase. The team moved away from only MQLS and into FIRE account profiling, which helped them assess buying centers across multiple solutions. This helped scale global coverage across more than 350 SDRs around the world.
“When it all comes together, we have marketing and sales activation, all driven by our unified FIRE scores, specific to the solutions each SDR and AE sells,” said Matthew Miller, Global ABX Principal at Workday.
The Results
As Workday implemented Demandbase, scaled its marketing campaigns and enabled its SDR and AE sales teams, the company crafted highly personalized and targeted engagement strategies, ensuring every interaction added value. The company also produced omnichannel engagement strategies to ensure consistent messaging across sales and marketing, as well as scaled ABM tactics.
Additionally, the team at Workday implemented a Demandbase training hub, which allowed for:
- No more Google Sheets;
- Scaled training to more than 150 sellers;
- Short video tutorials on how to do simple Demandbase tasks; and
- Significant reduction of 1:1 meetings.
“We didn’t give out rules for sales outreach, we wanted them to pay attention to the FIRE dashboards and act like a human,” said Miler. “We wanted them to reach out to their prospects to be helpful. This gave sellers a level of autonomy — instead of being overly prescriptive, they were able to adjust to the very specific needs of their territory and accounts.”
When it comes to embarking on a journey toward marketing and sales alignment, cracking that code to increase pipeline or scaling ABM, the Workday team suggested starting simple: First, find the right projects and the right internal stakeholders. Who will your allies be? Then, gain momentum with quick wins, which could be as basic as finding a sales champion in the room.