Doug Benson, Director of Marketing at OpenSpan, shared how OpenSpan’s marketing team automates the early lead lifecycle and lead data appending.

Benson said the OpenSpan marketing team uses over twenty-nine applications. Most of the applications are used infrequently, but some like their CRM, marketing automation, and analytics are heavily integrated and used by all of their employees every day.

Benson went on to explain that most companies today have implemented some level of marketing automation.

“Most begin with lead collection and email. For example at OpenSpan, on our Web site we collect leads using contact forms. When a prospect submits a form we look up additional information on the company that they provided in the form, such as headquarters information, revenue, SIC, etc., and we append that information into the record that we create in our CRM. On our Web site we have resources, like most companies, such as case studies, white papers, Webinars, etc. that prospects can read and download.”

Those resources are immediately available after the prospect submits a form. Some of those resources we add the prospect into drift campaigns and that then automates sending out follow-up emails on a predefined schedule. Everything that has been described above is automated. OpenSpan can handle thousands of leads every day and it would not require any manual work on their part.

OpenSpan uses ReachedForce SmartForms for data appending. Benson explained that they simply insert a little java script in their submit button code. When the form is completed and the prospect clicks the submit button, he or she is presented with a pop-up box of four to six choices for the location of his or her company.

The prospect can then select from any one of those or click on “none of the above.” Based on that action the ReachedForce database is accessed and the additional information is appended. There are around sixty additional hidden fields that then are populated. The data is pushed directly into OpenSpan’s CRM.

With the additional data OpenSpan can better score, nurture, and route the lead without further manual efforts or additional form fields.