Description
Oracle Europe small business team based in Dublin regularly made several thousand telemarketing calls per month across Europe to regularly track the progress of known IT infrastructure projects that were subject to tender or in the pipeline and awaiting financial approval. The majority of these were undertaken in partnership with an Oracle approved vendor whom acted as lead contractor with Oracle supplying the bulk of the infrastructure to support the ultimate delivery of the vendors software to the project. However, with project and procurement lead times often extending from 18 months to 3 years, the task of tracking projects was a laborious one which could not easily withstand a change in marketing could not easily withstand a change in marketing personnel without risk of losing the prospect.
80%
Success rate in opportunity monitoring across UK infrastructure projects.
Solution
Thule Media were commissioned to liaise with the telemarketing team and build up a portfolio of unique keywords and project references with the aim of delivering a bespoke prospect news portal for each infrastructure project within the UK and totalling some 100+ projects. This information was gathered with bespoke web crawler technology visiting a dedicated list of sites some requiring secure user login and at regular intervals spanning several days or weeks. The output was delivered to the marketing team members by email newsletter on a project by project basis.
This allowed the marketing team to make less calls to the end customer(s) but be far more informed at the point of having a conversation to discuss progress with the potential customer or financial approving authority. Given the increased level of knowledge supplied to the telemarketer, the customer was drawn into supplying much greater levels of information regarding progress as they felt that they were engaging in a much more interesting conversation with a mutual expert.
result
Over the course of 1 year we were able to successfully deliver a constant weekly feed of news information. Over 80% of projects tracked were of public interest and a significant story could be built up using automated web crawler techniques.
The telemarketing team were then able to make less but more informed calls giving rise to greater chances of conversion.
