Rsm Mc Gladrey Ac Growth Case Study[3]

CASE

STUDY

RSM McGladrey, Inc.

Best Practice Case Study onLead Management Automation

Company Background

McGladrey & Pullen traces its history to 1926, when Ira B.McGladrey started his own accounting firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.The I.B. McGladrey Company was formed when McGladreypurchased a seven-person office from his employers, Billings,Prouty and Tompkins. Shortly after, he added one-man practices inDavenport, Burlington and Iowa City, Iowa.

During the next 40 years, the firm expanded into 29 offices in eightstates and in 1966 began offering consulting services. Over the nextseveral decades, the firm continued to grow and acquire firmsacross the country and for simplicity's sake, the firm changed itsname to McGladrey & Pullen in 1987.

In the summer of 1999, McGladrey & Pullen sold its non-attestassets and business to H&R Block, Inc. RSM McGladrey Inc. (RSM)was established as an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of theBlock organization. To ensure independence, McGladrey & Pullenwas maintained as a separate entity offering audit and attestservices. McGladrey & Pullen is owned and managed by McGladrey& Pullen partners, independent of RSM McGladrey. Today, the twocompanies provide assurance, tax and consulting services fromnearly 100 offices and have more than 7,000 employees with over1.4 billion in annual revenue.

McGladrey's original concept of service, predicated upon thepersonal attention of partners to the needs of our clients, hasremained unchanged.

VisionMcGladrey delivers “global capabilities with the “local” touchthat brings world class assurance, tax and consulting expertiseto their clients through enduring relationships built on genuineunderstanding and trust”.

Client PromiseThe company has a “Client Promise” which focuses on“understanding their client’s business, aspirations andchallenges”. The company tries to “bring fresh insights andtailored expertise to help [clients] them succeed”.

The culture of the company is built around letting smart people dosmart things. Individuals are encouraged to develop tools andprocesses and then apply them in the workplace. The Firm believesin a decentralized approach to getting the job done but is

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centralized in its management philosophy. The “power of beingunderstood” encapsulates the Firm’s position. The goal is to learnas much about a client as possible including what is most relevantto them in solving their business challenges, their individual needsand provide insights and ideas from day one. Employees are trainedto take the time to learn the business of their clients, know theindustry and to search for opportunities and insights that clientshave not yet uncovered.

Client servers take a global perspective with their clients and spenda considerable amount of time asking questions to understand thebusiness model of their clients and the market conditions they faceeach day.

This is a highly deliberate approach which can appear slow, but ifmarket and organizational research is performed earlier, the insightsdeveloped during this collaborative session garners newopportunities and ideas for clients. The premise is that executiveshire reliable providers but truly value advisors that bring insightsand uncover issues they may not realize are on the horizon.

The company emphasizes collaboration throughout the organization,filtering important information and business intelligence throughoutthe organization and then transforming this information and intelli-gence into market research reports that can then be sent out to abroader client audience, as well as client servers.

An area of focus for the company is to eliminate the silo effect thattakes place at times between the sales and marketing teams, aswell as other lines of business and industry groups. The companyis working toward a more integrated approach to attracting clientsand creating improved market messaging that is more relevant toprospects and clients. The strategy for implementing a LeadManagement Automation (LMA) system was to help create this newculture between sales and marketing where people are learning andhelping one another to develop integrated marketing and salesprograms that align to the buyer’s interest and timing, and providessales with leads that are “sales ready.”

Business Case

There are approximately 60 business development executives in thefield and a total marketing group of about 80. Although thecombined revenue of McGladrey & Pullen and RSM McGladrey wasover 1 Billion dollars, the Chief Marketing Officer felt that the demandgeneration programs could perform better and be better measured.

The Firm was facing mounting competitive pressures and the abilityto find new clients continued to become more challenging and


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costly. The “Big Four” accounting firms, who traditionally targetedcompanies outside of the Firm’s target markets began to market tothe Firm’s prospect base. The increased competitive environmentfurther emphasized the need to optimize sales and marketingefforts. Like most companies, marketing management estimatedthat nearly 80% of leads generated were going into a “Black Hole”because they were not considered “sales ready” by the sales team.These interested individuals had questions but were likely 6-18months away from moving forward with a buying decision. Therewas no system or process to deal with these “interested” individualsor identify when their interest would change to the considerationphase of making a buying decision.

There was a lot of demand generation activity – “thought leadership”offers, webinars, traditional event development, but it wasincreasingly more difficult to determine whether any of theseactivities were really accelerating sales. The number of sales-readyleads as a percentage of the total number of leads generated bymarketing was low. This led to sales thinking that marketing leadswere, for the most part, unqualified and not worth the timeinvestment to follow up on them.

To compound matters, Sales was continually taking credit for sales-ready leads by stating that the leads were already in their CRMdatabase. Marketing countered by stating that these leads were aproduct of their mailing campaign efforts or other events. Thebusiness development organization felt like they did not get supportand marketing felt like the business developers were not takingresponsibility with the leads they were given.

Beyond the sales and marketing alignment issue, there was theissue of coordinating national and field marketing implementation.With 18 regions, it was difficult to plan and implement a coordinatedeffort because each region planned independently and there wasno easy mechanism for understanding who ran recent programsand what their success was.

This created problems with clients that they were accidentallyreceiving mailings that were meant for prospects or prospects werereceiving several different pieces from different parts of theorganization at the same time. The company was faced with agrowing dilemma: “How to integrate regional and corporateinquiries and stop clients and prospects from being overwhelmedby calls and mailings that may or may not be appropriate for them?”


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Marketing knew it needed to create standardized systems formanaging their marketing campaign efforts. Implementing an LMAsystem seemed to be the best solution to the increasing magnitudeof problems being faced.

The company had to make some big changes to begin the journeyfor better marketing performance. The first change was to replacethe current lead management process provided by a nationalsolution provider. The solution provider was developing a customLMA system and also handled the call center needs of the firm.Unfortunately, the development of a custom solution was becomingvery expensive and the field felt it wasn’t really helping them.

The Go To Market Services Director was tasked with the project ofevaluating the existing relationship with the national call center andthe system they were developing and determining whether it madesense to continue with them. It was determined that there werebetter solutions out there, and what was missing was educationaround direct marketing best practices.

The decision to not continue with the existing vendor was a big one.The company had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars with thisvendor and stopping the existing development of a custom LMAwould mean the firm would have lost time.

After cutting ties with the existing vendor, a new call center wasfound and kept separate from the search for an LMA vendor. Thecompany was now in a position to evaluate and select a new leadmanagement provider.


Marketing realized that there were looming issues for thecompany:

The reputation of the company was being damaged by thedisjointed marketing campaign efforts and brand dilutingcreative development.

Uncoordinated and duplicated efforts in marketing campaignswere costly to say the least.

The uncoordinated and duplicative marketing efforts werecomplicating the regions’ efforts to implement effectivemarketing campaigns.

Measuring marketing activity was a must to continuouslyoptimize demand generation efforts.

Getting sales and marketing to work together and support eachother was needed to maximize opportunity development.

There was a large education element around direct marketingbest practices required in order to optimize demand generation.

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Technology Strategy and Selection

The Go To Market Services Director and Demand Generation teamsat down and evaluated their current lead management automationneeds and came up with the following criteria for selection:

• Increase effectiveness and efficiency of the leadmanagement process

• Provide customization to work in a decentralized marketingenvironment

• Provide the ability to nurture and segment targets

• Provide analytics and measurement

• Aggregate leads across all channels

• Centralized system that allows regional teams to see andborrow the best demand generation programs from otherregions

A major initiative at the time was changing the mindset of the salesand other parts of the organization in regards to online marketing.The sales department did not see the value of online marketingactivities as an immediate tool that could capture prospects. Themarketing team knew this was not the case and wanted to prove thevalue of online marketing, which they believed was the core to theiroverall marketing strategy. They had spent the previous yearrestructuring and redesigning the website so the emphasis of thepages was “thought leadership” instead of brochure-ware.

The project team first reevaluated the offerings from the previousvendor but the email engine the vendor provided would have leftcontinued integration gaps with their CRM platform(salesforce.com), and while the email engine offered wasimpressive, the cost for supporting the program was over onemillion dollars a year and considered prohibitive.

The company underwent a rigorous selection process thateventually narrowed the field to two candidates. In the end, Eloquawas chosen to implement a new lead management automationsystem for the Firm.


Key considerations for the selection of the applicationwere the following:

Level of technical support from pre-implementation to postimplementation

Ability to integrate with salesforce.com

Reporting capabilities

Customization to fit the organizational structure

Centralized control with decentralized implementation

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Implementation

The Firm developed their new lead management process duringtheir provider selection phase and continued to refine it through theimplementation phase. They also decided that education of directmarketing and email marketing best practices had to be somethingthat was provided on an ongoing basis. The company felt that theplatform created a central point for all its lead channels andprovided a straightforward process for managing leads from thesechannels.

The Marketing team used Eloqua’s strategic services and clientsupport groups to define the system requirements, provide trainingto handle ongoing questions from the RSM McGladrey team. TheDemand Generation Team set up a training program that includedan initial training by Eloqua, but monthly training for what it termed“Power Users.” Power Users had to take training and pass a test inorder to be designated a “Power User.” Model Metrics, aSalesforce.com Consulting firm, assisted in the integration of theLMA system with their CRM, and Relationship One, a certifiedpartner for Eloqua, was hired to assist in the implementation of thesystem itself.

The “Power User” group was a new role in the organization and formany a dual role that aligned with their “data steward” role. TheDemand Generation team developed the ongoing training programin such a way that the users learned and then mastered specificfeatures of the program before being taught the next feature set.This allowed the user group to gain understanding not just technicalexpertise.

The team affected by the LMA included:

• Database Management Administration

• Vertical Industry Market Research

• Custom Content Development, a team of writers

• Newsletter Production team

• Media planning agency as they learned new informationbeyond click-thru rate

• Web and Digital Marketing teams


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CASE

STUDY

RSM McGladrey, Inc.

Results

RSM McGladrey’s marketing strategy was based on the need todrive marketing return on investment. The company at one time hadbeen experiencing an email and direct mail response rate of lessthan 1%. The company relied upon nationally recognized researchbenchmarks to help determine goals for “bounce-back” rates,“click-thru” rates and the movement of leads to the sales readystage. The first year with the LMA system in place, the companyachieved a 3% click-thru rate, a jump they didn’t expect. Bounce-back rates, while initially in the “red zone” quickly dropped as theLMA helped clean out and qualify leads in the system that were notresponsive, or of poor quality. Currently the company isexperiencing an overall response rate of 5% for its campaigns andresponse rates for specific campaigns have reached well above60% on a regular basis.

The ability for “Power Users” to see reports that showed whatprograms around the country produced the best results drove themto want to copy those same programs, so they not only learned howto build better campaigns but quickly improved results.

Measurement and results were quickly adopted by the marketingteam; they finally had a consistent reporting and measurementsystem, even across regions. Where once there was only the abilityto show anecdotal success, marketers were able to produce hardnumbers. Integration of the Eloqua scripts on the website alsoallowed business developers to see what their prospects weredoing on the website, allowing them to have more relevantconversations with those executives. No longer were they makingintroductory calls but calling with insight and ideas based on thebehavioral data being provided by the system.

RSM McGladrey realized that only incremental changes wereneeded in the way their lead programs were being managed toshow a significant enhancement in the company’s marketing returnon investment. With just the implementation of the system, the Firmimmediately achieved a 50% reduction in costs almost immediatelyfollowing the implementation.

The company also learned through its benchmarking researchefforts that, in general, a marketing team’s perception of a qualifiedlead and sales’ perception of an acceptable lead led to less than20% of marketing qualified leads being acceptable to sales.

RSM McGladrey compared previous marketing campaign perfor-mance to the benchmarking information and set out to improve theirmarketing qualification/acceptability rate for leads. Currently, thecompany has reached an 11% acceptability rate – the highest inthe company’s history. While, anecdotal evidence points to improved


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win/loss rates which can be linked to marketing efforts, the companyis still tweaking its tracking to help identify consistent linkage. Thecompany’s plan of attack focused on three key areas to achievethese breakthrough results:

• Create a lead scoring process

• Improve response rates

• Increase the number of qualified leads

Post Implementation

RSM McGladrey has transformed its marketing and sales culturethrough disciplined training. The Firm now has a more educatedand knowledgeable team capable of driving new performance levelsfor the company’s marketing programs. RSM McGladrey partneredwith its LMA provider to train its team on the fundamentalimportance of having a robust direct marketing process as part ofthe technology implementation. The company emphasized in itstraining that no one activity creates a client and that the integrationof marketing and sales activities to build relationships withprospects is the only way to develop them into clients.

The LMA system has been in place for over a year and theimprovements the system has made in email campaigns andWebsite traffic conversion rates have been impressive.

For example, improvement in the quarterly newsletter as amarketing tool has evolved from no one understanding the potentialpower of its effectiveness as a lead nurturing tool and a very lowpercentage click through rate to now, where the newsletter is thetop clicked on marketing piece for the company.

Management at the Firm is quick to point out that this was threeyears of hard work in developing the awareness and need for leadmanagement automation leading up to the LMA system implementation.


Best Practices

Consistent reporting and measurement system – even acrossregions

50% reduction in costs

Improve their marketing qualification/acceptability rate – 11%(Highest in company’s history)

Before Current

Email click-thru rate <1% <5%

Specific Campaigns <1% <60%

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CASE

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RSM McGladrey, Inc.

RSM McGladrey continues to move to the next level of functionalitywith the LMA application to assist the company with more strategicobjectives. Key initiatives for the company include:

• Another round of comprehensive training and education

• Optimize content strategy for all marketing materials and theWeb with greater thought leadership for web design andcontent that is aligned to buyer behavior and timing

• Develop “micro-relevant” marketing programs to addresshighly specific industry segments and buyer interests

• Improve lead scoring capabilities by creating a better flow ofinformation that provides more granularity for scoring criteria

• Enhance the lead stratification process in order to routeleads to different lead nurturing programs depending on theirindividual requirements

• Evolve their social media marketing through an onlinecommunity and other “social” channels, including asuccessful survey that gains over 1000 responders annually.The Firm would like to learn more about the 1000 respondersby treating them more exclusively than are prospects and orclients.

RSM McGladrey continues to face certain challenges with its leadmanagement process. There is the occasional “batch and blast”email campaign taking place, however, this is a rare occurrence.The company is also diligently working to refine the use of itsLMA system.

Currently, the system counts every interaction with a contact as atouch point. RSM McGladrey has enforced a regulated number oftouch points per contact to guard against sending too many emailsto a contact. The balance is that marketers need more touch pointoccurrences added for lead nurturing to compensate for the systemcounting every single contact interaction as a touch point.

Because of the systems inability to count a series of touch pointsas one touch point from a campaign perspective, it forces thesystem administrators at RSM McGladrey to increase the number oftouch points allowed for each contact. So a responder may receivean invite and by responding also receives a “submission”confirmation as well as a thank you. This would be counted as threetouch-points but most respondents would view it as a single event.So the touch point count allowed per month is high which can bedetrimental if a marketer does decide to perform single email touchpoints which are not associated to the same offer. These marketerswill be able to use the increased number of touch points to blastout even more single touch point email campaigns which will thenrun the risk of overloading contacts and undermining RSMMcGladrey’s entire campaign strategy.


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The Marketing team is also working with to improve their dashboardlayout and at times there are synchronization challenges withsaleforce.com.

Overall, the company is very satisfied with their LMA system.Eloqua’s responsiveness, experience and expertise have helped theFirm achieve its stated objectives. RSM McGladrey will continue toexplore enhanced levels of functionality to ensure that there isenough customization within their platform to meet the evolvingneeds of the organization.

Smartchoice™ Insight into Best PracticesRSM McGladrey’s success story illustrates how the proper selectionof a technology provider and platform in combination with a wellthought out implementation can deliver breakthrough results for acompany.

The following best practice tips should be considered for selectingand implementing an LMA system in your organization.

• Develop consensus within your organization forimplementing LMA

• Develop a cost/benefit analysis for your LMA system

• Make sure to develop a comprehensive RFP process

• Have the vendor take you through a comprehensivedemonstration

• Use a consultant/certified partner during the implementationphase

• Make sure IT is included in the process from beginningto end

• Ensure everyone knows their role in creating a successfulimplementation


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Rsm Mc Gladrey Ac Growth Case Study[3]

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