Comprehensive marketing and sales process transformation for Storyblok
Storyblok is a global software company that develops a headless content management system (CMS) designed to support both developers and marketers in managing structured content across digital channels. With an API-first approach at its core, Storyblok enables efficient collaboration between teams, making it easier to deliver consistent, reusable content across websites, applications, and emerging platforms.
Focused on performance, scalability, and flexibility
Storyblok helps organisations adapt to evolving technologies, such as AI-powered search, by providing a future-ready foundation for content management.”
As a fast-growth, ambitious scale-up, Storyblok identified the need for its marketing and sales efforts to focus on the right type of business. That relied on identifying the total addressable market (TAM) and pinpointing those companies with the highest likelihood to buy. To make this approach scalable, Storyblok needed to focus on the right accounts and implement an efficient, data-driven, customer-experience centric account and lead lifecycle. It selected CRMT Digital to support this comprehensive transformation of marketing and sales processes.
Key Challenges
- Identify accounts with a high propensity to buy, based on best-in-class data providers
- Ensure a data-driven and efficient account and lead lifecycle
- Provide always-on insight into the performance of marketing and sales.
The Result
- Delivery of an account propensity model that leverages HG Insights, 6sense Intent data and Salesforce to identify top target accounts that are actually in market for outreach and optimised performance marketing spend
- Sales and BDR territories defined based on both location and opportunity value
- A data enrichment process that leverages HG Insights, SMARTe and Clearbit to identify leads that meet the right criteria for sales
- A lead lifecycle that leverages LeanData to match leads to accounts and efficiently routes leads to the right BDRs and sales executives
- A marketing and sales performance dashboard that provides crucial insight into the business.
Propensity modelling and lead management process design
Storyblok’s sales and marketing operations team were looking to move quickly on building account insight, developing a propensity model, plugging data gaps, and developing improved targeting and segmentation for more effective engagement. To make this transition it needed to systemise and automate its approach to lead record validation and data enrichment.
To achieve this, CRMT Digital worked with the Storyblok team to:
- Onboard and ingest external data sources to improve data quality.
- Update ICP criteria, better define the Total Addressable Marketing (TAM), develop a propensity-based account list and more clearly define territory assignment.
- Align on a new lead management process for routing and lead to account matching.
- Overhaul the Storyblok reporting infrastructure to ensure it has the insight it needs to make the right decisions on marketing and sales, including user-tailored reporting dashboards.
A proven marketing operations framework
CRMT Digital used its structured marketing operations framework to define, design and deliver a multi-workstream programme. These streams were used to evaluate current lead management practices and develop a process design for improved marketing lead routing, enrichment and assignment, as follows:
Account Insight
- Comprehensive discovery to identify requirements for account propensity model
- Improvement in TAM definition
- Full review of account level data quality in Salesforce
- Design of a propensity model supported by 6sense, HG Insights and Salesforce
- Design and implementation of a data enrichment process (using 6sense, Clearbit and SMARTe)
- Development of a clear process for customer accounts for sales territories in Salesforce.
Lead and Account Lifecycle
- Define, design and build of a lead lifecycle process
- Optimisation of outreach for best fit, high intent accounts
- Alignment of activation with propensity model
- Automation of lead validation and lead append
- Leveraging and implementation of LeanData for routing and lead to account matching
- Design and implementation of a data enrichment process (using 6sense, HG Insights, Clearbit and SMARTe)
- Leveraging wider technology stack for increased optimisation.
Performance Insight
- Facilitate alignment on key metrics for marketing and sales
- Identify datapoints to support reporting requirements
- Build a dashboard to manage the performance of marketing and sales as well as the BDR teams.
As a result, Storyblok can now work with:
- Transformed marketing lead management processes
- Enriched account and contact data
- Robust operational reporting.
Mark Wheeler, CMO at Storyblok, commented: “This multi-workstream approach allowed CRMT Digital to support and deliver a technically complex build and implementation at scale and speed. The entire process from discovery to go live was achieved in less than three months, enabling rapid business change for new territory management and tiered account management.”
New CMO and BDR reports and dashboards have been implemented, providing Storyblok with previously unavailable insight into marketing activity, pipeline and revenue contribution. This has become an invaluable asset to the business.
Delivering optimised lead management at speed and scale
The company can now conduct its marketing and sales operations in an account-centric way that leverages both first- and third-party data most effectively. It can also obtain rich insight into marketing and sales performance, while being more efficient in its deployment of BDRs.
Key results include
- 97% of contacts and 44% of leads enriched by SMARTe, HG Insights, and Clearbit in a waterfall style process, based on the availability and quality of data. The combination of vendors allowed enrichment of nearly all contact data, resulting in more complete profiles, better segmentation and an improved chance of leads reaching MQL status.
- Introduced lead to account matching, resulting in 20% of leads being linked to existing accounts. This ensures customers are recognised correctly, improving the experience through more relevant and consistent engagement.
- Propensity modelling introduced, resulting in tiering of nearly 50% of all accounts. This has enabled a focused sales and marketing effort by prioritising accounts most likely to convert.
- Achieved a 12% increase in MQL to SAL conversion. This uplift was driven by the introduction of a sophisticated lead scoring approach combined with enhanced data enrichment processes, delivering higher quality leads that aligned with Storyblok’s ideal customer profile and personas (ICP).
- Moving from a human-based qualification process to an automated one has increased operational efficiency and allows the team to focus on strategic tasks.
Next steps in Storyblok’s marketing operations roadmap
CRMT Digital continues to provide ongoing support for Storyblok, with our SmartRoadmap service, providing direction for account hierarchy, enhanced data automation and persona identification.
The next steps for the Storyblok and CRMT Digital partnership include an account-focused nurture redesign programme, focused on delivering content based on persona and leveraging buying intent to provide the right messaging at the right stage of the buyer journey.
