DXC: Integrating a huge number of marketing sources into CRM?

Summary

Client: DXC provides IT services, professional services, and solutions for large corporations. With an annual revenue of USD 12B, the company has  approximately 74,000 employees worldwide.

Purpose: Consolidate the performance of various marketing channels into one easy-to-use dashboard available to a wide audience in DXC sales and marketing teams

Data Sources: Salesforce Developers Community platform (SFDC), Eloqua, Conductor, Adobe Social, Adobe Analytics… 50+ data sources in total!

Delivery: Dashboard accessible as a stand-alone application or via SFDC or both

The Story

DXC provided IT services, professional services and solutions to large corporations for 60 years. A pioneer in its field, DXC offered software programming, in the early days of such services, to major computer manufacturers such as IBM and Honeywell. The company secured its first contracts for the US public sector with NASA. Last year, the legendary brand merged with HP Enterprise Services to form DXC Technology.

Before that, we had had an opportunity to work with DXC on an ambitious project ‒ bringing all its global marketing efforts to a comprehensive dashboard available to a wide audience within the DXC sales and marketing teams. And when we say wide audience we mean huge. Over 3,500 sales staff and a 500-person marketing department managed an 8-figure marketing budget annually. It was our job to help Chris Marin, our champion at the company, to make a sense of the data.

We started by collecting questions which should be answered by bringing their data sources together. These were pretty standard:

How are our marketing efforts affecting our sales?

How are our digital properties performing?

Can we show direct and indirect links between marketing spend and the resulting sales?

But, as you can imagine, solving these challenging questions in a global company with branches on three continents and with multiple marketing tools is no easy task.

But such difficult tasks are exactly what we built Keboola for.

First of all, we needed a hero. A hero is a person at the company with both the willpower and the competence to make a change, to fight for what is right and thus to innovate. At smaller firms, it is usually the owner or CEO, in this case the best person for the job was Christopher Marin, Senior Principal for DXC Digital Marketing & Analytics. We worked closely with Chris, and our Solution Architect Adam Hu has become for the time being an unofficial part of the DXC team.

“The Keboola Solution Architect has been with us since the inception of this project, and I can say without a doubt that he has made invaluable contribution to our success.” says Christopher Marin, Senior Principal for DXC Digital Marketing & Analytics.

Our goal was to consolidate complicated ecosystem of 50+ tools into a single dataset, which would then be accessible both from standalone app and CRM.

And we don’t call our product “Keboola Connection” for nothing. To connect data from most of the used solutions took just minutes. The remainder we had to join through APIs or custom connections. This technical part is usually the first issue, and most companies struggle with it because each one of them use different set of tools. That is why we made our product universal.

But the greatest challenge lies elsewhere. In order for a solution to be successful, it must be beneficial for the end user. Having clear data in one place to work with is only the first step on the journey to being a better company. That is why Christopher summoned specialists from each discipline ‒ Demand Generation, ABM, Social, Content, Web, Events, Industry and Regional Marketing, and all the rest ‒ to participate. These are the experts who truly understand their various domains and what is worth measuring.

“This project was really built in a very collaborative manner.  From the C-Suite to Marketing, Operations and the Reporting & Analytics departments, all had a hand in developing the dashboard and the metrics used to measure performance, ” adds Marin.

Thanks to this approach, we tracked the right KPIs and insights. And when we say right we mean those most beneficial, those that specialists work with regularly. Instead of going to great lengths through multiple sources in gathering data and putting them into context in the spreadsheet, there were single apps for everyone.

“Having all of the key details in one place is a great time saver, so folk don’t have to hunt down metrics in a bunch of different systems. We also save them a great deal of time and effort that would traditionally go into Excel/PowerPoint work to generate periodic reports,” he says.

Though the effort of Chris and all those who were involved and an agile approach to the problem, we made all this possible in 90 days.

Not long after we started to see the benefits. The DXC staff in particular were able to deliver 206% growth in marketing qualified leads.

We then added additional value by using backend Redshift transformation to interconnect the disparate data sets. We created and stored daily snapshots to provide DXC with more in-depth historical records, and generated data-health checks to produce warnings in case any of the various data streams weren’t available. Also, we made it easy to connect CRM to BI tools for more complex analysis and reporting, when needed.

The icing on the cake was that the digital marketing team at Computer Science Corporation won the prestigious ITSMA Diamond Marketing Excellence Award for this project.

“Keboola was instrumental in the success of our digital marketing analytics project, both as integration technology and as the extension of our team,” concludes Marin.

Christopher Marin

Senior Principal, Digital Marketing & Analytics

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