Branch Saves Over 30 Hours Per Marketing Campaign

Building Trust Between Sales and Marketing

The previous gifting strategy proved the number one challenge Cynthia had in front of her was marketing and sales alignment. The two teams had trouble finding the perfect gift to offer to prospects. It took almost two months for the teams to settle on a gift to send to prospects in the hopes of booking a demo.

The challenges didn’t stop there. Branch’s gifting process was completely manual and Cynthia relied heavily on outside vendors and her own processes to do follow up.

Cynthia knew that they needed a better way to gift, one that would help save her time and show her sales team the value of gifting.

That’s when they turned to Alyce. With Alyce, there wasn’t a two month discussion on what gift to send, because gifts are chosen individually for each prospect. Alyce researches a recipient and suggests a gift for the sales reps to send, and the recipient still has the power to choose a gift they want if the original gift sent didn’t suit them.

With the small switch to the power of choice and less time spent discussing what to send, Cynthia and the Branch sales team had more time to refine their gifting strategy.

“You can never predict what people will want. It was a good wake up call for me that even if we pick the nicest gift ever, people might just want to exchange it for something I never would have guessed.”

Crawl, Walk, Run

For the first few months of using Alyce, Cynthia worked very closely with the sales team to make sure they got the hang of gifting on a one-off basis. Together they would develop lists of prospects who had previously engaged in marketing programs and knew the Branch name.

Once the gift was sent, Cynthia leveraged the Alyce for Outreach integration to kick off different sequences based on the prospects actions with the gift. She included a variety of outreach channels, including phone calls, emails, and social media outreach on Linkedin.

All of Cynthia’s work to enable her sales team paid off. Branch sales reps started to view gifting as a relationship builder, rather than a bribe for meetings.

Integrations were a huge part of being able to measure the success of Alyce for the Branch team.

Due to the manual nature of their past gifting campaigns, Cynthia was relieved and thrilled to use the Outreach, Marketo, and Salesforce integrations to help with gift status tracking and attribution.

Cynthia was also able to track the lifecycle of the gifts through Marketo and Salesforce. With status updates for gifts sent, viewed, and accepted, Cynthia always knew what stage her tier 1 and tier 2 prospects were in at any given moment.

All in all, by moving away from the manual gifting and tracking process and switching over to Alyce, Cynthia was able to save 30 hours for each campaign, allowing her to stand up more campaigns and focus her time on optimizing the process versus just executing the process.

Booking Meetings And Generating Pipeline

Once Cynthia had found a better way to enable her sales reps to start sending gifts, she turned her attention to creating a seamless and frictionless gifting experience for her top accounts to drive more meetings and build more pipeline.

With an increasingly remote workforce and people starting to work from anywhere, Cynthia tapped into Alyce’s digital gifting and recipient-first approach.

Not only did Cynthia not have to ask personal questions to prospects in order to send them a gift (such as “what’s your address?”), but she was able to create a seamless experience for every gift recipient with a digital and personal invitation, a meeting booker, and an e-commerce-like checkout process where you specify your preferred address after you claim the gift, all in one easy flow.

With a frictionless gift acceptance process, the Branch sales team started to see real results from their gifting, and Cynthia didn’t stop there.

During the holidays, Cynthia set up a campaign for their tier 1 and tier 2 accounts, sending a small donation as a way to give back for the holiday season.

Acting in good faith, and without requiring prospects to book a meeting, the campaign helped to create a better relationship with Branch’s tier 1 and tier 2 accounts. The campaign was a huge success, with an overwhelming positive response from Branch’s dream customers.

Expansion And Engagement

After the success of their holiday campaign, Cynthia is brainstorming new campaigns she can run with a charitable gifting strategy to engage more prospects throughout the funnel. Since her sales team has gotten the hang of gifting as a door opener, she’s now thinking of teaching them the value of using gifting as a deal accelerator later on in the sales cycle.

But she’s not just gifting pre-sale.

Word has spread around the Branch organization about the success of Alyce, and the customer success team is interested in leveraging Alyce Personal Gifting in their customer expansion program.

“Now, when I run campaigns every month, it's so seamless. I barely have to do anything -- it's like an engine that can run on itself.”