full Case Study.
Gigamon dramatically shortens its sales cycle with RainKing
Company expects 1000% return on their investment
Like many companies selling sophisticated technology solutions, Milpitas CA-based Gigamon was frustrated with sales cycles that seemed to drag on forever. But unlike many of their peers, Gigamon found a solution.
Gigamon makes products that help large companies and service providers run their data centers better. The company has grown fast - it has customers in more than 40 countries.
In 2008, Gigamon took a chance with a then brand-new provider of IT marketing solutions called RainKing. And man, has that bet paid off. "We expect a ten-fold return on our investment," says Kevin Jablonski, Gigamon's director of business development.
RainKing caught the company's eye because it approached an old and tired business - IT leads - with an entirely fresh approach.
RainKing's web-based service puts clients in charge of a suite of powerful tools to penetrate the IT structure at top corporations. Based on constantly updated intelligence from a team of savvy research analysts, RainKing delivers precise and accurate contact data and background intelligence on the key managers and buyers of technology services and products.
RainKing maps out the technology decision-making process, including who reports to whom and which hardware, software and technology systems individual decision makers manage or control. It even tracks specific projects within these firms.
"RainKing catapults you past all the gatekeepers," says Jablonski. "It's streamlining our approach to sales - making us more efficient and more accurate. It gets you away from basic prospecting - that first layer of determining whether or not this is a good person to contact. It delivers much more valid opportunities."
And once the meeting's set, Jablonski's team leverages detailed insight from RainKing to speed the sales cycle even more.
"For example, we know this person's doing app development, or we know what tools he's using, or we know he's got a problem with configuration management. All that information's in RainKing. If we can throw that out on the table in that first meeting, the conversation can produce something much quicker," adds Jablonski.
Insider knowledge produces deals
Jablonski says that RainKing's First Alerts - which provide daily updates on management changes, among other intelligence - have proven particularly valuable. "We were talking to a major airline, and we learned of a change in management through a First Alert. With that knowledge we knew the reason for some recent delays, and we had a new, specific target to go after."
The Gigamon sales and marketing team is also smitten by RainKing's Prediction Engine, and is deploying it as a major weapon in the company's sales efforts. The Prediction Engine is a proprietary RainKing application built around a powerful algorithm. By selecting and weighing custom criteria, including such elements as competing technologies, relevant keywords, and key industries, you receive a scientifically ranked plan of attack that allows your salespeople to hit top-priority targets first.
The RainKing Prediction Engine has already delivered a vastly superior audience for webinars Jablonski regularly holds.