Aruba is the networking subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard, providing secure edge-to-cloud networking solutions. Using AI-based machine learning, Aruba delivers simpler, faster, and more automated networks that analyze data to help businesses thrive.
Aruba’s sales and marketing efforts have always been successful, but it found itself struggling with an unwieldy martech stack that hindered it from leveling up its goals.
But bringing in 6sense yielded:
- 20% increase in account engagement with personalized ads
- 60% increase average deal size and sales velocity
- Improved revenue team collaboration and communication
- Reduced time-consuming manual processes to 1 day
The Challenge
Gladys Alegre-Kimura, Aruba’s head of Marketing Operations, explained that traditionally, Aruba had been a hardware company with a transaction-based business.
But a company shift to include a software-as-a-service model required not only a shift in the business, but a seismic change in the way marketing and sales approached its work.
“The inside sales teams came in and they said, ‘Hey, we have 90,000 accounts. We don’t know what to prioritize. We don’t know who to go after, and it’s really difficult. We just attended this webinar, and we found out that if we target accounts that are in the buying cycle, we’ll be more successful,” she explains.
In order to be successful, Aruba needed “to know our customers better,” Alegre-Kimura says. “We need to know who they are, where they are in their lifecycle, so that they are able to extract the value from our solutions and provide value to their business on a continual basis.”
But one of the biggest difficulties Aruba faced was in its martech stack. As part of such a massive global company, there were multiple systems with siloed data that required manual integration — which sometimes took weeks to execute.
“With all these discrete martech tools, I felt like we’re in the NASA control center with all those screens and you’re trying to figure out where your rocketship is,” Alegre-Kimura laughs. “When you’re looking at all of your networking management tools, you really can’t get a sense of what the network is doing because you don’t have a single pane of glass. So having that single pane of glass is really important to understanding.”
Aruba was ready for an easy-to-manage, single source of truth: 6sense.
Centering 6sense to Know the Customer
The Aruba model, as Alegre-Kimura explains it, is “customer first, and customer last.”
With that as a guiding principle, Aruba was ready to use 6sense to bring high levels of personalization to the customer experience. Using a data unification layer to bring information in from multiple martech platforms had the dual benefit of making 6sense a central martech tool.
“We could triangulate between all our various data platforms to understand who our customers were, and understand the customer landscape,” Alegre-Kimura explained.
Aruba demonstrated its customer-first mindset with deeply personalized campaigns, which instantly generated a 20% increase in engagement. That early success allowed the revenue team to begin planning further customer-focused contacts, including using Drift on Aruba’s website.
More Wins
But that wasn’t all. Aruba’s inside sales team, using 6sense data, saw a 60% increase in average deal size and sales velocity. The sales team’s success increased marketing’s interest in 6sense, and strengthened communication across the revenue team as they unified on a single source of data.
And in a relief for one of Aruba’s biggest pain points, the processes centered around 6sense as the core of its martech stack have greatly reduced manual workload.
The Results
Sometimes for companies, it’s not just about the success in metrics — it’s about reducing major pain points. Aruba’s experience with 6sense shows it’s possible to have both.
By bringing in 6sense as part of its martech and revenue revision, Aruba experienced:
- 20% increase in account engagement with personalized ads
- 60% increase average deal size and sales velocity
- Improved revenue team collaboration and communication
- Reduced time-consuming manual processes to 1 day
