Ashleigh Ford, Trend Micro’s Director of Marketing Operations, shared the silver linings Trend Micro found in the COVID B2B shakeup during our recent 6sense Austin Recap.
Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity leader, helps make the world safe for exchanging digital information. Its platform protects over 500,000 organizations and more than 250 million individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints.
After 34 years, Trend Micro had weathered its fair share of changes. But primarily motivated by changes due to COVID, the company made some major shake-ups to its marketing plans and processes.
Those major changes led to major results. In one 6sense-powered ad campaign, Micro Trend saw:
- 30% existing account click-through rate
- 65% existing account view-through rate
- Over 4x average new account engagement
The Challenge
The changes that the COVID business landscape visited on Trend Micro were both internal and external.
Externally, a global shift to remote work meant a huge influx of sales requests as organizations dealt with new security demands.
Internally, the company had relied on a regional field marketing structure in the U.S., which suddenly needed to pivot to digital.
“It was overwhelming and scary, the changes, but it ultimately forced us to transform in a way that we absolutely needed,” Ford said.
The Scramble, The Plan
Initially it felt like a scramble. But the silver lining was that the changes in the environment brought forth opportunities to make a new plan.
As part of that plan, Trend Micro shifted to an ABM program and became a 6sense customer. But that was only part of the shift. “It’s not a technology, it’s a thought process,” Ford said.
“That was what we were throwing our entire marketing team into. ‘Hey, we’re going to completely move from a leads model. Yes, leads are still going to come in, but we need to start thinking about accounts.’”
Supporting the Team
At 6sense, we’re big on our customers’ success. And one of the keys to success is a smart rollout — and Trend Micro stuck the landing.
Because bringing 6sense in as a source was only part of the shift, the revenue team needed lots of support.
So Trend Micro launched an extensive training campaign, with an eye toward “helping the team feel empowered and maybe not so overwhelmed. And I think it was absolutely critical to getting the team really rallied around this and excited about this new platform,” Ford said.
The Results
Those incalculable feelings of success and excitement came through in Ford’s presentation, but she was also happy to report on the streamlined process and solid numbers they have found in using 6sense.
Ford and Micro Trend have great advice for launching a new martech platform, and in remaining agile in tough times.
