Projectplace selected Marketo as its marketing automation platform to improve lead management across seven countries. With Marketo, Projectplace increased marketing's revenue contribution by 20%, standardized lead qualification to save sales 2000 hours per year, and increased monthly engagement levels threefold. Marketo provided insights to better align marketing and sales, support expansion, and increase personalized content marketing.

1. Projectplace driving revenue with Marketo across seven countries
Highlights
 Increased marketing’s contribution to company revenue by 20%
 Newly introduced recycle program has influenced 7% of marketing supported revenue
 Greater alignment of marketing and sales eliminating 2000 lead qualification hours for sales
team per year
 Increased marketing campaign output five-fold in first 6 months
 Ability to support expansion across multiple countries and markets
 Recent programs have also tripled monthly average levels of engagement.
Challenges
Projectplace brings secure and scalable collaboration tools to individuals, small businesses and large
enterprises enabling them to reach their goals. It pioneered cloud-based collaboration 16 years ago
and now has more than 1 million users and facilitates close to 160,000 projects worldwide.
Projectplace is part of Planview, global leader in portfolio management and project collaboration
As a fast growing organization, Projectplace faced a number of challenges, as Sofia Fogelfors, Head
of Demand for Projectplace International explained: “We were generating a lot of leads across all of
our markets but our database had become a black hole. We had no clear overview of how these
customers or prospects had interacted with us and were therefore underestimating their journey
through our sales lifecycle. We also had a dysfunctional opt-in/out handling process as leads were
stored in multiple disparate systems with duplicates galore. We realised that we needed to find a way
to better understand our lead management and how marketing was contributing to revenue.”
Like many successful organisations, managing growth and empowering local marketers with the right
tools are key to supporting both market share and geographic expansion. Projectplace also wanted
the ability to become more of a centralised resource for serving and supporting its local markets
across Europe. It was running campaigns across six markets and in six languages with no set
structures or templates.
The decision was made to explore marketing automation platforms that would enable greater insight
and analytics into how campaigns and marketing investments were driving revenue and improve
engagement with customers.
“Our new COO at the time was in the process of changing operations in the company and recognised
the benefits of marketing automation software. Having this C-level buy in from early on was key to the
success of the project,” added Fogelfors.
Solution
After an in-depth market evaluation, Projectplace selected Marketo as its marketing automation
platform of choice.
“We wanted a SaaS platform that we could manage ourselves without endless hours of consulting
and that could integrate easily with our internal systems. On top of Marketo’s functionality and ease
of use, its reference customers played an integral role in our selection of the platform. We really like
the fact that it constantly communicates with its customers.
“We also spoke with its development teams about the product roadmap and were excited about the
future plans and capabilities.”
Marketo’s Professional Services team worked closely with Projectplace on the deployment, to help set
up some of the basics and integrate with the company’s CRM system.

2. “We were one of the first cloud companies in this space, dating back to 1998, so we have a lot of
legacy data and on-going data cleansing,” said Fogelfors. “It was important that we could seamlessly
integrate Marketo with our CRM data, as well as continue with our de-duping and data management.”
Projectplace began using Marketo for lead generation and customer lifecycle programs in June 2012
with 15 local marketers across Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Benelux, Germany and the UK. In 2014
we set up a new Demand team with a dedicated Demand manager, a Customer Success Manager a
Systems manager and a Lead Development Team of 3 people. The team is ensuring program and
lead qualification success and has increased marketing activities fivefold.
Benefits
“Our new way of marketing is revenue focused and people centric. We have put processes in place
based on the best practices from Marketo and bridged the gap between sales and marketing. By
bringing the Lead development team into marketing and standardising our lead qualification process
we have saved our sales representatives 2000 hours of lead qualification and is improving the quality
of the conversations they are having.”
Projectplace is also starting to apply and track accountability and return on investment with its various
marketing initiatives. Its new recycle programme is responsible for 10% of marketing qualified leads
and has influenced 7% of actual revenue to date. Marketing’s contribution to overall revenue has also
increased by 20%, which is ahead of original targets.
“We are now able to speak the same language of revenue and communicate with our sales team with
dollar signs,” added Fogelfors.
Generating relevant content is seen as key to the overall success of Projectplace’s marketing
programmes and it has placed content at the heart of its activities.
“We are a B2B organisation but we work with people and want to talk with the person behind the
business by personalising our content. The customer now owns the buying process and we want to
ensure we always remain relevant and provide content that is deserving of their attention. Marketo is
helping us to understand the buyer in new way and is enabling us to help, educate, and entertain
prospects. Lead scoring is opening up new opportunities for cross and upsell and is changing the way
we engage with customers. Recent programs have tripled levels of monthly engagement which is
fantastic.”
- Sofia Fogelfors, Head of Demand for Projectplace International