A Partner Engagement, Pipeline Generation, and Customer Advocacy Engine

“As a 100% channel organization, my team is continuously thinking about how we keep our partners, who we see as an extension of our team, informed and engaged. We want them to be brand ambassadors, keeping Arctic Wolf top of mind and at the tip of their tongue when having security operations conversations,” said Megan.

Arctic Wolf’s channel sales team regularly meets with partners to execute training sessions, run call blitzes, gain mindshare, and build relationships. Working in a post-pandemic world, the team quickly designed new ways to engage virtually and boost lead creation.

Megan’s team compiled a prescriptive playbook of canned activities and associated themes matched with recommended gifts that the channel team could leverage to reward top-performers and incentivize sales behaviors. The channel sales team has provided glowing feedback regarding the variety of options available and the ease of sending through the Salesforce integration. “It’s been really positive for us. Not only are we streamlining workflows, we’re also creating a new touchpoint for partner sales reps, allowing Arctic Wolf to stand out in a time when that has become increasingly difficult,” said Megan.

The channel marketing team also uses Sendoso to streamline what historically had been a very complex channel promotions process. Tight integration between Marketo, Salesforce, and Sendoso makes the communications and address collection process seamless, and the shipping process less cumbersome. Beyond this, Sendoso has simplified budgeting, vendor relationship management, and expense reconciliation.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Megan and her team were hosting over 150 in-person events per quarter. When social distancing measures were put into place, they pivoted quickly, transforming their live events into virtual experiences.

In April 2020, Arctic Wolf hosted 40 turn-key webinars with top partners. “Webinars are an excellent way for our channel partners to get the security operations message in front of their buying accounts,” said Megan. By sending Uber Eats eGifts to registrants prior to the virtual event, they saw an outstanding average 72% attendance rate (1.3X the industry benchmark of 55%) and 9% average conversion rate from MQL to SQL, one of the highest performing campaign types.

To continue the conversation and build relationships with prospects after the virtual events take place, her team segments attendees by criteria that have a higher likelihood of converting, including company size, job title, and geography. Those prospects are sent an Arctic Wolf swag kit including branded notebooks, stress balls, and stickers.

To prevent deals from stalling in the pipeline in the wake of COVID-19, Megan’s team wanted to incorporate Physical Impressions to boost speed to closed-won deals. They worked quickly to build a pipeline acceleration campaign targeting deals with the highest likelihood of closing within the upcoming two quarters.

Megan’s team sourced Arctic Wolf branded puzzles and bundled them with the message, “We hope that you and your family are doing well in these puzzling times.” Shortly after building the campaign, Sendoso rolled out the Address Confirmation feature, allowing recipients to confirm their address prior to sending the bundle. “The timing was great because before, we would have had to create a manual form, which would be terribly time consuming and cause delays in the campaign process. Sendoso enabled us to move much faster,” said Megan.

To date, the pipeline acceleration puzzle campaign resulted in three closed-won deals, and received positive responses from recipients. Megan noted, “We had recipients reaching out, thanking us for the puzzles and sending pictures of pieces eaten by dogs or lost by their children! It was fun to inject a moment of togetherness when folks were holed up in their homes.”

Finding new and exciting ways to drive engagement in a remote world is key. Liz Caspersen, senior customer marketing manager at Arctic Wolf, is focused on increasing engagement through delight-worthy experiences and influencing growth within the existing Arctic Wolf customer base. Her team leverages Sendoso to send welcome gifts to new customers and appreciation gifts to existing customers at key milestones throughout the customer journey.

In June, Liz launched an upsell campaign intending to set meetings with customers facing security gaps that would likely see the value in Arctic Wolf’s Managed Risk solution. Marketing provided email templates with fresh messaging, and CSMs followed up with a call and social media outreach to set a meeting. After the meeting took place, CSMs sent the customer a Sendoso Choice eGift, allowing them to choose between various food and retail offerings.

The coordinated efforts between May and mid-June, which cost less than $1000, resulted in 41 influenced net-new opportunities and 27 closed-won deals equating to more than 20% of quarterly revenue. Because their campaigns have proven to be successful, Liz is planning on employing Sendoso to improve their Net Promoter Score.

Looking ahead, The Arctic Wolf team is excited to explore more ways to roll out Sendoso across the organization. Given that remote work doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon, Sendoso is a key partner for building connections with current and future customers—and ultimately driving revenue.