How Rezilion Converts More Marketing Qualified Leads with Priority Engine

An interview with technology sales and marketing innovator, Tal Klein, Chief Marketing Officer at Rezilion

Rezilion is a new approach to cloud workload protection that makes production environments automatically resilient to attach and unsanctioned change by leveraging existing DevOps tools. Tal is responsible for all facets of marketing at Rezilion. Check him out on LinkedIn.

What are some of the strategic business challenges you face at Rezilion?

At Rezilion, we have a unique and differentiated solution, and our target buyer persona is very specific. One of the fundamental issues with the kind of persona we target is that these types of people usually own vulnerability management, meaning they are very busy and rarely have time to engage with vendors or research new offerings. We find that we have very high conversion rates with Sales Qualified Leads to Opportunities. However, we struggle in converting Marketing Qualified Leads to SQLs because of how difficult it is to break through to our target prospect.

What are you trying to accomplish for your sales and your marketing strategy using Priority Engine?

We primarily use Priority Engine to help us better identify and engage with the right buyers. A unique value of Priority Engine is that it allows us to engage with those buying personas who are already actively researching relevant content. We know that if someone in charge of Vulnerability Management is reading an article on that topic, it’s a perfect opportunity for us. Priority Engine also gives us a way to better engage our buyers by using the prospect and account insights to personalize our messaging and sales outreach. We can easily identify the specific articles a person read, the technology their company has installed and firmographic information to give us a holistic view of their universe.

Tell us about your teams are using Priority Engine. How does Priority Engine fit into your tech stack?

Priority Engine starts at the top of the funnel by helping us identify new MQLs. We use Pardot as our Marketing Automation Platform and Salesforce as our CRM. We have automatic weekly exports set up from Priority Engine into Pardot for the Priority Engine list of leads that have engaged with us. When we initially set up Priority Engine, I worked to curate the lists and included the appropriate filtering to identify and target our actual buyers. Priority Engine’s leads save me a ton of time and effort – It’s like the leads are prequalified. We have a much higher conversion rate because of the quality of Priority Engine leads. Once the leads move into Pardot, we create the appropriate drip-campaign based on Priority Engine’s insights. We’re able to create custom content based on Priority Engine’s prospect-level insights to better engage our buyer personas.

When a lead has progressed from an MQL to a SQL, it moves into Salesforce. We have the Salesforce Integration setup with Priority Engine so that our sales team can see the account and prospect insights via the Insights Widget and Insights Tab within Salesforce. The ability for sales to engage with the detailed data from Priority Engine inside of Salesforce takes a lot of the manual work off them. They don’t need to spend hours researching a prospect when they have the insights they need from Priority Engine right there within Salesforce. Our Sales Development Representatives are using the insights to tailor their outreach to help set meetings. They use all the insights from Priority Engine including if someone downloaded a particular piece of our content, to the company’s firmographic data, to the technology the company has installed. It’s incredibly helpful for them to remain relevant when reaching out to a prospect. We also have Account Executives who leverage the Insights Tab and Insights Widget to quickly find all the information on their accounts when they need additional details to help progress and close deals.

How are you tracking and measuring attribution?

We track attribution pretty granularly. I know if someone is coming in from content syndication, for example. When a lead comes in from Priority Engine, we know exactly what list they were a part of and what content they engaged with. Our leads are tagged with the lead source. For instance, leads that come in from Priority Engine are tagged with the lead source ‘Priority Engine.’ We find quite often that the leads that come from a source outside of Priority Engine will have a second touch from Priority Engine, proving that even if the initial lead source isn’t Priority Engine, they are usually still reading TechTarget’s content.
Without a doubt, it’s very easy for me to prove ROI with Priority Engine – In the last quarter, we have had six opportunities directly attributed to Priority Engine. These are opportunities that that came into Pardot, and in some cases only had one touch and very quickly became opportunities. Some of our other lead generation mechanisms are a lot tougher because you may find someone with the right title, but it doesn’t matter unless you know their intent.

How has Priority Engine helped you overcome some of your business challenges? What has changed within the company since implementing Priority Engine?

As a small company, every minute a salesperson spends speaking to the wrong prospect is costly – we don’t need to worry about that with Priority Engine. Before we had Priority Engine, there was no way for us to find out if someone was actively researching our solutions. So much of demand generation is like putting lures out there and hoping that somebody engages with them, but you don’t really know why they engaged with it. With Priority Engine, you understand the intent behind why someone engaged with your content. It makes it much easier to have a conversation with a prospect when you already know that they are more likely than not going to be receptive to what you have to say. You also know that it’s top of mind for them because you can see they were just researching this week – that intent is critical for us.

I don’t know of anything else out there that gives you the level of richness in intent that Priority Engine provides. Because TechTarget creates the content for people to educate themselves, it’s not only that they are engaging with syndicated content, but that they are also reading seven other articles around the topic this week, so there is no question about their intent. In the world of demand generation, it’s usually a game of quantity over quality. With Priority Engine, we’re able to better engage and break through to our buyer. We know when our target persona is actively researching ways to improve their lives with new technology. We know that they are interested in what we have to offer right now. We know exactly what to say to appeal to them to better engage.

A big thank you to Tal for sharing some feedback with us. We look forward to hearing about more of your success in the future!

If you’re interested in sharing your TechTarget story with us, feel free to reach out to Sarah Geissler.