Marketing leaders are expected to have a positive impact on revenue—but double it? That was what Amisha Gandhi was asked when she arrived as senior VP of marketing at Tipalti in January 2021. Tipalti, a payables automation software provider, benefited from the need to pay bills from anywhere—as offices shut down at the beginning of the pandemic. The next challenge for Gandhi was maintaining record growth.

“At every stage that your company goes through, you need to take a breath and reassess, revamp, and make some improvements on the gaps that you have at this level of growth,” Gandhi said. “What is the next thing to get the brand, demand gen and our goals to the next level?”\

Where did you start?

I prioritized a demand-generating integrated campaign because it would have the most impact. You're getting everyone to start thinking about those long-term things that intrinsically become the icing on the cake. If we do an integrated campaign, for example, our messaging and our look and feel are going to get better.

The demand gen engine was really strong, but we still needed to get to the next level. We had been taking a tactical approach executing campaigns, email, SEO, webinars and all these other things, but we needed to tie them together and provide a cohesive prospect experience based on their intent. We also worked closely with our sales development reps on the content, to look at integrating campaigns more holistically. For example, if a prospect downloaded a piece of content, the follow-up from the reps was consistent. We included some influencer content and some other third-party validation to provide high-value thought leadership and establish credibility. We had a series of webinars along with a variety of content including social some of it was un-gated and some of it was gated to maintain engagement. Then we retargeted those accounts that demonstrated high intent signals and followed up with account-based marketing.

What kind of impact did this have?

We were able to qualify leads better and find signs of purchase intent better so that just pushed everything forward. Compared to previous campaigns, we not only had more qualified leads, but we also had more Sales qualified opportunities. It’s important to focus on opportunities and bookings over leads. We can get leads all day as marketers, but what matters is that these leads turn into bookings.

We also found that account-based management (ABM) really helped increase our annual contract value per new customer.  

How did crystallize Tipalti’s brand purpose?

We started at the top, interviewed all our C-level executives, brought in a writer and a consultant to help us out. We didn't bring an agency in because this wasn't meant to be a big-budget project. We did interviews internally, with customers, and we had the consultant interview customers so that they could be upfront and share their real feelings about how they perceive the brand. After that we did a competitive analysis, then we brought it all together.

What is the purpose?

The internal message is “We free finance to lead the modern business.” Finance can identify trends in the business and bring opportunities to the business for growth. They see it all. If they're doing a lot of manual functional tasks and not automating them, they're not becoming a more strategic function, so that's what we took from that. The external message could be what we have on our site now, which is “Transform your finance team.” It's more action-oriented; it means something to someone on the other side.

How did you engage employees with the brand purpose?

We went through the background of the “what” and “why” with the executives. Then we did the same thing with managers and other leaders. We did marketing training; we did sales training and then we had the all-hands reveal with the CEO.

How did you bring the brand purpose to market?

Last year, we had our first user conference at Tipalti, which was virtual. The purpose drove the keynote, which was a highly produced experience. We had more than 20 customers participate as speakers. Half of the product track was open to everyone, and the other half was just for customers so they could get the latest innovations and understand how Tipalti could help their business.

We had a full on-demand library after that with strong content and were able to use that for the rest of the year going into Q4. For conferences, it comes down to how you treat your customers and prospects. Make sure you have your ABM set up. Whatever campaign you had going into the conference, make sure that you have the follow-up planned, and do it immediately.

What was the impact on the business?

We had many deals move forward, a lot them created from that event. In marketing, we exceeded last year’s numbers by about 12%, which is huge. We were able to increase things such as the average deal size. We were able to increase the amount of engagement with the brand.

What metrics resulted from the marketing initiatives?

Last year, more than 50% of all net new deals were marketing-sourced. We increased anything that was marketing influenced or had ABM programming by at least 15% to 20%. Our marketing-influenced deals are at approximately 80%. We also did a brand research study and it showed we were head-to-head with our competitors. Before this, people didn't know about us as well as our competitors.