Case Study | Five9
Successful cloud-based contact center provider
turns to DemandGen International® to build
revenue engine for lead capture and conversion.
Situation
solutions, and cloud-based contact center provider
Five9 is one of the hottest com­panies in this high-growth
sector: dominating the small and medium business
space. After posting double-digit growth over the
past several years with almost no outbound mar­keting,
the company decided to go up-market to the enterprise
space, and brought Doug Sechrist, Vice President of
Demand Marketing, on board to lead the way.
“My task was to continue the historical success on a
grander scale: to feed a growing sales team and enable
bigger deals—without screwing up everything that Five9’s
marketing and sales teams were already doing right,”
explains Doug. Getting the most out of Five9’s Marketo
system would be critical, but Doug discovered that it
wasn’t doing anything very impactful. “They had built
lead scoring, but Sales wasn’t really using it: Sales just
cherry-picked the leads they wanted to work, and 70%
of them were left behind. Marketo was populating
Salesforce, but that data wasn’t being used for anything;
any lead that wasn’t qualified immediately was archived,
and archived leads were never touched again. Some
nurtures were running, but nobody was measuring
their effectiveness at accelerating the funnel.”
Five9 needed a solid revenue engine for lead manage-
ment, to enable efficient, effective capture and conver-
sion. Doug’s team created a blueprint for the lead work-
flow from entry to close—and then turned to DemandGen
to get it done. “This is the third company where I’ve
worked with the DemandGen team; it’s a real partner-
ship,” Doug reveals. “We needed horsepower, and the
breadth of different DemandGen brains to help us think
through all the different components. And because we
think similarly, I knew we could hit the ground running.”
Solution
Getting Started
The project kicked off with DemandGen’s thorough audit
of the Marketo system’s architecture and the business
processes around it. Though a series of workshops, the
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OVERVIEW
Situation:
Growing SMB company needed the most effective
approach to support enterprise market expansion.
Solution:
Rapidly deploy a sophisticated, highly automated,
scalable revenue engine.
Results:
Dramatic pipeline uplift in 6 weeks: no lead
left behind.
team developed a plan of action, including scrapping the
existing demand funnel, developing a new one, enhancing
lead scoring, developing an entirely new gating strategy
and subscription center, and running campaigns under
the new approach.
Like Schoolhouse Rock’s ‘How a Bill Becomes a Law,’
the team created a clear, memorable approach to
understanding ‘How a Lead Becomes a Deal.’ “We have
posters of the architecture hung in the CEO’s office,
my boss’s office, all the sales cubes,” explains Doug.
“It’s a reminder to everyone that we’ve got this proven
process for how everything needs to happen, and
everyone needs to be on board. Here’s what lead scoring
does and why, and how it impacts you, and the same
with nurturing. That was the foundation for building the
revenue engine.”
After that, it was full steam ahead throughimplementation
and deployment.
During the Project
Five9 Marketing Operations Manager Divya Jumani,
who “lives and breathes in Salesforce and Marketo,”
was responsible for driving involvement with the Five9
stakeholders, and collaborating with the DemandGen
consultants who did the majority of the heavy lifting.
Throughout the workshops and brainstorming sessions,
Doug and Divya looked to DemandGen to guide their
thinking and consider different use cases. “It’s second
nature to them to look at all the options and give us the

“This is the third company where
I’ve worked with the DemandGen
team; it’s a real partnership.”
Doug Sechrist,
Vice President of Demand Marketing
best practices,” Divya observes. “They always start with
the end in mind and work backward to get us there.
For example, when we talked about contact status,
Nova probed into what we really were trying to do and
explained which fields should be linked to the contact
record so we won’t lose the activity history once the
lead is converted.”
Divya and the DemandGen consultants worked hand-
in-hand to create all the new campaigns and workflow
actions in Marketo, and a DemandGen developer
constructed highly functional new forms. “We wanted to
be ready to roll as soon as as everything was approved.
We were moving at a crazy speed, and checked with each
other all the time, even after business hours and over the
weekend: DemandGen was constantly on top of it,” Divya
remarks. And DemandGen’s support extended beyond
project details. For example, Five9’s Salesforce instance is
complex, and the company’s own contact center product
is deeply integrated, so making changes to Salesforce
could be challenging in more ways than one. “It’s hard for
Sales to accept change, but we needed to make all these
changes. The DemandGen people really helped me craft
the story to get the buy-in we needed from Sales and and
the core IT team that handles Salesforce,” Divya confides.
“I tend to get too technical, so they coached me on how
to talk about the concept and the ROI, the what’s-in-it-
for-me kind of thing. Our lead consultant has a knack
of getting people to understand the 360-degree view
of things: she’s an awesome collaborator.”
A DemandGen solution architect built the actual
workflows in Salesforce. “They did wizardry in Salesforce
that we could not have done internally,” remarks Doug.
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“And as we were building out lead scoring, tables, and so
forth, they were able to jump in and help us out when we
needed them.”
The team deployed the new demand funnel in phases.
“For a time we had two demand funnels, in order to
prove the value of the new approach,” Divya explains.
“For example, we knew that a lead shouldn’t be called
Sales Qualified just because it is coming from an SEO or
SEM source, but Sales needed to see how lead scoring
could decide that in a scientific way. It was all about
proving ourselves.”
Together, Five9 and DemandGen planned, built, and
implemented everything start to finish—signed contract
to full deployment—in six weeks. DemandGen’s controlled
deployment methodology and dedication enabled a
smooth transition. “Everyone was on call for us,” recalls
Divya. “Their commitment and insights were critical. If it
had not been for DemandGen, we wouldn’t have been
able to do this in such a short time.” Adds Doug, “This
project was the fastest end-to-end implementation of a
new demand funnel, lead routing, full lead scoring, and
subscription management that I’ve ever seen. It was
awesome to get this done in my first two months on
the job: being able to show what we can do and have
immediate impact.”
Results
The results of these initial projects—a new demand
funnel, new lead taxonomy and routing, lead scoring,
forms, progressive profiling, and a new gating strategy
with subscription center—have been excellent. “We have
seen a dramatic uplift in the volume of opportunities we
are able to send to the sales team, and the lead quality is
much higher Doug reports. “We are taking Five9 solutions
to market in an entirely new way, and the pipeline is
growing at a faster rate than the company has ever seen.”
A new sales development team has been brought on
board to handle the increasing volume.
“At the most basic level, it makes our lives simpler,” Divya
asserts. “We’ll certainly exceed our planned numbers,
but most important to me is that I can SEE the leads flow
through the funnel. I can tell how many leads are coming
in, net new leads, total leads in contract: we truly have no
lead left behind. I used to be nervous when people asked
questions, but now I’m confident in reporting results.”
Laughing, she adds, “In fact I was asked questions at
a couple of recent conferences, and I felt like a pro...
I could answer all of them!”
 Sales and Marketing at Five9 are now aligned from the
top down, with Marketing firmly inserted into the
sales process.
“DemandGen was constantly on
• The two teams meet weekly to review funnel stages,
velocity, and progress, providing everyone with top of it...It’s second nature to them
a much better understanding of the lead sources
and marketing spend. According to Doug, “We know to look at all the options and give us
where every lead we’ve generated is in the cycle,
and we know who’s responsible for it.” the best practices.”
• With the new lead scoring model, approximately
90% of the leads passed to Sales make their way
into the pipeline. “The lead scoring reports are the
‘aha’ moments: now we can show Sales real value,” Divya Jumani,
Divya observes. Marketing Operations Manager
• Quite a few opportunities are being uncovered
from tens of thousands of archived leads. Marketing
has begun to reengage with these dormant leads,
and the sales development team is successfully
moving them along in the funnel. “We are so in love with DemandGen,” Divya declares.
“Everyone is so approachable—it’s their culture.
The feeling you get is that they’re just part of your
The Future extended team: they are part of Five9.”
“Marketing automation is a journey: it’s not just going to
be done one fine day,” notes Divya. Currently the team is Doug agrees. “DemandGen is an ideal bolt-on to your
refining lead scoring to help identify the tipping points for team. If you want to get something very sophisticated
conversion, creating drilldown reporting dashboards, done very fast in a high-quality way, they give you the
and looking at additional tools for business intelligence. resources, strategy, and brain power to do it. Even when
we run into things we didn’t plan for, DemandGen always
“The company is confident enough of our success to raise has someone at the helm ready to go. They have so
our investments in demand marketing, so we’ll continue much collective brainpower and sophisticated knowledge;
to work with DemandGen to build out that original they bring all the best ideas from the industry to bear
blueprint of a sophisticated, highly automated, highly on what we’re trying to do, and push us to explore
scaleable revenue engine,” confirms Doug. The team what else we can do. They help us be our best.”
plans to revise the marketing analytics process
to get even greater insight into the demand funnel.
A new nurture strategy will fill mid-funnel gaps that have
been revealed by the new reporting, and an automated
program will handle sales development follow-up.

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