1. Samsung France Aligns Sales and
Marketing to Grow Pipeline Eightfold
For a global organization with a history firmly rooted in consumer product excellence, it only
makes sense to target the business sector with a product-centric marketing plan. Unless, in the
meantime, the digital revolution has transformed marketing into a race car with a driver’s seat
designed and destined for no one else but the customer.
But if a sharp strategic turn needs to be taken, how fast can a local marketing department take it
in a multinational corporation? What Güçlü Ozsayin—Head of CRM and Marketing Automation at
Samsung France—knew for a fact was that in this day and age, there is no profound transformation
without the right technology to fuel it.
“For a modern marketer, investing in marketing automation amounts to putting your money
where your mouth is – ROI,” says Güçlü. With Oracle Marketing Cloud, his team of five went from
the point-of-no-return on marketing investment to global best practice in nothing but record time.
CHALLENGES
After being a consumer-oriented company for so many years, Samsung Electronics Co. created
the Samsung Business division to start supporting companies and administrations in their digital
transformation. Headquartered in Paris, Samsung France thereby helps the French business sector
leverage new technology to optimize productivity, strengthen customer relationships, and create
value every step of the way.
But for the branch office, aligning sales and marketing from lead management to campaign
impact measurement has long been the main challenge—not that leads didn’t go through to sales,
but either they didn’t qualify or they would come in too late. “Not only did we use to lose 80% of
our cold leads, we also had low performing campaigns and no way to measure ROI,” says Güçlü.
And because it took so much time and effort to generate such poorly qualified leads, neither mar-
keters nor sales teams cared much about following up on them.
“To measure campaign success and contribution to sales performance, we were relying more on
individual feedback than actual facts”, says Güçlü.The only thing the team was able to measure
was the lead conversion rate, and it rarely went over the 10% threshold. In other words, both
marketing and sales teams were coping with the pitfalls of having systems, processes, and data
spread across the organization with no or little connection between them.
“We had reached a point where it wasn’t about crafting the next genius campaign anymore, it was
about rebuilding trust on a solid substructure made of tangible figures,” says Güçlü. So the team
decided to sit back at the drawing table, ready for a technology-driven paradigm shift. “We inves-
tigated every marketing automation system out there but it didn’t take long for us to reach the
conclusion other Samsung departments had reached before us: Oracle Marketing Cloud was the
best fit, period,” says Güçlü.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY SALES AND MARKETING ALIGNMENT
“After just four months,
marketing contribution
to the sales pipeline had
already increased from
5% to 40%, which was
unheard of inside the
organization. All in
all, everybody was
so impressed with
the figures that they
were using Oracle
Marketing Cloud after
just six months, which
is a fragment of the
time typically required
to deliver innovation
in any given enterprise
environment.”
Güçlü Ozsayin
Head of CRM and
Marketing Automation
Samsung France