About ShoreTel
About ShoreTelShoreTel established in 1996 at Sunnyvale, California (USA). It was founded by Edwin J Basart. ShoreTel has regional offices in Austin, Texas; New York; Maidenhead, United Kingdom; Sydney, Australia; and Singapore. The Company entered into the IP telephony market to become a worldwide leader in the IP based business communication solutions field. To meet the evolving needs of the modern enterprises , ShoreTel focused to provide thoroughly proven communication solutions to its growing customers. ShoreTel is an expert in providing premise-based, all-in-one IP phone system with unified communications and contact center capabilities. Cloud based communications were unique service provided by ShoreTel. ShoreTel sky was another service provided by the company. It delivers businesses of all sizes proven and secured hosted VoIP, hosted unified communications and hosted contact communication services. ShoreTel’s solutions were built to scale, grow and evolve as needed. So, customers could buy or subscribe, the business communication solution as per their requirements. Company purpose was to provide simple but effective solutions to customers using fewer resources. ShoreTel was the only provider of simple, unified business communication solutions that consistently leads the industry in customer satisfaction and lowest total cost of ownership. Organizations enjoy freedom of choice with ShoreTel, to own and manage their own brilliantly simple system in house. ShoreTel already provided solutions to different organization who were seeking to replace an old phone system or moving to new office sites or branches. Some of these organizations wanted to upgrade to unified communications or modernize its contact center. The company received a higher ranking for customer satisfaction from different organization through world wide. ShoreTel’s world class customer service and quality products consistently received industry awards and accolades for performance and innovations.
ShoreTel’s Business Objective
Michael Freeman, Senior Manager of Search and Analytics for ShoreTel, was frustrated by limitations of marketing tools used by his marketing team for implementing solutions. They used Eloqua to support shoretel.com and shoretelsky.com. But they found it extremely slow, inflexible and not user friendly. After the detail research the demand generation team at ShoreTel found a solution for their problem. All the team members believed that implementing inbound marketing strategies they could solve hurdles from their path. After evaluating all other marketing options Freeman sorted out two options Hubspot and Marketo. His objective was to find such a system which was easy to use and that would grow with the business. Finally, he chose Hubspot. Because it was the most complete solution available in the market. The best thing he found with Hubspot was continues improvement in the software to fit in latest market trends.
Strategy Adopted by ShoreTel
Freeman decided to apply the inbound marketing approach to the current market situation. Also, he finalized to use HubSpot software. He decided to move from marketing automation to Inbound marketing with HubSpot. They focused on Inbound marketing techniques. Very soon they understood that people liked to see personalized content with personal attention. They realized that instead of machine generated emails, personal emails were effective. Within a few days ShoreTel noticed significant changes in complete process. Before HubSpot freeman’s team used different software for different processes. It was getting difficult to manage different software. The team was facing problems while providing solutions to customers. But by HubSpot they found their problems were almost solved. HubSpot was the combination of all features in one software. The team could see all required functions under one roof only. They found it most user friendly software. New people could easily get trained with HubSpot. It saved their time and marketing cost as well.
“What makes HubSpot so appealing is its all-in-oneness. The fewer tools that I have to use, the better off I am. It’s easier to get people trained. I’m less likely to have to jerry rig things together to make them happen.” -Michael Freeman (Senior Manager of Search & Analytics, ShoreTel)
Result Achieved by ShoreTel
Within a short time company observed positive changes in their complete process. As Hubspot included with all required features it was easy for a freeman’s team to analyse all the factors that affecting website. For example, they could easily identify organic traffic towards website, user behavior on website, time spend by user on the website, most visited areas, landing page, percentage of converting leads into customers, etc. Freeman observed that year-over-year Organic search traffic was increased by 60%. There were increases of 36% in leads generation. He observed a substantial increase in qualified leads. Year-over-year qualified leads was increased by 110%.
“HubSpot meets our needs as an enterprise perfectly. It has the sophistication, it has the scale, it has the functionality… and it has the vision that gives us the confidence to entrust our marketing platform to them.”
Learning
The use of inbound marketing with Hubspot proven the best decision of ShoreTel. Inbound marketing proven its value to those organizations and companies who successfully used it. It is clear from this case study that marketing trends are changing. Customers are least interested in old marketing techniques of cold calling, banner, advertisements, print, etc. Now people are more interested in New Marketing techniques which relies on earning people’s interest. Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy which focuses on getting found by customers. Most effective inbound marketing techniques are content marketing and social media participation. Personalized content creation is a unique feature of this technique. Content can be shared with people through different social media channels such as Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, etc. This leads to a substantial increase in visibility of content. The biggest advantage of Inbound marketing is that it is the most cost effective method as compared to outbound marketing methods. It helps to increase organic search, leads generation and search engine ranking. It also helps to build long term customer relationship. Inbound marketing with the use of correct software can produce great results. It is clear that marketing is changing at a fundamental level as the continuous internet revolution to find, buy, sell and interact with the brands and their product or services. The days of convincing customers with intrusive advertising and marketing tactics are fading. The new age of inbound marketing is about providing added value and earning customer loyalty.
Image Credit: Shoretel
