Toshiba is a Japanese group with a global reach. The group has over 100,000 employees and worldwide turnover of around 77 billion dollars. Toshiba France distributes the full Toshiba range of mobility products and solutions, including PCs and hybrid tablets, across a very wide French B2B market, ranging from very small businesses to large accounts. In this video, William Biotteau, Business Unit Director, Business Computing Solutions, Toshiba France, gives us his feedback on the Sparklane for Marketing solution.

An initial data deficit on B2B end-clients

Toshiba goes through a complicated circuit that includes wholesalers and resellers to distribute its products on the French market. Until now, the Japanese firm did not directly reach its B2B end-clients. However, given the very competitive context, and in order to maintain its market share, Toshiba decided to change strategy and lead Marketing actions directly with the companies that use, or could be interested in, its mobility products and solutions.

Toshiba had end-client databases, but they were in a very poor state and did not offer any qualified email addresses.

Sparklane: the choice for performance and integration

So Toshiba conducted research to identify a service provider capable of providing it with consistently qualified and reliable marketing data, within its target of companies of 20 or more employees. The necessity of integrating the data into the CRM system was also an essential prerequisite.

Having studied the market for marketing data solutions, Toshiba naturally chose Sparklane for several very concrete reasons:

• The unique system of continuous data updating and enrichment
• The incomparable quantity of nominative email contacts within our IT target
• The solution’s precise targeting capacity, through numerous segmentation criteria
• Its simple integration into the CRM system via a dedicated connector.

Marketing/sales alignment and a new Account Based Marketing strategy

The marketing team uses the Sparklane solution for emailing and telemarketing campaigns with its end-clients. The adoption of this solution lets Toshiba really bring its marketing and sales departments into alignment. Thanks to the targeting criteria, it is possible to contact priority targets, in specific regions or business sectors, on the demand of the sales people. This enables the generation of qualified leads — and in quantity — in their different perimeters.

Moreover, the Sparklane solution lets William Biotteau’s marketing teams implement Account Based Marketing strategies on key accounts, which was previously impossible for them.

Immediate benefits for Toshiba’s Marketing

With the adoption of the Sparklane for Marketing solution, William Biotteau’s teams saw immediate results with their campaigns:

• Better targeting of its market: Toshiba now speaks directly to its end-clients. This consolidates its presence in its target market.
• The centralisation of client and lead data within its CRM system. This represents a gain in productivity for both the marketing team and the sales people.
• An excellent deliverability rate, of up to 95% on average across the campaigns being run. This performance is much higher than for the other solutions that were tested before.
• Opening rates doubled, hitting 10% or even more depending on the message delivered. The better targeting capacity has resulted in this significant improvement in the opening rates across the campaigns being run, thanks to the Sparklane solution.

Towards the addition of a “business signals” feature to contextualise prospecting

William Biotteau is very satisfied with the integration of the Sparklane for Marketing solution into his CRM system and his processes. He sees himself quickly going further, with the acquisition of a new functional feature – the business signals and alerts about events experienced by the target companies, such as executive appointments or the hiring of new sales people. This will let Toshiba target its prospection even better, depending on the context of these target companies.

In conclusion, for William Biotteau, the Sparklane solution can be summed up by a total integration into the CRM system and better marketing and sales performance.