Highlights:

• Bizible wanted to increase interest in the company's paid marketing attribution app. 
• The marketing analytics company partnered with Vicasso to develop and write two free AppExchange apps intended to develop leads. 
• After only four months on the AppExchange, the free apps have generated over 150 leads and more than $100K in pipeline value.

Bizible Reports ROI in Only 4 Months after Partnering with Vicasso

Marketing is a tough, but important, position at all successful companies. At Seattle-based B2B marketing attribution company Bizible, helping marketing professionals make the best decisions, with regard to both online and offline marketing campaigns, is a top priority. The firm's core competency is in marketing attribution. Bizible offers clients an online, at-a-glance dashboard which promotes clarity across various marketing channels. Marketing professionals who use Bizible's solutions are seamlessly able to maximize profits and accelerate growth.

Bizible's own business goals are tied to each and every customer's bottom line. The company helps hundreds of B2B companies around the globe measure marketing impact on revenue.

Marketing the Marketing App

Bizible's B2B Marketing Attribution product was launched on the Salesforce AppExchange in 2013. Promising a 30-minute simple installation, according to Bizible, the app empowers clients to "make the best marketing decisions" by integrating data from both online marketing channels (including AdWords) and offline channels such as conferences. The company arms marketing professionals with easy access to analytics so they can measure marketing efforts, performance and, in the end, revenue and ROI. In a world where "what's working" and "what's not" often means the difference between a successful marketing campaign and one that falls flat, the ability to accurately measure analytics is critically important.

Further, what makes the app so popular is that it is easy to use and requires little user-hand-holding, leaving marketing professionals free to assess strategies and make changes as necessary. Best yet, it works! Bizible's B2B Marketing Attribution app is a go-to resource for hundreds of marketing professionals.

However, one of Bizible's biggest business growth challenges is an ironic one: how do you get the attention of new prospects -- successful marketing professionals who are so busy marketing to their own prospective clients?

Bizible's Director of Marketing, Dave Rigotti, practices what his company preaches. He integrates online and offline marketing efforts for an all-encompassing approach to lead generation. Bizible uses LinkedIn advertisements, events that promote face-to-face interaction and old-school outreach via phone calls – all to get in front of the company's prospective B2B client base.

These efforts have certainly proven successful, increasing interest in the company's value proposition. Also, because they are scalable, Mr. Rigotti can increase investments as needed. "We can spend more on ads and hire more people to do phone calling. But the AppExchange itself is a channel that doesn't scale."

Mr. Rigotti wanted to change that so he found money in his marketing budget to develop a couple of free apps and test the waters. The concept was fairly simple: develop free apps that would exist as lead generation tools for the paid product. "We wanted to see if we could replicate what we've seen with our paid app. Could we use the AppExchange for lead generation or not?"

With a strong, successful team of developers in house, you would think getting those two free apps up and running would be easy. Maybe...but not cost effective. Bizible decided to outsource the project, due to the kind of challenges any business would experience.

"We didn't want to distract our internal development team from our paid projects and delivering upgraded features on existing products," Mr. Rigotti explained. "The free apps did not directly correlate to revenue, which means they would have always been at the bottom of our to-do list."

Lead Source Funnel and Campaign Funnel

Bizible turned to Vicasso in 2015 to develop two free AppExchange apps. Lead Source Funnel and Campaign Funnel are the two free appropriately named apps designed to "funnel" paid app prospects to Bizible's sales team. Both products are intended to give users a taste of Bizible's expertise, for free, while also leading them toward the more robust offerings provided by the paid app. The early plan, Mr. Rigotti said, was that "by launching these free apps, we could make sure the AppExchange is a healthy lead channel as we grow."

Success! In only four months on the AppExchange, the free apps are already doing their job very well. In fact, Mr. Rigotti said the "free apps have generated over 150 leads and over $100K in pipeline."

Vicasso Develops Apps and Exceeds Bizible's Expectations

When it came time to choose a partner, Mr. Rigotti says he met with a few developers, including Vicasso. He was familiar with the Hamilton, NJ company because of the Salesforce Cloud Collective.

"I met Vicasso a few years ago and, since then, the company had been on our short list for this project. I was really blown away by Vicasso' level of expertise. In fact, some people here thought it wasn't possible to achieve what Vicasso said they were going to do for us," Mr. Rigotti recalled. "We thought this work would be very hard to do."

In short order, it was clear Bizible had nothing to worry about. The Vicasso app development team wasted no time in proving, three times over, to the decision-makers at Bizible they had chosen the perfect partner to ghostwrite the free apps.

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1. Knowledge is Power:

Vicasso's level of Salesforce knowledge was extraordinarily high

2. Getting it Right the First Time:

The two free apps had the "cleanest code" Bizible had ever seen

3. Time is Money:

The project came in under budget

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"Vicasso knows Salesforce so well so they knew what we had to plan for in terms of limitations within Salesforce. They knew details, such as how future Salesforce editions would impact the apps or how customer settings in Salesforce may or may not interact correctly with the app. Vicasso was able to help us plan for that in advance," Mr. Rigotti said. "They did a great job in making the applications very streamlined from a user perspective. Since these are free apps, our goal was to make them self-service. Their work made it easier for users of the apps to onboard."

One of the things that pleased the Bizible team most is that the apps were written in a way that they can be edited and updated when Bizible wants to do so in the future. They are somewhat evergreen, but certainly not written in stone. What they were written in was "incredibly clean" code.

"About the same time we were doing this project, we hired an Elance provider from a foreign country. The code was a mess," Mr. Rigotti explained. "However, when we were doing the code review with Vicasso, Bizible's CEO, CTO and myself, there were literally no issues with the code and that was awesome. It was the cleanest Salesforce code I've ever seen. Our expectations on this were definitely exceeded."

Mr. Rigotti said he believes the upfront work Vicasso performed to ensure the project was executed correctly and completed to spec saved Bizible "a lot of hours and money, too." In the end, Vicasso was able to usher the free apps efficiently through the Salesforce AppExchange Security Review, decreasing time to market. Additionally, it turns out, the entire project came in under budget, resulting in tangible cost savings for the client.

"Vicasso put a lot of effort into making something great up front. It wasn't a small undertaking to make these apps and we hope it will continue generating leads for years to come," the marketing director said.