Many Citrix customers look to us to help them embrace the transformative power of cloud services. Because we’ve been experiencing that journey at every level at Citrix, I’ve been interviewing leaders across the company to hear first-hand how this Cloud-first approach has changed their jobs through my blog series The Way We Work.

One team at Citrix that has gone through a complete Cloud services makeover has been our marketing operations team, which is responsible for capturing a comprehensive view of our customers, captures incoming leads, and manages marketing data, business intelligence and marketing analytics. To learn more about how that team has used the power of cloud services, I met with Lea Ann Eblin, Citrix Vice President, Marketing Operations and Strategy, who also serves as the Chief of Staff for Tim Minahan, Citrix Senior Vice President of Business Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer.

Joe: Let’s start by describing your responsibilities here at Citrix.

Lea Ann: As my title suggests, I oversee marketing operations, which includes our global Demand Center responsible for marketing systems and lead management; our data czar who is responsible for data quality, data management and data governance; our business intelligence and analytics team and our Demand Management teams in AMER, EMEA and APJ; and Citrix Insiders, which includes our customer loyalty and insights program and our business strategy team.

I also serve as the chief of staff for our Chief Marketing Officer Tim Minahan.

Joe: I know that the Marketing Operations team has embraced a number of SaaS tools. How have these SaaS tools changed the way you operate?

Lea Ann: Using SaaS tools and cloud-based tools has affected almost everything we do.

When I joined the Marketing Operations team in 2015, our primary focus was limited to keeping the lights on, working on numerous production issues, data issues, and ad hoc reporting requests. Innovation and new services were limited to the maintenance of our marketing systems and small incremental efficiency improvements bound by the constraints of legacy process. We did our best to provide data insights to help drive the business forward and to meet the needs of the ongoing Marketing business.

While many of our Marketing Systems were already SaaS-based products or cloud services, with additional tools we have procured over the recent years we have chosen to continue down this path.

We have addressed (or are continuing to address) several pain points across the business with SaaS-based tools. Now with all of the new and existing SaaS-based tools we use, we’re able to make marketing more effective across the company.

One example of the challenges we faced was in the area of customer insights.

Today, Scott Hakeem’s team uses a customer intelligence SaaS platform called Vision Critical, which enables them to completely engage customers who sign up for our Citrix Insiders program, and we have a complete 360-degree view of each customer.

Before we had Vision Critical, we would recruit customers to participate in surveys. Then we’d send out the survey, manually collate the results, then work through a laborious process to extract that information and share with marketing and product marketing.

The process was not iterative, nor collaborative. We had difficulty getting to the root cause of their feedback as we only had their original comments to work from and they had no way of knowing we were even working on their issues. Fundamentally, we were unable to close the loop with our customers. They had to wonder if we were taking them seriously.

Now, we’re able to save on resources three-fold, because we’ve eliminated those manual processes. We know what products and services they use, where their pain points are, and we’re engaged with the produce management and engineering teams to directly address customer concerns.

Then we circle back to each customer and explain how Citrix is working to address their pain points in real-time, so they now see how we’re using their feedback and working with them as real partners. They see great benefits from being part of our Citrix Insiders program, and we’re constantly working with them to make our services better, and more appealing.

That’s a critical advantage when we’re selling our Citrix Cloud services, since the more value customers gain from our offerings, the more they use them, which increases revenues per customer.

The fact that it is a cloud service means that we are able to scale the program quickly and leverage new innovations on the service immediately.

We’ve also used cloud services to dramatically increase our lead velocity, which is directly related to how effectively our sales teams can convert leads to sales. Low lead velocity means it takes too long to route a lead to sales, which then takes even longer for someone to follow up with that prospect. If velocity is too low, leads go cold, and prospects are no longer interested.

We procured Integrate, a cloud-based platform that helps us automatically capture media leads from many different sources and import them directly into our cloud based Marketing Automation platform, Marketo. By embracing these services, we’ve accelerated our lead velocity, which means Sales can execute and convert leads into sales much faster, and we’ve improved our ability to report Marketing attribution.

In addition, by leveraging Azure to extract data and insights from Marketo, Marketing Operations is now becoming more self-enabled to manipulate our data flows between Marketo and SalesForce, so we can be proactive, rather than reactive when it comes to monitoring and identification of production issues.

We now have the ability to create reports and dashboards about our Marketo contact database. We extract data faster, and we’re pushing all of marketing to think differently. The cloud is making us all smarter and more effective.

Joe: You are now using more turnkey SaaS services? How does that compare with custom software running on our infrastructure in terms of your ability to move fast and adapt to changing market conditions?

Lea Ann: Overall, we’re able to make better decisions, and make them faster. Since we’re using SaaS applications, we don’t have to worry about the infrastructure or tools, and whether we have enough processing capacity. For example, we’re using cloud-based data models for predictive scoring.

Because we’re a global company, we’re also able to tweak those predictive models and adapt them for each specific geo. And that’s important, because each geo has unique characteristics that have to be factored in so we can effectively reach and serve our customers around the world.

Joe: So how are you working back with your SaaS vendors when you need to make adjustments? How do you evaluate vendors?

Lea Ann: First, we have to look at each vendor from a global perspective. Any tool we use has to support all geos, because we are a global company, and we need that ability to support each region effectively.

We look for vendors who are really looking to partner with us on the service they are providing for our business. They must be willing to listen to our needs and tell us where on their service roadmap our changing needs fall.

All applications and tools we use must be stable and reliable, because we cannot afford downtime.

Any tool or app we use also has to be easy to use. We look for systems we can plug in, and use immediately without any training. We need real-time analytics, so we can improve the speed and quality of our decisions and be more responsive, because as I said earlier, it’s all about accelerating lead velocity while improving lead quality.

Our Marketing Leadership Team is focused on data. These cloud-based systems ensure we’re making quality data-driven decisions faster.

Joe: Have you experienced any new problems resulting from all of these new SaaS-based solutions?

Lea Ann: As our lead velocity has improved, as our ability to close the loop with our Citrix Insider customers, it’s leading to even higher expectations for marketing operations. That’s really a good thing, but we have to continue to focus and execute.

In addition, cloud based products and services challenge the team because the speed of delivery for new features comes faster than the business can consume them at times.  We are working hard to stay up on the enhancements and must prioritize our work carefully to be sure we can spend time to continue bringing these features back to the business.

It’s all about finding the right balance between continuing and even accelerating the speed of our transformation without sacrificing the quality of our decisions, our analysis and our execution.

Fortunately, I have a lot of great people on my teams who are constantly looking for ways we can improve, and that makes me feel good about our future.