Networking Opportunity

Sure, online social networking is all the rage. But remember good old-fashioned in-person events, where human beings interacted face to face instead of Facebook to Facebook?

Crossbeam Systems does. And it's using them — coupled with a multitouch e-mail strategy — to spur interest from prospects and established customers.

The Boxborough, MA-based company markets a network security appliance which enables large enterprises and service providers to run a number of applications concurrently — such as firewalls, content filtering, and intrusion prevention software — on a single device.

The product's cost varies depending on the size of the customer's business, but the average installation runs around $200,000. The sales cycle is typically lengthy, notes Lisa Paglia, managing director for marketing services at Davies Murphy Group, which handles Crossbeam's marketing and sales functions.

Historically, the company has picked up leads through Webinars and in-person events such as seminars, luncheons and representation at targeted trade shows.

“We've found that when you're dealing with security and network professionals, there's a lot of discussion about infrastructure,” Paglia says. “Face-to-face interaction at events allows this type of engagement, since a lot of people always hang back afterward to discuss things.”

“The audience is sophisticated and does a lot of pre-sale research before purchase,” adds Paul Teshima, senior vice president of client services and support for Eloqua, which helps Crossbeam manage its e-mail campaigns.

Crossbeam holds about 150 to 200 seminars, luncheons and dinners per year, estimates Aimee Kreth, team lead at Davies Murphy.

The company doesn't focus much of its marketing on things like big brand-building print ad efforts, according to Paglia. “We really spend more money on generating leads at a local level.”

E-mail is the primary way Crossbeam invites prospects to events, working with channel and application partners to assemble invitation lists. “There's a high degree of customization, so electronic is the only way to handle it in a reasonable amount of time,” Paglia says.

For Webinars the average list of invitees might number in the tens of thousands, while an in-person dinner at a nice restaurant, for example, might only draw 1,000 people, or even a few hundred, depending on how targeted the topic is. Success is determined based on the percentage of people who respond and then, of course, attend.

“With a luncheon or dinner, we want to keep it more intimate. For example, we're doing a series of network security luncheons this quarter all over the country,” Paglia says. “Our goal is to get 25 to 30 end-user prospects in, so we'd invite 200 to 300 people to get that many. If we have more than that it becomes too big.”

E-mail invitations are sent twice. Once people register, they get another e-mail with details about the event location and time. A reminder goes out 48 hours before the function. “And we also do a phone call, because the invitees are very senior level,” Paglia says.

One recent campaign, “Generation Crossbeam,” was aimed at CIOs and IT managers. The promotion, which ran from March to September of last year, touted the company's next-generation security technology. Starting with a series of teaser e-mail blasts alluding to the product rollout, Crossbeam managed a 25% open rate among the audience. The teasers featured several clues revealed over a four-week period, and were coupled with a final trivia questionnaire. The launch culminated in a road show to several cities including Atlanta; Boston; Dallas; New York; Palo Alto, CA; Bangkok, Thailand; Munich, Germany; and Toronto, designed around a sneak-preview concept to pique customer and prospect interest.

At the moment, Crossbeam isn't incorporating direct mail into the mix, although it's been used in the past. When Crossbeam started working with Eloqua two years ago, it used the latter's products as an e-mail management system to measure open and clickthrough rates and do custom tracking of different categories. “We wanted to see which audiences generated the most registrations,” Kreth notes.

This year Crossbeam intends to do more lead scoring and incorporate it into the lead-management process, she says.

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