CloudPassage addresses the number one inhibitor to cloud adoption – security. The company provides server security products purpose-built for dynamic public and hybrid cloud hosting environments. The award winning Halo™ platform is a security SaaS that operates seamlessly across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments and can even be used on physical servers. CloudPassage is headquartered in San Francisco.

The goal of CloudPassage was to capture significant market share in a rapidly growing cloud security market. Joerg Rathenberg, Vice President of Marketing, was tasked to create a seamless business process that would allow large numbers of prospects to try out Halo for free and then upgrade to a paid version, once their cloud deployments grew.

The Lead- to-Contact conversion process within Salesforce was not able to support this SAAS business model. Joerg asked West Coast Consulting for help.

The West Coast Consulting team started with a business process assessment. They then integrated Marketing automation platform Marketo with Salesforce and implemented a complex lead scoring system that would allow flagging Freemium customers who were ready to move to the paid stage.

Completely eliminating the lead functionality, the consultants wrote custom code that created new customers immediately as contacts and scored them according to specific criteria. A custom trigger enabled a cumulative score of all contacts within an account, to rank accounts by their use of Halo and to provide the sales team with high value opportunities.

The new process automatically converted Freemium users into paid opportunities, which was at the heart of the SaaS business model of CloudPassage. New users would sign up on the company website, where they would be provisioned automatically with their Halo license. They were then continuously tracked and scored in Marketo, and their scored aggregated per account. An automatic assignment processes distributed accounts with upsell opportunities to the appropriate sales person.

The team created powerful dashboards that provided complete visibility into every stage of the sales and marketing funnel, enabling the executive team to take immediate action when performance metrics were out of bounds. The flexibility of the integration between company website, CRM, and Marketing Automation systems, allowed CloudPassage to roll out and manage major lead generation campaigns at a rapid pace.

Joerg said: “The campaigns fueling our marketing machine helped us to exceed the aggressive market share targets we had set for ourselves. It was a pleasure working with West Coast Consulting, who got us up and running fast and helped us implement SaaS best practices.”