UNICORN FINTECH COMPANY PROFILE
Unicorn Fintech is a mobile - only financial - services startup created by a consortium of consumer
banks to resell savings, checking, loan, transfer/remittance, and other services from a secure
smartphone app. The company is venture - funded, and plans to reach profitability before a planned
IPO in two years.
Business issues and requirements
Marketing is responsible for acquiring new customers 0 through online, television advertising, and
email campaigns, and for cross - selling new services to customers through IM, email, and in - app
campaigns. Evaluating the success of these campaigns has been a persistent problem: although the
company can track revenue by product line, it can't attribute those revenues to campaigns: for
example, did a new loan come from onboarding a new customer, or by cross - selling a savings -
account customer? Marketing currently uses
crude, manual tools and guesswork to evaluate the quality and lifespan of new leads, and even the
deliverability of emails in its external campaigns. As a result, the department can't allocate spending
to the most productive campaigns, or decide how much different touchpoints in multi - stage
campaigns contribute to revenue. Operational processes to connect lead data to CRM and other
databases are entirely manual.
Staffing and leadership
Unicorn has fewer than 200 employees, and roles aren't always defined in traditional ways. Since
customer acquisition and cross - selling are primarily through electronic channels, Marketing and IT
roles especially often overlap. The traditional Sales role falls entirely to Marketing, and IT is
responsible for the Salesforce CRM system, Google Analytics, and a handful of third - party
integrations. The CMO and CIO work closely together on most initiatives, and budgets are typically
project - driven rather than fixed annually. Individual contributors to Marketing campaigns include the
Marketing Operations Manager, responsible for lead scoring and analytics. Key IT contacts include
the CRM Administrator and Web Developer. Incidental contributors are the Corporate Attorney, who
signs off on opt - in/out and DMARC policies.
Revenue sources
Unicorn earns commissions on financial services delivered by the banking consortium through its
apps, including fixed finders' fees for what the company calls "skips" - customers who initially engage
with Unicorn, but then "skip" to receive services directly from a consortium bank. Unicorn needs to
attribute revenue from these customers to its own campaigns; currently, it's impossible to attribute
ROI to individual campaigns, or provide documentation to claim commissions on "skips."
Current and aspirational marketing technology
Current Marketing technology consists of Marketable,an open - source lead management solution
supported by a set of spreadsheets and scripts developed in - house. Marketable offers lead tracking
and source attribution, but not multi - touch source attribution. Unicorn Fintech Marketing has
difficulty linking the different stages of customer campaign journeys, and relies on scripts to translate
Marketable's "sales alerts" into next steps it could use in multi - touch campaigns. IT has worked out
scripts to input Marketable qualified leads into Salesforce, but the system is brittle and often requires
manual intervention.
Current campaign management processes
A typical email campaign:
• Addresses a purchased (for customer acquisition) or0 in - house (for cross - sell) list. Purchased lists
range from 300,000 to 1.5 million addresses
• Is sent from multiple data centers in the US and Canada
• Includes an "unsubscribe" opt - out below the message
• Is static; there are no formula fields
• Uses no deliverability authentication, nor integration 0 with any email management platform.
All campaigns to date direct respondents to a single 0 landing page with the company's "all markets"
message. More sophisticated targeting is a high priority.
Current lead management and attribution
Unicorn's lead - management process follows
Marketable's "out of the box" defaults: lead evaluation levels 1 through 3, lifecycle stages
"unqualified" and "qualified." The qualification processes are manual, and highly subjective:
Marketing staff classify leads according to prospect email responses, including free - form comments.
"Sales" followup is by email forms prompting higher levels of engagement. The company intends to
phase out Marketable and replace spreadsheets and scripts with native features of whatever
solution set it adopts.
Attribution processes are binary: response to a campaign email or web visit is rated a success if it
results in a sale: there is no success rating assigned to TV ads that result in web visits, for example.
Cost are not allocated to individual campaigns.
The Marketing department plans to expand outreach to social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
in - house and third - party financial blogs), and wants to make sure it can assess the ROI of these
channels, and the overall social media program.
Current governance processes
Currently, the Marketing department assigns content development and campaign management
duties to team members on a campaign - by - campaign basis. All team members (and IT) have access
to all assets and tools, which sometimes leads to duplication and conflicts. The CMO realizes that a
more specialization will be necessary to support the social media campaigns, but hasn't decided on
the optimal organizational model.
Input of qualified leads from Marketable into
Salesforce is by manual cut - and - paste, assisted by scripts; inconsistency of input practices across
Marketing team members is a known problem; individual members have their own "go - to" fields:
where one member might check "TV ad" as Lead Source, another would put that in the comments
field.
CMO
The CMO's most important concerns are:
• The current solution has too many manual steps to scale with anticipated growth
• Without more sophisticated attribution, the company will overinvest in less productive campaigns,
and underinvest in better ones
• In general, analytics integrations are manual, slow, and unreliable
• The current system completely misses "skips" - customers switching from the Unicorn app to
consortium banks - an important source of revenue
• Documenting the value of Unicorn's Marketing processes is essential to the success of the planned
IPO, and millions of dollars in stock valuation hangs in the balance.
CIO
The CIO is concerned primarily with:
• The amount of time his team spends patching up Marketing campaigns and CRM data transfers, at
the expense of other, critical initiatives
• Quality and reliability of the Analytics information his team provides to Marketing
MARKETING STAFF
Marketing Operations staff concerns:
• Campaigns require so much work that they can't run as many of them as they need to
• Multi - touch cross - selling campaigns (for example, savings accounts to loans) with excellent
margins, but no way to know which campaign touches perform best
• Getting swamped with manual record - keeping; for example, spreadsheet mistakes take hours to
find and
fix
• Poor integration with third - party tools for preparing, sending, and evaluating campaign materials,
for
Example.
o Webhook not firing,
o Reaching API limit
o Synchronization errors with third - party tools and Salesforce
• Inadequate number of lead stages and qualification levels, making it difficult to evaluate lead
value, especially in multi - touch campaigns
Despite the absence of an external Sales team,
Marketing Operations would like to improve the granularity of their lead tracking, including both
lifecycle stages and quality levels, with "no score" and negative levels.
With help from the Adobe Marke to Engage Architects, Unicorn has an audit of their system and finds
the following issues:
• Mass uploading spreadsheet data with mistakes and failure to check with Salesforce data caused a
large number of Person records with the wrong Country field value in place. This reduces how many
MQL leads are being sent in a timely fashion to the right team in their CRM.
• Many fields in Marketo Engage must be hidden and field blocked. The fields are not currently
being used in day - to - day Programs, Lists, or Assets.
• The current Webinar and Tradeshow Event Program templates are not optimized. They have too
many steps for the actions captured, and do not use 'My Tokens' as effectively as they could.
Only one person is making these changes. There is no need for 'quick wins' In which order of
importance should these issues be fixed?