Generated registrations
Attendee to opportunity conversion rate
Of influenced pipeline revenue per webinar
SAP HANA is the leader in enterprise application software. As a solution, it provides a superior and flexible database management experience empowering companies to create advanced applications and next-generation services. That’s because SAP HANA can process transactions and run analytics in real-time with any data type — a necessary foundation for machine learning and predictive analytics.
SAP HANA burst onto the market in 2010 and became an immediate success in an industry thirsty for robust database management solutions. Functionally, SAP HANA provides a simple database server solution. But its flexibility also means it can perform advanced analytics, such as predictive, streaming, spatial data processing and much more. For high technology organizations, its solution offers an enticing foundation for future growth and capabilities. Best of all, SAP HANA works regardless of if their products reside in the cloud or on-premise. SAP HANA customers fell in love with it quickly and it became a leading solution in the database management industry.
Naturally, SAP HANA’s success was a great opportunity to celebrate its clients and accelerate its pipeline. So, it tapped into its satisfied customer-base and invited customers to share their success stories through one-hour, interactive webcasts.
After several webcasts, SAP HANA realized the platform it used dampened the volume of its customer stories. Audience sizes were restricted. Attendees could only attend if they used the right browser. Mobile attendance, whether on a tablet or a phone, made for a bad experience.
The platform SAP HANA used didn’t capture critical audience metrics, like resource downloads, interactions, viewing time and overall engagement. Finally, the old solution didn’t share the data it did collect with sales, hindering pipeline and revenue. All of these elements added up to a subpar experience.
The potential to give customer success stories a powerful voice was there. So was the promise of generating interested leads for SAP HANA’s sales team. But the group’s old webcasting solution simply didn’t have the ability to realize both factors. SAP needed a more flexible and scalable platform to match the scope, visibility and voice of their satisfied customers. It needed a solution that engaged attendees and gave their customer stories the best on-brand event experience possible.
“The whole intent of this program is to allow the customer’s voice to be heard. ON24 takes care of all the deliverables we need a third party to take care of to get the webinar done; we get to focus on finding the best customers to tell the best stories.”
Scott Feldman
SAP Global Head Customer Communities
After assessing its options, SAP HANA took the ON24® Platform and used it to support a bi-weekly series of customer-led webinars. Armed with better user experience, SAP HANA produced media-rich webcasts that could drive engagement with attendees anywhere on any browser and collect actionable data for sales to use in conversations and to fuel demand generation and lead nurturing efforts.
Attendees could directly interact with SAP HANA’s team through webinars thanks to the company’s clever widget use. Live Q&A sessions, chat, polls and surveys provided answers, connected customers with attendees and drove more engagement. Attendees could log off an event with a folder full of useful slides, templates and white papers thanks to the resources widget. Sales members could see which attendee downloaded which resource or asked which question, allowing them to seamlessly continue a conversation and guide a prospect further along the buying cycle.
With the right solution in place SAP HANA could finally:
• Identify, save and promote meaningful customer soundbites
• Highlight powerful SAP HANA platform topic areas
• Answer Q&A queries live or on-demand
With insights at hand and integrations in place to capture data, SAP HANA can seamlessly share information from its customer-led webinars with its wider marketing and sales apparatus. With a comprehensive approach to data sharing, the company can easily identify quality prospects and follow a lead’s journey through the buying cycle.
With the right webinar platform in place, SAP HANA’s customers finally sang the virtues of its database management solution. With only 20 customer-led webinars from various industries, SAP HANA:
• Drove unprecedented registration. With the right platform in place, SAP HANA generated more than 2,600 registrations, averaging more than 130 registrations per event.
•Influenced new opportunities. With engagement-driving tools and compelling webinar content, SAP HANA influenced more than 200 opportunities through its events.
• Made real revenue impact. SAP HANA contributed to more than $100 million in measurable pipeline revenue with its webinars in place.
With a better tool in hand, SAP took SAP HANA’s program and expanded the spotlight series to include big data, mobility and other hot topics—all in multiple languages.
“ON24 is the best broadcasting platform compared to the others. It is fully web integrated, allows the client to join using their computer and browser, any mobile device and just about any way they want to join.”
Scott Feldman
SAP Global Head Customer Communities
