How Avid Successfully Replaced Its Legacy ESB Solution with Workato

Courtney Tobe, Senior Manager of Marketing Operations at AvidXchange, was tasked with migrating marketing data from Hubspot to Marketo. Along with it, Courtney saw an opportunity to modernize marketing operations and reduce some of the manual work involved in uploading leads.

For example, a full-time employee used to have to manually scrub supplier data, upload the end result into Salesforce, and send out direct mail. Direct mail was more expensive than email, but finding the corresponding emails for each supplier was too time-consuming, and so mail became the norm.

There were two main constraints that complicated the migration/modernization project. One, AvidXchange gathered data from a lot of different sources and not all of them were in straightforward places. Take customer data, which had to be manually ported in from the AvidXchange product to Marketo.

And second, Courtney had a timeline of three months to migrate data from HubSpot to Marketo and to implement sound and repeatable marketing data pipelines. Courtney wanted to move fast—but she also didn’t want to have to depend on IT to build or fix marketing workflows.

Courtney knew that she needed some sort of middleware technology in order to connect the dots between the new and former marketing platform (Marketo & Hubspot), as well as the various data sources that the team used.

In partnership with IT, Courtney conducted a formal evaluation of various technologies on the market. At first, the team prioritized companies that AvidXchange already had in place to best complement their ecosystem. However, all of these tools proved to be too technical.

Workato was a gamechanger for the marketing team. With Workato, Courtney was able to quickly create recipes and build the necessary workflows. It gave her confidence that this was a platform that she could build an entire marketing operations strategy on top of for the foreseeable future.

Since implementing Workato, AvidXchange has been able to save the time of a full-time marketer, or more than 2000 hours annually. Now, instead of manual uploads, Workato automatically uploads new supplier data, ensures they aren’t already in the system, and sources their email from Marketo.

This allows AvidXchange to market to suppliers using email, instead of always relying on the more costly direct mail. The cost savings from this change have been dramatic—AvidXchange has been able to save over $100,000 each year simply from deprioritizing direct mail.

Given that email marketing is faster and leaves room for A/B testing and quick edits, Courtney’s team is more confident that they’ll be able to improve their relationship with new suppliers. Best of all, supplier and buyer data is clearly divided in Marketo following a successful data transfer.

Recently, Courtney received the ultimate compliment when a team member assumed that IT had to be involved in her project, given its level of difficulty. Quite the opposite—Courtney has been in charge of the project since day one, and she’s excited to move forward automating more workflows.