How Pure Storage reduced execution from 3 days to 10 seconds & saved $400,000

Joshua Chen, the Global Campaigns Operations Manager at Pure Storage, set his sights on a lofty goal: centralizing all marketing campaign building. The upsides of this plan—well-managed, uniform global campaigns—came with a serious challenge: ensuring that this strategy could scale.

Already, Joshua had seen Pure Storage grow from 900 employees to over 4000 in just four years, which translated into higher sales quotas and more marketing campaigns to run. Marketing agencies assisted with the work of campaign building, but Joshua didn’t want to keep hiring on more and more agencies.

Agencies helped tremendously with Joshua’s workload, but there were still a lot of hours involved in managing them and QAing their work to correct inevitable human error. Even with help from agencies, it still took an average three days to complete campaign requests. It wasn’t a scalable solution.

A lot was on the line for Joshua: without the ability to turn around campaign requests fast, he knew that global marketers would bypass the centralized process and ask for help after they’d built campaigns on their own, which wasn’t an optimized workflow and only added to delays.

Joshua knew that there were a huge number of manual, repetitive steps involved in setting up a marketing campaign that didn't need to be completed by a human. He saw automation as the future, and the only way that his team could scale out their campaign building.

When he began searching for an automation platform, a robust, seamless integration with Marketo was essential. At Pure Storage, all marketing campaigns are built using Marketo, and Joshua knew that’s where the most automation would be needed.

Ease of use was another priority; Joshua wanted to be able to manage the platform himself without having to learn code. That quickly eliminated some of the more technical solutions, and left Workato as a stand-out option. Workato finally clinched the deal with its stellar customer service.

In the short time since Joshua went live in Workato, it has made a huge impact on global campaigns operations. The combined automation of his ticketing system (Zendesk) and Marketo has reduced the average time spent fulfilling marketing campaign requests from three days to 10 seconds.

As a result, more and more marketers are using the centralized system that Joshua implemented—he expects to have over 10,000 completed Zendesk tickets by the end of the first year, about 70% of which will have been automated in some way by Workato. The bonus? No mistakes in campaign creation, ever.

With less time needed to manually build out campaigns, Joshua expects that the team could save roughly $300,000 to $400,000 in agency costs. The alternative is an equally positive outcome: agencies are retained for higher-value, more complex work that drives better business outcomes.

The rest of Pure Storage has taken notice of Joshua’s innovative work with Workato. For example, the legal team recruited Joshua to help automate terms and conditions creation, which is required for events that promise promotions or giveaways. The result? Over 500 annual hours saved in costly legal time.

Joshua was even selected among 500 integrated operations employees for the “Game Changer” award, due to his groundbreaking accomplishments with Workato. He is excited about the progress that has been made, and knows that Pure Storage can achieve even greater automation success company-wide.