With Automate 2024 officially in the rear-view mirror, it’s time to discuss another inspiring customer story that was deservedly highlighted in our annual customer conference. The star of the show is Julz James, Director of Marketing Operations at 6sense. By leveraging Workato’s orchestration platform, Julz and her team were able to conserve resources on one of their most important and intensive processes. This journey resulted in a complete, top-to-bottom revamp and led to material gains in time savings, cost savings, and employee engagement.
The Challenge
With 6sense being a disruptive predictive intelligence platform providing innovative solutions for sales and marketing teams, effectively communicating that immense value to customers is mission critical to 6sense’s success. Fully aware of this, Julz and her team prioritized educating 6sense users through regular customer training sessions. Each customer session required a comprehensive setup; consisting of 3 emails, 3 static lists, 4 smart campaigns and 1 Salesforce campaign. In addition, each email required a custom subject line, header text, Zoom link, add to calendar links, and content with dates. And with Julz and her team running 100 customer training sessions a month, this intensive process created significant friction points, and actually required Julz to bring in agency help.
In fact, the monthly time-to-build of this entire process, not including Smart Campaign updates, was 87 hours. 87 hours of manual, tedious work that not only drained the team’s time but also led to decreased wellbeing and engagement in other initiatives.
The Solution with Workato
Julz was unhappy with how labor-intensive the current build process was, and began looking for a platform that she could adopt to decrease complexity. Through an iterative development process, Julz began leveraging Workato, starting with the updating of Marketo tokens.
Once she was confident in the functionality of that step, she moved onto cloning Marketo programs, creating Salesforce campaigns, and finally optimized her recipe to be task efficient.
The Results
When the dust had settled, Julz had transformed an 87 hour process to a 38 minute process, a 99.3% reduction in time. In addition, Julz was able to pivot away from the agency, resulting in $60,000 dollars in annual savings. These impressive metrics were not Julz’s most valuable takeaways, however; “I’m a teacher, and I loved seeing my team get to try new things. The biggest thing for me was to allow my team more time to follow their interests, to make marketing fun.”
Looking Forward
Julz is already looking to the future, and to further push the envelope of her collaboration with Workato. The Marketing Operations team at 6sense currently have 13 active recipes that have saved 2800 hours in FY25. With 6 more recipes in the pipeline, she hopes to break 5000 hours saved as a team. Julz also has ambitious plans to orchestrate other processes, including persona mapping, list uploads, program creation, G2 review requests, and CMO/CRO net new accounts tracker. She’s also interested in the rise of AI, and is looking forward to trying out Workato Genie, Workato’s agentic AI platform announced at this past Automate. Heading out with such ambitious goals, Julz is perfectly positioned to continue driving innovation and efficiency at 6sense.
