Quest Diagnostics teams up with Sojourn to future-proof marketing ops & navigate a pandemic

When COVID-19 struck in March, 2020, Quest Diagnostics wasn’t completely prepared (nobody was), but its marketing team had been collaborating with Sojourn Solutions to streamline its marketing technology. As a result, Quest was able to rapidly scale up its customer engagement during a global health crisis, when demand for its testing services skyrocketed. During a recent webinar hosted by Oracle - 5 Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Marketing Automation - Quest’s Christopher Crowe, Director of Digital Marketing, and Karin Pindle, Senior Marketing Automation Consultant at Sojourn Solutions, told the full story.

The Problem: Too much complexity, too many silos

Crowe began by describing the disjointed, complicated state of their marketing ops prior to its collaboration with Sojourn, which kicked off in 2018. “Back then, Quest had multiple marketing automation platforms with minimal integration with our CRM,” explained Crowe, and all this complexity created a number of problems, including:

• Limited internal capability and a reliance on external agencies, which was costly and inefficient;

• Silos were limiting Quest’s ability to gain insights from its data and manage leads -- more cross-team sharing of leads and insights was needed;

• A multiplicity of platforms and silos were creating confusion and a lack of efficiency for the in-house marketing teams. Best practices and lessons learned weren’t being shared effectively.

  
  

Things had to change, and they reached out to Sojourn to help streamline marketing operations in order to drive more integration (of tech and teams) and more efficiency.

The chosen solution: One MAP (Eloqua)

Quest and Sojourn examined where the diagnostics company was, i.e., an inefficient and confusing place, and mapped out where they wanted to go in the future. Crowe sketched out what they wanted:

• A centralized “center of enablement” that all in-house Quest Diagnostics' marketers could draw upon for resources and support, one that would support cross-team collaboration as well as sharing of data, leads, and best practices;

• A reduction in the time and the cost involved for launching campaigns, including less reliance on external agencies;

• Clear lead flows into the appropriate CRMs, helping Sales and Marketing alignment;

• Increased maturity to support more campaigns and more campaign complexity.

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What became clear after these discussions about goals was that Quest “needed a single MAP flexible enough to offer all this functionality and also integrate with CRMs,” said Crowe. 

Quest and Sojourn agreed on migrating the organization to Eloqua, largely because, as Crowe explained, “Eloqua checked all the boxes for us in addressing our needs,” providing a single, centralized source of truth and customer engagement. Crowe noted that “the Eloqua campaign canvas is so user friendly that our people could get comfortable using it quickly.” In addition, healthcare companies like Quest must comply with strict regulations around patient privacy: Eloqua has great tools for HIPAA [the patient privacy act] compliance compared to other MAPs.

Implementing the solution

With the goals of the collaboration clearly defined and a chosen MAP in Eloqua, Quest and Sojourn began implementing the solution. They started migrating the multiplicity of data and campaign assets contained in multiple MAPs into Eloqua. As Pindle explained, this required numerous steps, such as the consolidation and streamlining of Quest's in-house marketing processes, bringing the entire, confusing array of multi-MAP instances into Eloqua (with just a few Eloqua instances) as “a single source of truth,” cleaning the data, and improving lead management so more and better leads could be funneled to Sales.

Pindle explained exactly how Sojourn approaches MAP migrations with a clear 4-step process: (1) plan and organize to identify exactly what data/assets need to be migrated and when; (2) set up, with APIs saving clients 75% on time and cost to migrate data/assets; (3) testing -- “we use humans to test everything,” Pindle explained; and (4) go live -- “we monitored Eloqua for Quest to quickly resolve any issues that might arise.” Of course, the migration and transformation process took time, but by the time the pandemic struck in 2020, Quest was in a great position to pivot and scale up its customer engagement with Eloqua. 

Results: Quest Diagnostics pivots & scales B2B Marketing during a crisis

Crowe explained that the 3-year collaboration with Sojourn and Oracle has made Quest a more streamlined and more productive marketing operation. The newly-implemented Eloqua MAP “helps us get the right message to the right customer at the right time,” said Crowe. ”Even though we’re running a much higher volume of campaigns and we sent 40 million emails in 2020, our campaign costs have gone down, so we’re doing more with less.” Campaigns are now easier for our people to create and develop using Eloqua, said Crowe, and they were able to ramp up customer engagement at a time when customer demand for their testing service was surging.

In the end, says Crowe, ‘we’ve seen significant gains across multiple revenue measures” and “we continue to use Eloqua to create rich customer experiences.” Today Quest has greatly increased its in-house capability, relying much less on expensive agencies to fill gaps in its capabilities (gaps that no longer exist).

What’s next: Driving more efficiency

Chris Crowe and Quest Diagnostics, with the ongoing help of Sojourn Solutions, continue to drive benefits and cost efficiencies using Eloqua, strengthening lead generation and alignment between marketing and sales, while enhancing personalization and CX in its approach to customer engagement. Quest has effectively navigated an unprecedented pandemic and is ready to handle whatever happens next.

Want to learn more about how your organization can drive more efficiency and future-proof your marketing operations, just as Quest Diagnostics did? Reach out to us here.

About Quest Diagnostics

New Jersey-based Quest Diagnostics (QD) is a leader in healthcare testing, offering an extensive menu of testing services that include COVID-19 testing. The Fortune 500 company has some 44,000 employees around the US, and engages a wide range of customers in both the B2C and B2B spaces.