Overview
For an enterprise with over 100 years of history, operational silos are often part of the foundation. Rockwell Automation, a global leader in industrial automation and digital transformation, needed to modernize a complex, siloed GTM engine to meet the expectations of today’s digital buyer.
Amanda Shelley, Global Marketing Operations Leader, oversees teams across North America, EMEA, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. Her mandate is to orchestrate people, process, and data to drive revenue efficiency globally, but a legacy infrastructure slowed speed-to-lead and obscured the buyer journey. Rockwell needed an orchestration layer that could bridge departments and automate complex decisions without constant IT involvement.
- Industry
- Industrial Automation
- Location
- Milwaukee, United States
- Interview With
- Amanda Shelley, Global Marketing Operations Leader
Solutions
LeanData Orchestration
Results
400%
75%
84%
Summary
Challenge: Rockwell Automation struggled with deeply entrenched organizational silos and a rigid Go-to-Market (GTM) infrastructure. A manual verification process for new accounts caused leads to stall for weeks, sometimes months, rendering data stale before it ever reached sales. Furthermore, reliance on IT for workflow changes created significant operational bottlenecks.
Solution: The Global Marketing Operations team implemented LeanData to orchestrate complex lead-to-account matching and routing within a new Salesforce instance. This transition shifted control from IT to business users and enabled the deployment of a sophisticated Buying Groups strategy.
The Challenge: Stalled Data and Operational Rigidity
Before transforming their orchestration strategy, Rockwell Automation grappled with critical breakdowns in their lead management lifecycle. The friction wasn’t just slowing down processes; it was actively eroding revenue potential.
- The “Unverified Account” Black Hole: Rockwell’s process for handling new prospects created a critical revenue bottleneck. Unverified records required manual review and often sat idle for weeks or months, delaying sales engagement and allowinTheg buyer intent to decay before opportunities ever reached a rep.
- The IT Dependency Loop: Updating routing rules or territory logic required IT tickets and development sprints, creating rigidity across the business. For global teams even minor issues could take 24 hours to resolve, slowing experimentation and limiting real-time market responsiveness.
- Fragmented Buyer Views: Operating within a “lead object” mentality meant that records were routed as isolated individuals based on campaigns or regions. This “push” method flooded sales reps with individual leads rather than providing a holistic view of the buying group in an account.
Transforming Lead Management with Intelligent GTM Orchestration
To break down these silos, Rockwell Automation deployed LeanData as the connective tissue of their GTM stack. This implementation coincided with a broader migration to a new Salesforce instance, providing a clean slate to reimagine their operational workflows.
Automating the Complex
The team implemented a dynamic model leveraging LeanData’s fuzzy matching capabilities. The most critical shift occurred in how the system handled unverified accounts.
By automating the logic and routing rules within LeanData, the operations team removed the manual “holding pattern” experienced with their previous system. Instead of sitting in a queue for weeks, records could be processed, matched, and routed based on intelligent criteria immediately.
“We have reduced that time by about 400%,” notes Shelley. “We went from weeks to minutes. Records are getting into sales hands quicker.”
Democratizing Operations
One of the most significant shifts was moving routing ownership from IT to the business. LeanData’s no-code interface allowed teams to visualize and adjust workflows instantly. For global practitioners, this removed time-zone and ticketing barriers, enabling real-time optimization.
“LeanData put real power back in our teams’ hands. They can adjust workflows in real time, and that autonomy has unlocked a new level of energy and momentum.”
Amanda Shelley
Innovating with Buying Groups and “Packaged Opportunities”
With the foundational routing architecture in place, Rockwell Automation began moving up the maturity curve toward true Buying Group orchestration. The goal was to move beyond the “lead” and focus on the “opportunity.”
Shelley explains, “LeanData helps us connect buying group engagement to pipeline and revenue, allowing us to see what actually drives impact and scale it.”
From Leads to Context
Previously, sales received isolated lead records that required heavy manual research. Today, LeanData delivers what Shelley describes as a “packaged opportunity.”
By associating leads with accounts and opportunities, sales teams gain a complete view of the buying committee, including who is engaged, how they’re interacting, and their role in the decision process.
“It’s more of a packaged opportunity where you have these contacts on the account,” Shelley explains. “You can pull in engagement, add individuals to the Opportunity Contact Record, and label their role within the opportunity.”
The result is more than time saved. Sales enters conversations with context, understanding who’s involved and why the account is engaged.
Results
- 75 percentage points: Increase in contact and account match rate from 10% to 85%
- 400% increase in speed to lead
- Average size deal increased from $88K to $162K with 2 or more members from buying groups
- Decreased average days in stage by 70 days with SLA’s as it relates to buying groups
- Eliminated IT reliance for routing changes, boosting agility
Driving Measurable Impact Across the Funnel
By removing bottlenecks and aligning data around the customer, not departments, Rockwell Automation built a GTM engine designed to scale. What began as a routing initiative quickly evolved into a broader shift in how the organization approaches revenue.
By moving from a lead-centric to an opportunity-centric model, Rockwell aligned teams around how B2B buying actually happens; connecting strategy, technology, and execution across the funnel.
“We quickly realized LeanData’s impact went far beyond our original use case,” says Shelley.
“You understand the end objectives and strategic priorities of the company,” she concludes. “And you can connect your technology to those priorities so everything works together. It’s really aligning our work holistically.”
About Rockwell Automation
Rockwell Automation, Inc. (NYSE: ROK), is a global leader in industrial automation and digital transformation. We connect the imaginations of people with the potential of technology to expand what is humanly possible, making the world more productive and more sustainable. As the world’s largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, we understand and simplify our customers’ complex production challenges and deliver the most valued solutions that combine technology and industry expertise. Our portfolio spans intelligent devices, advanced control systems, and FactoryTalk® software, complemented by consulting and managed services that drive operational excellence, sustainability, and secure IT/OT integration. Through cutting-edge solutions and strategic partnerships, Rockwell Automation enables customers worldwide to optimize production, empower people, build resiliency, drive sustainability and accelerate digital transformation.
