"Now, instead of running one campaign every few weeks, we're able to run multiple campaigns globally simultaneously. And that is an enormous business impact for Elastic."
About Elastic
Elastic is a global technology company powering real-time search, observability and cybersecurity for some of the world's largest organizations, with teams across EMEA, the Americas and APJ.
It works across all industries, but a substantial share of its customers sit in regulated ones, financial services, government, healthcare. That sets the bar for what any centralized ABM function at Elastic has to handle. Buying cycles for some of its solutions are genuinely complex: a security solution has multiple influencers inside a single buying group, with developers and practitioners among them, and each needs a different message. The content that reaches those accounts often can't be published openly either. It has to be controlled and password-protected, and Elastic's sales team expects that as standard.
The challenge
Elastic's problem was never the plan. Personalized content was a requirement of the market it sells into rather than an experiment: for ABM, and for its strategic accounts generally, the team needed content that connected with individual customers, and a different message for each influencer in the buying group.
What it didn't have was a production capability of its own. The work was distributed across outside agencies and internal queues, which meant execution sat with other people.
"With our current systems, it just was too hard to actually create that personalized content at scale, effectively and as quickly as we needed to, to engage with the market."
Getting a single landing page live took three to four weeks. Every page and every update ran through a chain of copy, imagery, an internal web ticket, QA and approvals, and a great deal of it depended on agencies, a standing dependency for a team that needed to move on its own terms.
Building the capability from scratch wasn't the answer either. The program needed to ramp quickly, and there was no time for a homegrown platform; the team needed something usable more or less out of the box.
At that build time, production sets the calendar rather than strategy. One campaign every few weeks was the ceiling, and personalization stayed concentrated on a smaller subset of accounts, not because the ambition stopped there, but because the production model did.
The turning point
To scale ABM properly, Elastic needed to cut build time and dependencies and put execution back in its own hands. That is the whole of the requirement: not a faster agency, an in-house capability.
Other platforms were evaluated and came up short on three counts.
"When we were looking at other solutions, we weren't finding the implementation to be as easy. We weren't finding the user experience to be as polished, we weren't finding the professional services to be as comforting."
Userled cleared three specific bars:
- No-code build, with delegation. Brandon's team could create templates themselves, drag and drop, and then give access to other people across the organization, the mechanic that turns one team into a shared capability rather than a new bottleneck.
- Deep integration with the Martech stack. Salesforce, Marketo and LinkedIn, so a personalized landing page and the ads pointing at it connect directly to the systems Elastic already runs on.
- Access control and authentication. The requirement that had no answer before: sales could share account-specific content knowing only the intended audience could open it.
"Being able to connect Userled with Salesforce, Marketo and LinkedIn was an absolute game changer."
The platform itself carried some of the decision.
"When you see the Userled platform, it automatically gives you confidence, because it's intuitive, it's easy to use, it's easy to pick up on, it's powerful, it has the agentic experiences that we would expect from a platform like that, and it really feels best in class."
The transformation
Elastic now runs ABM as a center of excellence: one function, more than 100 landing pages live across over 40 accounts, spanning a diverse set of industries.
What makes it a capability rather than a longer campaign list is how many dimensions it covers at once. Campaigns run globally and simultaneously instead of sequentially, across EMEA, the Americas and APJ, by industry, and around key events. And within a single account, the team builds personalized content for each persona around the buying center, so the security influencer, the developer and the practitioner each meet a message pitched at what they actually need, at the same time.
Launch time has collapsed from three to four weeks to minutes. Cadence is no longer set by production: instead of one campaign every few weeks, multiple campaigns run in parallel.
Access control changed what sales can put in front of an account. Account-specific material now sits behind a password, so the content that matters most in a regulated-industry sale is shareable rather than withheld.
And the engagement data has changed the relationship between the two teams.
"The insights that we're getting out of Userled are really helping build a stronger relationship between our marketing and our sales team. It helps the sales cycle move quicker, and it helps us get in front of opportunities that maybe we wouldn't have known existed before."
The results
The clearest measure of the shift isn't a single metric, it's what Elastic's ABM motion can now do that it couldn't before:
- ABM production owned in-house, with the agency dependency removed from the workflow
- Delivered as a center of excellence the broader Elastic teams can draw on, rather than one team's project
- Personalization at persona level inside a buying group, so multiple stakeholders in one account can be addressed at once
- Account-specific content shareable under password protection, as sales requires in regulated industries
- Campaigns running globally and simultaneously instead of sequentially, regionally, by industry and around key events
- 100+ personalized landing pages live across 40+ enterprise accounts and a diverse set of industries
- Page launch time reduced from three to four weeks to minutes, so campaign timing follows the account rather than the production queue
- Real-time engagement insight by stakeholder, account and content, shared with sales
- A faster sales cycle, with opportunities surfacing that the team wouldn't otherwise have known existed
- Marketing time redirected from asset production to strategy and orchestration
Asked what Userled has meant for the team, Brandon's answer went past the software:
"Userled has been way more than a tool for us. It's genuinely been a partnership. We're able to work very closely with the Userled team to define what campaigns look like, to help create the content that we need for our personalized journeys. And it's something that the broader Elastic teams have been able to take advantage of."
Looking to the future
The next phase moves the team further up the stack. With Userled 2.0 and its agents for Campaigns, Content and Insights, the work shifts from producing assets to deciding where to point them.
And the capability is spreading past the team that built it: what started in strategic enterprise growth marketing is now something the broader Elastic teams draw on, which is what a center of excellence is supposed to become.
"With Userled 2.0 and agents for Campaigns, Content and Insights, it allows us to act more strategically and to be able to focus on the execution within the market."
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