Revenue-Driving Educational Tour Grows in Interest and Popularity, Secures Key Speakers and Sponsors

San Mateo, CA – September 15, 2011 – Marketo, the fastest-growing provider of Revenue Performance Management (RPM) solutions, today announced the guest speaker roster for its ‘Revenue Rockstar’ Tour, as well as new sponsorships from several industry-leading organizations. Officially announced in mid August, the fall rock-and-roll inspired tour has already seen a tremendous amount of interest, garnering over 1,000 registrants worldwide in just under one month.

Across the twelve cities, participants will hear from best-in-class marketers, sales professionals, corporate leaders and successful Marketo users who will shed light on everything from marketing automation and sales and marketing alignment to lead scoring, nurturing and marketing ROI. These well-respected B2B marketing and sales heavyweights will provide valuable insight into what it takes to demonstrate measurable ROI and become true revenue rock stars.

Featured Revenue Rockstar Speakers include:

• Seattle: Expedia – Jennifer O’Brien, director of NA marketing and Michael Robertson, director of premier sales
• Boston: Cynosure – Matt Taylor, digital marketing manager; Enterasys – Paul Green, marketing automation manager; HealthcareSource – Michael DiPietro, VP of marketing
• Atlanta: Navicure –  Phil Dolan, CMO; DecisionLink – Jim Berryhill, CEO
• Toronto: Algonquin College – Doug Wotherspoon, executive director of advancement
• Raleigh/Durham: iContact –  Sally Lowery, director of acquisition & retention
• Virginia:  NeuStar, Inc. –  Christina Kozlowski, marketing program manager
• Chicago:   TBD
• Austin:  Dell Inc. –  S. Nick D’Alessio, retail brand manager; Pervasive Software –  Erica Lanyon, senior demand gen marketing manager; Socialware –  Christie Campbell, director of marketing
• New Jersey (NY): Networked Insights –  Paul Dunay, CMO
• London: TBD
• San Diego:  FusionStorm –  Josh D. Krasnegor, VP of marketing
• Silicon Valley:  Appirio –  Kirk Crenshaw, director of marketing

“We are thrilled to have such an active, engaged and revenue-focused community,” said Paul Albright, chief revenue officer at Marketo. “With the help of our innovative customers and sponsors, we’ve designed this Roadshow to showcase marketing automation best practices and industry leading strategies to unleash the power of revenue performance management.”

In addition to an extraordinary lineup of speakers, the tour has also secured sponsorships from a number of leading B2B organizations. The tour’s platinum sponsor is InsideView, and gold sponsors are Bizo, LeadMD and ReachForce.  Media sponsors include CMI, LeedSeed and VisionEdge Marketing.

“We are very pleased to have a thought-leadership role for the upcoming Revenue Rockstar Tour,” said Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView. “InsideView’s customers are leveraging Sales Intelligence every day to improve the alignment between their sales and marketing organizations – with a performance increase that has resulted in the creation of countless ‘Revenue Rockstars!’”

The four-month tour includes stops in Seattle, Wash., Boston, Atlanta, Toronto, Raleigh/Durham, N.C., Virginia/Washington DC, Chicago, Austin, Tex., New Jersey/New York, London, San Diego and Silicon Valley. Click here for more information or to register for Marketo’s ‘Revenue Rockstar’ Fall Tour. The event’s Twitter hashtag is #RockTheRev.

Revenue Performance Management (RPM) Defined

Revenue Performance Management (RPM) extends beyond traditional marketing automation and lead nurturing technologies to optimize interactions with buyers across the revenue cycle and accelerate predictable revenue growth. It includes the full range of online and offline customer interaction channels, including web, mobile, social and events. Marketo’s vision is to provide the tools, thought leadership, and best practices to change how marketing and sales work — and work together — to help companies of all sizes accelerate predictable revenue growth.

About Marketo

Marketo is the global leader in Revenue Performance Management. Marketo’s powerful yet easy-to-use marketing automation and sales effectiveness solutions transform how marketing and sales teams of all sizes work — and work together — to drive dramatically increased revenue performance and fuel business growth. The company’s proven technology, comprehensive services, and expert guidance are helping corporations around the world to turn marketing from a cost center to a business-building revenue driver.

Marketo has been recognized by CRM Magazine as the “2011 CRM Market Leaders Awards Winner for Marketing Solutions,” the 2010 CODiE award for “Best Marketing Solution,” the “Best Sales and Marketing 2.0 Solution” from SellingPower and the “Best Marketing Automation Application” by Salesforce customers on the AppExchange. As of September 2011, more than 1,300 enterprise and mid-market clients globally have adopted Marketo solutions. For more information, visit http://www.Marketo.com, or subscribe to Marketo’s award-winning blogs at http://blog.marketo.com/.

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PR Contact:  Jen Howard | Marketo, Inc. | 650-240-4632 | jen@marketo.com

I received an invitation from Marketo last week for an on-demand webinar, ‘B2B Email Marketing and Lead Nurturing’. While I haven’t had a chance to view the webinar itself (busy, busy), the statistics cited in the email copy are the value of a lead nurture program are definitely worth sharing.

• Fewer marketing-generated leads ignored by sales (from 80% to as low as 25%)
• 150% increase in contact-to-lead conversion rate
• 2-3x lift in conversion rates on raw leads to qualified opportunities
• 20% more sales opportunities
• 225% increase in volume of prospects that convert to sales opportunities
• 7% points higher win rates on marketing-generated leads
• 6% points lower rate of “no decisions”
• 2x increase in bid-win ration
• 47% higher average order values

Related articles

• The Job of a Lead Nurturing Email (marketinginteractions.typepad.com)
• 6 Reasons Lead Nurturing Wins Over Email Blasts (hubspot.com)
• Learn Nurture Marketing … Or Else (customerthink.com)

I ran across an interesting post on the Google Reader blog announcing a new feature that allows users to follow content changes on website pages that do not have RSS capabilities. [Note: The post was dated sometime in late January so I am, admittedly, a bit behind.]

Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today we’re rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don’t have their own feed.

These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated. For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org’s latest products, just type “http://www.google.org/products.html” into Reader’s “Add a subscription” field. Click “create a feed”, and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.

- Liza Mae, Product Manager, Google Reader

Read full post.

Another email lands in my inbox today that simultaneous skeeves me out and irritates the hell out of me in the same breath; a sales rep from a website I recently perused indicating that they “saw you visited our website but abandoned your cart before purchasing [redacted]”.

Lead nurturing is a topic that is often top of mind for marketers in the demand generation niche. In a digital and social generation where customers lead the sales process, it is important that we don’t inadvertently cross the line between helpful/proactive and obnoxious/pushy.

As marketers, we work tirelessly to develop creative, inventive, valuable programs to build trust and credibility with potential and existing customers, thus enabling our brands to stay top of mind and attract buyers on their own terms.  Even with the best of intentions, we look around and see some of our peers mistakenly crossing over to the dark side, leveraging the same pushy tactics in new media that were never entirely effective in traditional media.

While I can appreciate the technology and benefits that emerging marketing automation tools have afforded the industry, I can’t help shake my head when I get that intrusive, creepy email from a sales rep reminding me that my online habits are anything but private.

Marketing automation tools give us the ability to understand the behaviors of website visitors at a very granular level. We can tell who is perusing our sites, where they work, how many times they have been there, which tabs they went to, links they clicked, collateral they downloaded, videos they viewed, the amount of time spent with each.

There is, without question, much to be gained from studying behaviors of our target audiences on the web – observing how they interact with their peers, their families, listening to and engaging in their conversations on social networks, gaining insight into the areas that are of value and that which is not. But we also have much to learn about the ways in which we utilize that information to enrich user experience without engaging in ways that are awkward, pushy, and intrusive.

While it may seem like a personalized email acknowledging a visitor’s behaviors on our site would be an improvement over the outdated email techniques in which we bomb the rubble with mass messaging without time or consideration into their unique situations, we must also look at it from the perspective of the visitor and take into consideration their feelings and communication preferences.

Before we run the risk of completely repulsing our audience, we need to stop and think about how we can communicate in ways that are helpful and authentic.

In the words of Rob Frankel, (@brandingexpert):