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)

In a [somewhat] recent post on Marketo’s B2B Marketing Blog, Maria Pergolino points to 5 separate infographics that help outline and visualize the facets of online marketing strategy, including:

The Noob Guide to Online Marketing

For the complete list of infographics, check out the full post.

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.

The making of OK Go’s new viral video – cnn.com

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):

Mobile Marketers Demand ROI

Quantifying returns needs most improvement

Mobile is at least somewhat important to the strategy of more than three-quarters of marketers in North America, according to a January 2010 survey by R2integrated. But barriers to mobile campaigns remain.

The greatest obstacle, the survey found, was difficulty in developing the business case for mobile campaigns, followed by inability to measure ROI and a lack of a mobile component to the strategic marketing road map.

Asked what the most critical area of improvement was in mobile, 43% of respondents said quantifying ROI—the top response.

Respondents said the main goals of their mobile campaigns were raising company awareness and generating leads. To that end, marketers were most likely to measure their success by an increase in customers or sales.

“It appears that 2010 will be a year of experimentation and education on mobile marketing as marketers struggle to come to terms with its practicality and ROI,” said Matt Goddard, co-founder and CEO of R2integrated, in a statement. “This shouldn’t suggest that marketers ought to table their mobile marketing plans, but that they should pay considerable attention to how they can connect the dots back to driving revenue.”

Most respondents reported that they would spend less than 15% of their budgets over the next year on mobile, though about one-quarter would spend between 15% and 30%. More than one-half were focused on mobile Website development, while 40% used apps for their campaigns.

The marketers surveyed considered iPhone and BlackBerry the most important platform for mobile development. Consumers may be warming up to Android, but only 7% of respondents to the R2integrated survey thought it was “very important.”

via eMarketer.com

I recently worked with an external PR team to develop the verbiage around a corporate social media education campaign, geared to an internal, employee-only audience, the point of which was three-fold:

• Provide a succinct definition and overview of social media/networking as a whole
• Provide an explanation of why it was important to us as a company and the benefit we hope to derive from our continued participation
• Provide a deeper dive into a select number of platforms which serve to represent the most important elements of our corporate social media strategy

In doing so, it occurred to me that, as a marketing professional immersed in the social web, it is easy to take for granted that what is a given to me is not necessarily so to those who have not make a career of new media. This was confirmed, of course, when I rolled out the campaign internally and began receiving a number of requests from coworkers who were interested in participating but were having a tough time getting started.

While many of these people were engaged on a personal level – sharing photos of their children or exchanging conversation with friends, old classmates, and the like – on popular networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, a question emerged; how does one extend their presence on the social web to establish their personal business brand and become a trusted advisor in their respective field?

As branding expert Heather Huhman points out, in her post entitled “Establishing Your Personal Brand on Niche Social Networks”, there are three basic principles that apply no matter where you emerge on the spectrum of social media.

• Don’t “spray and pray”

It’s easy to make the mistake of diving right in and branding yourself on dozens of social media sites, but keep in mind the adage “quality over quantity” and remember to remain selective in your choices. Social media is not a “one size fits all” solution and it’s important that you do your research to determine which platforms make the most sense and provide you with both a community and an audience that is receptive to your message.

• Don’t be all business

Selling yourself is important, but try not to diminish the value that others place on your message by inadvertently turning yourself into a 140 character digital billboard. Remember that one of the many values of these platforms is that they enable you to engage with your audience, rather than talking at them, so loosen up a little and have some fun; you have the opportunity to ask questions, be helpful, start a dialogue, and become part of the community.

• The rules are the same

No matter what platform you land on, the Golden Rules will always apply: listen, be relevant, mind your brand, engage, and give more than you get.

Why You Need a Strategy for Social Media

Planning and organization no longer optional

Social media has matured to the point where marketers are no longer asking whether it should be part of their marketing mix but how and where they should participate. A clear strategy for the channel is now necessary.

“The low cost of social media can lull marketers into improvising solutions,” said Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the Insight Brief “Five Reasons Why Marketers Need to Have a Social Media Strategy.”

“But taking account of the time spent debating, formulating, managing and executing social media campaigns—not to mention creating content—makes it clear that money is at stake and a well-thought-out plan is needed,” Mr. Verna said.

“Instead of researching the best ways to engage, many businesses create accounts across multiple social networks and publish content without a plan or purpose. However, businesses that conduct research will find a rewarding array of options and opportunities.”

—Brian Solis, founder and principal, FutureWorks, in a blog post on Mashable, January 11, 2010

A strategy is also critical because social media users will expect companies to be savvy in the social space. That includes making sure social marketing initiatives are in line with other brand marketing strategies.

“As increasing numbers of companies immerse themselves in social marketing, the sophistication level rises for all,” said Mr. Verna. “That creates an environment in which only the most organized can compete.”

A critical part of marketers’ planning is determining how to integrate social media into their companies. In the Insight Brief “Where Does Social Media Fit Within an Organization?” Mr. Verna analyzed how marketers are weaving social media into the larger corporate fabric.

Most companies find social media useful as a marketing and communications tool, but many companies also use social channels for sales, customer service, IT and more.

Although companies may use social media for several discrete business purposes, they should work toward integrating social media expertise into functional teams. Silos of expertise should be avoided.

“A Facebook promotion is only as good as the information that it feeds back to the sales, CRM, marketing or senior management executives who can turn it into a business gain,” said Mr. Verna

via eMarketer.com