Fast
Cheap
Good
…you can have two of the three…
Twitter Updates
Error: Twitter did not respond. Please wait a few minutes and refresh this page.
Categories
Archives
-
Recent Posts
Marketo User Group Meeting
Our last new York Marketo user group meeting on August 21st had double the usual turnout and no wonder – the topic was the popular RCA, or Revenue Cycle Analytics product. We could barely fit into the meeting room!
Revenue Cycle Analytics reporting allows marketing team to provide deep insight into how programs, acquisition campaigns and leads perform very easily, without having to set up and run complex BI reports. This type of insights is highly sought in organizations and is not always readily available. By using the product, marketing people can impact business decisions and inform leadership team of the best possible scenario to reach maximum ROI and increase revenue.
Our guest speaker was TJ Kim from Marketo, Senior Manager for RCA and analyzers who did a product demo. The group had many questions and few very good discussions among users took place. I immediately thought, we should host several follow up sessions tailored to different user levels (current user, advanced, intro for beginners) – it’s a hot topic for marketers!
Key takeaways from the meeting:
- For attribution model to work, there needs to be a proper set up (e.g. lead source field, interesting moments, or progressions statuses)
- Beyond built-in standard reports, there is an option to customize your views within Revenue Explorer
- Marketers can leverage help of the Enablement Team from Marketo which is available as an add-on
- Get a bigger room for any RCA sessions!
As marketers, we need to make two major decisions: where to invest the money, and how to allocate internal resources to support your most effective programs. RCA allows to analyze marketing program effectiveness via multi-touch revenue attribution without having to run complex manual reports. This is exactly what gets us a seat at the C-table as we are able to quickly provide strategic insights into company’s investment in marketing.
Download Marketo Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics & Analytics here.
(For all NY Marketo User Group meetings we use hashtag #NYMUG .)
Inga Romanoff is a User Group leader for New York for Marketo, named the fastest-growing private company of 2011 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal.
Swan, Pike And Crawfish
I thought that this famous Russian fable happens to describe many of the business situations…
Once Crawfish, Swan and Pike
Set out to pull a loaded cart,
And all together settled in the traces;
They pulled with all their might, but still the cart refused to budge!
The load it seemed was not too much for them:
Yet Crawfish scrambled backwards,
Swan strained up skywards, Pike pulled toward the sea.
Who’s guilty here and who is right is
not for us to say-
But anyway the cart’s still there today.
by Ivan Andreevich Krylov
Posted in Leadership
Obstructionism
By wiki definition, obstructionism is the practice of deliberately delaying or preventing a process or change. It’s interesting to encounter an instance of that in the corporate world. As a recently independent consultant, I see the world from a different perspective – as an outsider. I am hired to solve a finite, specific problem and help company advance. Some of my scope includes best practices, process and employee training. So, why then am I facing obstructionism from some employees? Is it intentional?
I’ve seen that rarely do consultants get support in the company, no matter how essential their project. In fairness, I believe it is rather unintentional and companies today simply are not set up to support the greater mission, not aligned to business objectives. At the day-to-day level of an individual employee, the world’s top most priority is being “busy” with tasks and keeping their job. A consultant with possibly more knowledge and definitely more focus can become a threat. As a result, consultants may find it hard to reach people, get answers or even schedule meetings to discuss key components of the solution.
Naturally, one would imagine that any employee would happy to partake in an a hot initiative that the company is funding and augmenting with external talent but the reality is, people keep too busy at work, attend too many meetings, their scope is not focused on the overall goals of the company and therefore even some of the most important projects get queued behind other things.
Posted in Leadership
5 Key Takeaways from the Marketo User Summit
Last week I attended the Marketo User Summit organized by our partners at Marketo , who help us with the simplification of our marketing efforts. This year, their attendance more than tripled, with over 1,400 customers. It’s no wonder they were named the fastest-growing private company of 2011 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal . (You can see tweets for the event with the hashtag #MUS12 .)
The conference kicked off with live deep-dive sessions of “Marketo University.” These were interactive, hands-on workshops and included pre-work for participants. The content was of a high quality and relevant, especially for advanced users. I wish I could have attend all of the sessions, and I had a hard time prioritizing them.
Some of the notable keynote speakers included Sue Bostrom, formerly CMO of Cisco Systems , Andy MacMillan, SVP, Products for Data.com and Salesforce.com , and Justin Gray, CEO and Chief Marketing Evangelist at LeadMD. Jon Miller, VP Marketing and Co-Founder of Marketo, led several break-out sessions and delivered an excellent presentation on the Lead Qualification process – after all, Marketo is best-in-class when it comes to SDR and sales teams.
My top five key takeaways from the Summit:
- Don’t do social, be social.
- The role of Marketing is shifting – make friends with Sales & IT.
- If you can’t report on it, why are you doing it?
- Less than 20% of inbound leads are “sales-ready” and typically need to be nurtured for 4 months.
- When talking to your CEO/CFO, provide details of the ask and how the expense will make a difference.
(My 6th learning was to find out how to clone myself so I could attend all of the sessions!)
The culmination of the conference, of course, was The Revvies award ceremony, where Marketo customers were recognized for their achievements in the innovation, leadership, success metrics and business impact categories. TheLadders was named the winner of the Most Dramatic Business Impact award in B2B, which is a huge achievement. We implemented the software in November 2011, and I’m proud to say it had immediate impact on business and culture across the sales and marketing teams.
–>> Also posted on TheLadders blog
Posted in Marketing Automation, Marketo
How we changed the way we talk to customers
If you are looking for innovative ideas for driving revenue for your 
organization, a regional user group is the perfect format. You get an opportunity to get answers to the top questions on your mind and network with other experts in the field to find out about their methods.
This week I am holding the first Marketo Regional User Group at our TheLadders office in New York. More than 20 marketing professionals from several companies are joining for a discussion about their experience with the solution. The topics include lead scoring and qualification process, nurturing programs and using Sales Insight tools to maximize the impact on the top line.
TheLadders just recently launched the solution while rolling out marketing campaign functionality, lead scoring and nurturing programs. Our biggest challenge was to tie all the data environments together to make Marketo tools effective so we reached out to the CRM team to create the infrastructure. Everything needs to work in synchronicity with each other. Currently our focus is partnering with Sales Leadership to refine our scoring logic, build process and drive adoption. With Marketo, it’s easy to set up reporting and the marketing team can execute campaigns with less manual effort enabling us to be more strategic, and focus on driving higher marketing and sales ROI.
Marketo Highlights
- Allows the marketing team to pass highly qualified, prioritized leads to the sales force at the right time
- Enables marketing to measure effectiveness of its campaigns in real time
- Gives sales team better visibility into marketing programs and to get tips and talking points on customer behavior
- Launched the solution in five weeks, immediately pushed several key campaigns to help achieve corporate KPIs and set records on site visits and all-time site engagement
We’re confident the Marketo Regional User Group will be a success, and we’re excited to share with the attendees—and learn from them—so we can all reach our customers more effectively.
>> Also posted on TheLadders.com blog
