Choose an enterprise technology brand. Now type in their URL and engage. “With what,” you ask? Exactly!

We live in a world of engagement through some of the most extraordinary and disruptive technologies. These very technologies persuade us to take risk with our personal information, our company’s financial and business data and in some cases our own well being. So why is it that we have an appetite for risk-taking with some of our most valuable business and personal assets but very little appetite for pushing the risk envelope when it comes to branding and creating a “legendary” site?

As I beat my head against the wall every day that I surf the “enterprise” web in search of extraordinary, I have come to realize that there is one key barrier preventing the most inspired executives from taking the leap to legendary.

Define then Design

It’s difficult to define a category to own. Beyond its technology categories, Apple is the standard bearer of defining and owning a brand category: exceptional design. It clearly permeates everything that is Apple, from communications to product design to experience. They left the soul in their brand by remaining ever vigilant in their quest for good design and recognizing our quest as consumers for an intuitive and delightful experience. The difficulty in most B2B businesses is building consensus for what it is you want to own in a category. The risk comes in choosing. But in not choosing, the average B2B site positions everything equally and runs the risk of owning little.

There are many companies who have defined new categories. Three examples of companies I have recently worked with come to mind. The first is Jive Software. As a collaboration tool they defined the category simply as “The New Way to Business.” Jive launched their new site in 2011 with a dramatic black background with provocative messaging and distinctive light writing. In stark contrast to its competitors, the message was spare and direct, “illuminating what matters”. The combination was effective in further defining the social enterprise.

SuccessFactors, the second company, created a new category-Business Execution Software (BizX). Business Execution Software elevated an otherwise complex human resources software suite to a business imperative. BizX aligns strategy, vision and individual goals across the enterprise to improve overall business outcomes. SuccessFactors’ site created an iconic representation of BizX with one clear message “It’s time to love work again.”

And now, Marketo. Analytics and lead gen on steroids, Marketo is transforming how companies generate revenue. The category defined is Revenue Performance Management (RPM) and this disruptive suite is changing the sales and marketing landscape. With it comes a dramatic change in their site.

Using graphic iconography to guide visitors through the value of RPM (opposed to a tome of marketing and technical content on the home page) the site engages visitors with a unique interface. Who says the enterprise web doesn’t have to entertain! The CEO, Phil Fernandez, and his marketing team dove in head first to this interactive transformation and I have to applaud them for daring to be different. Not for the sake of different, but for the sake of reflecting their own value props, “Break the Barriers of Traditional Marketing Automation,” “Own Your Seat at the Revenue Table” and “Outpace the Competition.” Transformation is a beautiful thing, whether it be technology or design.

I personally look forward to sharing these and other examples of companies breaking down the traditional B2B barriers of engagement on the web. I, for one, promise to do my part.

Can the website of an enterprise technology company really truly engage? was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

So, where did all the purple go?  Don’t get us wrong—Purple is still the core brand identifier for Marketo.  It’s not gone; we’ve simply opted for a cleaner page with more white space (or negative space as the design community thinks of it) and provided a platform for us to tell our story in a more meaningful way.  Marketo software is known for its ease of use, so we owed it to ourselves to apply this thinking to our most visible marketing asset.

We feel this bold and exciting new web presence better represents the type of forward thinking company we are.

Here are some of the milestones we crossed to get to where we are today:

•  In June of 2011 we engaged 1185 Design in Palo Alto as our design agency who came up with the radical new home page concept.
• The design process took 2 months, with three review cycles.
•  In August, we switched gears to launch our sub-brand, Spark by Marketo – that site went live on October 11.
• In mid-October, we resumed work on the main site and handed off the final design files to our programming team at Flickerbox in San Francisco.
•  Due to the innovative nature of the home page and the depth of the thought leadership library on the site, programming took three months, including an alpha, beta, and final review period.
• In January, working with the Executive Staff, we looked more closely at specific user experience elements and made refinements in several areas.
• Today’s launch comes seven months since the first meeting with the design team.

Depending on where you are with your site’s complexity, company size, politics, resources, and budget, seven months to redesign a site will either feel like an eternity or rather speedy.   No redesign I’ve ever been involved with is ever done hastily.   With or without enterprise content management systems, the process just takes time to get it right.  As marketers, it’s our job to make sure we put our best foot forward on all aspects of the site, especially when giving life to an entirely new home page experience.  This means we sometimes have to refine for perfection and accept that ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’.

In these first few weeks, we’ll closely monitor the site analytics and our SEO strategies making subtle or major adjustments based on the data we collect.  And in the next few months, we’ll be developing and rolling out global websites, another first for Marketo.

Please explore this amazing new site and let us know what you think!

Where did all the purple go? A ‘brand’ new B2B marketing site for Marketo.com. was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

To celebrate, we are launching a week full of festivities, each day giving away fabulous gifts that customers can select from our birthday bin. Here is how customers can get involved:

Monday: Marketing Powwow Day Network, discuss & banter with your fellow Marketo Community members in the featured “Marketing Powwows” happening in the discussion forum. Find a topic of interest and chime in! We’ll randomly select 100 participants to win gifts.

Tuesday – The Amazing Idea Race Have an idea that you’d like to see in the product? You’re in luck; we’re picking 2 of the top 10 ideas to be in a release next year. Find an idea that you like and vote or create a new one! The three people whose ideas have the most votes will get to choose a gift from our birthday bin.

Wednesday – I Love Marketo Community Have you had a fantastic experience with the Marketo Community? Share the love! We will choose a winner to dig from the birthday bin for each of the following categories:

1) Most Retweeted Tweet(s)

2) Most Creative Video

3) Best Blog Post

Thursday – Community Appreciation Day We will introduce you to the top five most active contributors from the last year. Each of these winners will also be inducted into the Winter class of our Marketo Champions! Hear their stories and find out how you can become a Marketo Champion too.

Friday – Community Scavenger Hunt Find the answers to all 10 of our scavenger hunt questions for a chance to win a fabulous gift from the birthday bin. We will pick three winners at random from all of the correct entries.

Next Monday I’ll share the results of the week, along with all of the winners!

Best,

Heather

Happy Birthday Marketo Community! was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

We received an overwhelming number of submissions, exceeding our expectations by over 150 percent!  We were also thrilled to learn how our customers are truly reshaping the way they generate and accelerate revenue through their game-changing use of revenue performance management technologies, including marketing automation, sales and marketing alignment and marketing analytics.

The “Revvies” are comprised of five categories that best highlight our customers’ cutting- edge uses of Marketo:

• Most Successful Global RPM Execution: Honors organizations that have successful Marketo implementations across multiple countries or regions, as well as unprecedented results within those deployments, including increased revenue, marketing ROI, global alignment and overall business impact.
• Most Dramatic Business Impact: Honors organizations that have measured exceptional results working with Marketo solutions. This includes increases in qualified leads, deal sizes and sales effectiveness, as well as increased conversion/new customer rates and shorter sales cycles.

• Social Media Marketing Maven: Honors companies that have achieved notable success in converting social marketing efforts into real leads and opportunities, or in utilizing Marketo for outbound social marketing.

• Most Innovative Revenue Engine: Honors businesses that are using an especially creative, effective or original Marketo deployment to increase revenue performance at their organization, or to revolutionize how the business operated at a fundamental level.

• Most Impactful Use of Marketo by a salesforce.com customer: Honors companies that have achieved the most unique and successful results through the combination of the Marketo and Salesforce platforms.

Although it was an extremely tight race, there were notable standouts that we feel are creating the most dramatic business impacts for their organizations. Drum roll please…

The Marketo Revenue Performance Excellence Awards Winners and Finalists are:

• Most Successful Global RPM Execution
  • Winner: QlikView
  • Finalists: Aricent, MobileIron

• Most Dramatic Business Impact
  • Winner: Navicure
  • Finalists: Dell, Equilar, Rimini Street

• Social Media Marketing Maven
  • Winner: Egencia
  • Finalist:  Navicure

• Most Innovative Revenue Engine
  • Winner: Sourcefire
  • Finalists: Modern Healthcare, Owlstone

• Most Impactful Use of Marketo by a salesforce.com customer
  • Winner: Serena Software
  • Finalists: BigMachines, MediaVantage

Congratulations once again to both the winners and the finalists!  You are all truly thought-leading organizations that are changing the world, and we look forward to many years of working with you as you continue to innovate with Marketo.

Marketo’s First Annual “Revvie” Awards Begin with a Bang was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

2011 Dreamforce Priority Discount Coupon Code – Save $100 over published prices was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

In March, Marketo announced a collection of APIs and connectors that enable businesses to rapidly access and leverage dozens of enterprise data sources on the Marketo platform. This collection includes Adobe Connect, Cisco Webex, Microsoft Dynamics, ON24, Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce.com, as well as custom and legacy applications. Connectors also speed deployment, so customers can go live with Marketo applications in days, not months.

Today, Marketo announces that it has become part of the NetScaler Cloud Gateway from Citrix, taking a step further to help mid-size and large organizations easily deploy and manage Marketo applications as part of their overall IT efforts. NetScaler Cloud Gateway centralizes all aspects of SaaS and Cloud application management, starting with the management of users and security permissions, monitoring usage and compliance. It also ensures operational integration into enterprise service desks, in order to manage escalations and other issues.

We believe this solution will benefit both administrators and end users. For example, when a new marketing manager joins an organization, the administrator will now be able to easily provision the user on SalesForce CRM systems as well as the Marketo Sales Insights and Lead Management products. From there, the marketing manager will be able to log into each of these applications with a single sign-on.

Marketo’s momentum in the mid-size and enterprise markets continues to accelerate. In the fourth quarter of 2010 alone, Marketo secured nine new customers at corporations with revenue over $1 billion. We also added 146 customers in the first quarter of 2011. As these customers increasingly rely on Marketo to drive their revenue machines, we will continue to ensure they see maximum value quickly and continuously by eliminating barriers to successful deployment and adoption.

Marketo becomes part of the NetScaler Cloud Gateway from Citrix was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

Three years ago Marketo redefined the marketing automation market with our powerful, yet easy-to-use, Lead Management solution. Since then, we introduced Sales Insight and Revenue Cycle Analytics, two solutions first of their kind, and have helped over 1000 customers accelerate revenue growth on average by 40%.

Today, we’re thrilled to unveil Marketo Next, our largest release yet, which includes major enhancements across Marketo’s Revenue Performance Management Suite.

Marketo Next helps companies improve sales productivity by enabling sales and marketing to be more agile, more social, more intelligent and more connected than ever before. It’s the next generation of marketing automation and sales effectiveness solutions!

Here are some of the highlights of the release:

More Agile: Efficiently execute and maximize returns on a variety of program types including live and online events

• Smart Events^TM : Maximize the ROI of online, live and hybrid events by attracting more attendees with personalized invitations and timely reminders, and converting more attendees to buyers with post-event lead nurturing. Smart Events^TM lets organizations run more events with fewer resources by managing the entire event process in a single flow and making it easy to clone and reuse events.

• Multi-channel program management: Go beyond email blasts or single ad campaigns. Efficiently manage complex programs across multiple channels, including online ads, video campaigns, mobile, virtual events, and social media.
• Spend management: Easily capture upfront and ongoing period costs for each program and intelligently allocate resource all channels by measuring ROI and predicting the impact each program will have on revenue.

More Social: Acquire Sales Leads and Improve Effectiveness through Social Media

• Social Response: Marketo now integrates with social listening platforms, enabling companies to trigger actions or elevate lead scoring based on the social activity of prospects in their database. Marketo also provides more accurate sales insights and targeted campaigns through integrated Jigsaw data that improves the quality of contact information for leads within Marketo lists.
• Social Sharing: Leverage social channels as part of the overall campaign distribution. For example, enable prospects to easily forward or “like” information that not only expands the reach of your campaign, but also provide valuable information on how your prospects are responding to your message.
• Social Analytics, Social Publishing, Sales Insights Social Feeds and much more

More Intelligent: Real-Time Program Effectiveness and Revenue Trending Analysis

Marketo has added several new analyzers and out-of-the-box reports, dashboards, and metrics to make marketing more intelligent when it comes to making investment decisions in programs and events. These include:

• Program Effectiveness Analyzer:                                                                                                                        Visually evaluate the return on marketing investments in terms of pipeline generated and revenue closed.
• Opportunity Influence Analyzer: Demonstrate marketing contribution to revenue by analyzing the programs and events that influenced the creation of opportunities and revenue generation.
• New out-of-the-box reports, dashboards and cost and return-on-investment (ROI) metrics: Analyze the metrics that matter with new reports and metrics, such as cost per lead, program ROI, etc.

More Connected: Integrates seamlessly with third-party vendors

As the single system of record for RPM, Marketo has extended its support for connecting with a broad range of solutions, including:

• Social business solutions such as Jigsaw and Bizo, which provide more insight into prospect’s behavior and demographics to run targeted campaigns.
• Webinar providers such as Webex, Citrix, On24 and Adobe Connect and live events providers such as Eventbrite and Cvent. Through these integrations, Marketo automatically knows who registered and attended, and automate every step of the event process within Marketo.
• Social connectors with Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin as a distribution channel for content, as well as for getting more information on prospects.

At Marketo, we hold ourselves to a furious pace of innovation, delivering solutions to help customers drive predictable revenue growth. With Marketo Next, we’re taking RPM to a new level.

Marketo Next will be available to all customers starting June 25, 2011. Like previous releases, it will be fully compatible with the existing product, and customers can choose to use the new capabilities at any time.

Stay tuned for more details!

Announcing Marketo Next, The Largest Product Release in Marketo’s History was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

My Team’s Best Bets – this is a new out-of-the box view that shows a Salesforce user the Best Bets for all users under his/her role in the Salesforce hierarchy. What this means is that now, as a sales manager, you can monitor how and if your reps are following up on the leads assigned to them. What better way for a sales manager to hold reps accountable for following up on the sales leads assigned to them!

Custom Views – you can now set up views in Sales Insight that show you Best Bet leads even if you don’t own the leads themselves. This is especially helpful when you want different sales teams to identify new and collaborate on revenue opportunities.

For example, a product sales rep and a services sales rep can work together to drive cross-sell revenue on an ongoing basis. The services rep can setup a custom view showing him the list of Best Bet leads for a complementary product. He could then either add those Best Bets to a special lead nurturing marketing campaign for complementary services offerings, setting the stage for a potential up-sell in the future. Better yet, he could also proactively reach out to the product sales reps who actually own those Best Bet leads to craft a bundled offer and jointly work the lead.

Custom Views can be setup by an end user or by an administrator on behalf of the end users.

Hiding Best Bets – What happens if a sales rep follows up on a Best Bet and discovers that the lead isn’t as ready to buy? For example, maybe the lead said they’re pushing their product evaluation out by a month. The sales rep can now use the “Hide” button to put the lead on hold. After 30 days, the system will show the lead in the reps Best Bets list again.

This ensures that the sales rep focuses on the Best Bets that he owns. So, there you have it. Are there any other thoughts as to how these new features will help in your organization?

Introducing Marketo Sales Insight 2.0 was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

A security breach can be defined as attacks that circumvent the security policies and practices of an organization. Data breaches can range from targeted exploits, such as spear phishing (targeted attacks designed to acquire user login credentials), to accidental loss of memory sticks or laptops. Regardless of the scale of the breach or exploit, you must take the proper preventative steps.

Security at Marketo

Marketo takes security very seriously.  Our CTO and co-founder is also our CSO (Chief Security Officer) so it’s clear why we’ve invested significant resources into security from the very start of Marketo.  We are continually reviewing and improving our security systems and processes.  Along with our annual third-party penetration tests as well as our own security scans with every Marketo release, many of our enterprise customers audited Marketo’s security capabilities before trusting us with their data.

Marketo is investing heavily to minimize the risk of breaches with protocols like customer data and server isolation and restrictions on employee access to data.  If Marketo were ever to be breached we would immediately implement our breach response program that includes steps to isolate the attack, minimize damage and notify our customers.

Working with Industry Associations

Incidents like the recent security breaches degrade industry trust in cloud solutions. That’s why Marketo is working to help the entire industry to improve their practices.  Marketo is a proud and active member in the Online Trust Alliance (OTA). The OTA is a collective of some of the best and most knowledgeable experts in security and security best practices.  With the recent breaches, the OTA has gone into overdrive and is working hard to develop comprehensive set of security protocols to minimize the possibility of breaches.  Marketo is committed to this OTA initiative and we hope it helps make the Internet a safer place for commerce and business.

Our Recommendations

Of course, security requires comprehensive programs, so Marketo recommends that our customers take appropriate steps and implement these best practices to secure their interactions with Marketo’s solutions, including:

• Deleting employee accounts that are no longer active
• Removing data that is no longer needed for business purposes
• Upgrading the most recent and current browser
• Deploying email authentication protocols DKIM & SPF

Marketo is committed to security of our applications and our customers’ data.  We do not take the recent breaches at other companies lightly and we intend to work with the industry to make the Internet a safer place for all of us.

Marketo’s Stance on Security was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

In addition to enhancing the Service cloud, Radian6 will also help enhance Chatter by adding real-time insights from across the social web to the activity happening within the company. It will also add more social listening capabilities inside the Force.com platform. But what does it mean for Marketo and our customers and prospects?  Here are a few answers.

What does this mean for Revenue Performance Management and Marketing Automation?

Revenue Performance Management is a strategy to optimize interactions with buyers across the revenue cycle to accelerate predictable revenue growth. It is about transforming the way that marketing and sales work – and work together – which means that the lead management capabilities must integrate seamlessly with the CRM system to enable a single optimized revenue process.

When done right, this means that as the CRM system gets better, the entire revenue cycle gets better. Today, a key part of revenue performance management is the ability to “listen” to what prospects do online, but it is primarily focused on listening to what they say on your website. With enhanced social media monitoring capabilities, the ability to listen and react to prospect behaviors will expand to many more channels off traditional corporate websites.

What does this mean for Marketo’s solutions, specifically?

Marketo boasts the best integration with Salesforce, including the ability to bi-directionally sync data with leads, contacts, opportunities, activities, campaigns, and custom objects.  This integration, combined with Salesforce for Twitter, allows Marketo to attach Twitter profiles and tweets to leads and contacts in our system. With Radian6, this ability will give Marketo greatly expanded B2B social media marketing capabilities, including an enhanced ability to:

• Monitor what prospects say on social sites
• Segment campaigns based on social interactions
• Trigger follow-up campaigns based on social media interactions
• Adjust lead scoring to reflect social conversations
• Notify sales reps when prospects and customers make interesting comments

What about Chatter?

Chatter is a great private, secure social network for the enterprise, but it has been primarily about hearing what internal employees are saying about your customers and prospects.  Our Marketo Sales Insight already augments Chatter with the ability to add key “interesting moments” and buying signs to the feed for each customer.  The more information Marketo has about the buyer – including all the new social signals from Radian6 – the better our ability to add intelligence to our interesting moments and incorporate customer intelligence in marketing campaigns.

Will Salesforce make other acquisitions in this space?

The short answer is, nobody outside of Salesforce.com executives really know. Personally, I think Salesforce will continue to make acquisitions “around” the marketing automation space (such as Jigsaw and Radian6) without moving directly into the category; I also would not be surprised if they bought an email service provider.  Salesforce has never shown much interest in a “Marketing Cloud“; they seem more interested in Chatter, the Force.com Platform, and Service Cloud 3, and I suspect future acquisitions will focus on augmenting those capabilities more than in marketing.

What do you think this means for Revenue Performance Management?  What other acquisitions do you think Salesforce will make?

Salesforce Buys Radian6: What Does this Mean for Revenue Performance Management and Marketing Automation? was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com