It’s pretty well known that B2B companies have been comparatively slow to adopt social media strategies. They certainly have lagged their B2C counterparts in terms of jumping into the social media marketing space over the last few years. But now more than ever, it’s time to put the pedal to the metal. Why? Revenue. Simply put, the saying “he who hesitates is lost” couldn’t be truer right now – and the loss can be measured in cold, hard cash.

There are a number of reasons for B2B companies’ seeming reluctance to employ social media in their marketing. First, companies that sell to other companies tend to be more conservative and bottom-line focused overall, and measuring the impact and results of social media strategies is still a work in progress. Relatedly, many B2B companies have believed that the social media phenomenon is mainly about networking and sharing likes and photos with friends on sites like Facebook – not about driving inbound interest and improving demand generation. For example, think about Facebook’s IPO and its potential $100-billion valuation. The darling social network behemoth is going to be under more pressure to increase profits to match that price tag, which means they will need to up the ante in regards to its own advertising options…and that includes catering more features towards the nascent B2B social media marketing market.

Also, as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn inevitably become better at capturing leads, B2B marketers are going to be forced to spend more time and money on them. The unveiling of Facebook’s data regarding its customer growth, for example, could be the nudge that makes B2B marketers take notice and beef up their Facebook marketing strategies. Indeed, more than 800 million users listing professional-related preferences is no lead pool to scoff at!

Social has been creeping into the overall shifts taking place in B2B marketing for the past few years, and early-adopting companies have seen success – as panels at forward-thinking conferences like SXSW Interactive and Enterprise 2.0 to online publications dedicated to the practice like BtoB Online can testify. But 2012 should be the year – has to be the year – that social becomes standard operating procedure. There’s too much money being left on the table otherwise.

B2B Marketers Need to Get on Board with Social Media… NOW! was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

In contrast to the raging success that’s leading to Facebook’s imminent IPO, many companies are still struggling to achieve their goals – RPM is a great way to get there.

We recently analyzed Marketo’s customers’ year-over-year gains in creating sales leads and efficiencies through marketing automation.  We found that their average number of opportunities had increased by over 30 percent, while their leads under management grew by a whopping 250 percent.  Revenue growth is a numbers game – the more you have, the more you grow. Plain and simple.

Behind the numbers are a lot of great stories.  I wanted to introduce you to one of what we call “Revenue Revolutionaries” – Zuora.

‘Subscription Economy’ Innovator Propels Growth with RPM

Zuora, widely recognized as one of the fastest growing Silicon Valley companies, has pioneered a new way for businesses to launch and monetize any type of subscription service. Zuora has been an early adopter of RPM as a primary driver of its business growth and market leadership.

To meet their ambitious revenue goals, Zuora’s marketing and sales team needed an RPM platform to fully integrate marketing and sales processes. They wanted to establish their company’s visibility in the sales funnel, drive campaigns and content to target prospects, and based on responses, allow their sales professionals to focus on the highest probability leads that would convert into sales opportunities.

With its RPM-driven sales and marketing solution in place, Zuora is able to manage every stage of its revenue cycle, and to focus its sales and marketing efforts on those prospects and opportunities that deliver the greatest revenue.

The ultimate proof is in Zuora’s growth. In four years, Zuora has created the Subscription Economy giving businesses a new way to launch, grow and monetize any type of subscription service. By using RPM to build a higher-powered revenue engine, Zuora has optimized its entire sales and marketing process, resulting in the company quadrupling in size and revenues, expanding internationally into Europe, and raising more than $82M from prominent investors to capitalize on a massive market opportunity.

“Revenue Performance Management empowers companies to transform their sales and marketing processes and achieve truly breakout revenue results,” said Jeff Yoshimura, Vice President of Marketing at Zuora.

Companies like Zuora are proof positive that Revenue Performance Management works. RPM is having a profound effect on corporations’ ability to grow more revenue, more predictably, and more profitably.

So, what are you waiting for? In 2012, RPM is ready to drive the same positive revenue results for you.

Cracking the RPM Code: A Look at Our Customers’ Growth was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

The media have been enthusiastic about our news, but today’s announcement is just the tip of the iceberg of a truly breakout year for Marketo. The broader business economy is hungry for ways to grow, especially given the current economic climate (I recently wrote on Forbes about the ways turmoil breeds opportunity). Indeed, there’s a new class of cloud technology that is transforming the enterprise, and business overall. Marketo is right in the thick of that transformative shift.

Here at Marketo, we are changing – and accelerating – the way businesses grow and succeed. The impact spans companies of all sizes and types. The enterprise sector has become the fastest-growing for Marketo, delivering value to major firms like McKesson Pharmaceutical, Dell Retail, Intel Corporation, Kelly Services, USG and many more.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, our new Spark by Marketo™  product is fueling rapid growth for small businesses in the US and abroad.

If you break down the impact we’re having on our customers, Marketo helps improve revenue dramatically across all sectors – customers often cite figures like a 40 percent increase in revenues, 12 percent uptick in contract values and more. When you aggregate those increases, our vision is to grow our customers’ total revenue by more than $2.5 trillion over the next three to five years (source: RPM Quotient Study).

Our investors are excited about this market opportunity, as well as our own best-in-class growth. We’ve reached this point by practicing what we preach: Just last month, we were honored to be named the fastest-growing company in Silicon Valley by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. We grew more than 1400 percent from 2008 to 2010, and we did it with our own technology and Revenue Performance Management thought leadership.

Today’s news is big for us. We view our total capital of $70 million to be a war chest to dominate the market, go above and beyond for customers, and transform the way that any business grows. I’ve long thought the rule for modern, agile start-ups is that you should begin frugally, and, when your business is taking share from competitors, you should double down.  Our investors concur – they don’t expect us to just sit back and admire our new capital.  They expect us to transform their investment into continued distinct leadership by broadening the technology we bring to the market, expanding internationally, and looking beyond our four walls to complement our own innovation engine.

As AllThingsD noted, Marketo is a “rocket fuel for sales.” That fuel has launched us to new heights, and we think it will power the growth of businesses worldwide for years to come.

‘Rocket Fuel’ and Today’s $50M Funding News was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

I was asked recently about what is the best strategy for competing effectively – and winning – in today’s hyper-fast, massively competitive business world. The answer that kept coming back to me was simply this: You’ve got to stay on the offensive. In the current business and technology environment, the minute you get rocked back on your heels and find yourself on defense, you stand a good chance of losing. At the very least, you will lose critical momentum.

The recent World Series was a good illustration of this thesis. Leaving aside the fact that the St. Louis Cardinals made several egregious “defensive” errors in its epic Game 6 win over the Texas Rangers, the Cards ultimately prevailed by staying on the “offense” the entire four hour-plus game. The Cardinals kept pushing hard to score improbable runs, even when they found themselves teetering on brink of series-ending outs – not once, but twice!

It’s hard to remain on offense when all seems lost, but that is exactly what winning organizations do every day. That truism is just as evident in World Series baseball as it is in business. Probably more than anything, to manage a business to real and enduring success in today’s fiercely competitive marketplace, you need to stay on an offensive footing.

How can you ensure that your company always plays offense and, in the process, stays firmly on the winning track? The following are some recommendations that will help you keep the offensive momentum rolling:

• Stay Agile – A key definition of agility is being “nimble” and “mentally quick.” Whether you are a GM leading a business unit or a VP of marketing driving the company’s brand development and demand generation, the ability to move (and change) quickly, and do so with control and finesse, is a key ingredient for a successful offensive strategy. For example, marketers today are inundated with a dizzying array of data and media, which must be managed with skillful agility to attract, nurture, and convert leads. By using advanced marketing automation and analytics software, marketers are strengthening their agility and increasing their offensive capabilities to grow revenue more consistently and profitably.
• Break Down Walls – The truth is that teams usually beat themselves, long before their opponents claim the winner’s mantle. There is no quicker way for a team to lose the offensive initiative and thus hasten its path to defeat than by failing to get its act together internally. The historically dysfunctional relationship between sales and marketing is a vivid example of this. In the history of modern business, sales and marketing have had a fractious and mostly unproductive relationship. This has put companies at a real disadvantage when it comes to closing more sales and driving increased revenue. But, when businesses adopt proven strategies like Revenue Performance Management, they are able to get back on offense by breaking down the internal silos and enabling sales and marketing to work more seamlessly and productively to drive revenue performance and results.
• Keep Stoking the Entrepreneurial Fire – Large corporations frequently are more conservative (and sometimes act defensively) because they have more to lose – they are compelled to protect profitable brands and preserve global franchises. The bigger these corporations get, the more they lose their entrepreneurial edge. Start-ups, on the other hand, usually play offense because that is what entrepreneurs do (and they have no legacy assets to protect). The truth is, however, that there are many examples of agile, hugely successful large companies that stay on the offensive by keeping their entrepreneurial fires stoked. Just think of major corporations such as Oracle, IBM, or DuPont, and you can see how staying entrepreneurial is not just the province of just start-ups. It’s also a winning strategy for smart multinationals.

The old saying goes that the “best defense is a good offense.” My advice to business executives looking to compete better and win consistently, is to forget the defense and keep playing offense. Seizing and maintaining the winning momentum is always the best hand to play.

In Business, Going on the Offense is Usually the Best… Offense was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

Here are some of the key findings from IBM’s global CMO survey:

• 78% of CMOs expect more complexity over the next five years, but only 48 percent are prepared to deal with that increased complexity
• 82 % of CMOs said they plan to increase their company’s use of social media
• 80 % of CMOs plan to increase mobile apps
• In answering the question of “what skills you personally need to succeed in the next 3-5 years,” only 25 percent of CMOs said they needed to acquire social media expertise, and 28 percent said tech savviness
• Instead, a majority of CMOs said they needed leadership, customer insights, and creative thinking

I’d be very interested to hear your views on what new skills and expertise (if any) marketing leaders need to succeed in today’s rapidly changing business, technology, and media environments.

For my standpoint, the IBM survey findings track with my experience in working with marketing leaders and their corporations, whose primary strategic imperative today is revenue growth. That said, I was particularly struck by the survey’s major insight regarding the CMO’s relative lack of influence in the enterprise – the fact that CMOs are “only confident of significant influence in promotion.” That finding certainly does not bode well for marketers (and especially CMOs), who already are fighting for an influential seat at the corporate senior management table.

The fact is that marketing has for too long been characterized as a cost center rather than being what it truly is: an essential investment in growth. But, in countering this misperception, marketing executives frequently are their own worst enemies. As I have written here in the past, CMOs can start to change these perceptions and expand their influence by adopting the hard-nosed language of business – terminology like revenue performance, gross margin, and profit and cash flow.

Better yet, CMOs can and should take the lead by helping their organizations to bust out of the old silos and adopt a holistic, metrics-driven approach to managing the entire “revenue cycle.” We call this Revenue Performance Management (RPM). RPM is a strategy and business process that optimizes interactions with buyers across the revenue cycle and accelerates predictable revenue growth. Just as Six Sigma and Total Quality Management reinvented supply chain and manufacturing processes on a global scale, RPM is now reinventing the marketing and sales process.

When their work is viewed within this broader revenue prism, CMOs will assume a much more powerful position in the corporate hierarchy. For sure, the CEO and CFO are going to look at the marketing department’s efforts in an entirely different way.

CMOs are now using advanced revenue-building solutions to enable their enterprises to become more agile, more social, more connected, and more intelligent. In the process they are not just grabbing a seat at the senior management table, they are really “owning” that seat.

IBM Global Survey: CMOs Need to Boost Influence in the Enterprise was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

That huge number reflected a 40 percent increase in revenues that Marketo’s customers could deliver as a consequence of deploying RPM. Talk about a data-point that focuses one’s mind (and hopefully actions)!

The study assessed how over 250 Marketo customers (nearly 19 percent of our current customer base) are faring by using the company’s full range of revenue-building solutions. According to the survey, Marketo’s customers are registering tangible business results across the revenue cycle, including:

• 22 percent increase in qualified leads generated by marketing
• 21 percent increase in qualified leads converting to sales-accepted opportunities
• 17 percent increase in sales win-rate
• 12 percent increase in average contract value
• 7 percent improvement in length of sales cycle

The study also found a sharp increase in marketing productivity as a result of deploying our RPM-related solutions.  On average, Marketo customers ran over 46 percent more programs and campaigns after a year of using Marketo. The top 20 percent of customers had doubled their programs, and 49 percent of customers had increased programs by 75 percent.

Clearly, by using these revenue-focused products and services, corporations are significantly expanding the scope and frequency of their marketing activities. And that leads to increased revenue performance and results.

How the RPM ‘Maturity Curve’ Correlates to Revenue Results

What I found particularly intriguing about this study was its examination of where customers are on the “maturity curve” in terms of deploying various aspects of RPM. Even more important was how that maturity level correlates with the companies’ revenue performance. A deeper analysis of the study data examined where our customers placed on the RPM “maturity curve” around these three revenue process categories:

1. Increasing flow of opportunities through marketing automation, optimized campaigns, and lead nurturing
2. Improving sales effectiveness through better lead prioritization, insights into buyers, and alignment with marketing
3. Optimizing investments in programs, processes and people across marketing and sales through better insights and planning

The bottom-line is that the research found a strong correlation between the customer’s position on the RPM “maturity curve,” with the business results they were seeing. Simply stated, the more you use RPM, the more revenue results you will put on the board.

For example, customers that deployed the full RPM solution (the pinnacle of the “maturity curve”) achieved a 29 percent increase in qualified leads. That is a notable increase from the 21 percent increase in qualified leads for customers who deployed just marketing and sales effectiveness solutions. And, it is a significant boost over the 7 percent increase posted by customers who deployed only marketing automation, which is at the starting point of the RPM “maturity curve.”

Where Does Your Company Stand in The Revenue Performance Continuum?

This RPM “maturity curve” is a useful analytical model in helping companies gauge where they stand in the revenue generation continuum, and what skills and additional process improvements they need to keep progressing up the various levels. Of course, the more companies progress on the curve, the more impact that has on their sales and marketing productivity, and ultimately their revenue results.

So the question is: Where does your company fall on the Revenue Performance Management “maturity curve?”

Answering that question could be the critical first step in accelerating your company’s journey on the path to a high-performance, high-growth revenue future.

‘Maturity Curve’ Shows Strong Revenue Gains for Companies Deploying RPM was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

During the past year, I have written frequently on this blog about the increasingly urgent global imperative for businesses to grow. Corporate executives have cut about as far as they can in overhead and expenses. At the same time they have drastically improved productivity. The one thing left to do now is to drive growth. And that means reeling in more revenues – more efficiently and profitably.

I expanded on this critical theme in a recent commentary that was published at Forbes.com. In the piece, I made the case that even with the recent (and ongoing) turmoil in the financial markets and macro economy, there is real opportunity for organizations and business leaders that are willing and able to seize the moment.

In the article I discussed the radically altered buyer/seller dynamic, which has resulted in buyers having more power than ever before during the sales process. To compete more effectively – and win – in this substantially different business landscape, companies need to make major changes in their sales and marketing strategies and tactics.

For the Forbes piece, I also outlined some of the powerful new innovations in marketing technology, sales effectiveness, and social media monitoring that have given companies the proven tools they need to increase revenue performance and drive outsized growth.

To be sure, these are challenging economic times. In particular, faltering consumer demand and confidence have cast a pall on the US economic picture. But even with all of that irrefutably bad news, there are plenty of examples of businesses – global enterprises as well as hard charging start-ups – that are embracing creative new ideas and solutions that are catching fire in the marketplace.

What do you see as some standout examples of companies and brands that have withstood the economic downdrafts and succeeded in spite of the challenging economic climate? I welcome your comments on this important subject.

Reeling in the Revenue: What Are You Doing to ‘Catch More Fish’ and Grow? was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

Being based in Silicon Valley – which has continued to burnish its reputation as a hotbed of US entrepreneurial growth and excitement – I frequently get asked how one builds a successful start-up. This question is even more urgent on a macroeconomic level as the US struggles to re-energize its job creating capacity, which has all but sputtered out in the past year.

The importance of start-ups to our country’s (and the world’s) job creation is well-established fact. According to the US Small Business Administration, small firms represent 99.7 percent of all employer companies and employ half of all private-sector employees.  These small companies generated 65 percent of the net-new jobs over the past 17 years.

The US economy overall is still suffering from weak consumer demand that stubbornly persists following the Great Recession. Without demand, companies don’t expand and hire, ensuring that unemployment remains high (currently at 9.1 percent nationwide).

Entrepreneurial Passion Drives Job Creation

That is the depressingly negative news. The good news is that entrepreneurs across the country, from San Jose, CA to Austin, TX, and Bethesda, MD to NYC, are still following their dreams to start new companies. The passion and commitment of American entrepreneurs, and the investors who risk their capital to stake them, really are the cornerstones of our business landscape and the entire capitalist system. Those entrepreneurs are building the companies that will continue to be the engines of job growth that I believe will eventually pull our economy out of the ditch.

In that spirit, the following are five recommendations for start-up success that I like to share with budding entrepreneurs:

1.  Aim High and Think Big – Don’t limit your horizons as you envision your start up dreams. Why not set a goal of truly changing the world with your ideas and business ventures? Even if it’s just your small corner of it. One of the greatest start-up success stories of all time is FedEx. When Fred Smith launched the then Federal Express, he was not limiting himself to just creating a new package delivery company. He thought big from the very beginning, building a corporation that literally would transform the global supply chain. FedEx’s enormous success became the self-fulfilling prophecy of Fred Smith setting out from the start to do very big things.

2.  Make Sure Your Product Passes Three Critical Tests – When you design your product and/or service, it should meet the following key criteria:

• It should be valuable for the customer (this may appear to be painfully obvious, but you might be surprised to learn how many new companies and their products don’t really meet this test)
• It has to be well defined (make sure your product’s value proposition is clear and compelling)
• And, it has to be different than the competition (be unique and differentiated…if you build essentially the same mouse trap, no one will buy it)

3.  Use Thought Leadership as Your Business Launchpad – When we launched Marketo back in January of 2007, we did not yet have a product to sell. But, we started immediately to educate prospects and build our thought leadership around what we eventually would call Revenue Performance Management. Through search optimization and creating and distributing high value content, my co-founder Jon Miller created sufficient interest and demand that by the time we had our beta product ready to sell by the end of ’07, we already had 15 customers ready to buy it. As you build your product and company, don’t wait to start sharing your thought leadership ideas and expertise.

4.  Drink Your Own Champagne – Again, looking back to the early days of Marketo, we “drank our own Champagne” by becoming the key beta user for the product we were building. By using our own marketing automation platform and employing the most up-to-date content marketing and social-driven marketing strategies, we successfully accomplished for our fledgling company what Marketo would eventually do for its customers. One of our most successful marketing strategies to this day is when Jon Miller presents Marketo’s “Secret Sauce.” It really is how we use “Marketo for Marketo.” As you build your product and company, make sure you gain first-hand knowledge in validating your product’s essential value and benefits. It is amazing how powerful that personal user experience will be in attracting customers.

5.  Drive Your Business With Velocity – I was asked recently if I advised emerging SaaS companies to focus on getting a larger number of smaller-sized deals, or a fewer number of larger customers. I firmly believe a larger number of small-sized deals is the optimal approach for most start-ups. The minute you launch your product, you want to have as many prospects as you can who are ready to buy it, or at least test it out. Each month, it’s critically important to increase your number of leads and keep the deal flow high and constantly growing. Building a successful company today is an entirely different ballgame than it was just a few years ago. To compete and win in the current turbo-charged business environment, you need to use velocity in everything you do – from product development and human capital development, to sales and marketing.

There is no silver bullet to being a successful entrepreneur. More than anything, it takes creative thinking, a passionate belief in yourself and your ideas, and the dogged persistence and courage to hang in there even when things get tough, as they invariably will. But, if you follow the above outlined suggestions, I promise that you will be much better positioned to survive and thrive in the always exciting start-up game.

Here’s wishing all of you huge success in advancing your big ideas and growing your new companies. Your willingness to put it all on the line to pursue your entrepreneurial dreams is the greatest hope for our country getting its job-creating mojo back again!

Five Tips for Building a Successful Start-up – And Creating Jobs was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

• An estimated 93 percent of marketers are engaged to some extent in social media marketing (Source: BtoB Magazine)
• 71 percent of U.S. web users have Facebook accounts (Source iStrategy Labs)
• Some 43 percent of users will “like” a brand on Facebook, and there is at least a 17 percent likelihood of purchase (Source: MarketingProfs)
• On Twitter, 25 percent of users will follow a specific brand, and 67 percent of those followers will purchase from that brand (Source: DigitalSurgeons)
• In the second quarter of this year, LinkedIn members grew to 115.8 million, an increase of 61 percent from the same quarter of 2010. In the same time period, LinkedIn’s revenue was $121 million, an increase of 120 percent from a year ago (Source: LinkedIn August 4, 2011 second quarter earnings release, its first as a public company)

The fact is –  “social” has become inextricably linked to business. Nowhere is this more evident than in what is arguably the primary role of the business enterprise: Creating, managing, and accelerating revenue growth.

The key social principles of connectivity, openness, and engagement are also core to Revenue Performance Management (RPM), the powerful new business strategy and process that is reinventing sales and marketing on a global scale. Indeed, RPM was founded on a fundamentally social approach to optimizing the interactions with buyers across the entire Revenue Cycle.

Dreamforce 2011 Heralds the “Social Enterprise”™

I have been thinking a lot about the growing social dimension in business and marketing as my organization has been getting ready for salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2011 event, which kicks off today at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Probably not surprisingly, this year’s Dreamforce is built on the theme of the “social enterprise,” a term coined by salesforce.com to reflect this growing trend.

The Dreamforce promotional message underscores the importance of this major business shift to social:

“There’s a post-PC revolution underway, and your customers have moved to a world that’s entirely social, mobile, and open. Has your company?”

That is an excellent question. It’s one that I have asked a lot on this blog. As I have argued here many times before, buyers today are on a very different journey. Largely because of social media, consumers are arming themselves with the information, advice, and intelligence they need to make informed purchasing decisions. And, they are doing so long before they ever even think about engaging the company or its sales people. According to SiriusDecisions, “70 percent of the buyer’s journey is complete before they ever contact sales.” (Source: Convince & Convert Blog, 6/15/11).

This social-empowered buyer is more in control than has ever been the case before in business history. Given the social media “ethos” of openness and transparency, we can expect this trend to continue moving in the buyers’ direction in the years to come.

There’s no question: by emphasizing the “social enterprise” this year, salesforce.com is highlighting a critical imperative for business competitiveness and success. The timing couldn’t be more appropriate or strategic for the 40,000 registered attendees who are looking for new ideas to catalyze winning opportunities.

‘Social Business’ Requires More Intelligent Tools and Decisions

Building on this “social business” conversation, I would include the importance of employing more “social intelligence” in the corporation. In an article earlier this year on Digiday, Rob Key, CEO/Founder of social media agency Converseon, defined social intelligence as the following:

“Social intelligence then is not only about capturing this vast conversation, but unearthing deep meaning and insights that can meet the myriad – and proliferating – uses across organizations. This is about finding the ideas that change organizations and products.”

The real game changer here is to adopt more intelligent RPM systems that enable you to think of marketing programs not just as spending, but as investments in revenue growth. Of course, if you’re going to make investments, you need to have the ability to track, measure, and report on ROI.  You need to be able to think through and identify what is going to pay back, and what won’t.

It’s very much akin to making financial investments. Your certainly would not manage your money based on hopes and dreams (or at least you shouldn’t!). Just as you need a constant flow of intelligent information to manage your finances, the same is true with effectively managing your revenue programs. In light of the recent wild gyrations of the global financial markets, the need for intelligently guiding financial decisions is not just an intellectual exercise.

At this year’s Dreamforce event, we will be joining with our salesforce.com colleagues, and all of our incredible customers and partners in attendance, to advocate the shift to  “social enterprise.”

We will also be making the strong case that by adopting Revenue Performance Management, corporations can leverage the most advanced social strategies to generate outsized revenue growth and profitable results.

Even more exciting, they will be well on their way to inciting their own Revenue Revolution.

‘Social’ and RPM are Closely Linked In Driving Outsized Revenue Performance was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com

In several previous posts I have been discussing the ways that marketers (and other business professionals) can gain and maintain a secure position at the senior management table. Taking hold of that seat means being more agile, social, and connected in your marketing activities, and in everything else you do to generate revenue and drive profitable results.

But, probably the most important prerequisite for owning that coveted management seat is to inject more “intelligence” into every aspect of how you develop, deploy, and measure marketing. Smarter information, better data, and intelligent insights are now watchwords for marketing programs that deliver bottom-line results and consistent, predictable ROI.

These more intelligent marketing assets and tools are crucial to building and operating a high performance revenue engine. They are essential to succeeding in today’s complex, fiercely competitive business environment.

You’ve no doubt heard the hoary business axiom, “Half my marketing spend is wasted, but I just don’t know which half.” Now, I realize you are probably groaning right now at the mention of that crusty old line. However, I bet that you would also agree that it is much truer than it should be.

Here’s another way of looking at the problem. This is from Marketo’s newly published “Definitive Guide to Marketing Metrics and Analytics”:

Do you know what profits a 10% increase in your marketing budget would generate? According to the Lenskold Group’s 2010 B2B Lead Generation Marketing ROI Study, the most common answer to this question is “I Don’t Know.”

Forty-four percent (44%) of qualified marketers have no idea what a 10% budget increase could do for their companies.

No one in business today should ever wonder which half of their marketing spend is performing (or not). Nor should they ever be clueless about the real impact a budget increase would have on their marketing results.

With more intelligent marketing metrics and analytics, marketing and sales teams no longer need to fly blind.

Taking Intelligent Steps to Transform Marketing Into a Revenue-Generator

By continuously measuring the effect they have on revenue, marketers are taking the necessary steps to transform marketing from being viewed as a corporate cost-center, to being a true revenue-generator. And, the minute your work is viewed within the revenue prism, you assume a much more powerful position in the corporate hierarchy. For sure, the CEO and CFO are going to look at your marketing efforts in an entirely different way.

A critical starting point in achieving this intelligent transformation of your marketing activities is to adopt 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.

RPM is all about making intelligent marketing – and revenue – decisions across the full range of online and offline customer interaction channels. These channels include everything from the web and mobile, to social and events.

An important initial step along the RPM journey is to have a clear ROI decision. You need to think about what are you doing that’s going to pay back, and what probably (likely) won’t. Smart new analytics solutions now enable marketers to glance across all of their marketing programs, or just a subset, to determine what’s working, or not. These intelligent systems allow you to drill into campaigns, webinars, trade shows, and search marketing to analyze how they are affecting the bottom line. You can also analyze how all of these activities are performing together.

Just as you might do in managing your personal financial portfolio, you can use these intelligent analytics solutions to rebalance and re-calibrate your marketing efforts to measure and maximize results. Driving breakout revenue performance doesn’t just happened on its own. It results from continuously measuring and improving every aspect of your marketing program. In other words, it takes being more intelligent in your revenue processes.

Knowing What Actually Matters in the Revenue Process

One of the hardest things in successfully adopting RPM is ensuring that the marketing and sales teams really work together to get the forensics about what’s going on every day (and every moment) relative to the myriad touch-points in the Revenue Cycle.  In a typical customer engagement scenario, there might be a total of 500 unique interactions.

The crucial question becomes: How do you know what actually matters?

Being able to accurately and rapidly answer that question can mean the difference in closing the deal, and losing the sale. Companies are now starting to use intelligent Revenue Cycle Analytics solutions (like those from Marketo) that help them to model the entire end-to-end revenue funnel so that they can understand what is happening at each critical point in the process.

These solutions provide the information and insights for the marketing professionals and the sales team to sit down together to fully understand what are the different events in that customer lifecycle that are making a difference. They also point out what needs to be addressed, tracked, and followed up on.  Naturally, the key is to do more of those things that are connecting and working, and stop doing the ones that aren’t.

This is not about pretty pictures and charts. It is about getting down and dirty…and using granular marketing and sales analytics and data to drive results. It’s about bringing even more intelligence to every aspect of your revenue process.

And that is where RPM again comes into play. By bringing together truly intelligent capabilities to generate more leads, more buyers, and more dollars, RPM enables marketing teams to clearly demonstrate to the C-suite how their efforts are positively impacting revenue.

Using RPM, marketers can now determine very quickly (almost in real-time) what’s not performing well, and then make adjustments to improve results. That’s real intelligence at work, driving significantly greater revenue results.

‘More Intelligent’ Marketing Drives Greater Revenue Performance and ROI was posted at Modern B2B Marketing - Marketo Best Practices Blog. | http://blog.marketo.com