Demand Gen Report

Act-On Software, provider of cloud-based integrated marketing platforms, announced today that it has closed $10 Million Series C funding, led by Trinity Ventures. Existing venture partners Voyager Capital and U.S. Venture Partners, were part of the round, as well as participation from Stanford University.

The Beaverton, OR-based company has grown its staff by more than 200% since its first round of funding in November 2010, according to CEO Raghu Raghavan, and is on pace to exceed the 300-customer mark by the end of Q2 2011.

The sales and marketing funnel had three days in the spotlight during the inaugural DemandCon event, May 18-20 in San Francisco. Bringing together more than 60 industry speakers and approximately 300 attendees, the event featured blueprints of successful rollouts of integrated demand generation programs, and challenged the conventional thinking on the structure of the funnel.

In the opening keynote address, Jeff Ernst, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, serving CMO and Marketing Leadership Professionals, took a somewhat controversial stand by encouraging sales and marketing executives to “bury the funnel.” Ernst said it was a myth that the funnel represents buyer behavior and suggested that rather than aligning marketing and sales, organizations must focus on alignment with the buyer.

Pardot today announced the availability of its Spring 2011 release, which adds tighter integration with Google Apps as well as improved content organization and new reporting capabilities.

The provider of cloud marketing automation software for small and medium-sized businesses, set out to make the new release “easier to use and more flexible,” to accommodate the marketing preferences of all clients.

Tapping into the latest streaming technologies, Marketo took to the web yesterday for the unveiling of what CEO Phil Fernandez described as the company’s “largest release to date,” dubbed Marketo Next.

The new release boasts enhancements across the company’s Revenue Performance Management (RPM) Suite, with new functionality designed to enable companies to be “more social, more intelligent and more agile” than ever before. Specific new features have been added in the areas of event tracking, program management and social media monitoring and analytics.

Marketo also used the webcast of the live event reinforce the impact RPM solutions are producing for leading companies. The company unveiled The Marketo Revenue Quotient, a study of customer results intended to quantify the global economic impact of RPM.=