Demand Gen Report

Marketo announced Marketo Financial Management (MFM), an application to provide marketers with an up-to-date view of marketing spend so that they can forecast accurately, find and reallocate program dollars and spend to plan. MFM's web-based, automated approach is designed to replace spreadsheets and manual processes to easily share and manage budgets from a single source, according to Marketo officials.

"Marketing organizations need a system for budgets and operational data, just like other departments," said Kristen Petersen, Director, Marketing Operations at F5 Networks, a provider of application delivery networking services. "Combining budget management and marketing automation in a single marketing platform is a big win for marketers. We expect Marketo's solution to help marketing improve budget oversight and simplify the relationship between marketing and finance."

Are marketing-generated leads really full of dreck, or is sales just unable to close deals? It is an age-old battle of wills that is getting more heated as the pressure is on both sales and marketing to meet ever-rising revenue targets. Many organizations are looking to Big Data and predictive analytics to help identify hot sales prospects, but weaknesses in their databases are hampering sales productivity.

More than two thirds (68%) of companies report struggling with lead generation, blaming marketing for not providing enough quality leads, according to recent research sponsored by Lattice Engines, a data analytics platform provider, and conducted by CSO Insights, a sales and marketing effectiveness research firm,

With a small staff and limited marketing budget, officials at online video hosting company Wistia were looking for automated ways to nurture their leads.

“We have been around for six years and have a small sales and support team, so we have always been exceptionally low touch,” said Ezra Fishman, Director of Marketing for Wistia. The company offers a free model – where users can store five videos for free – and a tiered paid model approach in which users are charged for additional video storage and bandwidth.

There are several challenges sales teams face throughout the various stages of the funnel process, including the need to improve efficiency and increase revenue growth.

A recent webinar titled The Funnel Is Not A Process: Understanding Lead-To-Revenue Management, hosted by SalesEngine International, a B2B integrated marketing and sales acceleration company, highlighted trends in lead-to-revenue management.

Marketing has traditionally been viewed as a cost center – money goes in, but it has been hard to measure the actual return on the investment. Marketers have been accustomed to speaking the language of clicks, page views, email open rates and other metrics, yet experts say these metrics don’t matter much to the CEO, CFO and others who are focused on the bottom line.

This dynamic is changing at a rapid pace, and marketers are being asked more frequently and more earnestly than ever before to justify marketing spend. According the IBM Global CMO Study, 75% say that return on marketing investment will be the primary measure of their effectiveness by 2015, but only half feel sufficiently prepared to provide hard numbers.