Marketo made simultaneous announcements this week that the company has surpassed the 500 customer mark in just two years, and that it has closed $10 million in Series D funding to further accelerate the company’s rapid growth curve.

Phil Fernandez, president and CEO of Marketo, said the company added 119 new customers in the first quarter of 2010. He told DemandGen Report that the company has set an internal goal to grow its customer base to 1,000 by the end of the year, which would require it to step up its already rapid growth rate to an average of more than 165 per quarter.

Catering to the BtoB and BtoC marketing arenas, Silverpop recently announced the launch of a new digital marketing platform designed to combine email-marketing tools with its top-ranked marketing automation and lead management applications.

“For some time now, I felt that the solutions supporting BtoC and BtoB marketers should come together into a single, scalable platform that makes the unique tools of each marketing discipline available to all, and our clients have overwhelmingly agreed,” said Bill Nussey, CEO of Silverpop.

With more businesses looking to distribute their content and thought leadership out via social networks, Act-On Software has announced the addition of a new application called Twitter Prospector, designed to help clients automate the process of publishing content on Twitter and then measure and track the activity of prospects from the social network.

While there is no secret sauce that guarantees success ROI from a marketing automation rollout, a new report from Forrester found four key practices which proven to accelerate time to value on lead management initiatives: profiling and targeting, lead scoring, mapping content and nurturing early-stage buyers.

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Net-Results announced the integration of its marketing automation platform and lead management tools with Salesforce.com. Coupled with Salesforce.com, Net-Results' new application is designed to bridge the gap between sales and marketing with regard to prospect and lead handling.

The phrase “content is king” applies to a wide variety of media platforms, but it is especially fitting when it comes to crafting a demand generation strategy. In the Lessons From The Trenches Survey, recently conducted by DemandGen Report, early adopters of marketing automation cited better content as a top priority they would change if they were to lead a rollout at another organization. Specifically, 78% said they would “prepare the organization by building proper processes and content offers to feed the automation system.”

The intersection of sales and marketing keeps drawing closer as lead management solution providers continue to roll out new applications which provide sales executives with insights and new paths to interact with prospects.  Both Marketo and Eloqua bowed new tools last week which stretch beyond the marketing automation space into CRM-based, sales intelligence offerings.

At a time when most marketing and sales executives are searching for ways to accelerate the speed of their pipelines, the SiriusDecisions Summit once again helped to provide some direction on how best-in-class BtoB organizations are still driving demand and closing deals.

The Summit, held last week in Scottsdale, AZ, drew a packed house of leading executives from both sales and marketing teams, and helped to introduce several new concepts and terminology which will help to shape the priorities around sales and marketing alignment.