Marketing Automation & Dreamforce 2011 – Day 2
Joe Zuccaro (@joezuc), Allinio’s President & CEO, continues to blog from the Dreamforce trenches in San Francisco:
Day two of Dreamforce started off with a bang; mainly in terms of product announcements by Salesforce. There was a mind-boggling number of new products that Salesforce is launching, and their vision is quite ambitious (as if they have never been ambitious before!), with a lot focusing on the “social enterprise.” They are extending their Chatter product for general use and with their recent acquisition of Radian 6, they will enable marketers to better understand the “voice of the customer.”
Best Marketing Automation Session of the Day
There were some good sessions – Mathew Sweezey of Pardot did a good job standing in for a customer who could not make it at the last minute. In his session, “Can You Live Without Marketing Automation?” he laid down the fundamental steps of starting a lead nurturing program and having both sales and marketing define the processes in which a lead goes on the way to qualification. Telling the story of his client, Apprenda, he was able to frankly explain the steps they took to get a solid nurturing program going.
Also on the agenda today was ”Drive More Revenue – Be Everywhere Your Customers Are, All the Time!” given by Bryan Brown (@getvision), Director of Product Strategy, and Loren McDonald (@LorenMcDonald), of Silverpop did a great job giving tips on how to have your company be as ubiquitous as possible on the Internet, including have people use social signup for your content, give them email opt-ins on your company Facebook page, and use QR codes to drive the offline to online.
But the Best Marketing Automation Session of the Day was “10 Strategies for Content Marketing, Events, & Marketing Automation Success.”
Jon Miller (@jonmiller2), Chief Marketing Officer at Marketo and Ann Handley (@marketingprofs), Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs and co-author of Content Rules gave a great talk. I’ve seen both of them speak solo over the past year but together they weaved a great story for Marketers regarding Marketing Automation.
Each attendee received a complimentary copy of Ann’s book and heard her encourage them to “re-imagine” their content. Jon told to the audience some interesting statistics – generally, over 80% of their website visitors aren’t in a true buying mode; that Marketo invests a lot in marketing – for every $1.00 of Sales budget, there is $1.08 of Marketing budget, and 89% of Marketo’s revenue is due to marketing. The synergy of both top-notch speakers was terrific and I hope that the audience realized they were getting their Dreamforce registration fee’s worth all in one session.
Marketing Automation Buzz of the Day
This is probably leaning more towards “gossip” or rumor than actual “buzz,” but several salespeople from a couple of the Marketing Automation vendors told me that Salesforce was going to buy a Marketing Automation solution for their sales team, and that they told one of the sponsors that they did not make the shortlist. I could not find vendor person outside of sales to confirm/deny that, but I guess I’m just blogging about the “buzz” without regard to its veracity, because, after all, it’s “buzz.” We’ll see if there’s any more buzz to this on Thursday.
And, while this is not Marketing Automation, having Metallica play for a corporation for the first time in its illustrious history was definintely appreciated by the crowd:
Most Fun Marketing Automation Doo-Dad of the Day
Marketo’s series of pendulums at their exhibit hall booth:
Most Fun Non-Marketing Automation Doo-Dad of the Day
Bunchball‘s “wind-up man” booth SWAG: