I had the opportunity to attend the Marketo Revenue Rockstar (#RocktheRev) event at the W Hotel (you know the one where the elevators make you disco) in downtown Atlanta. This was my first encounter with Marketo live… Here’s what I had hoped to get out of the session:
1) Connections with Users/Prospects/Staff
2) Sales Demo
3) Learn about new platform updates
4) Glowing Client Testimonials — Are there any other kind? 😉
5) New or more in-depth techniques for Marketers leveraging automation
Secret Sauce
Unfortunately due to my tardiness, I missed the first part of the session Secret Sauce for Revenue Growth by Jon. Jon Miller is one of the most notable (@jonmiller2) analytical marketers out there, so these presentations are worth paying attention to. (Jon, update your profile pic… I almost did not recognize you!) Fortunately, I’ve seen this presentation before, but it was nice to see some interesting updates including: Q1/Q2 2011 internal Marketo marketing stats, incorporation of lead scoring, marketing/sales hand off, content and nurturing (and not just through email).
Client Presos
Jim Beryhill (@jimberryhill), CEO of DecisionLink — Interesting to listen to a company like DecisionLink, offering solutions which help companies with their offerings value, be enlightened by not only the technology of MA, but the best practices that accompany them. I like a CEO who is always open to new ideas. The attendees were heads down scribbling notes when the CEO discussed DecisionLink’s “JumpStart” program built in Marketo.
Phil Dolan, CMO of Navicure — Dating and Content were the philosophy and theme of Phil’s preso. The dating metaphor was a good one as it related to selling. For those of you who were successful at it, you might take this for granted. For those of you who weren’t (like me), well, you should probably take note. Phil shares that the dating philosophy is about building relationships before selling. “You wouldn’t walk up to someone and ask them to marry you?” Also, he shared a nice “Team Infrastructure” slide outline the key players and functional roles they participated (you’ll have to sign up to see for yourself).
Good speakers and great opportunity to get to know their operations better.
More Sauce
The final part of the event was another presentation by Jon M. where he builds a roadmap on how Marketing needs to prove and sustainably improve to be taken seriously at the revenue “table”. Excellent (must have) material (it only costs a bit of your information).
Panel
These clients and sponsors Justin Gray(@myleadmd) from LeadMD & Rolf VonSosen (@rvonsosen) from InsideView joined in the panel discussion. I felt the best questions were ones about how to “win friends and influence people” in other parts of the organization. The strong theme of alignment and content management/creation were of the highest interest.
Sales Demo
After chatting with a couple of clients, I stopped by the post event sales demo to hear how prospects were evaluating Marketo. There were a few of us there and one sales person hosting the gathering. The demo revolved around building a campaign, something that Marketo does very easily. For those who haven’t seen Marketo in action, the process was very wizard like taking a marketer from one step to another. A bit of fact checking probably needed to be done about the competition, but then again, its “Caveat emptor.” Another prospect, evaluating Marketo and a competitor, had and asked about the sync with CRM. Marketo syncs everything! A win for Big-Data. There’s very little setup, but I wonder how syncing everything affects performance?
Networking/Cocktails Opp
These smaller local events are very much worth the time… In many ways, attending these events can be better than the hordes at Dreamforce. I encourage my clients (and YOU) to attend these as there’s a host of things to learn and good people to meet.
It was a good gathering. Good discussions with folks from IDology, McKesson, Clickfox, Heather W. at Marketo (kudos on a great event)!
Overall
I usually find the networking opportunity at these conferences to be more useful then the agenda, but not the case here. Both the sessions and the networking opportunities were on equal footing and well worth my afternoon. I definitely got what I came for. If you are interesting in attending there are a number of local Marketo sessions remaining: Check out the Marketo Revenue Rockstar Roadshow page.
On Tuesday, Marketo announced their small business offering named “Spark”. More about that here later, but in the meantime, check out David Raab’s analysis on Spark