TheLadders Blog

Last week I attended the Marketo User Summit organized by our partners at Marketo, who help us with the simplification of our marketing efforts. This year, their attendance more than tripled, with over 1,400 customers. It’s no wonder they were named the fastest-growing private company of 2011 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. (You can see tweets for the event with the hashtag #MUS12.)

The conference kicked off with live deep-dive sessions of “Marketo University.” These were interactive, hands-on workshops and included pre-work for participants. The content was of a high quality and relevant, especially for advanced users. I wish I could have attend all of the sessions, and I had a hard time prioritizing them.

Some of the notable keynote speakers included Sue Bostrom, formerly CMO of Cisco Systems, Andy MacMillan, SVP, Products for Data.com and Salesforce.com, and Justin Gray, CEO and Chief Marketing Evangelist at LeadMD. Jon Miller, VP Marketing and Co-Founder of Marketo, led several break-out sessions and delivered an excellent presentation on the Lead Qualification process – after all, Marketo is best-in-class when it comes to SDR and sales teams.

My top five key takeaways from the Summit:

1. Don’t do social, be social.
2. The role of Marketing is shifting – make friends with Sales & IT.
3. If you can’t report on it, why are you doing it?
4. Less than 20% of inbound leads are “sales-ready” and typically need to be nurtured for 4 months.
5. When talking to your CEO/CFO, provide details of the ask and how the expense will make a difference.

(My 6th learning was to find out how to clone myself so I could attend all of the sessions!)

The culmination of the conference, of course, was The Revvies award ceremony, where Marketo customers were recognized for their achievements in the innovation, leadership, success metrics and business impact categories. TheLadders was named the winner of the Most Dramatic Business Impact award in B2B, which is a huge achievement. We implemented the software in November 2011, and I’m proud to say it had immediate impact on business and culture across the sales and marketing teams.

Kudos to the teams here at TheLadders who made it happen!

Inga Romanoff is Director, Enterprise Marketing for TheLadders and the Marketo Regional User Group Leader in New York City with over ten years of marketing experience in the U.S., Russia, Europe and Asia PAC. Inga is responsible for strategic initiatives in developing the B2B platform at TheLadders.

When our VP of Public Relations, Lisa Hagendorf, first asked me if I wanted to work with AMC’s The Pitch, I broke out in a cold sweat. It wasn’t the show’s fault — it was that simple phrase: The Pitch.

See, before I started my successful career here at TheLadders, I was an agency guy. I’ve worked at some of the biggest and best advertising agencies — Ogilvy, Euro RSCG, Draft and McGarryBowen. Throughout my agency days, I’ve worked on over 50 pitches. They can be exhilarating and they are always exhausting. Late nights. Bad take-out dinners. Intense discussions. Strategies. Concepts. More intense discussions. New strategies. New concepts. Arguments. Sometimes there was crying. Too many calls home, saying you’re still working. Finally, we’d finalize the concepts and send them off to production. There would be a light at the end of the tunnel.

But wait! Emergency meeting!

The new Executive Creative Director took a shower and now has a new strategy and creative idea. Swearing. Lots of swearing.

As soon as I became a Creative Director, I vowed to respect my teams and make sure I understood how they felt. But that goes out the door after a few late nights and the pressure you feel to win. No other professional business gets close to the insanity and pressure of “the pitch.” You have to be willing to put everything you have into it. No one wins because they brought in work they could do in one day. They might have done the work in one day but that’s because they only had a day to do it.

As I watched The Pitch, I felt the pain and excitement of the teams. A part of me wanted in. The competition showcased is really addictive and brought up old competitive feelings. The rush.

And it’s on AMC. Who doesn’t love AMC right now? They’re the most Emmy-recognized network on basic cable. Many of you know it as home to your favorite shows, including Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Killing and The Walking Dead.

TheLadders is happy to collaborate with The Pitch. How do we fit in? We’re experts on the elevator pitch, one of the key aspects of career advancement, and an essential part of a strong personal brand. The Pitch reached out to us because they know we can help professionals give the perfect Elevator Pitch and move their careers forward.

Learn more about perfecting your elevator pitch ›

Todd Hoza is Director of Creative & UX at TheLadders. When he’s not busy helping build the brand from the inside out, he’s taking credit for all the great work his talented team creates.

We live in a mobile world where business never stops. Most of us read emails, send texts, and engage with coworkers, friends and family on our mobile devices. It’s easy. It’s fast. It’s makes us more productive wherever we are.

So why are recruiters still reduced to staring at their monitors as they try to find the perfect candidate?

We asked our product and development teams that same question. During a “hackathon,” a few of them answered it: Recruiters can go mobile, too. With a lot of hard work, a mobile app was born.

Today, TheLadders is proud to launch our first mobile app for recruiters: “Recruitable™.”

TheLadders Recruitable mobile app will instantly connect recruiters to fresh “recruitable” candidates that match their job posts, so recruiters can contact great candidates instantly, wherever they are.

This is great for TheLadders recruiters and job seekers alike. It means more frequent—and faster—connections.

(For now, Recruitable is only for recruiters on TheLadders who have a full RecruiterLicense, and only available for the iPhone. Download Recruitable from the app store now.)

So what does Recruitable bring to the table for recruiters?

Instant notification of great candidates.
We spend a great deal of time away from our desk: waiting for the next train, buying special order lattes, or jumping between meetings. Recruitable aims to make these moments more useful.

Recruitable compares every new candidate who joins TheLadders to a recruiter’s existing job posts, and immediately sends the recruiter a push notification when there’s a match. Recruiters don’t need to keep checking email or even run a search. Recruitable simply hands them great candidates.

Key candidate info.
Recruitable provides the candidate’s name, location, title, company, and dates of current and previous roles. According to our recent eye-tracking study, that’s what recruiters need to make a decision on whether or not to connect with a candidate.

Recruiters quickly see new matches for their open positions, and job seekers are given a jump start on a job. Win, win.

Instant communication.
First impressions are important, but being first is more important. Recruitable gives recruiters the chance to send a personalized message to matching candidates at the moment they join TheLadders. That means both the job seeker and recruiter have a competitive edge.

We’re excited about Recruitable. We can’t wait to help both recruiters and job seekers find the right match, at any time.

Download Recruitable from the app store now or read the press release.

Dan Logan is a Product Marketing Manager at TheLadders. As a frequent host of company meetings, he’s used to answering questions and keeping up with industry trends. He also lives in Brooklyn… and loves it.

If you are looking for innovative ideas for driving revenue for your organization, a regional user group is the perfect format. You get an opportunity to get answers to the top questions on your mind and network with other experts in the field to find out about their methods.

This week TheLadders is hosting the first Marketo Regional User Group in New York. More than 20 marketing professionals from several companies are joining for a discussion about their experience with the solution. The topics include lead scoring and qualification process, nurturing programs and using Sales Insight tools to maximize the impact on the top line.

TheLadders just recently launched the solution while rolling out marketing campaign functionality, lead scoring and nurturing programs. Our biggest challenge was to tie all the data environments together to make Marketo tools effective so we reached out to the CRM team to create the infrastructure. Everything needs to work in synchronicity with each other. Currently our focus is partnering with Sales Leadership to refine our scoring logic, build process and drive adoption. With Marketo, it’s easy to set up reporting and the marketing team can execute campaigns with less manual effort enabling us to be more strategic, and focus on driving higher marketing and sales ROI.

Marketo Highlights

• Allows the marketing team to pass highly qualified, prioritized leads to the sales force at the right time
• Enables marketing to measure effectiveness of its campaigns in real time
• Gives sales team better visibility into marketing programs and to get tips and talking points on customer behavior
• Launched the solution in five weeks, immediately pushed several key campaigns to help achieve corporate KPIs and set records on site visits and all-time site engagement

We’re confident the Marketo Regional User Group will be a success, and we’re excited to share with the attendees—and learn from them—so we can all reach our customers more effectively.

Inga Romanoff is Director, Enterprise Marketing for TheLadders and the Marketo Regional User Group Leader in New York City with over ten years of marketing experience in the U.S., Russia, Europe and Asia PAC. Inga is responsible for strategic initiatives in developing the B2B platform at TheLadders.