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.

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.