Marketo: Make The Most of Sales Leads

Company:

Headquarters: San Mateo, Calif.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: Marketo Lead Management

Year Founded: 2006

Number of Channel Partners: 10 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Consultants

Why You Should Care: Marketo's SaaS-based marketing automation applications help businesses improve their lead-generation efforts and get their sales and marketing organizations working on the same page.

The Lowdown: There is a major disconnect today within many businesses between marketing and sales departments. "Eighty percent of sales leads generated by marketing are never used by sales," said Phil Fernandez, president and CEO of software vendor Marketo. That's because the leads are of poor quality, aren't trusted by sales representatives or simply aren't properly communicated between the two organizations, he said.

Sales representatives, meanwhile, spend 50 percent of their time prospecting for leads when they should be selling, Fernandez said.

Marketo's applications, delivered via the SaaS model, are designed to bridge that disconnect by generating and qualifying sales leads and shortening a company's sales cycles.

Marketo was founded in 2006 by Fernandez and several other former executives from Epiphany, an early CRM application vendor that's now owned by Infor. The company launched the first release of its on-demand software in early 2008, targeting both midsize companies ($50 million to $500 million in annual sales) and large corporations, and shipped the third generation of the product in March.

Marketo Lead Management automates repetitive marketing tasks like managing aspects of e-mail marketing campaigns, and manages leads generated by Web sites, e-mail marketing efforts and other sources. The application collects, analyzes, scores and qualifies sales leads and manages them in a database. The accompanying Marketo Lead Insight for Sales application alerts sales representatives when a prospect has responded to an e-mail and helps reps track lead activity.

The recent Marketo Lead Management 3.0 release offers enhanced prospect-targeting and profiling capabilities, new data quality management features an improved user interface.

Marketo has allied itself closely with CRM powerhouse Salesforce.com. Both Marketo applications work with Salesforce, and the vendor is part of Salesforce's AppExchange program. Right now, all of Marketo's customers are Salesforce users, Fernandez said.

About 20 percent of Marketo's sales today are through channel partners, largely marketing service providers and marketing consultants such as eMarket2, Indestructible Concepts and Media Logic, according to Fernandez. Marketo hosts the applications while solution providers sell subscriptions, manage the customer relationship, provide support and build services around the software. Marketo also lets partners white-label the service.

Fernandez envisions channel sales growing to between 40 and 50 percent of Marketo's revenue by the end of 2010. Leading the channel-recruiting effort is Amy Guarino, vice president of business development, who previously worked at Right90 and Biz360 and began her career at IBM where she worked for 13 years in various sales and channel-management roles.