hypanis.ru It’s All About Revenue

Strategic Guy

You are here: Home / Archives for It’s All About Revenue

by

What’s Hot at Eloqua Experience 2012 – Day One

Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua, steps out in an Astronaut uniform for his presentation to open up today’s festivities

As hundreds of modern marketers from companies all over the globe flock to Eloqua Experience 2012, we here at All About Experience would like to capture some of the excitement from attendees surrounding the user conference.

Despite yesterday being an important day with the Presidential election, marketers checked in early to soak in knowledge on several marketing automation best practices with the Eloqua platform. Yesterday’s jam-packed day featured valuable content from educational sessions such as new lead scoring programs, sales enablement tools and custom subscription management.

As a nice value added feature for attendees of this year’s conference, Eloqua has a mobile app from CrowdCompass to download. The app has some cool features such as 24/7 access to the event schedule and speakers, the ability to create a schedule based off personal interests, and the opportunity to view all speakers and sponsors.

Also, Eloqua will feature images taken by attendees on Eloqua’s official blog, It’s All About Revenue. Several of these images will be displayed on Topliners, Eloqua’s social community, along with the company’s Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter page. Attendees who want to have their photo(s) displayed simply have to share images on Instagram or Twitter using the event’s official Twitter hashtag — #EE12NA.

Today’s festivities will capture a ton of excitement for many attendees. Eloqua has already announced a new product offering called the Eloqua AdFocus, which allows marketers to manage targeted personalized display ads from the Eloqua platform.

There’s also a lot of anticipation from many attendees on today’s speakers as well. Many of the speakers will be sharing valuable insights on how their firms use the Eloqua platform to drive results.

by

Marketing automation in 2013: It’s more than just Email

Many companies today are using more than just email marketing as a tool to reach and engage with prospects. This is especially the case in the B-to-B realm where companies are using marketing automation platforms that lead score and lead nurture potential buyers in a competitive and complex marketing and sales environment.

As a response to this growing movement, several marketing automation companies are acquiring and integrating new functionalities for clients to use under one umbrella.

Take for instance ExactTarget, a leading global provider of email marketing, and its acquisition of Pardot, a leading business-to-business marketing automation software company. Clearly this unique acquisition indicates where the marketing automation industry is headed as more companies can now offer multi-channel functionalities under a single platform.

According to Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget Co-Founder and CEO, “With the addition of Pardot to the ExactTarget suite, we will redefine marketing automation and deliver the most scalable, comprehensive automation solution that helps both B-to-B and B-to-C marketers leverage the power of data to connect with customers across email, mobile, social media and the Web.”

As more of these acquisitions in the industry occur, what impact will they have on current marketing automation companies that already offer clients multiple functionalities under their platform?

Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua, provided his rationale to this question based on the ExactTarget purchase of Pardot on It’s All About Revenue, the official Eloqua blog.

Below is an excerpt on what Joe had to say:

While both Pardot and ExactTarget are good companies with leaders I deeply respect, the truth is we don’t compete much with Pardot, and we certainly don’t compete today with ExactTarget. Pardot has served the small business market well in our space and I expect them to continue to do that now that ExactTarget is bringing them on board. As long as the combined businesses sell the same product, we don’t expect to bump into them often.

And there’s some history here, also.

Three years ago, Oracle bought Market2Lead, a strong marketing automation solution targeting the business buyer. Not too long after that, Teradata purchased Aprimo, another well-known brand in the space. What we saw in both cases was that the consolidation didn’t lead to tougher competition. In fact, as the acquired companies were assimilated, they became less effective at competing with Eloqua. While I like Scott Dorsey and David Cummings personally, I don’t expect they’ll be able to change that pattern.

Marketing automation isn’t just about tools and technologies; it’s a fundamental shift in the way you market and sell. Modern marketers need more than a vendor, they need a partner with the expertise to train, educate and guide them through a constantly changing communication and business landscape. These consolidations, though, haven’t led to the kind of focus and dedication the enterprise needs.”

Ultimately, as marketing and sales cycles continue to challenge companies, marketing automation tools and technologies will continue to be a valuable resource for marketing and sales departments to connect with buyers. And for the marketing automation industry, offering the right functionalities that meet organizational needs under one platform will help determine who clients choose and remain with in years to come.

by

Heather Foeh, Director of Customer Culture at Eloqua Discusses Topliners

As we discussed in a previous post, it takes a lot of effort for a company to build an interactive online community to produce results. However, for marketing automation pioneer Eloqua, building and maintaining their own community called Topliners continues to be a fruitful experience for both community members and the company.

We recently had the pleasure of connecting with Heather Foeh, Director of Customer Culture at Eloqua. Heather was an Eloqua customer before joining the ranks and becoming an Eloquan in 2008. She truly enjoys helping customers achieve success and receive the recognition they deserve with the use of the Eloqua program.

In our Q&A below, Heather discusses the Topliners community in more detail, the benefits that members walk away with and examples of educating and engaging content that continue to draw in a crowd:


Can you provide us a little background on Topliners?

Topliners was created as a platform to help identify and increase “top-line” revenue for marketers and sales reps. It was developed around years of interacting with customers and learning how marketers think.

When we first launched, our original plan had three sections – Imagine It, See It and Do It. These sections continue to have a focus on inspiring creative marketing or sales campaigns, encouraging the community on what fellow members are doing, and obtaining details on putting ideas into practice.

As the community evolved, we added on the Code It section, where developers can effectively work with one another to build and deploy applications to connect with Eloqua.

Topliners was launched in January 2011 and we now have 6500 members and growing. Each day there are more conversations, more comments, more peer-to-peer assistance, and heck, more fun!


How is Topliners different from other social media communities such as LinkedIn or Twitter?

I would say that we have a very tight community where people can get to know each other on a personal level.

The immediate sense of camaraderie where members can connect and interact with one another by asking and answering questions, sharing success and even funny stories is what helps to educate and engage our members to come back.

We recently had a discussion featured a couple weeks ago titled, “How do you pronounce your name? EE12.” This particular thread did a great job of getting members to interact and schedule to meet one another in person at the upcoming Eloqua Experience 2012 conference in November.

Overall I feel that our customers are able to connect quickly with each other because they already have something in common – the Eloqua platform — and they experience the same common hurdles and questions.


What are some of the benefits for Eloqua users (and non-users) who are involved in the Topliners community?

For Eloqua users, the interaction with fellow peers sharing their tribal knowledge, previous mistakes and workarounds is extremely beneficial. Often times customers can see how one person performed a function one way, yet found another way to make the function work more efficiently instead.

A good example was recently posted in our Do It section titled, “What would you do differently if you got a clean instance of Eloqua and could start from scratch?” This discussion continues to draw in a vast amount of replies with some helpful answers provided by members who continue to climb the ranks in earning points and badges.

For non-users of Eloqua, future customers often take a look at the community and join to get a better idea of the Eloqua platform and the success stories that users are experiencing. We often find that many prospects actually join Topliners first before becoming an Eloqua customer.

 

What do you want Topliner participants to walk away with?

I hope that our customers are able to get their jobs done more efficiently and more successfully because of the conversations and resources on Topliners.

On a personal level, I want everyone to have a delightful experience and enjoy doing business with Eloqua. Maybe even have a laugh or two before they go back to their busy day. By accomplishing this we’re able to help others do their jobs better, which in turn, results in customers continuing their relationship with us.

 

Are there plans to extend content from the highly anticipated Eloqua Experience 2012 event on Topliners?

Yes, currently we have active discussions leading up to the event. Following the event, we plan to post presentations of speakers sharing their stories of success and struggles in our Eloqua Insiders Group, a group exclusive to Eloqua customers on Topliners.

Of course, we anticipate some discussions to be created organically for non Eloqua members to view some highlights. We will also extend the highlights on our It’s All About Revenue blog and YouTube channel.

My Clients

Most Popular Posts

3 Ways B2B Sales Rep Can Avoid the Coming Extinction
Red Lobster Proves Its Class is Genuine and Sincere
Call for Pride and Professionalism in Enterprise Sales
Queasy Unease About Best Places to Work
Marketers: Pay Heed to the Siren Song of Content and Social

Tag Cloud

social media social media marketing content marketing Strategic Communications Group sales enablement marketing automation Eloqua lead generation Web2Sales lead nurturing thought leadership Chief Marketing Officer