Marketo Summit Thoughts

I’m back from the Marketo Summit 2013 massive event where I met many of you for the first time in person. I’m so glad we were able to connect and talk about Marketo, marketing, and more.

Session Takeaways

• EMEA and Canadian Privacy Issues: many thanks to Adam Waterston for his detailed look at the implementation of the EU privacy and cookie laws and how he helped Planon increase the proportion of visitors who accepted.
• Using Multiple Product Lines requires serious planning to work well with RCM and scoring. We knew that though 🙂
• Advanced Forms Use: in this session with the legendary Eric Hollebone, he and the other presenters described how they used javascript techniques to pull in tons of background detail on their audience without actually asking for it. Most of these methods will require a web programmer and possibly a tool like ReachForce. Seems well worth it to enhance data quality and targeting without annoying leads.
• SFDC Dashboard Creation: Will Scully-Power from Datarati took us through his methodology for developing helpful dashboards that are Actionable and Understandable. His big tip is to start with the end in mind.

New Features and Integrations from Marketo

• Hootsuite integration: this will be amazing.
• Financial intergration: wow. This completely automates my budgeting and ROI process. If I had this right now, I would save at least 1 man-day a month on reporting.
• Marketo’s new interface looks fantastic! Clean, modern, etc.
• Forms 2.0: this could be a game changer for many of the less technically inclined.
• Nurturing System Module!! Completely abstracts the complicated traffic cop flows to make nurturing super easy. As Glen Lipka noted in the “History of Marketo”, “We never wanted traffic cops.”
• Multiple RCM Modules: I know quite a few advanced users have been asking for this for years to handle multiple partitions or product mixes.
• Marketing Calendar: this sounds great. Not sure how it works yet.
• Box.net Integration to upload files directly into Marketo. Pretty neat. I know more firms are using DropBox or Drive though.
• Gmail Sales Insight Plugin: ok, this is very cool since now we can move away from the horror of Outlook while enjoying the benefits of Gmail and MSI.
• Email Performance Reports: those with Revenue Explorer can now see very cool Day of Week and Hour of Day heatmaps.

These changes show me that Marketo is still very much attuned to the Ideas section of the Community and feedback from all of us. Perhaps a few of these features (Forms 2.0) took longer than we’d all like because it’s complicated to make things “just work.”

If you use any of these features, I’d love to hear from you! Remember to sign up for more updates.