Earlier this week, Marketo , the marketing automation company, held its second ever user conference in San Francisco. As a Marketo agency partner, I attended along with colleagues from Spear Marketing Group to greet clients, talk shop, and hear how other companies – including Marketo themselves – are putting technology to use in the service of improved lead management. From Marketo’s perspective, I understand the need to frame marketing automation in ever more mission-critical terms. Marketo has more than 300 content assets on offer on its Website.). Email? MORE >>

You probably saw ExactTarget ’s June 13 announcement of its strategic partnership with Marketo and Eloqua ’s June 21 announcement of its new AppCloud marketplace for connectors with other systems. In fact, the real head scratcher was why ExactTarget would deal with Marketo if it had ambitions to occupy the same central turf. Marketo’s motivation is obvious: to gain broader distribution.) ExactTarget also sees Marketo as the first of many partner applications for IMH, further clarifying that they see it in the central position. So did I. Oh well. So it’s all good. MORE >>

Working marketers care more about how this affects the products and services they’ll get as current or potential Eloqua customers. That may be the best for Eloqua’s customers in the long run, but the changes will take time to deliver and necessarily distract from near-term product enhancements. The impact on customer service is likely to be even more negative. Eloqua’s culture is very focused on customer success, and it has been a clear leader in areas like marketer training. Oracle is less customer-focused and generally less nimble (I'm being polite here). MORE >>

Summary: Marketo's new Sales Insight ranks prospects for sales people, based on recent Web and email activities. It lets Marketo sell seats to sales departments, which could be more lucrative than selling its core demand generation system. Marketo today officially launched “Sales Insight”, an application that makes prospect activity history directly available to sales people from within Salesforce.com. The moments are set up as real time triggers within Marketo. an option to send emails and add prospects to Marketo campaigns. There are some subtle differences. MORE >>

We love our customers and really love it when they tell the world why they chose us and how we are helping them manage leads, close business, and generally just rev the marketing engine. In it, they lay out why they sought out a marketing automation solution, what happened when they compared LoopFuse and Marketo, and the results they began to see immediately. How do we nurture a potentially valuable lead that simply isn’t ready for a sales call, but could be a customer in a few months?” Marketing Automation adzerk marketoRead the whole thing. ” Thanks! MORE >>