As part of Oracle’s Modern Marketing Experience (#MME16), over 2200 modern marketers listened to CMOs from Clorox, Sears, and Western Union share their data driven transformation journeys.  Eric Reynolds, CMO of Clorox commented on his digital transformation on how ‘it takes courage to start down a road where you don’t know where it will end.’  In this environment of constant technology innovation and the pressure to perform, many of us could relate to that statement.

Throughout the week, several other enterprise peers presented their digital learnings with an emphasis on the MarTech stack that best enabled their data driven decisions.  While there were several other announcements regarding the B2C Oracle Marketing Cloud, here were three other lessons learned from MME16 that B2B enterprise attendees could use as next steps to execute against.

1. Speed matters. In his keynote address, Oracle CEO Mark Hurd called out the macro economic trends by framing up the pressure he and his peer CEOs are under to perform, correlating that pressure as to why we as marketers need to respond with tangible results.   With S&P 500 top line revenue growth nearly flat over the last five years and IT global spend down by over 5% in the last year, modern marketers need to move quickly, test, and experiment to achieve measurable results.
2. Account Based Marketing (ABM) is more than just the new black. In her ABM breakout session, Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of MongoDB leveraged Eloqua and Demandbase among fifteen other marketing technologies for a new account based strategy, targeting and nurturing approach.   Meagen displayed her dashboards and revenue conversion rates on her ABM efforts.  Oracle announced an account based score and account nurturing capability that streamlines a manual Eloqua process; each could be valuable for marketers to consider as they plan their ABM strategy.
3. Bringing order to data chaos through integration: Allen Wagner, head of Marketing Operations for Deltek, echoed a common theme of other enterprise presenters in finding a ton of value in utilizing the Eloqua API to connect islands of information.  Specifically, having the ability to pull and push data to and from disparate sets of data to Eloqua to personalize, segment, and report effectively was of significant importance in getting a complete view of his customer or prospect interaction.

From an informal attendee poll, several attendees felt the breakout sessions on company use cases of technology led by company spokespeople, not vendor or multiple panel members, provided the most valuable insight, more so than in years past.  Many of us left MME16 with a renewed focus, more urgency, and a clearer picture of where an overall Eloqua and Marketing cloud strategy fits as part of a MarTech cloud strategy stack to drive new digital customer acquisition.

Today’s blog contribution comes from Jon Russo, founder of B2B Fusion, a sales and marketing performance firm focused on connecting marketing investment to new revenue.  Enterprise clients include Anthem, Ricoh, Thomson Reuters, and Level(3) among others.  Jon currently serves on the Board of Directors for MOCCA, the leading enterprise association for operational excellence in Digital Marketing.  Prior to founding B2B Fusion, Jon held global CMO roles for 10 years in private and public technology companies in Silicon Valley, NYC, and Luxembourg.