Here are my notes from the June Boston Marketo User Group. It’s a terrific user group having attended a few others on the east coast (DC, NYC, ATL), Boston seems to have the lead on making a great user group experience.
- Compared the Marketo summit session topics and year over year summit performance
- Lead Gen and Lead Lifecycles are ‘dead’ content wise vs. discussions around ABM and how to measure ABM (see below).
- Underlying concern around budget and the ability to invest in new technologies – planning to use those technologies was a key conversation ahead of making the purchase of those technologies.
- In slide two below (Buzzwords Y/Y), the percentage change is in topics year over year – so 0% represents no change in total topic count year over year.
- Discussion around how companies could measure Sirius 2.0 waterfall
- Discussed a SiriusDecisions measurement model in Salesforce that was persona driven where marketing creates the opportunity (which has process implications), avoids leads object altogether, and manages opportunity process through conversion
- There was some customization to Salesforce but the SFDC customization was not entirely clear – eg. contact roles, related lists, custom objects, etc.
- The discussion sounded like a ‘poor man’s’ Engagio implementation using a customized SFDC approach with weighted scores based on prospect sales and marketing engagement, difficult to tell how the model scales on score or persona change (e.g. do you need to manually update new scores?) but an intriguing model nonetheless.
- Observation from Boston Marketo User Group leader – since Sirius 2.0 waterfall is new and typical sales cycles are 6-18 months long in B2B, the case studies at summit were basically implementation only, none spoke about actual ROI or results yet – but they expect at next year’s summit to start seeing results.
- Discussed a SiriusDecisions measurement model in Salesforce that was persona driven where marketing creates the opportunity (which has process implications), avoids leads object altogether, and manages opportunity process through conversion
- Discussion around framework for ABM that was discussed at the Marketo Summit.
- Starting point – baseline assessment
- 5 key issues of ABM and MarTech we see in our engagements:
- FOMO, Technology, and ABM Starting Point
- Selecting the right targets (ICP, Accounts, Contacts)
- Lack of the right ABM Intent Data strategy
- Missing system and process requirements for ABM
- Not hiring the right internal and external talent
Very few audience members had used intent data (2 in audience of 50) – a function the audience said of not having a clear enough need or the budget to execute on it, though most agreed the concept sounded interesting and relevant.
Of the 5 key issues, the topic of talent seemed to be the most challenging aspect many enterprises face.
Summary from BMUG Leaders: Paul Green, Jody Spencer
Overall observations on Marketo Summit and SiriusDecisions Summit:
- Reporting and analytics – there are not that many companies that figured out.
- No one has Sirius funnel 2.0 figured out.
- There aren’t a lot of companies embracing Artificial Intelligence (AI) – the feeling was AI is so over-hyped. One audience member was using Conversica to handle lead responses. Marketo has content AI. Audience AI in Marketo.