At this week’s Marketo Summit, I realized we’re right in the middle of B2B Marketing Event Season. MarketingSherpa’s B2B Marketing Summit was last week, Pardot’s user conference was 2 weeks ago, and the Eloqua Experience is coming up next week. In this post I’m giving a short impression of the Marketo Summit.

The Marketo User Summit was BIG: 600 customers and partners were attending. It was also very professionally done: from the full color program guide and the loot bag to the well-balanced program and fun Mardi Gras party. With the exception of some Wifi issues in the beginning, it was running extremely smoothly.

Marketo University

The program started with the Marketo University, with a beginner and an advanced track. I attended the advanced track, and it was a nice combination of detailed feature descriptions and lead management best practices. They covered the main parts of the Marketo application: Lead Database, Design Studio, Marketing Activities and Analytics.

Global Marketo Roll-Out

After the University, Douglas Laird and Jonathan Moody showed how QlikTech managed to roll out a Soccer-themed Marketo campaign in 15 countries and 13 languages in a matter of months. This is an good example of how Marketo is now also being used in bigger implementations.

PR Newswire Integration

The PR Newswire session announced an integration that makes it much easier to distribute press releases, videos and other content right from Marketo. Additionally, it will make it possible to measure the results of your content marketing efforts more accurately.

Forrester Lead Management Overview

After that, Andre Pino, the new Forrester B2B Marketing principal analyst gave a nice overview of lead management. Some people thought it was a somewhat basic, but I thought it was a key component of this User Summit. He told the story in a nice way, and illustrated it with a good case study.

How Marketo Uses Marketo

Jon Miller and Bill Binch presented a session on how Marketo uses Marketo internally. One of he things Bill illustrated was how Sales Development Reps have to follow up with leads within a certain of days, otherwise their boss or even the executive team will be notified (using Marketo). This pretty much ensures a timely follow-up for each and every lead that reaches the lead score threshold.

Jon showed how Marketo is using a sophisticated decision workflow to start the right campaign at the right time: on every change, a “Traffic Cop” campaign decides which other campaign will be started next. It looked great, but also somewhat hard to understand and maintain. It’s a big contrast with Pardot’s pragmatic approach, in which they give every lead a 60 second look – manually – and then decide how to route the lead.

Webex Integration & Other Product News

J.D. Peterson, VP Products, presented the product roadmap. The big announcement was an upcoming integration with Webinar software, starting with Webex. GotoWebinar will follow, but GotoWebinar first needs to add an API to their product (please do so ASAP!).

There was a whole list of other planned improvements. One of them is the continued development of the Analytics module, including campaign influence measurement and revenue forecasting. That’s something that I’m really looking forward to, because it will make it much easier to show how Marketing activities influence current and future revenue.

Summarizing

There were many different tracks, so this post only gives an impression of the sessions that I was able to attend. I didn’t even mention the great presentation by Avinash Kaushik (Web Analytics Guru), who is a very energetic and humorous speaker: a great choice for the final presentation of the conference. Overall, it was a great conference and I learned a lot.

If you attended, please leave a comment about your experiences. What did you like, what could be improved?

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PS. the presentations are here: http://www.slideshare.net/marketo

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