InsideView, a provider of social selling and sales intelligence tools, recently announced that it has closed a $12 million Series C funding round led by Foundation Capital, the investor behind companies including Netflix, Chegg, Financial Engines, Rearden Commerce and SimplyHired. Also participating in the round are existing investors Emergence Capital Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Greenhouse Capital Partners, according to a company press release.

With the new funding, Foundation Capital General Partner and enterprise technology veteran Paul Holland will join InsideView's board of directors.

New study: companies acknowledge negative impact of outdated BtoB data

By Kathy Greenler Sexton, Vice President of Marketing, ZoomInfo

Outdated BtoB contact data is pervasive — and, like a runaway train, it’s getting worse by the minute. In the time it takes you to read this, a couple hundred changes will happen in the business landscape that affect contact information (job changes, businesses starting and failing, etc.). Sales and marketing teams are hard pressed to keep pace with the changes. This is one of the findings of a just-published DemandGen Report study.

New study: companies acknowledge negative impact of outdated BtoB data

By Kathy Greenler Sexton, Vice President of Marketing, ZoomInfo

Outdated BtoB contact data is pervasive — and, like a runaway train, it’s getting worse by the minute. In the time it takes you to read this, a couple hundred changes will happen in the business landscape that affect contact information (job changes, businesses starting and failing, etc.). Sales and marketing teams are hard pressed to keep pace with the changes. This is one of the findings of a just-published DemandGen Report study.

The popularity of the “daily deal” model has skyrocketed among the BtoC audience, as smaller merchants have found an alternative way to allocate marketing spend to bring customers in. For the first time, the trend has been tested with bigger ticket BtoB models. Ajilitee, a business intelligence, analytics and cloud computing consulting firm, announced 50% off strategic business intelligence and cloud computing consulting services on the daily deal web site Groupon.

Through Groupon Stores, Ajilitee offered fast-paced workshops designed to help large and mid-sized organizations improve their current business intelligence (BI) environments or build their business cases for cloud computing. The company offered two options: a BI Best Practices Audit (a five-day workshop that deep-dives in a specific area that warrants help, including Data Architecture, Process Architecture, or BI Architecture) and analyzes findings against critical success factors; as well as a Cloud Opportunity Map, a five-day workshop that brings together key stakeholders to assess opportunities, potential benefits and strategies for cloud computing adoption.

The popularity of the “daily deal” model has skyrocketed among the BtoC audience, as smaller merchants have found an alternative way to allocate marketing spend to bring customers in. For the first time, the trend has been tested with bigger ticket BtoB models. Ajilitee, a business intelligence, analytics and cloud computing consulting firm, announced 50% off strategic business intelligence and cloud computing consulting services on the daily deal web site Groupon.

Through Groupon Stores, Ajilitee offered fast-paced workshops designed to help large and mid-sized organizations improve their current business intelligence (BI) environments or build their business cases for cloud computing. The company offered two options: a BI Best Practices Audit (a five-day workshop that deep-dives in a specific area that warrants help, including Data Architecture, Process Architecture, or BI Architecture) and analyzes findings against critical success factors; as well as a Cloud Opportunity Map, a five-day workshop that brings together key stakeholders to assess opportunities, potential benefits and strategies for cloud computing adoption.

Eloqua today announced a new partner program — designed to “ensure that client needs are not only met by Eloqua partners, but also that the commercial relationship is clear from the start.”

The program, which consists of exclusive resellers and vendor-agnostic “Ambassadors,” spans 150 resellers, integrators and service providers, across a wide array of industries. Under the new partnership structure, Eloqua said customers will have better insight into the services each vendor provides, the full nature of their relationship with Eloqua and how the company can maximize the value of Eloqua’s marketing automation platform.

By David M. Raab, Principal, Raab Associates

It’s almost a cliché that today’s buyers can gather product information for themselves. No one has taken this to heart more than marketing automation vendors, which publish mountains of information on their own web sites and subsidize distribution of still more by third parties. But even the most complete information and insightful analysis can’t accurately predict the future. Since the future is when you’ll use any marketing automation system you buy today, that’s a problem.

By David M. Raab, Principal, Raab Associates

It’s almost a cliché that today’s buyers can gather product information for themselves. No one has taken this to heart more than marketing automation vendors, which publish mountains of information on their own web sites and subsidize distribution of still more by third parties. But even the most complete information and insightful analysis can’t accurately predict the future. Since the future is when you’ll use any marketing automation system you buy today, that’s a problem.

A new education conference dedicated to managing and integrating the entire sales funnel, DemandCon, will debut in San Francisco May 18-20, 2011. The three-day event is focused on addressing and defining workable solutions that demonstrate how sales and marketing can work together as one highly functional team.

Co-founded by former Eloqua exec and current CEO of 28Marketing Steve Gershik, and Shawn Elledge, Chief Engagement Officer of the Integrated Marketing Summit, the event is positioned as a new type of conference experience that prioritizes actionable learning opportunities around all parts of the funnel, while facilitating ongoing community building.

By Jesse Noyes, Corporate Reporter, Eloqua

This year’s South By Southwest Interactive festival didn’t deliver much breaking news. That’s surprising because SXSWi has become an annual pilgrimage for tech geeks looking to discover the next Twitter or Foursquare.

This time around mostly incremental improvements were rolled out, like CNN’s “Open Stories” initiative. In case you missed it – and you probably did – Open Stories is basically a platform where users can contribute content to individual stories with photos, location-mapping and text. Yeah, it’s a lot like Wikipedia.