News

Salesforce unveiled Salesforce1 Sales Reach, which brings together Salesforce1 Sales Cloud, Pardot and Communities into a new solution that is designed to help sales teams deploy personalized, one-on-one campaigns to accelerate the buying journey.

"In this new connected era, sales reps must be empowered to cultivate long-term, meaningful relationships with customers in order to be successful — transactional touch points won't drive impactful results," said Linda Crawford, EVP and GM of Sales Cloud at Salesforce. "With Salesforce1 Sales Reach, sales reps can engage with the customer at just the right moment with instant marketing and selling to build better relationships with customers at scale and ultimately accelerate sales."

Marketo  announced that Q2 2014 revenues reached $36 million, a 60% growth over the same period the previous year.

"Across the board, we delivered a strong quarter as customers adopted our customer engagement platform and purchased new applications such as our Real Time Personalization product, which we released early in the quarter," said Phil Fernandez, Chairman and CEO of Marketo. “Marketers are choosing our innovative solutions to build individual and personal long-term relationships with their customers.”

LinkedIn has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Bizo, a business audience marketing platform provider. The deal is valued at $175 million, with 10% being paid in company stock and the remainder in cash, and is expected to close in Q3 2014.

“This gives LinkedIn another way to serve its customers, who want ways to reach B2B buyers,” said David M. Raab, Principal, Raab Associates in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “The move should also allow much better targeting by Bizo, based on LinkedIn data. And it makes it easier to do targeting on LinkedIn’s own pages.”

SAVO Group announced the launch of Sales Presentation Pro, a tool designed to guide users through the PowerPoint presentation compilation process to expedite creation, maintain brand consistency and ensure regulatory compliance.

In the company’s Maturity Benchmark assessment of more than 300 customers, SAVO determined that only 38% of companies are effective at controlling sales content and messaging to ensure compliance with company policies and regulatory requirements. Sales Presentation Pro uses a Q&A wizard that applies business logic, content and industry priorities to recommend relevant presentation slides for final decks.

At its Oracle Marketing Cloud Interact 2014 event this week, Oracle announced upgrades to the Oracle Marketing Cloud designed to deliver simplified, customer-centric marketing and create ideal customers. Key enhancements include look-alike modeling to help companies accurately pinpoint ideal customer prospects, more mobile-native engagement options, and content marketing capabilities that make it easier for marketers to simplify content creation and distribution across multiple channels. 

The upgrades further integrate Oracle’s range of marketing solutions — which include Oracle Eloqua, Oracle Responsys, Oracle BlueKai, Oracle Content Marketing and Oracle Social Marketing — and reinforce Oracle Marketing Cloud’s position as the industry’s most comprehensive marketing platform.