Revenue Strategies

Bulldog Solutions, Inc. has launched Bulldog PowerPlay, which company officials describe as an integrated demand generation framework based on the buyer’s journey.

Comprised of three “plays,” the goal of the packaged solution is to enable marketers to drive a measurable impact on revenue by implementing a robust content marketing and promotion strategy at the top of the funnel, lead nurturing and conversion tools at the middle and sales enablement tools at the bottom, company officials added.

Marketing used to just “throw leads over the wall” to the sales department and hope that a good number of them would stick. But now that marketing is responsible for a revenue contribution goal, the walls are tumbling down. It is no longer a question of how many leads marketing can generate, but how they can provide the right content and other resources to sales to ensure that as many leads as possible turn into deals.

The increased pressure to contribute to revenue, along with buyers delaying their engagement with sales until later in the decision-making process, has resulted in rising interest in sales enablement tools over the past six months, industry observers noted.

The Pedowitz Group announced a new Revenue Marketing Analytics service to help marketers bridge the gap between business intelligence and revenue growth. The service will use partner solutions from GoodData and Birst to unify data and deliver actionable insights, according to company representatives.

Birst combines data from varied sources to help companies answer pressing business questions and address concerns in real time. The business intelligence solution from GoodData enables companies to make better business decisions by transforming data, reports and dashboards into tangible results, company officials noted.

Marketo announced Marketo Financial Management (MFM), an application to provide marketers with an up-to-date view of marketing spend so that they can forecast accurately, find and reallocate program dollars and spend to plan. MFM's web-based, automated approach is designed to replace spreadsheets and manual processes to easily share and manage budgets from a single source, according to Marketo officials.

"Marketing organizations need a system for budgets and operational data, just like other departments," said Kristen Petersen, Director, Marketing Operations at F5 Networks, a provider of application delivery networking services. "Combining budget management and marketing automation in a single marketing platform is a big win for marketers. We expect Marketo's solution to help marketing improve budget oversight and simplify the relationship between marketing and finance."

Are marketing-generated leads really full of dreck, or is sales just unable to close deals? It is an age-old battle of wills that is getting more heated as the pressure is on both sales and marketing to meet ever-rising revenue targets. Many organizations are looking to Big Data and predictive analytics to help identify hot sales prospects, but weaknesses in their databases are hampering sales productivity.

More than two thirds (68%) of companies report struggling with lead generation, blaming marketing for not providing enough quality leads, according to recent research sponsored by Lattice Engines, a data analytics platform provider, and conducted by CSO Insights, a sales and marketing effectiveness research firm,