Marketo Maps Predictive Path For Marketers With Revenue Cycle Explorer

Marketo recently announced the general availability of its Revenue Cycle Explorer, the latest addition to Marketo’s Revenue Cycle Analytics, designed to provide a unique methodology to make it easy to measure, understand, optimize and predict the revenue cycle.

Supporting the need for the new revenue tracking applications, Marketo pointed to Forrester Research, which showed that while 20% of companies believe they excel at measuring performance of their marketing initiatives, 76% agree that the ability to track ROI fosters more respect.

“Marketers and CMOs need to take more responsibility for the impact they have on revenue,” said Marketo President and CEO Phil Fernandez. “Unfortunately, most marketing automation solutions are operational in nature and have not delivered on the promise of true revenue performance management — until now.”

Marketo’s family of analytic solutions is designed to help marketers develop a deeper understanding of how marketing investments today influence revenue over time. Revenue Cycle Analytics strives to empower marketers to measure how leads move through the revenue cycle over time to become customers; understand which marketing programs drive conversion and velocity of leads at each stage of the revenue cycle; and optimize their entire marketing mix to focus investment on lead generation and lead nurturing activities that have the greatest impact on revenue.

Marketo’s VP of Marketing, Jon Miller, said the new solution is designed to help provide clarity for investment ROI and also to offer visibility into data that changes over time.

Nearly 100 Marketo customers have already built models using the Revenue Cycle Explorer, and the company anticipates selling the solution to an additional 100 customers by year’s end, according to Miller.

“Despite time and effort invested in capturing and measuring marketing programs and lead generation activities, we have not been able to understand how it all ties together,” said Sally Lowery, director of Demand Generation for Bronto Software, Inc. “With Revenue Cycle Modeler, we visually describe our processes that define how leads flow through our revenue cycle.  With this baseline understanding, Revenue Cycle Explorer allows us, for the first time, to truly understand and demonstrate how lead generation and lead nurturing activities trend over time and how they impact revenue.”

The next application to the revenue cycle analytics suite is designed to offer marketers a solution for planning and forecasting revenue from current and future marketing activities. The app is designed to enable marketers to automatically create analytic models that predict conversions between funnel stages over time, offering forecast deals and bookings before they enter the sales cycle