Here at Marketo, everyone is very excited about the upcoming SiriusDecisions 2009 Summit being held May 13-15 in Scottsdale, Arizona. This year's topics focus around Lessons Learned, and over 400 attendees will have the opportunity to share their experiences through panel discussions, networking sessions, and workshops. We are looking forward to all the well-respected speakers, and many of the sessions, including those discussing pipeline dynamics, social media, benchmark modeling and the technology roadmap.
Last year attendees made big leaps in integrating their sales and marketing teams during the event. We believe it is this need for tight integration between sales and marketing that has caused marketing automation to become so popular. As CEOs have begun to expect unified reporting from their teams, managers have had to find ways to view the entire pipeline from conversion through purchase. Marketing automation helps managers create this complete view of the sales funnel, allowing sales managers to view marketing campaigns inside the CRM and marketing to report on sales successes from their individual campaigns.
A similar topic during last year's event was the new overlap between sales and marketing, since marketing no longer just feeds leads into the sales funnel, but now helps sales nurture leads through opportunity completion and beyond. If the systems sales and marketing used were not integrated, it would be near impossible to understand campaign influence in combination with sales successes.
Unfortunately not all sales and marketing problems could be solved and questions answered during last year's event. It became clear to many of the attendees, including Marketo, that sales not only needed to understand how marketing contributed to the sales process, but that sales needed to be able to see a 360 degree view of each individual lead from first click, showing marketing interactions with the lead, plus the results of their own personal efforts. Because of this, Marketo announced in November the development of Lead Insight for Sales. This product creates new ways for sales to see the results of both their online and offline efforts by marketing and sales, allowing sales to identify and interact with the best sales leads, resulting in shorter sales cycles and additional sales.
We are excited to benefit from Lessons Learned at this year's event and hope we leave with new challenges to make our product better in the years to come. We hope to see you at there!