Marketo Sales Insight Update Now Available
Marketo yesterday unveiled its new spring 2011 version of Marketo Sales Insight (MSI). Built natively on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform, MSI provides sales professionals Facebook-style status updates, indicating buying interest based on recent Web activity, correspondence, or participation at an event.
"MSI offers customers several unique capabilities rather than simply providing an overview of activity detail," says George Jaquette, senior vice president of engineering at Marketo. "It synthesizes and provides analysis of customer activity to highlight what's really important, letting sales reps focus on the key moments that really matter."
MSI is fully integrated with Salesforce Chatter and updates can be accessed within Saleforce or from a desktop computer or mobile device. "There's nothing new to learn, no new tools to install, and no need for additional IT," Jaquette says.
With MSI, Marketo also is introducing custom views and filters that allow any Salesforce user to see lists of "Best Bet" leads that are scored as highest quality and most urgent. According to Jaquette, MSI gives sales professionals a "sixth sense." "MSI helps make sure reps are prepared at every stage of the revenue cycle to deliver the right response to the right sales leads at the right time to ensure the right revenue results," he says.
According to Kevin Akeroyd, general manager of Jigsaw, MSI has already enabled Jigsaw to "significantly increase" sales productivity and grow its sales team. "Marketo helps prioritize their activities by starting each day with a short list of the highest scored leads, which results in higher lead-to-opportunity and close ratios," he maintains.
Paul Albright, chief revenue officer at Marketo, says it's "gratifying to see an overwhelming customer response and then keep on introducing innovation.
"It's no secret that companies want to make their sales organizations more effective," he said in a statement. "According to IDC, sales reps spend 45 percent of their time figuring out how to spend their time instead of closing deals. With Sales Insight's new productivity features and improved visibility into the hottest leads and opportunities, we make it even easier for our customers' sales teams to focus their time on revenue-generation."
The updated spring 2011 MSI is now available and is free for all existing customers. Pricing for new customers is based on a per-user, per-month basis.