are lead generation machines, leveraging social media marketing, search engine opti- mization (SEO), viral marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), email marketing, and other technically-advanced methods. Yet many B2B companies don’t have a clue. The incumbent technology leaders like IBM, Oracle, and SAP have done very little in online marketing, and thus have given their smaller challengers a huge opportunity. Whether they use an automated product like Eloqua or a team of marketing analysts and spreadsheets, online marketing and demand generation is a “must have” for cloud companies. In this new era, the creative elements of marketing are becoming secondary and Joe Payne quant jocks and analytical wizards are starting to take over the CMO and VP Mar- CEO, Eloqua keting positions. At the marketing executive’s fingertips should be detailed reports (NASDAQ:ELOQ) showing pipeline sources, costs per lead, funnel conversion rates by stage, costs per “More and more of the mod- acquisition by source and campaign, effectiveness by channel, and so on. If you are ern buying process the CEO or a Board member, you should review these reports closely and make them is happening before an ac- the basis for assessing marketing effectiveness and performance. tual conversation with a sales rep ever takes place. Modern marketing is increasingly The most advanced marketing executives are also starting to embrace social media about Revenue Performance and to do multimodal attribution analyses. Customer and prospect conversations are Management, and reading no longer defined by website text, email messages, and sales discussions. Twitter, Fa- the digital body language of cebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, blogs, and dozens of other social media tools constantly your prospects, often before they even reveal themselves.” facilitate discussions about your market, your competitors, and likely your company and product. You need to get into position to monitor and help define these discus- sions, and the savviest marketing teams will use this to their considerable advantage. A strong head of online marketing will also be able to give you detailed demand generation forecasts based on different budget levels. It’s important to understand the natural limits of organic traffic as well as the slope of the supply curve for each of your various paid lead sources. Your blended cost per lead may be very attractive, but if a large portion is organic/free traffic and your marginal cost of an incremental paid lead is quite high, then you may not be able to scale marketing spend in an efficient manner. If SEM is a lead source, you should study the quantity and pricing of your main keywords and do burst Jeff Zwelling testing to validate the assumptions before dramatically CEO, Convertro increasing budgets. If these data are good, highlight them to your prospective investors. We love to find businesses “The Cloud Computing world is just starting to apply the with 6 month CAC paybacks and the capacity to absorb lessons learned from the consumer internet market and really 10x more marketing spending. If it’s bad, you don’t need change the game through aggressive online lead genera- to highlight it – but you better understand those limits tion. Proper channel attribution is critical to optimizing the right mix for your online marketing spend.” and how you can address them over time. Bessemer Venture Partners 18