Get your taxes in? It was a sprint to the mailbox for many of us, but the sense of relief (or resignation) gave way to genuine interest yesterday afternoon at Three Pillar’s first Global Product Mindset series forum — Leveraging Cloud Concepts for Product Development.
Featured speakers where a trio of execs and experts from Eloqua, a company that has created a very successful marketing automation platform. PeakTwo founders Mike and Jay cut their online teeth managing targeted online marketing campaigns during the dotcom boom (RIP LifeMinders). It was a meticulous and labor intensive. The intellects at Eloqua have found a way to automate, manage, and refine that process with a level of speed and precision that, frankly, blew our minds a bit. It was like explaining supersonic flight to a couple guys who used to be motorcycle mechanics. Very cool.
What’s the impending impact on today’s marketing efforts? We’re sussing that out for ourselves, but the potential seems massive. Eloqua’s clients can already attest to that. After the presentation, we knocked a couple back with Senior VP Andre Yee, who elaborated on a couple of compelling presentation points. Overall, however, he was emphatic about the mission of marketing:
It’s about revenue, and that there is a direct correlation between effective marketing automation and good ol’ profit. In so many words, he explained the critical importance of understanding customers. The right targeting coupled with informed follow up relevant to their initial interactions is almost a lock to generate revenue. It’s not intuition; it’s science, and Eloqua is committed to perfecting the formula. With more than 250 customers having already logged two billion interactions with the software, Eloqua is generating a pretty accurate process for generating revenue within specific industries. Now, it’s poised to really turn it up.