Company: Marketo, San Mateo, CA
Entry Submitted By: Greenough Communications
Company Description: Marketo provides B2B marketing automation software that translates marketing spending into revenue. The company's lead management software features email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and closed-loop reporting capabilities to help marketing and sales teams work together to generate and qualify sales leads, shorten sales cycles, and demonstrate marketing accountability.
Nomination Category: Sales Achievement Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Demand Generation Program of the Year

Nomination Title: ShipServ Drives Growth Through Strategic Demand Generation

1. Tell the story about your organization's demand generation program since the beginning of July last year (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

In early 2008, ShipServ transformed its strategy by taking a new approach to
B2B marketing to drive business growth through sophisticated demand generation.
The company, which is the leading e-marketplace for the maritime shipping
industry, was expanding at a rapid rate, and it had to keep pace with an
extremely fragmented and truly global industry, composed of ship managers,
shipyards and suppliers around the world and ships themselves that are
constantly in transit. ShipServ already had software in place for sending
emails to lists, but had no way to follow up with, nurture, or score leads.

Because of this, ShipServ could not respond to prospects' actions, and the
marketing team had been forced to create lists and set calendar notices
manually to sort respondents and move their marketing campaigns forward. This
process was too cumbersome to support the velocity of ShipServ's business. "Our
old process simply was not scalable; we were not going to grow our business
through manual intervention," said John Watton, VP of marketing. ShipServ
needed its marketing department to be just as much of a revenue engine as its
sales organization. After carefully considering a number of options to address
these challenges, ShipServ selected Marketo Lead Management, a marketing
automation solution that includes tools for segmenting, nurturing, tracking and
reporting.

Since implementing Marketo in less than a day, the company has seen amazing
results; opportunities are not simply growing in number, but also in quality.
In just six months, ShipServ's conversion rate for moving prospects from the
initial "contact" stage to real "leads" has jumped from 10% to 25%. Further
down the pipeline, the company has increased its lead-to-opportunity rate from
30% to 45%. Most importantly, though, this new strategy has given ShipServ a
strong foundation for building its business by growing its pipeline of
opportunity around the world.

Because ShipServ eliminated many of its manual marketing processes, it now
sends more campaigns with targeted messages segmented groups of contacts and
can respond based on prospects' unique interests and behaviors. This drives
the overall business by creating a robust pipeline of quality opportunities and
ensuring that none fall through the cracks of a high-risk, manual process.
This thorough and customized approach helps ShipServ grow business opportunity
through strategic demand generation.

With a sales team spread thinly around the globe, ShipServ places a high value
on the growth that this new tool has created in its pipeline. "We're nurturing
cold contacts and driving them to sales when they're ready. We've increased
our hit rate, and the productivity of our salespeople is on the rise as well,"
said Watton. "Marketo is having a tremendous impact on our business because our
salespeople are able to focus their time on the best opportunities."

The marketing team has more time to be creative and strategic as
well. "Marketo has reduced our campaign management burden by about 80%,"
Watton noted. "This means that we have time for more value-add activities and
can do more marketing with more campaigns to generate more business."

2. List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

Press release: Maritime e-Marketplace Goes from Strength to Strength" (released
7/12/08): http://www.shipserv.com/info/2008/07/16/maritime-e-marketplace-goes-from-strength-to-strength/

3. Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated sales organization:

John Watton, ShipServ's vice president of marketing, has 20 years of experience
in marketing leadership experience. Before joining ShipServ, John was Director
of Global Marketing for telecoms software pioneer Cramer Systems, where he was
responsible for marketing communications and demand generation worldwide.
Previously, John held marketing management positions at Microsoft, Ariba, SAP
and Oracle. At Ariba, he was part of the leadership team that grew the
company's European revenues to $100m in three years and helped create the now
widely accepted market category of spend management.