March 31, 2014
By Maria Minsker, contributing writer

Marketo Adds C9's LeadMap to LaunchPoint Ecosystem

LeadMap, a predictive analytics application that provides a thorough view of the sales pipeline and tracks activity from lead inception to opportunity close, is now available through Marketo's app marketplace, the LaunchPoint Ecosystem. Created for Marketo by sales and marketing app developer C9, the solution brings together data from both Marketo and SalesForce.com to create a unified view of a sales pipeline, determine which campaigns can be paired to deliver better ROI results, and show marketers how they can engage in late stage opportunities to drive close rates.

When Marketo and Salesforce.com are used to track different stages in the sale pipeline independently, they are unable to deliver insight on the intersection of marketing and sales. LeadMap, however, gives sales and marketing teams a holistic perspective on their business processes by not only allowing users to transition between historical analyses and projections, but also creating a way to examine data from Marketo and Salesforce.com in one place and analyze the intersection of marketing and sales.

"With this product, we're solving three major problems that marketers have been struggling with. First, marketers are only seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to lead generation," Justin Shriber, vice president of products at C9, says. "Second, marketers and sales teams see the world in very different ways—marketers see their results as an aggregate number of engagements, whereas the sales view is much more territory based," he adds. The last, and arguably greatest challenge for marketers is that the tools they've had up to this point haven't effectively measured multitouch campaigns, and haven't been able to provide ROI insight on multitouch campaigns.

C9's LeadMap solution for Marketo tackles this key struggle with its Multi-touch Program ROI capability, which analyzes all of a company's marketing interactions to evaluate how each individual campaign performed, as well as calculate which campaigns worked best when paired together. While most marketing automation solutions attribute leads to the campaign that reached them, C9's LeapMap looks across lead and opportunity data and draws a fuller picture of lead generation. The LeadMap solution also maps early-stage leads stored in Marketo as well as later-stage lead activity that comes from the Salesforce.com end and creates a visual demonstration of the pipeline, giving sales and marketing teams the opportunity to pinpoint problem areas.

Unlike comparable solutions, LeadMap can identify all of the deals that marketing has influenced regardless of their explicit association to campaigns and present the information visually, breaking down the percentage of closed deals into three categories: those that were sourced by the marketing team compared, those that came directly from the sales end, and those that came from sales teams but were supplemented with marketing engagement throughout.

"C9's LeadMap for Marketo also enables marketers to quickly figure out how many new leads were generated over a certain time period and track their progress to determine which moved forward, and which ones did not," Shriber says. Furthermore, LeadMap's predictive sales engine can predict the success of future campaigns by combining early stage lead information with opportunity data to determine how future deals will perform.

The solution, according to Shriber, is bringing marketing and sales teams closer together, streamlining lead generation and making marketers more central to the sales pipeline. Robin Bordoli, president of partner ecosystems at Marketo, echoed this sentiment. "Marketo is focused on delivering the customer engagement platform that marketing organizations need to build deep, personal relationships with their customers. We see a 'Marketing First' world, where marketers are rising up in their companies and taking charge of growth and revenue," Bordoli said in a statement. "C9 LeadMap for Marketo is an excellent complement to our customer engagement platform, and it allows our customers to capitalize on their Marketo investment in a compelling way."