VENDOR WATCH
Turning 'Interesting Moments' Into Sales: Q&A With Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez

If there is any one characteristic of the current economy that stands out, it is that people are just not buying. From billionaires to budget shoppers, frugal is in.

Enter Marketo, a startup whose raison d'etre is to get people to buy.

Surprisingly -- or not, given its product lineup -- Marketo is doing very well these days, according to CEO Phil Fernandez, who spoke with CRM Buyer about his company's strategies for the recession and beyond.

CRM Buyer: How is Marketo weathering the economic downturn?

Phil Fernandez: What economic downturn? We are doing great -- growing leaps and bounds. Today we closed our 200th customer 14 months after entering the market. We are in the hot segment of this category, so even though some people are cautious about buying right now, the category is exploding. So business is good.

CRM Buyer: What are some of the cost-cutting measures you've taken?

Fernandez: We haven't taken any. We are consistently hiring people. In fact, we just brought in an in-house recruiter because we couldn't hire enough, so I guess we are cutting costs with our outsourced recruitment activities. Don't get me wrong -- we care about every penny, but we've been in consistent growth mode.

CRM Buyer: How can your products help your customers' bottom lines in the near term?

Fernandez: We are all about revenue -- about helping marketing and sales drive top-line revenue. We help the bottom line by making the marketing and sales process be much more efficient. So we deliver better leads to colleagues, we help the sales team be more productive by closing business faster. We also help customers save money by taking costs out of the marketing and sales processes.

CRM Buyer: What are some of the bright spots for your company right now?

Fernandez: We have been experiencing a very rapid growth of our customer base. As I said, we added our 200th customer today. We have also been receiving a lot of industry recognition: We were just named as one of the Red Herring top 100 private companies and named best marketing vendor on the Force.com AppExchange. We're widely recognized now as one of the industry's hottest startups.

CRM Buyer: How will your company look a year from now?

Fernandez: We'll be bigger. A year from now, we will get close to 400 customers instead of 200. We'll have operations in other parts of world. We'll have 80 people instead of 40. We're just announcing a second product -- a year from now, we will have a third major product out.

CRM Buyer: Tell me more about your new product.

Fernandez: Well, our first was Marketo lead management -- that was designed to help marketing teams find new leads using a variety of Web generation channels, then develop them to deliver warm leads to our sales product. The new product is called "Marketo sales insight" -- it's a campaign product for salespeople to help them take advantage of the wealth of information available from the lead management process.

It's a social sales application for front-line sales people. If you think about the sales process, what sales people do, you'll realize that historically, sales is a social function. You have to know how to read a room, read body language. But as the Web has become so important in buying and selling, it has put salespeople at a disadvantage. This product is about helping the salesperson be more intimate with customers, build a better network and prioritize time.

CRM Buyer: How does it help a rep be more "intimate?"

Fernandez: By monitoring and measuring things we call "interesting moments." We have defined some, and our product allows customer to define many more. It tracks if a customer has visited 10 corporate Web pages and stayed for more than one hour, or if someone has opened every email that marketing has sent for last two months. The product has this notion of interesting moments, and how rapidly customers are increasing or decreasing their engagement with you.

CRM Buyer: What's coming in the pipeline after this?

Fernandez: The third product in our roadmap will be Marketo Pipeline Analytics. That will be a layer up from sales -- a tool to help the chief revenue officer to understand what is working or not. It'll optimize the revenue funnel and provide some actionable analytics about deals that are falling out early or late in the funnel.