Radius announced $50 million in Series D funding that the company intends to use to scale its predictive marketing software platform and meet the growing demand for its solutions.

This investment will be applied toward further development of the Radius Predictive Marketing Software platform as well as the company’s proprietary data science engine and data cloud.

The funds come during a time of notable growth for the company, with its revenue increasing by more than 400% in the past year. The company has also doubled the number of employees during that period.

The latest round of investment was led by Founders Fund, which brings Radius' total funding to $125 million.

“The expectation is that ‘the data is out there,’ but no matter how many tools, scientists, or databases they acquire, CMOs struggle to gain the insights necessary to effectively pursue the largest market opportunities,” said Darian Shirazi, CEO and founder of Radius.

The B2B buyer's journey is fluid and progressive marketing teams are leveraging tactics such as account-based marketing (ABM) and predictive analytics to provide relevant and resonant content to prospects at any stage of the sales funnel.

These were some of the insights shared during the 2015 Lead LifeCycle Series. Roughly 1,400 marketing and sales professionals registered for the week-long event, designed to provide educational content to help B2B organizations enhance their marketing initiatives throughout the buying journey — from initial brand awareness to advocacy. The series also generated considerable social chatter, reaching more than half a million people over the course of the week.

In one popular session, Demandbase's John Dering highlighted that is has become more difficult to effectively nurture prospects due to the changing nature of the funnel, he said.

"We've seen the funnel in many different shapes and forms," Dering noted. "Now, funnels are no longer linear — making it difficult for marketers to walk these prospects through their journey."

The fact that B2B buyers are educating themselves through more channels adds to the challenge. Amanda Halle, Senior Marketing Manager for Demand Generation at LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, highlighted how multiple buyers within accounts and the nonlinear buying journey impact marketing effectiveness.

"Today's buyer's journey is, at its core, very unpredictable," Halle noted. "There are often multiple people involved in the buying decision and they are accessing different channels, which complicates the buyer's journey."

Halle educated attendees on how a multichannel nurturing approach can engage prospects earlier in the funnel to maximize conversions. "With longer buying cycles today, [marketers] need to get their brands in front of prospects earlier and more often to create demand. The more interest we drive at the top of the funnel, the more conversion marketers will see at the bottom of the funnel."

Dering stressed the need to continuously identify and target anonymous buyers. "It comes back to the idea of the 'always-on' campaign. You can never lose the opportunity to be in front of a prospect before they raise their hand."

The key is to have the messaging ready and available to them over an extended period of time, Dering said. "The value proposition can stay the same, but you change how it's presented to make sure it continuously resonates with prospects at the right time — through the right channel.”

Measuring campaign performance is critical to understanding whether your value proposition is still relevant to a target audience. During a session with Full Circle Insights, Influitive's Alex Shipillo highlighted three key funnel metrics that can help track the effectiveness of a company's marketing initiatives:

• Volume — what's happening in the marketing funnel right now;
• Conversion — how the marketing funnel changes over time; and
• Influence — which marketing campaigns are generating revenue in funnel.

B2B marketers should not solely focus on lead volume, according to Shipillo. "I care about the source and where the volume comes from. It's also important to dig into your funnel and better report how changes are impacting your marketing initiative.”

A Full-Funnel Approach To Building A Marketing Stack

Janelle Johnson, senior director of customer marketing at Act-On Software, outlined five categories that comprise the marketing stack — marketing experiences, marketing operations, middleware, backbone platforms and infrastructure.

Johnson said that marketers should focus on marketing and sales alignment when considering new technologies. “Before you implement marketing automation capabilities like lead scoring and routing, ask [whether] your sales and marketing have a common definition of a lead and do you agree upon the timeline for moving leads into the sales pipeline."

Johnson also noted: “Until you can answer these questions, some of the more powerful features and tactics available in today’s technology platforms could actually be a hindrance."

One of the most popular tactics being adopted is predictive analytics, which relies on aligning sales and marketing teams and technologies. Lattice Engines CMO Brian Kardon noted during his session that 94% of MQLs never close, even though companies are doing all the right things to nurture and qualify those leads.

He added that "the biggest time waster is not time spent working, but time spent with the wrong prospects. This is where predictive analytics can help make sure sales teams are put in front of the right prospects with high propensity to buy."

Kardon highlighted several ways predictive analytics is being leveraged within B2B marketing organizations, including:

• Optimizing list buys;
• Smarter, educated event planning;
• Prioritizing sales efforts; and
• Monetizing existing leads.

"Predicting can help companies identify who will buy, what they'll buy and when they will buy it," Kardon said. "This kind of information can be incredibly powerful for a modern marketer and can take initiatives like lead scoring to a whole new level."

Click here to gain on-demand access to every session from the 2015 Lead LifeCycle Series.

Leadspace, a predictive analytics platform provider, has raised $18 million in a round of funding led by Battery Ventures. The company plans to use the investment to expand its customer base and increase product innovations.

The investment also positions Leadspace to solidify its place within the predictive analytics market. The company has seen 3-times quarter-over-quarter growth in the past year and has more than 100 active customers.

"We're very pleased that investors have recognized the intrinsic potential of our best-in-class technology and expanding data partnerships that give us a competitive edge in the predictive analytics space," said Doug Bewsher, CEO for Leadspace.

Marketo announced its second quarter 2015 financial results, revealing a year-over-year revenue increase of 41% for a total of $50.7 million.

The company projects revenue of $53.5 to $55 million for the third quarter and total revenue of $209 to $211 million for 2015.

Other highlights from the second quarter included cash flow from operations of $10 million and a 52% year-over-year deferred revenue increase to $80.6 million. Marketo’s GAAP net loss was $18 million and its net loss per common stock was $0.43.

"During the quarter we made excellent progress in expanding our sales leadership team, continuing our success in the enterprise and deepening our relationships with key strategic customers," said Phil Fernandez, chairman and CEO of Marketo. "At the same time, we launched another wave of innovative products that continue to extend our competitive differentiation in the marketplace. Together, we believe these factors are cementing our leadership position in the marketing software industry."

New research from DialogTech, an analytics and automation solution provider, shows that marketers could be missing out on nearly half of mobile conversions. This can lead to inaccurate ROI data and an inability to optimize marketing spend.

The report analyzes roughly 400,000 inbound phone calls and 60 million website sessions across its Voice360 platform to measure the number of mobile calls generated by mobile advertising. By not attributing inbound calls to mobile campaigns, marketers run the risk of allocating budgets to campaigns that are not driving revenue, the report concluded.

Additional key findings in the research report include:

• Calls from mobile marketing sources are up 34% in the past six months across DialogTech customers, an increase of 78% on an annualized basis;
• Mobile search and landing pages are driving a combined 81% of calls for DialogTech customers, while mobile display and social drive 19%; and
• Many DialogTech customers see conversion rates over 10% from phone calls and others as high as 10-times the average.

“As marketers shift greater percentages of their budgets to mobile channels, getting closed-loop attribution for both digital conversions and phone calls is critical,” said Steve Griffiths, SVP of Marketing, Strategy and Analytics at DialogTech. "Our latest research illustrates marketers who analyze and understand the impact of phone calls in the mobile path to purchase have a significant advantage in developing impactful programs and accelerating customer acquisition.”

As B2B organizations aim to strengthen the relationship between sales and marketing teams, they are also working toward tighter integration of their CRM and marketing automation systems to achieve greater visibility into the customer journey, improve lead quality and gain more revenue from existing customers.

Leading-edge tactics such as account-based marketing (ABM) and predictive tools are spurring greater sales and marketing alignment at all levels. According to preliminary results from a June 2015 Sales & Marketing Alignment survey from Ascend2 and Act-On Software, 73% say that marketing and sales alignment is critical to the overall success of their company, but only 17% report that they are completely aligned.

“The integration of marketing and sales technologies is improving over time,” said David Raab, Principal at Raab Associates. “For example, more systems can now synchronize data from custom objects as well as the basic lead, contact, and account objects.”

Thomson Reuters, a B2B media company, was able to achieve a 23% increase in number of leads sent to sales with better alignment of its marketing and sales teams and technologies, which include Oracle’s Marketing Cloud. Other results include a 72% reduction in lead conversion time, and a 175% increase in revenue attributed to marketing. “The new, shared insight into our lead management funnel provides a clearer picture of the quality and quantity of leads needed to achieve revenue targets, enabling marketing to develop lead generation and nurturing strategies to engage the right prospects, in the right way, at the right time,” noted Mike Thompson, VP of Global Marketing Services, Intellectual Property & Science at Thomson Reuters.

Using their CRM and data from their CallidusCloud marketing automation system, Foremost Media started drip campaigns for existing customers. Revenues from their customer base jumped 30% in a year, and sales started getting calls about new projects from customers that had nothing to do with the contents of the campaign. “They were also able to use website visitor tracking to start generating leads from otherwise anonymous visitors to their website and pass those directly to sales, which gave them an entirely new lead flow,” said Giles House, CMO of CallidusCloud.

Technology Management Concepts (TMC), a professional services firm focusing on enterprise resource planning systems, has seen a 70% increase in customer engagement and a 45% increase in lead quality since implementing Marketo and linking it with its Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution. Working with Webfortis, a consulting services firm and Marketo partner, TMC integrated its platforms in order save time and create enhanced synergies between marketing and sales. “By synching our Marketo and Microsoft Dynamics CRM systems, our sales and marketing teams have greater visibility throughout the entire customer journey,” said Jennifer Harris, President of TMC.

ABM And Predictive Driving Alignment

To move forward with predictive tools and account-based marketing tactics, marketers need access to a salesperson’s interactions with a customer and vice versa.

“In order to create strong, personalized account-based marketing, marketers need to know everything going on with a customer and the interactions happening with them,” Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer at HubSpot. “Predictive analytics is no different. It requires really good down stream data like so that they can tie that back to future interactions.”

Both account-based marketing and predictive analytics rely heavily on the data compiled from marketing and sales technologies, but data is only valuable when it’s complete, up-to-date and accurate, noted Chris Lynch, Senior Director and Head of Product Marketing for Oracle Marketing Cloud. “Without alignment, data quality can be compromised and teams won’t be able to analyze data effectively.”

As they look toward ABM and predictive tools, many B2B organizations are taking a more granular approach as they seek to integrate CRM and marketing. “We definitely see a lot of sales and marketing operations folks asking how the marketing and sales systems will integrate as they start to look at new solutions,” according to Adam B. Needles, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal at ANNUITAS. “We’re seeing less rogue adoption and a more thoughtful approach.”

Account-based marketing and predictive analytics allow marketers to ultimately deliver a heightened customer experience at scale, said Adam Blitzer, SVP and GM of Pardot, a Salesforce company. “In order for those strategies to be most effective, the customer data utilized to enact them needs to be representative of all the customer’s interactions with a brand, from marketing through sales."

Still Some Hurdles To Overcome

CRM integrations can be complex due to the differences in individual sales and marketing tools. “The level of effort required to do a native, high performance, fully functional integration is non-trivial. It separates the well-designed and developed platforms from the jerry-built,” noted Atri Chatterjee, CMO of Act-On Software.

There are still many organizations with separate marketing and sales technologies that have been in place for a number of years.

“In organizations who have inadvertently siloed technology, budget for the rationalization of these systems can seem hard to justify,” CallidusCloud's House said.

Sales and marketing systems were designed for different purposes, which makes integration challenging, observers noted. CRMs use a transaction-processing data structure (read/write one record at a time) while marketing systems use an analytical data structure (read and select many similar records at once). “This means that traditional CRM systems can’t also do large-scale marketing automation,” according to Raab. “It’s why Salesforce had to purchase ExactTarget and even now copies sales data into the marketing database rather than running both sales and marketing on one system.”

The integration of data from other platforms, such as webinars, into the sales and marketing systems is a critical next step. “When marketers use tools that do not integrate with other platforms integral to sales initiatives, they are leaving a lot of data on the table,” said Joe Hyland, CMO of ON24. “When silos remain, ROI suffers.”

Looking forward, CRM and marketing integration will enable communications that are more targeted and tailored to customer needs and preferences, Blitzer said. “Sales and marketing have the same goal: to maximize revenue and profit for the company. An aligned sales and marketing operation that delivers what customers want ultimately makes more money, faster.”