SAVO Group announced it has received $35 million in its latest venture funding round, bringing the total funding to $84 million to-date.

The round of funding, led by Goldman Sachs & Co., will be used to expand SAVO’s global operations and further develop its suite of sales and marketing applications. Two new board members were also announced alongside the funding results: Michael McGinn and Holger Staude from Goldman Sachs’ Private Capital Investing group.

Content has become a highly valuable tool that B2B marketers are leveraging on a regular basis. As a result, buyers now face a daily deluge of content, raising the bar for marketers to differentiate their offerings.

What are the key attributes of content that rises above the rest? Of the 25 organizations that were recognized with Killer Content Awards this year, the trend toward highly visual content was evident. Content that speaks to buyers’ needs and reaches them on social media and other platforms that are relevant to them also were key features of successful content marketing campaigns.

Private equity firm GTCR completed its $447 million purchase of Vocus, Inc., a cloud-based public relations and marketing software provider. GTCR also announced plans to merge Vocus with Cision, a Swedish-based Vocus rival that the private equity firm also recently acquired.

The combined company will bring new software tools, content and services that help organizations of all sizes to enhance their performance in acquiring and retaining customers. When the combination is complete, Cision and Vocus customers will benefit from sharing access to a comprehensive influencer database, news distribution service and media monitoring and analytics services, as well as Vocus’ new marketing automation platform.

An overwhelming majority (84%) of companies are seeing healthy growth in demand for mobile content distribution, according to a report titled: Mobile Content Distribution Strategies, from Genwi, a real-time content marketing platform provider.

SAVO announced that availability of Sales Onboarding Pro, a new application for its Sales Accelerator Series designed to support recently hired sales reps so that they can begin contributing early to the company’s bottom line.

The offering creates a learning environment that maintains records of task completion and performance. This helps sales leadership to keep reps on track by providing timely and appropriate guidance when needed. New hires establish relationships across the organization — and obtain information about the company and responsibilities — by finding answers and soliciting real-time feedback from product experts and peers.

Next generation personalization and leveraging social data were among the topics at Marketo’s recent virtual conference, titled: The Road To Success Virtual Summit.

In the opening keynote session, Kiip co-Founder and CEO Brian Wong discussed the need for an always-on mentality, even in the B2B world. “In this model of living, we are super obsessed with connectivity and serendipity,” said Wong. “We want things now. We live in moments, and we consume in moments.”

Lattice Engines announced the availability of Lattice for Cross-sell and Retention, a new tool that gives Lattice users the ability to leverage predictive analytics across every stage of the customer lifecycle.

The new technology arms marketing and sales with the right combination of targets and products to unlock the full revenue potential of each customer. By combining customer contact and account-level data, marketers can get a complete view of the customer and even identify — not only the best opportunities for upsell or cross-sell — but the best offerings based off that information.

In recent years, the SiriusDecisions Summit 2014 has come to define the state of the art for modern sales and marketing organizations. Part of the reason is SiriusDecisions’ ability to plug into and analyze top-performing organizations across a variety of industries. Most likely an even bigger factor is the SiriusDecisions team’s talent for condensing its knowledge into compelling models and frameworks.

This year’s Summit, held in Orlando, Fla., was no exception. A number of sessions featured SiriusDecisions’ analysts rolling out new or modified versions of its frameworks, covering activities such as measurement, messaging, competitive analysis, teleprospecting and many others. In this week’s feature, however, we’ll focus on a topic that turned out to be particularly rewarding: content marketing, messaging and management strategies.