This year’s B2B Content2Conversion conference, slated for May 6-7 in New York City, is going to take an in-depth look at the role of content in customer engagement and driving buyers through the sales funnel.

Now in its third year, the event will feature three tracks — content strategy, demand generation and sales enablement — and 30 speakers. Among the major themes are next-generation metrics, understanding content consumption behaviors and strategies for aligning content with sales objectives.

Many B2B marketers struggle to determine how many emails they should be sending. But with Forrester Research estimating that 838 billion marketing messages were sent in 2013, businesses also are tasked to send relevant, timely and compelling emails to stand out.

“You want to take a look at how many objections you have — whether it is price, complexity of the services, or whatever it is — and as many objections as you have, you should have the same number of emails to address those concerns,” Tyler Garns, Founder of Box Out Marketing and former VP of Marketing for Infusionsoft, told an audience at ICON14.

Leadspace, a B2B demand generation solution provider, has hired former Salesforce.com CMO Doug Bewsher as CEO to lead the company’s operations and market growth strategy.

Leadspace has doubled its customer base in the past 12 months, posting record annual growth in 2013. Over that time span, the solution provider has helped marketers quadruple email response rates, drive 98% more conversions through higher response and create 30% more sales opportunities.

InsideSales.com, a cloud-based sales acceleration technology vendor, has secured $100 million in Series C financing. The company will use the investment to boost revenue growth, expand its portfolio of technology solutions and enter new geographic markets.

“We are going to move aggressively to fill out our sales acceleration platform,” said Founder and CEO Dave Elkington in an interview with Demand Gen Report. “This additional $100 million in financing, which brings our total funding to $140 million, will enable InsideSales.com to continue improving and expanding its patented sales acceleration technology to better serve its valued customers and partners.”

Matt Papertsian, Research Director at SiriusDecisions, believes there is a wealth of untapped data that can help marketers improve content performance. He said it is time to move beyond some of the current initiatives — aligning content, understanding the buyer’s journey, building personas and leveraging campaign framework — to hone in on metrics.

We caught up with Papertsian as he prepared for his presentation at the upcoming B2B Content2Conversion Conference, titled: Developing A Content Architecture.

Cloud-based marketing automation platform provider eTrigue has integrated SugarCRM into its DemandCenter solution. The integration is designed to provide visibility into a contact’s interest level by offering a full view of prospect and customer activity as they respond to emails, visit landing pages, download assets and participate in events.

The integration is immediately available to eTrigueDemandCenter users. Full interaction history is available for each prospect in SugarCRM, and is built to support effective engagement and convert new leads.

Salesvue, a prospect-to-pipeline automation solution, raised $3 million in financing that the company will use expand sales and marketing efforts nationwide and to build additional functionality.

The round of funding was led by Cultivation Capital, a Missouri-based venture capital firm. Bill Johnson, president and CEO of Salesvue — along with a small group of private investors — also participated in the funding round.

Idio will be inviting prospects to experience live, customized demos of its Content Intelligence Platform at this year’s B2B Content2Conversion Conference on May 6.

The platform is designed to help marketers analyze their consumer’s content consumption, which allows them to deliver more relevant and personalized content across all channels and boost customer engagement. The solution also automates the content delivery process to make sure relevant content is presented to the right consumer at the right time.