The sales and marketing funnel had three days in the spotlight during the inaugural DemandCon event, May 18-20 in San Francisco. Bringing together more than 60 industry speakers and approximately 300 attendees, the event featured blueprints of successful rollouts of integrated demand generation programs, and challenged the conventional thinking on the structure of the funnel.

In the opening keynote address, Jeff Ernst, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, serving CMO and Marketing Leadership Professionals, took a somewhat controversial stand by encouraging sales and marketing executives to “bury the funnel.” Ernst said it was a myth that the funnel represents buyer behavior and suggested that rather than aligning marketing and sales, organizations must focus on alignment with the buyer.

By Jeff Walcoff, Content Development Director with Demand Creation Specialists

Simply acknowledging the importance of content marketing and actually using it effectively to drive thought leadership and inbound leads are proving for many marketers to be two very different things.

By Jeff Walcoff, Content Development Director with Demand Creation Specialists

Simply acknowledging the importance of content marketing and actually using it effectively to drive thought leadership and inbound leads are proving for many marketers to be two very different things.

Pardot today announced the availability of its Spring 2011 release, which adds tighter integration with Google Apps as well as improved content organization and new reporting capabilities.

The provider of cloud marketing automation software for small and medium-sized businesses, set out to make the new release “easier to use and more flexible,” to accommodate the marketing preferences of all clients.

Tapping into the latest streaming technologies, Marketo took to the web yesterday for the unveiling of what CEO Phil Fernandez described as the company’s “largest release to date,” dubbed Marketo Next.

The new release boasts enhancements across the company’s Revenue Performance Management (RPM) Suite, with new functionality designed to enable companies to be “more social, more intelligent and more agile” than ever before. Specific new features have been added in the areas of event tracking, program management and social media monitoring and analytics.

Marketo also used the webcast of the live event reinforce the impact RPM solutions are producing for leading companies. The company unveiled The Marketo Revenue Quotient, a study of customer results intended to quantify the global economic impact of RPM.=

ReachForce, a leading provider of data about business professionals for demand generation, recently announced the expansion of its executive team to help prepare the company to drive future revenue growth.

By Godard Abel, CEO and Co-Founder, BigMachines

For those on the outside looking in, sales is a seemingly straightforward profession with one simple goal in mind: selling. While that premise certainly carries some degree of truth, the full reality is that the industry has become increasingly more complex and competitive. The challenges salespeople face on a daily basis continue to mount – higher quotas, changing metrics and new sales channels. Each new challenge presents a new system or process to learn that takes valuable time away from actually selling.

By Godard Abel, CEO and Co-Founder, BigMachines

For those on the outside looking in, sales is a seemingly straightforward profession with one simple goal in mind: selling. While that premise certainly carries some degree of truth, the full reality is that the industry has become increasingly more complex and competitive. The challenges salespeople face on a daily basis continue to mount – higher quotas, changing metrics and new sales channels. Each new challenge presents a new system or process to learn that takes valuable time away from actually selling.

By Godard Abel, CEO and Co-Founder, BigMachines

For those on the outside looking in, sales is a seemingly straightforward profession with one simple goal in mind: selling. While that premise certainly carries some degree of truth, the full reality is that the industry has become increasingly more complex and competitive. The challenges salespeople face on a daily basis continue to mount – higher quotas, changing metrics and new sales channels. Each new challenge presents a new system or process to learn that takes valuable time away from actually selling.

The economic downturn caused many BtoB organizations to downsize, creating an even greater challenge to “do more with less.” By leveraging marketing automation technology, Paymetric, Inc., a provider of integrated and secure electronic payment acceptance solutions, doubled its running campaigns by tightly integrating marketing automation and CRM tools.

With less than five salespeople, Paymetric was challenged to re-energize its marketing efforts to extend campaign development and better analyze prospect behavior. Migrating from an automation system that was not cost efficient for its business model, Paymetric tapped Pardot in October 2009 to implement its automation features, including email marketing, nurturing, scoring and social media tools.