How Successful Companies

Fuel Growth
With Marketo
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
For companies to be successful, they need to focus
on the critical components of profitability and growth.
While each company has its own unique recipe to optimize
these factors, there are some commonalities that
successful companies share.

This ebook explores a common and effective strategy that many

high-growth companies implement—their approach to marketing and their
use of marketing automation technology to help fuel their success through all
aspects of the customer journey from acquisition to advocacy.

Marketo serves as the growth engine and platform

of choice for about 2/3rds of the companies
on the JMP Securities—100 Best Privately Held
Software Companies list.

2
 Welcome to the
High-Growth Era
WELCOME TO THE HIGH-GROWTH ERA
Private companies with a valuation
of $1 billion or more are growing in both
number and size—and faster than at any
other time during the last decade.
In fact, according to CB Insights, there
are currently over 150 high-valuation
companies, of which an astounding
71% broke the $1 billion valuation
threshold in the last 2 years.
broke the $1 billion
71% valuation threshold in
the last 2 years.
High Valuations Bring Pressure
to Meet High Expectations
Once a high-valuation occurs, expectations
rise quickly. The companies in question
must act fast to meet investor expectations,
usually by hitting revenue targets that are
developed with best-case sales scenarios
in mind. That’s not always an easy task “A customer-obsessed enterprise
and can depend on the type of product focuses its strategy, its energy,
and its budget on processes
or service being introduced.
that enhance knowledge of and
engagement with customers and
To maintain as much equity as possible
prioritizes these over maintaining
and to justify high valuations, fast-growing
traditional competitive barriers.”
companies must accelerate revenue growth
quickly and consistently. – Forrester Research, Competitive
Strategy In The Age Of The
Customer: Only Customer-
Obsessed Enterprises Can Survive
Disruption
4
 Marketing Automation
Enables Marketers to be More
Efficient and Drive Revenue
MARKETING AUTOMATION ENABLES MARKETERS
TO BE MORE EFFICIENT AND DRIVE REVENUE
Marketing automation is a proven
technology many high-growth
companies leverage.
This powerful technology can have
a significant impact across the entire
customer journey. It enables marketers
to generate awareness and build
their database with valuable contacts
more successfully, measure the
results, and adjust campaigns in real
time to incrementally increase their
effectiveness. Additionally, marketing
automation helps marketers identify the
right prospects in a database, allowing
them to invest more effectively in the
activities that convert those leads,
which ultimately reduces churn.
Today, companies must think beyond
marketing and customer acquisition
to the entire customer lifecycle and
experience. This is because when it
comes to measuring results, customer
satisfaction and retention is one of
the most important benchmarks for
success. And cross-sell and upsell are
critical for high-growth businesses to
leverage. With marketing automation,
the benefits don’t stop after acquisition;
marketers can automatically track
customer engagement and identify
cross-sell and upsell opportunities in
order to continue to maximize the
value they provide and receive from
their existing customers.
6

MARKETING AUTOMATION ENABLES MARKETERS
TO BE MORE EFFICIENT AND DRIVE REVENUE
Many companies are still only focused
on the cost of acquiring customers
on a one-off basis.
It’s a throwback to the era of transactional
marketing when the goal was to generate
short-term revenue. But today, sustainable
growth is only possible by embracing
a marketing approach that enables
your organization to forge long-term
relationships with customers.
According to research by Forrester
Research and Heidrick & Struggles entitled
The Evolved CMO in 2014, only 18% of
companies have a synchronized view of
their customers across their organizations.
John Ellet, CEO of award-winning
marketing agency nFusion, shares this
advice for marketers at fast-growing
companies with Forbes: “Break down
the silos and build a single unifying view
that enables you to put end-customers
at the center of your programs and
engage with them seamlessly across
all touchpoints.”
Why a Multi-Billion Dollar
Startup Relies on Marketing
Technology
Slack is a communications tool
enabling teams to message each
other in real time, among other
functions. The company quickly
became a leader in the space,
drawing much attention from the
tech and investor community.
In April 2015, just about a year
after its official launch, Slack was
valued at $2.8 billion.
“Marketing is often one of the
first touchpoints that a customer
has with your brand. It is critical
that they have a great first
experience. A robust marketing
technology stack is a powerful
resource to deliver a great
experience. There is great
software right now that allows
you to target the right people,
test messages and experiences
that work, score leads so you
understand when the right time
to reach out to them is, nurture
people through the buying
process, and onboard them
successfully into your product.”
– Bill Macaitis, CMO, Slack
7
 The Dangers of a
Good Enough Solution
THE DANGERS OF A GOOD ENOUGH SOLUTION
With a focus on rapid and dramatic
customer acquisition and revenue
generation, “good enough”
and “acquisition only” won’t do
when trying to establish a scalable
marketing automation system.
Growth-focused companies will
outgrow automation systems that
don’t offer the ability to market
across the lifecycle in a matter of
months. For this reason, they need to
evaluate marketing automation systems
based on their 3 to 5-year growth
targets and the technology, processes,
and scale required to achieve them.
From a pragmatic standpoint,
a “good enough” platform is not
a robust, scalable platform and is
disconnected from the customer
lifecycle. Sure, it will support basic
workflows, like creating email
campaigns and landing pages. But after
a company builds a workflow or two,
they quickly recognize that they need
to do more—and to do it more easily.
There are so many marketing and sales
scenarios at work today, especially
for creative marketers, in which
restrictive workflow options ultimately
limit marketing effectiveness.
Eventbrite Powers
Hypergrowth with Marketo
Founded in 2006, Eventbrite is the
world’s largest self-service ticketing
platform and a Marketo customer.
As of October 2015, it had
processed more than $3.5 billion
in gross ticket sales and more
than 200 million tickets in more
than 180 countries. It had also
raised roughly $200 million from
investors and was valued at more
than $1 billion during its
last funding round in March 2014.
Today, the company’s marketing
team—relying heavily on Marketo—
contributes about 75% to 80% of
total sales bookings.
9
THE DANGERS OF A GOOD ENOUGH SOLUTION
Simply put, basic functionality
hinders marketers from achieving
the best results, and worse, slows
the entire business.
At the outset, organizations should
prioritize the decision of which platform
to choose, based on both the short
and long-term needs of the business.
But, if you’ve already made a decision
that you think isn’t a long-term fit,
don’t worry because you’ve already
Simply put, basic functionality hinders marketers
from achieving the best results, and worse,
slows the entire business.
invested time, money, and energy
into getting it going. Migrating from
a good-enough solution to a full-service
and scalable solution, like Marketo,
doesn’t mean you have to start from
scratch. Hundreds of companies
have preserved the value of their
marketing investment with best practice “In order to become customer-
and migration guidance, as well as centric, you need to be able to
successfully identify your ideal
professional consulting services,
customers, collect relevant
to help them achieve their marketing
insights, and send prospects
and business goals. down a buyer’s journey in a very
personalized way. We selected
Marketo because it was the best
solution for us to grow.”
– Lauren Hibben, Senior Group
Manager for Global Marketing
Operations for Eventbrite
10
THE DANGERS OF A GOOD ENOUGH SOLUTION
The migration from one system to
another can be a time consuming
endeavor, especially for a marketing
team that pushes a “good enough”
solution to capacity for too long.
For example, when high-growth
companies inevitably transition to
a more robust platform, they may
temporarily lose momentum because
data is not available and campaigns
cannot be run during migration.
Put another way, high-growth companies should plan
to scale at velocity from day one.
The combination of slowing down
the business due to sub-optimal
capabilities and drawn out platform
migration should eliminate the
consideration of a “good enough”
solution. A platform decision almost
always becomes clear in the mind
of a marketer who asks, “Which
platform can enable iterative, full
lifecycle marketing and high-growth
versus the growth of a ‘typical’ start-
up?” Put another way, high-growth
companies should plan to scale at
velocity from day one.
“When we were evaluating
marketing automation solutions,
we were confident in our
organization’s growth. So we
needed a tool that could scale
with us. That’s why we invested
in Marketo. A lot of times
you’ll engage with marketing
technology or a certain vendor,
and as you grow at some point
you end up having to move off
of that to the next level. The
beautiful part is being able to stay
with Marketo for an extended
time.Marketo today serves
as the core of our marketing
technology infrastructure.”
– Baxter Denney, Vice President,
Growth Marketing, New Relic
11
Signs That You’ve Outgrown
Your Marketing System
SIGNS THAT YOU’VE OUTGROWN
YOUR MARKETING SYSTEM
Many marketers have found
themselves in the unenviable
position of having to toss aside
their old email service provider
(ESP) or basic marketing automation
system in order to scale customer
acquisition and revenue growth.
In other words, marketers have
outgrown these solutions. The reality
of the high-velocity growth imperative
leaves marketers with little choice.
Scrap these solutions in favor of scaled
marketing automation or watch your
company’s valuation decline fast.
ESPs became mainstream when
companies saw the need to send
consumers large volumes of marketing
messages. But as email marketing
has become more sophisticated,
ESPs have struggled to move beyond
their original batch-and-blast origins.
Some have tried to evolve, but they
are constrained by their very nature.
Their databases are simple and lack
easy integration with other enterprise
systems. They were built for rapidly
sending the same message to many,
not for orchestrating intelligent
one-to-one conversations or
performing multi-channel engagement.
13
SIGNS THAT YOU’VE OUTGROWN
YOUR MARKETING SYSTEM
For marketers using ESPs,
even sending a short follow-up
email about an event is complicated,
requiring these arduous steps:
1. Manually compile a list of people
who attended the event. This isn’t
something the ESP keeps track of,
so marketers must perform exports
and imports to obtain names.
2. Determine which people on the
list RSVP’d to the event, but never
showed up, and then put them on
a separate list. This involves another
export/import.
3. Manually build two campaigns—
one for those who attended and
another for those who didn’t.
4. Manually send both emails.
With ESPs, valuable time is spent
manually gathering data, analyzing
it, creating lists, and setting calendar
notices in order to remember to
simulate what appears to be a
personalized marketing experience
for recipients. But worse, this
cumbersome process means
that scaling marketing efforts
becomes impossible.
But what if a marketing team has
started down the “good enough”
road? Transitioning to a platform that
can help a company keep growing
is not something that should be
delayed. In fact, the more marketers
find themselves stretching limited
capabilities, the more challenging
migration can become.
Put bluntly, “workarounds” waste
productivity and can create complex
platform and data issues that compound
over time. The key here is to find
a partner, like Marketo, with deep
migration expertise and engage early
with their experts. An experienced
technology migration partner leverages
where a team is with “good enough”
(so marketing never misses a beat)
and helps them plan forward with
platform that scales.
14
LIVEINTENT
LiveIntent Bolsters Prospective from the start and that opportunities
Customers by 97% With Marketo would not slip through the cracks.

Founded in 2009, LiveIntent is a platform Within 30 days of using Marketo,

that leverages the power of the email
address to provide a smarter way
to market to people. LiveIntent was
recognized in 2014 as the fastest growing
technology company in NYC (by Crain’s)
and in 2015 as one of America’s most
promising companies (by Forbes.)
One of LiveIntent’s core objectives
was to better align their marketing
and sales teams in order to close deals
more efficiently and effectively. LiveIntent
chose Marketo as it seamlessly integrated
with the company’s sales platform.
This guaranteed that data was accurate
LiveIntent’s sales team was able LiveIntent’s Results
to prioritize prospective customers
and close deals faster. As a result
of using the platform, LiveIntent
increased its sales opportunities by
97%, ultimately scheduling 50%
97%
more meetings. And within three
months, it boosted revenue pipeline
more sales
by 101%. Marketo made an impact to opportunities
the company’s bottom line not only
by arming sales with more accurate
information needed to close a deal,
but also improving the overall efficiency
of the team.
50%

more scheduled
“Our prior marketing tool was holding back our outbound sales efforts. meetings
We spent exceptional time researching and arrived at Marketo as the optimal
solution. We’ve experienced incredible growth and success in the past year,
and our sales and marketing teams couldn’t have done it without Marketo.”

– Suneet Bhatt, Chief Marketing Officer at LiveIntent

15
Marketing Automation
that Scales is a Must-Have
MARKETING AUTOMATION THAT SCALES
IS A MUST-HAVE
Marketing automation platforms
succeed in all of the areas in which
ESP solutions fail, particularly
when it comes to personalized,
targeted marketing.
Not only do marketing automation
platforms replace traditional ESPs for
email marketing, these sophisticated
systems enable marketers to:
1. Deliver high quality leads
to your sales team:
• Lead generation
• Customer scoring
• Behavior tracking
• CRM integration
2. Engage your potential buyers
until they are purchase-ready:
• Customer nurturing
• Relationship marketing
• Customer management
• Social marketing
3. Help your marketing team scale:
• Event management
• Landing pages
• Online forms
• Campaign management
4. Illustrate marketing’s impact
on the bottom line:
• Marketing analytics
• Customer retention
• Measure cross-selling
and upselling
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MARKETING AUTOMATION THAT SCALES
IS A MUST-HAVE
By bringing all this functionality
together into a single platform, a
marketer’s world is greatly simplified,
streamlined, and made scalable.
There are vast capability differences
between full-scale, robust marketing
automation platforms and basic
marketing automation solutions.
Remembering that “good enough” will
not provide the scale or full functionality
required of high-growth companies,
marketers should proceed based on
their 3-to-5-year marketing goals, not
their 6-month goals. By looking beyond
the short-term window, marketers will
save themselves from a painful “rip and
replace” as well as costly downtime that ESPs were built for email,
will undoubtedly slow the business. and email alone; this
makes ESPs ill-suited
for the sort of omni-
channel integration that
today’s audience requires
and which marketing
automation accomplishes.
18
The Importance
of Integrations and
Platform Flexibility

19
THE IMPORTANCE OF INTEGRATIONS
AND PLATFORM FLEXIBILITY
Today’s high-velocity companies
are integrating their marketing
automation platform with other
marketing applications, such as
Facebook Ads, Webex, Wordpress,
and SurveyMonkey to name a few.
But to do so, the platform must provide
the flexibility to easily and seamlessly
integrate an array of third-party apps.
Nearly every month, new apps are
introduced that make business processes
(especially for sales and marketing)
much easier. That’s why it’s imperative
to standardize on a platform with
optimal flexibility, native integrations,
and APIs that allow a marketer to
leverage as many new ways of engaging
prospects and customers as possible.
True automation can only come with
multidirectional integrations between
the wide array of available apps,
a marketing automation platform,
and a company’s core CRM system.
“We’ve seen tremendous growth at
New Relic. The company generated
over $100 million in revenues in
2015 and employs over 800 people
around the world. As we’ve grown,
our technology landscape has also
gotten more complex. We have
roughly 50 technologies that we use
in marketing and they’re all trying to
talk to each other. Having Marketo
to help us navigate that landscape is
really crucial.”
– Baxter Denney. Vice President,
Growth Marketing, New Relic
20
 How To Grow With
Marketing Automation
HOW TO GROW WITH MARKETING AUTOMATION
Many high-growth companies spend
great amounts of their funding
on attracting new customers
through advertising, search engine
optimization (SEO), website
promotion, and social marketing.
While the initial interaction is important,
a customer’s true value emerges over
his or her long-term relationship with a
company. For this reason, it’s important
to consider lifecycle growth and the
ways to achieve that with each and
every customer.
It’s no wonder that The Economist
Intelligence Unit reports that over
the next three to five years, 75% of
marketers say they will be responsible
for the end-to-end experience over
the customer’s lifetime.
Engaging customers throughout their
lifecycle drives more revenue from each
relationship, whereas leaving customers
to flounder results in losses. It’s almost
always less expensive to grow revenue
from an existing customer than to
attract and sell to a new one.
22
Drive Value and Revenue
Across the Entire
Customer Lifecycle

23
DRIVE VALUE AND REVENUE ACROSS
THE ENTIRE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE
Progressive marketers have come
to recognize the importance
of looking beyond the revenue
value in a customer relationship,
and instead, consider how to deliver
more overall value to a customer.
A positive customer experience across
all touchpoints is increasingly seen
as a company’s most valuable asset.
And, more than any other function,
marketing is responsible for managing
it—across the customer lifecycle and
across channels—from initial awareness
through loyalty and advocacy. In fact,
a recent McKinsey & Company global
survey found that the ability to create
sustainable and engaging customer
relationships is the top priority for
CMOs, even taking precedence over
demonstrating bottom-line results.
To continuously deliver value to
a customer, marketers leverage their
marketing automation system
to perform ‘engagement marketing.’
This is the process of engaging
customers as individuals, based
on what they do, wherever they are.
Engagement marketing is a continuous
process in which marketing keeps
an updated and “healthy” database
of engaged people who use encounters
with marketing to extract the maximum
value from their purchases.
What is engagement marketing?
In the last decade, marketers have
embraced engagement marketing
as a way to cultivate high-value
relationships with loyal and long-term
customers. Engagement marketing is
about connecting with people:
• As individuals
• Based on what they do
• Continuously over time
• Directed towards
an outcome
• Everywhere they are
24
Growth During
Every Stage
GROWTH DURING EVERY STAGE
There are six critical marketing stages across the entire
customer lifecycle. Companies that master these are on the
right path to fueling high-velocity growth:

1 Acquire

2 Engage

3 Convert

4 Retain

5 Grow

6 Analyze

26
GROWTH DURING EVERY STAGE
Acquire
Today’s potential buyers don’t become
customers overnight—they require
marketing over time as they self-
educate and build trust with a company.
With 60-90% of customers guiding
their own purchase journey, businesses
must build personal relationships with
prospects and customers to win them
and retain them over time. Yet this is
no small feat considering that most
people at the beginning of their journey
are anonymous buyers. The challenge
for every marketer is how to create an
engaging experience for both unknown
Just remember: it’s not acquisition versus engagement.
It’s acquisition as a first step to better engagement.
and known prospects and customers,
which is just as important as acquiring
the right customers from the start.
Marketo enables high-growth
companies to call upon critical features
and technologies that help marketers
do just that and drive higher rates
of acquisition. These include:
Customized Pay-Per-Click (PPC):
Personalized PPC campaigns enable
companies to narrowly focus on their
target market.
Intelligent SEO: The right marketing
automation platform enables an
intelligent approach to SEO that
ensures content is relevant to buyers
and search engines.
Web Personalization: This technology
helps marketing create meaningful,
real-time interactions with targeted
individuals through dynamically
generated, personalized communication
across email, the web, and ads.
Intelligent Retargeting: On average,
almost a quarter of digital marketing
budgets is spent on ads. Unfortunately,
more than 95% of visitors that come
to a company’s site from paid ads
may never convert. With intelligent
retargeting, companies can target the
right audience with personalized ads.
27
GROWTH DURING EVERY STAGE
Engage

Today’s buyers expect an extremely personalized, cross-
channel experience. They do not want to be spoken
to; instead, they want to be listened to. Companies should
focus on creating relationships with potential buyers, helping
to build trust and eventual advocacy. They can do so by
delivering relevant information and content that answers their
prospective buyers’ questions and concerns.
Marketo makes it possible to “listen” to prospects’ activities–
from website visits, social media interactions, or opening
emails–and refine messages based on those behaviors. It
also empowers companies to engage prospective buyers in
a personalized way at scale. Finally, it lets marketing engage
people based on how the company first acquired them into
their database. In fact, it allows marketing to start engaging
them the second after they acquire them.

Over time, marketers gain a true understanding of who their buyers are and where
they exist in the customer lifecycle. To develop a comprehensive profile of customers,
marketers require a unified view that shows how customers interact with their
company across channels. Understandably, an Accenture CMO survey revealed that
“lack of single customer view” is one of the key reasons that companies do not tackle
engagement marketing. Moreover, 42% of CMOs told Accenture they agree that
“technology is siloed and too difficult to use” for cross-channel experiences. So, the
key is to find a platform that helps every level of marketer understand what’s working
and what to change in order to drive optimal results.

28
GROWTH DURING EVERY STAGE
Convert

On average, 50% of the contacts in any system are not yet
ready to buy, and almost 80% of new contacts never convert.
High-growth companies cannot afford to waste their time
on unqualified and unfit contacts. The key is to develop
relationships with buyers at every stage of the buyer’s journey
until they are ready to purchase.
Knowing that potential buyers are interested is important,
but to accurately score them, companies need to know
they’re actually a good fit—before the sales team pursues
them. With Marketo, marketing can take into account
demographics, firmographics, and behavioral criteria
to deliver a prioritized list to sales.

Through the listening capabilities of Marketo, marketing can Marketo’s Opportunity Influence Analyzer shows the entire
have a continuous conversation with prospective buyers story associated with an opportunity
across web, social, email, advertising channels, and beyond.
With consistent, relevant communications, marketing can
build trust and a relationship with buyers over time.

Plus, for organizations with a sales team and process

(most B2B companies), Marketo enables lead scoring
so marketing can determine if a lead is sales-ready according
to agreed upon criteria from the marketing and sales teams.
This empowers them to only send sales-ready contacts
to the sales team.

29
GROWTH DURING EVERY STAGE
Retain
The best customers are the ones
that last a lifetime, so companies
must plan on the stickiness of the
customer experience, including
communication. Put simply:
after spending significant money
acquiring customers, how can
companies keep them? After all,
it’s far easier (and cheaper) to sell
to happy, existing customers than
to find new ones. When companies
gain the loyalty of a current customer,
they don’t just reap the rewards
of continued purchases from that
person; they also get customer
advocacy as the customer endorses
the brand to peers and social networks.
A study by King Fish Media found
that marketers spend 56% of their
marketing budgets on new customer
acquisition and 33% on customer
retention. But marketers seem to grasp
the need to invert this ratio. According
to Econsultancy, 82% of companies
agree that retention is cheaper than
acquisition, and 49% said they achieve
higher ROI from relationship marketing
than from acquisition marketing.
of companies agree that
82% retention is cheaper
than acquisition
achieve higher ROI
from relationship
49% marketing than from
acquisition marketing
And the numbers confirm what
marketers suspect—Bain & Company
has found that it costs between six and
seven times more to acquire a new
customer than retain an existing one,
but that repeat customers tend to spend
more—as much as 67% more.
By providing prospective buyers with
relevant information and making them
part of a larger community, companies
can help their customers get the most
value possible from their purchases.
Marketo helps marketers do just that,
by providing its customers access
to a community of more than 50,000
like-minded marketers, an annual
summit that brings together Marketo
experts and digital marketing thought
leaders, and a steady flow of insightful
best practices. Through these resources,
Marketo customers continually learn
ways to maximize the value of their
Marketo investment.
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GROWTH DURING EVERY STAGE
Grow
To fuel high growth, companies must
not just think about selling more,
but figure out how to build an army
of customer advocates. The goal is to
create a shared purpose with customers
to activate the customer base so it
advocates on behalf of the company.
New Relic has succeeded wildly
at this, increasing the percentage
of its customers generated by referrals.
Founded in 2008, New Relic—
which offers application performance
management software via the cloud—
has seen tremendous growth.
As of 2015, over 500,000 users
were using the company’s product,
including those from Airbnb, ZenDesk,
and Conde Nast. The company
generated $100 million in revenues
in 2015 and employs over 700 people
around the world.
According to Baxter Denney, As the core of New Relic’s marketing
Vice President, Growth Marketing technology infrastructure, Marketo
at New Relic, “marketing is about enables the company to run targeted
finding out who your customers programs that encourage customers
are and getting them to engage with to use features they haven’t used
your solution and demonstrating value or that encourage them to refer other
for them.” And early on, New Relic people within the organization to start
adopted a laser-like focus on getting using New Relic’s products.
people to adopt the company’s product
so they could see the value.
“Engagement marketing is crucial to
everything we’re doing at New Relic.
We’re continuously trying to get our
existing customers to try our new
products and to use more of what
they are already paying for.”
31
GROWTH DURING EVERY STAGE
Analyze
Now, more than ever, marketing must
prove the value of its contribution. For high-
growth companies, doing so can help make
the case for headcount, help demonstrate
the power of their investment to investors,
or ultimately help present a compelling
business case for company acquisition.
With a marketing automation platform, like
Marketo, you are able to understand and
plan where your marketing budget should
go based on data-backed analytics that
highlight the campaigns that deliver a high
return on investment and drive results, and
those that don’t meet expectations.
Consider the example of MyFitnessPal, a
Marketo customer. When it launched, it was
powered by a relentless drive to become the
world’s most popular nutrition tracking app
and healthy living platform. The company
crafted its marketing strategy to think about
users throughout the customer journey
and across all channels. MyFitnessPal and
its marketing leadership saw the marketing
function as the steward of the whole
customer relationship—not just the engine
to acquire customers. It quickly realized that
its lack of marketing tools was holding the
business back. While MyFitnessPal had the
build of a communicative brand, it wasn’t
exercising its engagement muscle.
For instance, despite having 15 million email
addresses in its database, the company only
sent a total of four emails in 2013.
To remedy this shortcoming, MyFitnessPal
implemented Marketo’s customer
engagement platform in April 2014. Using
Marketo to power its relentless focus on
engaging and re-engaging customers,
MyFitnessPal’s six marketing staff members
were able to scale at an intense rate. Within
six months, MyFitnessPal grew its email
database from 15 million subscribers
to 23 million. In addition, the company
reactivated 500,000 users weekly and saw
a 10% increase in user engagement and
dramatically grew its blog readership.
32
Determining a Company’s
Customer Lifecycle Stages
DETERMINING A COMPANY’S CUSTOMER
LIFECYCLE STAGES
Outlining the stages of the
customer lifecycle is key to
developing a strategy that speaks
directly to each customer based
on his or her current relationship
with your company and progressing
him or her to later stages.
Marketers most often start to outline
stages by noting the channels that
customers and prospects are using
to engage with the company and the
types of information they seek at each
stage. The ultimate goal is to identify the
ideal targeted stages and ways to speed
customers along various stages
to the desired one.
In addition to identifying desired
lifecycle stages, it’s also important
for marketers to identify undesirable
stages. In other words, are customers
getting stuck in stages it’s best to move
them out of quickly? For example,
do customers become dormant for
a year after their first purchase? How
can you keep customers engaged even
when they’re not making a purchase?
For many marketers, the final stage
of the lifecycle will involve some form
of advocacy—where repeat customers
are now sharing their positive
experiences regarding the brand
with their friends or colleagues.
34
DETERMINING A COMPANY’S CUSTOMER
LIFECYCLE STAGES
With a solid understanding of the
lifecycle and the stages that matter
to the business, marketers need
to figure out how to progress
customers to the “positive” stages
faster and keep them there longer.
Having a goal makes it easier to control
how people move through the lifecycle.
Ideally, marketers will develop content
and campaigns for every touchpoint
that influences movement through
the lifecycle. To do so, marketers must
analyze how customers currently move
through the lifecycle and consider
possible changes that may achieve
the ideal lifecycle.
The following six questions should
be considered in developing the ideal
lifecycle stages:
1. What stages comprise my
customers’ lifecycle?
2. Is this the ideal lifecycle?
3. What indicators identify a
customer’s stage?
4. Can I automatically measure those
indicators today?
5. How will I know when someone
moves forward or backward in
his/her lifecycle?
6. Am I effectively re-activating dormant
customers today?
35
How Marketo Accelerated
Customer Acquisition and
Revenue Growth
HOW MARKETO ACCELERATED CUSTOMER
ACQUISITION AND REVENUE GROWTH
Since our inception in 2006, Marketo niche. Our flagship product, and more
has aimed to build a high-velocity recent versions, helps marketing teams
business focused on helping marketers accumulate, understand, and manage Marketo’s Formula
prospective and existing customers. for Sustainable Growth
be more effective and efficient, and
one way that we identified that we
This includes connecting interactions In the last decade, marketers have
could make an immediate impact on embraced engagement marketing
with buyers over the web, social media,
this was by improving the process of as a way to cultivate high-value
events, etc., which marketers can then
lead nurturing and management. relationships with loyal and long-
use this knowledge to nurture those
term customers. Engagement
contacts throughout their own, unique marketing is about connecting
The lead nurturing capability helped
buyers journey until they are ready to with people:
us book our first real revenue just three
convert, afterward driving upsell and
months after launching. More importantly,
retention with continued customer • Relentlessly focus on
it drove us to develop an innovative,
engagement. All of this is done at scale communicating with the right
high-velocity customer acquisition
and in an automated fashion. buyer and addressing their
process that enabled us to sign on
pain points
1,000 dedicated customers within three
As a B2B organization, an important • Think from the beginning about
years of launching our flagship product.
aspect in our ability to scale was the entire customer lifecycle
the depth of our domain knowledge
We knew that if we could figure out how • Recognize that customer
around the sales and marketing advocacy is essential to high-
to acquire paying customers early on,
workflow. Our ability to reflect this velocity growth
then we could create a repeatable and
knowledge in our technology platform
scalable marketing process to optimize
and have it operate at scale made us
lead generation. Of course, the type
the de facto category leader.
of lead generation we performed for
ourselves, and which we enabled for
our customers, was itself a new industry

37
HOW MARKETO ACCELERATED CUSTOMER
ACQUISITION AND REVENUE GROWTH
It’s also important to note that
when we started, it was with
nothing but a website with
whitepapers, an informative blog,
and other educational resources.
We did not have anything to sell.
Yet, people consumed our content
and willingly gave us their contact
information in exchange. As our product
got closer to reality, we started hosting
our own webinars and gave people
sneak previews of what was coming.
We became our own beta user.
We adopted content-driven and
social-driven marketing strategies,
and we did for ourselves what we do
for our customers now. By the time
our product was ready for launch,
we already had the names of 50
potential buyers.
Today, our valuation is at
12.5 times the $100 million
in funding we raised in multiple
financing rounds. We attribute
this success to accelerating,
at scale, the critical business
functions of sales and marketing
through process alignment—
a vision that advanced-stage
investors, such as Google’s G-Cap,
appear to be embracing as well.
This alignment comes via automation,
which most marketers now know
as marketing automation.
Marketo: High Valuation
+ Rapid Growth
In 2008, we began actively selling
our product and by the end of the
year, had 80 customers. In 2009,
we acquired 150 customers, mostly
SMBs. Then, in 2010, we started
selling to enterprise customers,
which led to $30 million in total
revenue for 2011. After four years,
we hit the same revenue mark that
Salesforce.com achieved in their
fourth year. However, we spent only
$17 million to reach that revenue
level, while Salesforce.com spent
$250 million to reach it. We went
public in May 2013 with a market
valuation of $1.25 billion.
38
CONCLUSION: ADOPT MARKETO
TO FUEL HIGH GROWTH
High-velocity companies have to live up to lofty expectations
placed upon them by investors and their “best case scenario”
valuations. But if these companies can acquire customers
and grow revenue at their targeted rates, they stand to define and
dominate new markets as category killers. With the stakes so high
and the potential payoffs so enormous, it seems a non-starter to
consider anything less than the best and most scalable marketing “Marketing can be the fuel to the
automation platform for enabling optimal engagement-based fire which can amplify the growth
sales and marketing. trajectory of a company…Building
the best of breed teams out and
High-growth organizations have achieved their customer and revenue equipping them with a modern day
success goals, and fueled their high-velocity marketing activities through marketing tech stack can mean the
a heavy reliance on Marketo’s marketing automation platform. In fact, we difference between hyper-growth
and average growth.”
were the first unicorn to do so—pioneering and documenting the impact
that a robust marketing automation platform can have on a high-growth
– Bill Macaitis, CMO, Slack
organization. Marketo is a scalable, sustainable platform proven to enable
growth by helping organizations engage customers across the lifecycle,
use real-time data to determine where to re-invest and to justify their
marketing spend and staff, and measure and prove the value of marketing
to investors.

39
Marketo (NASDAQ: MKTO) provides the leading engagement marketing software and solutions designed to
help marketers develop long-term relationships with their customers - from acquisition to advocacy. Marketo
is built for marketers, by marketers and is setting the innovation agenda for marketing technology. Marketo puts
Marketing First. Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, with offices around the world, Marketo serves as a strategic
partner to large enterprise and fast-growing small companies across a wide variety of industries. To learn more
about Marketo’s Engagement Marketing Platform, LaunchPoint® partner ecosystem, and the vast community
that is the Marketo Marketing Nation®, visit www.marketo.com.

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