Earlier this month, Act-On presented two webinars to help marketing professionals better utilize the tools available to them.

From Marketing Thought Leadership to Brand Super-Influencer focused on how social media can help drive your marketing efforts and provide new opportunities to leverage brand influencers. A second webinar, facilitated by the American Marketing Association (AMA) and titled Knowledge Driven Marketing, focused on the tools that allowed BreakingPoint’s marketing efforts to succeed at a time when additional hiring was not possible.

Both webinars provided valuable insight for marketing professionals that could allow them to better reach consumers and cultivate leads in the future. Missed out on these offerings? Here are some key takeaways from last week’s webinars…

Knowledge Driven Marketing: How BreakingPoint is increasing Sales with Real-time Lead Behavior Insight

In her webinar, Pam O’Neal, BreakingPoint’s VP of Marketing, discussed how her organization used real-time insight about lead behavior to increase sales.

First, the lean organization used inbound marketing, to create profiles of potential buyers and identify those buyers content preferences at different stages of the decision making process. BreakingPoint then created a content engine that incorporated blog posts, webinars and case studies into their marketing mix. O’Neal expressed the value Act-On Software provided her company, allowing BreakingPoint to integrate the knowledge gained by these inbound marketing efforts with an outbound marketing campaign. She went on to explain how marketing automation and integration helped accelerate growth and lead to more marketing-driven sales opportunities.

From Marketing Thought Leadership to Brand Super-Influencer

This joint webinar included insight from both Forrester analyst, Jeff Ernst and Act-On’s own VP of Marketing, David Appelbaum. In their webinar, these experts shared information regarding marketing thought-leaders and turning fans into brand super-influencers. During the webinar marketers were encouraged to make their super influencers feel important by creating exclusive content and inviting them to spread the word.

Ernst reminded us all that “Business buyers don’t buy your product, they by into your approach to solving their problem” and provided examples of companies using innovative social media strategies to reach potential consumers.

Regardless of what marketing tools your business is currently implementing, there are always ways to increase marketing efforts. Looking for more great marketing insights? Make sure to mark your calendars for our November 2nd webinar titled How to Increase Lead Cycle Velocity and Close More Deals. In this webinar, David Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com, and Raghu Raghavan, CEO of Act-On Software, will discuss how to close more deals, faster—something every company can benefit from.

To find out more about this webinar and to register for FREE visit the upcoming webinars page.

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We are very pleased to announce that we are adding our own three-letter acronym to the business lexicon: SMT, standing for Small Marketing Teams.

Since we target companies of all sizes (the “Fortune 5,000,000″), people tend to assume that we target SMBs. This is categorically not so — we focus on SMTs. These are in fact very different segments.

Generally speaking, the SMB segment is characterized by modest budgets and modest tactical objectives. It is very well served by the likes of Constant Contact and MailChimp, who do a few things but do them very well.

By contrast, the SMT segment features small marketing teams with big ambitions, and with minimal IT or technical support. They tend to be agile and aggressive, and want to use every available tool to achieve their larger marketing objectives. Speed of planning and execution are paramount. And they expect their marketing systems to evolve rapidly to include new marketing channels as they become available.

With marketing teams everywhere being asked to do more with less, this is the way the world is moving.

The vendor that is able to serve the needs of this segment will find rapid growth, happy customers, minimal churn and substantial upsells. We can attest to this

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“Most people think automating marketing is a balance between tactical and strategic. In our experience implementing tactical tools that can also be used in long-term strategy is vastly superior to struggling with difficult-to-implement, bloated systems. Act-On allows us to immediately start our tactical campaigns and then grow into more strategic features over time. We highly recommend Act-On.”

- InsideSales.com, Act-On Software Customer

After reviewing other marketing automation platforms, InsideSales.com found the perfect fit with Act-On Software. Act-On provided not only the email marketing capabilities InsideSales.com needed, but also reverse IP lookup and lead nurturing capabilities. This allowed the company to better target the correct customers at the right time with the right message. With Act-On, InsideSales.com doubled its contact rates as well as the open rates for test emails.

Within just a week of implementation, InsideSales.com was up and running with Act-On. Salespeople could view key metrics to see just how effective they were being. Act-On provided a suite of tools that helped them actively cultivate hundreds of leads before they even attended DreamForce 2011.

InsideSales.com booked so many leads that it’s now got a 2-3 week lead time to keep up with the demand generated using the Act-On Software platform.

Want to see how Act-On Software can help provide value to your business? Visit the website to see a product demonstration and register for the free webinar on November 2 for first hand insight from the CEO’s at both Act-On and InsideSales.com.

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As marketers, we know how to create a “pretty campaign,” but we also know that great marketing campaigns (like all business ventures) are about more than just appearances. It’s also important to have numbers and other quantitative data to prove that your efforts were really worthwhile. That’s right—we’re talking about metrics here, people.

At Act-On Software it’s been a record quarter and we’re excited to share our metrics with you. Here are a few of the highlights:

• We welcomed 164 new customers—up from 137 in Q2 2011. (A warm welcome to all of those new members of the Act-On extended family!)
• During the third quarter our annual recurring revenues increased by over 400% compared to the same quarter last year.
• During Q3 we also launched Hot Prospects^TM, a real-time lead and opportunity barometer. Hot Prospects provides a highly intuitive graphical dashboard within Salesforce CRM that allows salespeople to focus on the right prospects at the right time. Some customers are already seeing results from this tool and have found that having visibility into certain behaviors can translate into a 28% increase in qualified leads and a 70% likelihood of moving to the next phase of the sales funnel (!) once a lead becomes qualified via Hot Prospects.
• During Q3, our employee count grew by more than 33%. Long-time VP of Sales Shawn Naggiar was promoted to chief revenue officer, Jay Shah joined the company as vice president of Business Development and Troy Strahl joined the company as vice president of Customer Success.
• We acquired the assets of Marketbright – one of the early pioneers in the marketing automation space.
• In addition we are excited to announce a partnership with InsideSales.com. Their PowerDialer and Lead Management suites will enable seamless lead passing between marketing and sales, complete with real-time analytics data.

While it’s fun to look back on past accomplishments, we’re even more excited looking forward to the success that’s coming in the months ahead—both for Act-On Software and our customers. And we have plenty more exciting projects in the works to help our customers utilize the marketing automation solution for the Fortune 5,000,000 to achieve their critical business goals. As the saying goes – damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead! Let’s all finish 2011 strong!

Want to find out how Act-On Software can help your business succeed? Contact sales@act-on.com for more details.