I had a chance to speak with Jeff Pedowitz, founder of The Pedowitz Group. Jeff is legendary in the Eloqua, Marketo and Marketing Automation communities, as many know. Having first got the MA bug at Eloqua and then creating one of the earliest demand gen/marketing agencies, Jeff and his team have been at the forefront of the new revenue marketing paradigm. Jeff and Debbie Qaqish are among my personal marketing heroes so it is a great honor for me to have interviewed Jeff on this blog.

But enough encomiums! Let’s hear what Jeff has to say.

How did you get started in marketing automation?

I started using Eloqua back in 2003 when I was working in the Channel Organization at Salesnet. We used Eloqua to help generate leads for our value added resellers. I fell in love with the product and the space. From there I went to Eloqua and became VP of Professional Services.

Why did you decide to start your agency?

In 2007. After working at Eloqua for a couple of years and seeing all the success the early partners were having and I was training them, I figured I could do just as well, if not better.

Tell me about your approach to client engagements.

Every client is a partner. It’s important to set expectations, develop a win-win plan. Work together towards the outcome. When at all possible, always meet the client in person; you can only get so far virtually.

What’s your favorite platform?

I honestly like them all for different reasons. A lot of our satisfaction comes from helping our clients be successful no matter what platform they are on.

What’s been your favorite engagement so far?

I think Palace Sports and Entertainment (owner of the Detroit Pistons) has to rank as one of my all time favorite clients and engagements. They treated us very well, had great creativity and were a joy to work with. We pioneered data encryption, preference center, social scoring, and many other improvements to demand generation best practices while working with them.

How many people do you have on your team?

65

Why should people choose you? (or, why TPG over an independent consultant?)

There is no better place to learn, grow, and achieve then at TPG. Our typical consultant has 5 certifications across multiple platforms. The work is challenging, the team is top notch and our clients are the best.

Which areas do you specialize in?

We specialize in getting results. Our clients select us when connecting marketing to revenue is a strategic imperative. We help them achieve results with consulting, revenue marketing cloud technology and agency services.

Do you have a Package or Pricing Summary?

We price by project, staff augmentation and program. We have a variety of packages for clients to choose from and customize where appropriate.  Three of our more popular packages revolve around our Integrated Revenue Marketing Services.   We can typically do a lot more for our clients with a fraction of the full time headcount they would normally have to invest in.  A quick summary is below:

[As Jeff pointed out to me in August, The Pedowitz Group has had a money back guarantee since the beginning and is very happy to ensure clients are satisfied no matter what. – Josh]

What kinds of firms would find you the most helpful?

A firm that adds documented and repeatable value for our customers in helping them transform marketing from a cost center to a revenue center.

What do you do for fun?

Play sports, travel, and spend time with my family.

What’s the best way for marketers to get in touch?

Jeff [at ] pedowitzgroup.com

I had a chance to catch up with Madhu Gulati, founder of Show Me Leads. I’ve known Madhu since her time at Marketo where she was very successful in helping hundreds of firms make the most of the system. What I did not know is just how deep her marketing automation expertise is. Let’s learn more from Madhu:

How did you get started in marketing automation?

I have been in CRM space for more than a decade now and having worked with Navision (Microsoft Dynamics) as well as a couple of startups in the Silicon Valley, I landed in Market2Lead (now Oracle) and then Marketo. Love every day of my life being involved in the Marketing Automation world. I’ve worked with over 500 customers and understand their Lead Lifecycle and Sales and Marketing Funnels, and helping them to get to the ROI faster with the Marketing Automation tool. And since then, there has been no looking back. I live and breathe Marketing Automation, and started my own Marketing Automation consulting services company called ShowMeLeads, Inc.

Why did you decide to start your agency?

As I was traveling globally for the Marketing Automation Workshops in Market2Lead and Marketo Consulting Services Group, I found that after the engagements with the customers was over, most of the time they were looking for more rather someone who can help them understanding who their prospects are and their needs and have the ability to provide the right message or resource, to the right person, at precisely the right time in their buying process — consistently and efficiently using Marketing Automation Technology. And most of the time they asked, “Do you know who is an expert like you and can manage our Demand Generation Process using the Marketing Automation Platform?” That kindled and triggered the idea, and I began to dream about it. And now I am living my dream with “ShowMeLeads Inc.”

Tell me about your approach to client engagements.

Our vision is to build a world-class global agency, which helps marketers prove the value of their marketing investments through the use of Marketing Automation & CRM technologies.

We have delivered some of the worlds most sophisticated multi touch nurture programs involving progressive profiling, dynamic content, and integration with other technologies.

Our process evolves from defining the success path considering the Marketing Automation Platform used by the client: We follow a simple process and work in phases depending on the clients’ level of maturity of the Marketing Automation process and technology mapping of their business process.

Phase 1: Foundation

In this phase, we help define what our clients need, and based on that build foundation around the following 5 key features:

• Lead Scoring
• Lead Nurturing
• Reports to get to ROI metrics
• Data Management
• Sales and Marketing Alignment

Phase 2: Transform

Once we have the Foundation complete, we get ready to take their Marketing Automation system to next level. In this phase the goal is not only to optimize what we did in Phase 1 but also to help them invest in profitable initiative (or not invest in non-profitable initiatives) and increase revenue.

Phase 3: Enrich

There is no limit on how much Marketing Automation platforms can do for users. During this phase, we dive deeper into the metrics and based on what data speaks, we help our clients implement all the future Marketing Programs.

What’s your favorite marketing automation platform?

Marketo is my favorite platform considering the flexibility, UI, and scalability it provides. At same time, I do believe mapping right tool for the client based on their requirement and business model is critical for adoption and success in getting ROI.

How many people do you have on your team?

We are a team of 11 smart people. Our team consists of demand generation experts, Marketing Automation email and landing pages designer (web designers), and developers. Having all these talents in a team, we are able to meet all the requirements of our clients related to Marketo Automation. Plus, most of us are certified either in Marketo, Eloqua, and/or SFDC.

Do you have a Package or Pricing Summary?

We have following packages to start with.

However, we do provide Marketo Training and Marketo Certification Boot camp for all those who aspire to be a Marketo Certified Consultant.

What do you do for fun?

I live in Silicon Valley and have my 7 year old son who has been nurtured listening to my phone conversations with my clients about lead scoring, lead nurturing, and it is funny, one day he said, “You want to show leads to your customers?” And the other day he came and said, “Mommy, can you help me make a funnel too?”  Really funny, and I enjoy my time with him and I totally let him drive my free time. BTW, at times, I use his art work for my blog post which he loves.

What’s the best way for marketers to get in touch?

Just shoot me an email: Madhu [at] showmeleads.com plus I’m also an active user on LinkedIn so feel free to connect or follow me on there.

As part of the marketing automation masters’ series, I took some time to speak with Alexander Pelletier. Alex is a good friend from the Marketo Community and a recognized RCA guru. Alex just launched his full time marketing automation consulting agency, Perkuto. (Perkuto means “percussion” in Esperanto, so Alex’s team will have a real impact on your revenue generation).

How did you get started in marketing automation?

That’s a while back! At that time, the term “Marketing Automation” did not even exist. I began to be interested in lead generation by reading Brian Carroll’s blog Start With a Lead in 2004 while I was doing online marketing consulting. I learned all the key concepts that define Marketing Automation today, namely scoring, nurturing, and routing.

In 2006, I started my own software-as-a-service company to develop a lead management solution. We built a nice landing page creation and management tool. We were a top download of the Salesforce AppExchange. Google selected us among a few others to be integrated to Website Optimizer.

In late 2008, I was not able to close the second round of financing so I sold the technology IP and started consulting around marketing automation and Salesforce.com. Since then, I alternate between consulting and full time positions as Director of Marketing in technology companies.

Why did you decide to start your agency?

While working with several marketing departments, I realized that all marketing managers are facing the same challenges: How do you demonstrate the value of the marketing efforts? How do you track ROI in a multi touch point complex B2B sale process? How do you combine the marketing and sales process to create a revenue process? So I teamed up with a Lean Six Sigma Blackbelt partner, Youcef Bouayad, with exposure to Sales and Marketing to launch our marketing automation consulting agency. Actually we just launched it this month!  It’s called Perkuto. Our mantra is to help sales and marketing executives to have an impact on their business.

Tell me about your approach to client engagements.

I think that one of the critical steps in any marketing automation project is the process definition portion. Too many projects are driven by quick implementation of the technology, while the process of managing leads is not well defined and that there a misalignment between sales and marketing. So we like to take the necessary time with our clients to properly define the Revenue process. We like to focus for instance on the bright spots. What’s the story behind the successful deals? When did the Sales and Marketing work well together? How can we reproduce and automate this? Once the Revenue process is aligned with the business objectives, we like to breakdown the project in very small bites to deliver value as quickly as possible.

What’s your favorite platform?

I was Marketo customer number 163 the first time I implemented it! So we developed a niche expertise with this platform and I believe this is beneficial for our clients. We have clients that are using other platforms, but we like to maximize the knowledge and make sure that we stay on top of our game with Marketo first.

What’s been your favorite engagement so far?

The favorite ones are often the most challenging ones. For one client, the goal was to put in place ROI tracking for campaign investments. That’s easy when visitors buy online after clicking an AdWords campaign. But when the visitors are buying online and offline, sometimes after speaking to a sales rep via a chat application or by phone, you just multiplied the possibilities and the number of systems. We were able to deliver a solution that not only informs the CMO about ROI of campaigns, but also to feed the AdWords campaigns on a daily basis to automate bid modifications based on offline sales. That’s exciting!

How many people do you have on your team?

Like I said, we just started this month. We are currently 4 and we are always looking for talented people!

Why should people choose you?

Not to sound too cliché, but we know Marketing Automation! Together, we have been in that field for almost 10 years. I also think that our focus on building the right process first and then continuously delivering value ensure the client that the project will be a success.

Which areas do you specialize in?

We focus on the lead management process, Marketo implementation, and Marketo best practices as well as tracking marketing ROI.

Do you have a Package or Pricing Summary?

At this point we have not created any packages. Our approach is to tailor the solutions to the client needs.

What kinds of firms would find you the most helpful?

Any company who needs to optimize the way theirs leads are managed. In term of company size, we have client who have between 2 and 15 people in the marketing team.

What do you do for fun?

Mountain biking & snowboarding.

What’s the best way for marketers to get in touch?

Our website: perkuto.com or my LinkedIn

Marketing automation is still in a serious growth phase. This continues to surprise and excite me because each day I see more and more firms embracing automation. The best part is, there is still an entire world of firms who need help from firms like Marketo.

I had the privilege of hearing about the expansion of demand generation and marketing automation into Europe when I interviewed Simon Harvey, founder of Demodia, a successful B2B agency based in the United Kingdom. Demodia provides the entire range of demand generation services from creative to automation. Simon gives us a view of how his firm works and how Europe is still different.

How did you get started in marketing automation?

I’ve been working in the content marketing area for just about as long as I can remember. My introduction to marketing automation in its current form was around 5 years ago. A good friend of mine was working in a product marketing role at Eloqua and he introduced me to the concepts and technologies that their company was selling. At around the same time my former employer also started looking at marketing automation tools to standardize processes and improve marketing efficiencies in-house. That initiative was largely focused around improving email click-thru rates in the early days, but things quickly moved on and I started to see some of the real benefits of the tools when used to automate nurturing and when they were integrated properly into content marketing programs. I’ve never looked back.

Why did you decide to start your agency?

We formed Demodia back in 2009 in response to the general lack of marketing automation and demand generation expertise in the European market. With marketing automation initially being much more mainstream in North America we found European companies that were looking to adopt MAPs were being forced to work with major demand generation agencies that were based on the other side of the Atlantic. The opportunity presented itself to take the expertise that we had already gained from running a content marketing and demand generation team within a large global company, and share that knowledge with others more locally.

Tell me about your approach to client engagements.

Each client is different and we like to treat them as such. Some clients will come to us directly asking for content to fit in with existing automated processes they have in place, others are marketing automation virgins that need to be taught a lot more about the whole inbound marketing and lead nurturing approach before they are happy to commit.

Whenever we begin we typically start by working with our clients to understand their buyers and their sales process. We will then develop campaigns, content and nurturing programs that generate leads and advance them through the sales funnel. To ensure that marketing content is used effectively across the company it is also not uncommon for us to also be involved in the creation of associated sales enablement programs.

What’s your favorite platform?

Depending on the needs of our clients we work with a number of different platforms including Eloqua, HubSpot, Pardot, and Prospecteer.  We’re very partial to Pardot, but being our own platform I would have to say that Prospecteer is my favourite. The reason I prefer Prospecteer is that unlike most traditional MAPs it provides us with the ability to really bring together the demand generation, content marketing and sales enablement processes providing a single point through which our clients can develop and publish content directly into campaigns whilst at the same time feeding the sales team with content assets to help them sell. With analytics wrapped around the whole thing, it’s a pretty compelling solution.

What’s been your favorite engagement so far?

We have done many great projects, but one of my favourites has to be one of our award winning ones. We built a customer on-boarding program for a large Canadian software company. The campaign was built upon two major components – a series of telemarketing activities and a personalized customer on-boarding website.

We used a combination of Eloqua and the Prospecteer content marketing platforms to develop a highly personalized experience. Each registered visitor to the site was presented with information about their own corporate environment, including details of the products that they, or others in their organization had already purchased. Content assets and other information within the campaign website were then personalized around the products the customer had in-house. Prospecteer was used to deliver, amongst other things, a social assets framework. This enabled visitors to view and interact with a variety of content assets in a social fashion within the context of the on-boarding experience site.

The campaign has now been running for about 6 months. During this time it has delivered a pipeline in the millions of dollars. Not a bad return on investment.

How is marketing automation perceived in the UK and European market?

Marketing automation is finally taking off in Europe. With Eloqua, Pardot, and HubSpot all setting up European offices in the last few years we are finally starting to see proper vendor presence and local support available. The adoption of marketing automation across Europe varies wildly though. The UK tends to be much more aligned to North America, and hence tends to be the early adopter. Elsewhere in Europe things are taking longer. In the last year we have started to see larger adoption in Germany and the Nordic regions, but other countries such are still well behind the curve and still use more traditional email based approaches. We are hearing more and more about building personalized web experiences right across Europe though, so maybe this will be the lead into Marketing Automation for more firms.

Can you share your perspective on how leads like to be treated in the EU?

Europeans tend to value their privacy, and this is always interesting when working with marketing automation tools. Whilst most people are prepared to provide an email address as part of an initial transaction, it can often have a very negative impact on conversion rates to request too much more, especially if you have no prior relationship with the visitor. For that reason we have found lead nurturing programs which use progressive profiling to be of real value.

How many people do you have on your team?

We are still a relatively small company with a regular team of around 10 people working on projects. Our team consists of demand generation specialists, graphic and web designers, developers, and content authors. This mix provides us with the ability to work with clients not only at a strategic level, but to also to be able to provide a full set of inbound and content marketing services.

Why should people choose you?

Our team excel when it comes to thinking of different ways to generate leads with more unusual types of content. Every man and his dog are building lead nurturing programs around whitepapers and webinars. We like to think different and have built up programs around online games, product simulators, ROI and assessment tools, and other more unusual lead generation mechanisms. Being based in Europe we are also used to doing all this in truly multi-lingual environments that cross over country borders. To this end we have received a 2011 Eloqua Markie and a Killer Content award from the Content Marketing Institute for Best International Campaign and Best Customer Relationship Enhancement respectively. Both awards were for our work with OpenText.

Which areas do you specialize in?

We specialize in the following areas:

• Sales and marketing process
• Marketing automation platform evaluation and recommendation
• Lead nurturing / lead scoring
• Content marketing strategy and planning
• Content asset design and creation
• Sales enablement

Do you have a Package or Pricing Summary?

Yes, I’ve attached a summary of our common demand gen service packages. Typically this is usually just a starting point and we find most customers prefer to tailor the offering to their particular requirements.

[Here’s a quick summary: – Josh]

Demodia provides three major packages of hours covering the entire range of demand generation including content creation.

• Bronze – 15 hours for CHF3,500 ($3,767 or $251/hr.) Includes 1,000 words and most demand gen.
• Silver – 25 hours for CHF6,000 ($6,458 or $258/hr.) Includes 2,000 words, 2 blog posts, and SEO help.
• Gold – 40 hours for CHF10,000 ($10,764 or $269/hr.) Includes 4,000 words and 4 blog posts.

Demodia has an interesting package model that includes more services with a higher level of commitment: more up front hours = more services.

What kinds of firms would find you the most helpful?

We tend to work best with larger organizations that have already some level of understanding when it comes to demand generation. Our challenge is coming up with different ways to generate leads and nurture them throughout the pipeline, and we find more experienced organizations are often more receptive to moving beyond the confines of simple content based approaches.

What do you do for fun?

Demodia is a great place to work, and a pretty youthful organization. A few of us are into home brewing, so we have created our own “Monkey Brew” brand of beer. Ok, it’s not available commercially, but who knows what our next venture will bring. We brew everything to our own recipes using whole grains and fresh hops as the starting point. It’s a lot more fun, if a little less predictable, than just brewing from a can of starter syrup. We’ve had the odd failure, but we’ve also come up with some stunning beers. Best of all is that you get to drink the results!

What’s the best way for marketers to get in touch?

Those wanting to reach out to us can mail info@demodia.com or complete the contact form on our website. I’m also an active user on LinkedIn, so feel free to connect or follow me on there.

Thanks Simon! Remember to sign up for future blog updates to learn about more demand generation and marketing automation consultants. (And to get a special gift that will help you convert!).