FunnelCake Announces its Marketing Operations System

FunnelCake today unveiled its Marketing Operations System (MOS), a software service designed to give business-to-business (B2B) organizations a deep view into the conversion rates associated with their marketing campaigns, as well as insights about how they can sharpen their investments.

FunnelCake's system utilizes the Big Data and machine learning capabilities of Microsoft Azure's Cortana Intelligence Suite and combines customer information stored in CRM and marketing automation systems and social media networks to assemble revenue-based performance reports. The solution, which can be installed on top of a company's technology stack, is prepackaged with commonly used metrics such as cost per lead, cost of customer acquisition, funnel conversion rates, and lead velocity. Users can also create custom filters and classify reports according to their geography, industry, or job title, for instance.

A goal of the product is to provide end users with insights into the different elements of a buyer's purchase process, to help companies focus their efforts and maximize marketing investments. The system works to figure out each organization's ideal customer personas and connects these accounts to campaigns. It factors in, for instance, any marketing material that is distributed to a prospect, or sales actions that have been taken surrounding the account, and links those to the funnel. According to FunnelCake's Web site, some discoveries include the best times to send out an email to a specific title holder within a company, and whether a piece of marketing content is having the desired effect on deals.

Users can also set custom goals for each of their campaigns. One outreach effort might be aimed at a revenue goal; another might be concerned with increasing social media engagement or website traffic. The system can monitor the firm's success in reaching the specific goals outlined and alert users when they are not on track to meet them. It can also provide users with insights regarding how many leads they should have in their funnels, and how many they should be generating per day on average.

According to Marko Savic, cofounder and CEO of FunnelCake, the vendor aims to fill the gap between solutions that measure campaign attribution, such as Bizible, Full Circle Insights, and BrightFunnel, and predictive lead scoring tools like Infer and InsightSquared. "InsightSquared isn't telling you, in a great way, what campaigns drive revenue, and what activities push leads forward," Savic says. "And Bizible isn't telling you anything other than your cost per lead. So when [marketers] get the leads, what actually happens with that? We're coming in in the white space between and saying we can connect your campaign attribution to your revenue performance so that marketing is actually now accountable to a revenue goal, not just an MQL goal.

"Marketing has to be responsible for a revenue target, and there aren't tools out there today that make that easy for them," Savic adds. "Everyone wants to operate in that way, but it's just so challenging when you're living in Microsoft Excel." And operating with just spreadsheets can cost a marketing organization hours, if they'd like to uncover insights regarding campaign revenue. "At the end of the day, this is really helping to bring about that cultural shift in marketing where the CRO role is coming in, and you can really have sales and marketing align to the same target rather than butting heads over what the definition of an MQL is."

FunnelCake is now available as a pilot offering and integrates with Salesforce.com, Pardot, Marketo, Oracle's Eloqua, HubSpot, LinkedIn, and Twitter. According to the company's website, customers include the video marketing solutions provider Vidyard and the network management firm Auvik. Savic notes that FunnelCake currently has 10 paying midmarket customers and hopes to expand that number.

The product will be generally available in the fourth quarter of 2016. Depending on the tool kit integrations and the amount of data an organization has, the solution will cost between $1,250 to $4,500 a month. Consulting services will be offered for an additional fee.

"Over the next six months, our goal is to launch in the Salesforce AppExchange as a premium app, and that's going to be a contact washing machine that really normalizes all of your data for you," Savic says. He says that the tool will be useful to marketing teams as it gives them a better sense of what a buying team looks like, and what content and campaigns each contact is likely to typically interact with.

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