Steve Woods

Eloqua

Steve Woods, Eloqua's chief technology officer, cofounded the company in 1999. With years of experience in software architecture, engineering and strategy, Woods is responsible for defining the technology vision at the core of Eloqua's solutions. Earlier, he worked in corporate strategy at Bain & Company and engineering at Celestica.

Social Media and Revenue

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Posted on 2011-12-05

When I gave a presentation on Social Media and Revenue at Eloqua Experience recently, I was blown away by the great reaction to it. I wanted to dig in a bit into where social media is in most of today’s businesses. In a lot of ways, social media today is like “digital” a decade ago. There was a wide recognition that you had to “do digital”, but it was very much separate from “marketing”.

Social media today, in a lot of organizations is like that. There’s marketing, and then there’s “social media”. In this presentation, I wanted to dig in a bit and showcase (with a lot of hands-on demos), how social media can drive actual revenue in businesses today.

I do this, in this presentation, through the lens of the 5 RPIs (Revenue Performance Indicators...

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Bored to 3.4 Billion Tears

1 comments 818 reads

Posted on 2011-12-05

In a sequence of events over the last few days, the best and the worst of the software culture and innovation were highlighted. SAP announce a pending acquisition of SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion, and TechCrunch, declared that this event was too boring to bother writing about.

This was fascinating to watch. As a SaaS entrepreneur, this is the culmination of a phenomenal – anything but boring – SaaS success story. SuccessFactors did what most of us in the market are working hard to do: build something that solves a real market need, deliver it to customers, make them successful with it and add real value to their business, and claim a piece of that value in the form of revenue.

SuccessFactors did this well, to the tune of projected revenues of around $330M in 2011.

And they did it as a real business. They operated the business fairly...

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5 Ways Social Media Can Drive Revenue

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Posted on 2011-10-26

There’s no doubt that social media has been a disruptive force on B2B marketing. Yet, many marketers struggle with how to use social media to go beyond awareness, to actually drive revenue.

I’m here to tell you it’s not magic. In fact, by attaching social media marketing to the 5 Revenue Performance Indicators high-performing companies have adopted, you can drive actual results. Here are five ways social media marketing can be used to drive revenue.

1. Extending Your Reach
As marketers we’ve defined “...

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Revenue Performance Management: Align Marketing and Sales to Optimize Top-Line Growth

2 comments 5,032 reads

Posted on 2011-01-25

Revenue Performance Management is a systematic approach to identifying the drivers and impediments to revenue, rigorously measuring them, and then pulling the economic levers that will optimize top-line growth. Really what RPM provides is an analysis framework that allows businesses to make the right investment decisions across the entire marketing and sales spectrum. Without it, making a choice between such disparate options as investing in a webinar series or hiring another sales person would be left to gut hunch or organizational politics.
RPM is focused squarely on measuring and improving your results.

As a discipline, it does this on three levels; dashboarding, benchmarking, and optimizing.

The first of these, dashboarding, is about understanding where you are. How big is the potential audience for your message? How many of those are aware of you? Who is in your funnel? How many of those become leads? Does sales close them, and how quickly? Only...

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Virgin America tackles cross-identity marketing

0 comments 1,487 reads

Posted on 2011-01-03

I just took a flight on Virgin America from San Francisco to Toronto. With the holidays, Google Chrome and Virgin America have teamed up to provide inflight WiFi for free, so I was more productive on the flight than any flight I have taken before. I’ve become a big fan of Virgin America as they seem to be innovating quite a bit on the inflight experience. At the same time, an interesting thing happened that caught my attention and made me wonder about their innovations in the marketing realm also. While it might have been a coincidence, I suspect that it was not and they are pushing the frontiers of cross-identity marketing.
I purchased a meal on the flight (seat-back TV with touch-screen food ordering, nice.), and as part of that I asked for a receipt, and typed in my email address. I’m always a fan of seeing what various companies do with their marketing, so I provided permission to include me in their marketing database. Sure enough,...

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Can Marketing Really be a Revenue Engine?

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Posted on 2010-12-20

It's a key question in today's business environment - can marketing really be a revenue engine, or is this current energy around marketing driving revenue just a fad that will blow over. I was truly honored to host a panel at Dreamforce to discuss that question with three of the very best in the field.
In this panel discussion, Michael Williams of McAfee, Daniel Greenberg of TrialPay, and Chris Boorman of Informatica dug into the question from three very interesting angles and showed exactly what they had done in their respective businesses to rethink marketing as...

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The Changing Dimensions of Lead Flow

0 comments 800 reads

Posted on 2010-11-16

One of the more interesting ways of assessing the revenue performance of an organization that we looked at in thinking about revenue benchmarking was via an overall plan (whether just an adjustment of historicals, or a forward-looking revenue projection). However, in building an end-to-end plan for managing your overall revenue performance, it is important to stay aware of how the “dimensions” change over time. As a marketer or salesperson interacting with a prospective buying audience, how that audience is defined changes as a more direct connection is made with them. While this change is unimportant if each stage is dealt with separately, it becomes important to understand and model correctly as the entire process begins to be viewed with the same lens.
...

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5 Things You Shouldn’t Expect from Marketing Automation

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Posted on 2010-11-10

Marketing automation is becoming a vital tool in today’s B2B space, as more marketers need to gain a better understanding of their customers’ buying cycles and increase their ROI from every campaign.
However, many marketers become enamored with the latest technology and jump into marketing automation without considering the human investment and business processes needed to make their efforts successful. If you focus on the technology over the planning, you won’t have the backbone necessary to support your marketing automation efforts and convert more leads into sales.

Whether you’re considering marketing automation or have already begun the process, you must understand exactly what you can – and can’t – achieve with the software. Here are five things you shouldn’t expect marketing automation software to do...

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Sales Handoff and the Net Quality Score

0 comments 1,339 reads

Posted on 2010-10-19

One of the most controversial and challenging areas of any revenue engine is the hand-off process from marketing to sales. It is this transition that bears the brunt of all the inter-organizational process differences, motivation differences, and politics. This makes it a vital area to focus on in building the benchmarks and dashboards that will help optimize overall performance.
The nurturing and discovery of qualified leads, while vitally important, is of limited value unless the hand-off to sales is efficient and optimized. As this aspect of the process involves a significant behavioral element in the managing of sales team engagement with the lead flow process, it can be the source of many easily remedied revenue engine challenges.
The first aspect of understanding this element of the process is to...

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How a 99¢ iTunes Download Can Change the B2B Software Industry

0 comments 1,525 reads

Posted on 2010-10-12

With the popularity of iPhone apps, common software price points have dropped from $39.99–$59.99 to $0.99–$1.49. This trend currently dominates the consumer market, but as a B2B software marketer, you should take notice.
GigaOM Pro recently forecasted that the market for apps is expected to grow from $183 million in 2010 to $8 billion by 2015. This means consumers will get used to paying low prices for the latest technology and this may change their expectations of how they acquire business software.
Why Does the 99¢ Software Trend Exist?
Over the past decade, the cost of producing and selling software has plummeted. Many of the up-front expenses have been minimized as new libraries and development tools make it easier for you to put software on the market.
In addition:

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