I know from last year’s Marketing Nation Summit final countdown weeks that inside Marketo it’s full-on chaos and get-it-done mode. It’s that time again when everyone from Phil on down the line are cramming for the annual gathering of the faithful devoted to all good things purple. About this time last year I was working my tail off building the slides and content for Phil’s two hour opening keynote session.
The honor went to me as the guy running product marketing at the time. I will tell you that the experience added more than a few gray hairs to my head under the pressure to help make it a great one for Phil, who happens to have an uncanny eye for detail. Just a couple of hours before the keynote, while making a final review of the ever-so-carefully crafted PowerPoint slides I noticed that the fonts were screwed up. Apparently the creative team built it running PowerPoint on virtual Windows on a Mac and the fonts didn’t transition over well to the presentation platform – a Mac. I had the good luck of connecting with a very cool production guy sitting at the presentation computer who went through every slide with me and together we got every word, every slide to build the way it was intended.
When keynote time came, instead of sitting back to enjoy the show I sat with the team in the A/V booth to the left of stage making sure everything went right at every step of the way for the entire two hours. Good planning and good luck paid off, I was pleased with how it was received and it was cool of Phil to send me an email with a thank you for my part in helping bring the keynote to a successful outcome.
This year the Marketo customer conference will be a very different experience for me (purple attire will be optional this year). My perspective on Marketo-the-product has evolved a lot from vendor-centered to customer-centered, now that I’m part of the Digital Pi crew helping Marketo customers realize the value and potential of this one-of-a-kind marketing platform.
It’s different out here in customer-land where this powerful marketing software platform inserts in a diverse and dynamic universe of business requirements and people. I have seen how much success depends on someone who knows the technology and the business of marketing + sales to configure Marketo. Making Marketo efficient, manageable and effective is tricky business, especially when it comes to discerning a customer’s business requirements. It’s important at initial design and deployment and all the time…you have to stay on top of Marketo every day, making sure its doing what you want and giving you what you need.
The potential to do great things with the platform is unlimited – that’s the magic that Marketo has placed in the hands of marketers. Its power and extraordinary flexibility can make you a hero to your company — we’ve seen it many times with our clients. The more you use Marketo the better you get — and it never ends. There’s always something new to try, some new requirement that comes along that pushes you into another realm of the platform. That’s what makes Marketo fun and rewarding — and yes, sometimes challenging.
Yep, the Marketo Summit is going to be a lot different for me this year. It’ll be fun to watch the keynote in the audience instead of the A/V booth. I can’t wait to see what the Marketo crew cooked up. My big question for the keynote is: will Hillary be wearing purple?
