• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, June 1, 2010

If Marketo's Chief Executive Officer Phil Fernandez has his way, CMOs will have tools to sit down at the table with CEOs and predict quarterly revenue based on marketing budgets. He thinks his company Marketo has developed software that can turn marketing into a profit rather than cost center.

Although the company has traditionally focused on "lead nurturing automation," a new set of products -- Revenue Cycle Analytics (RCA) -- is all about helping CMOs, CFOs and senior marketing teams better analyze and optimize sales through lead generation and other tools.

Two of the five products in the suite recently released are available today: Marketo Analytics Engine, and Revenue Cycle Modeler. The company expects to release the remaining throughout 2010. A handful of clients have been testing the first two apps in for several months, but Fernandez did not release results.

An iPad app called Revenue Cycle Explorer comes next, followed by the tools Planning and Forecasting, and Executive Insights. The tools will become available through a software as a service (SaaS) model.

"We're literally creating the next product specifically for the iPad because people want the ability to touch the pie charts and visually zoom in and zoom out," Fernandez says, explaining the tool in product development is scheduled for release in late July.

Fernandez says the planning and forecasting tool will predict revenue. "Very few marketing predict revenue and that's the reason why marketing gets treated like a cost center, rather than a revenue generating center," he says. "This is a product for the CMO to come to the table with the CEO and talk about what will happen for revenue."

CMOs continue to come under increasing pressure to measure, analyze and report online marketing effectiveness. Fernandez explains the problem this way and uses Marketo board member Wess Wasson, CMO at Citrix, as an example.

Wasson, along with his team, needs more than a hunch to determine where to spend the $120 million yearly to market the multibillion company. He says Citrix likely allocates the budget to a thousand different vendors to advertise through traditional and online media, Google and Bing search marketing, virtual events, tradeshows and email lists.

The tools in RCA aim to give CMOs like Wasson the tools to make educated decisions on where to spend the $120 million yearly that have a positive impact on revenue. You need data to know that the bets placed on search marketing or virtual events pay off.

Fernandez says the significant feature in Marketo's RCA product suite tracks and monitors how prospective customers move through the revenue cycle. He says data from the tool can predict both the future impact of today's marketing programs and the influence it will have on future quarterly revenue cycles.

Wall Street analysts will have a field day with these tools. "If I want to know what revenue the company will generate in September, I can now go to my head of marketing, who will have the tools to tell me, based on leads and other data, how many deals will start to come together in September, October and December," Fernandez says.