• by Ray Schultz , April 15, 2019

Pendo has launched Pendo VIA for Marketo, a tool to help Marketo clients better use that firm's capabilities.

The product is “a packaged solution that allows owners of the Marketo app to understand how users are engaging with Marketo and help them onboard the users,” says Jake Sorofman, CMO at Pendo.

The service also enables non-power staffers at companies to use Marketo in order to create emails and guides them on how to “select email templates available within the tool, upload and segment the email list and create a new email,” while complying with the firm’s customized standards, Sorofman adds. 

That “guard rail” is essential for maintaining a company’s standards, he says.

“Most Marketo shops have a small number of dedicated power users,” he says, adding that the tool is powerful and fairly complex, and that there is  a "high consequence of something going wrong if it’s not properly used.” One potential mishap would be failure to comply with GDPR and Marketo’s own standards for handling PII.

“You want to make sure you’re in compliance and that everyone is on the same page,” Sorofman says.

Another problem would be excessive frequency of emails.

One client that has signed on is Xactly, a sales performance software provider based in Silicon Valley. 

“Like most marketing organizations, we’ve contained our Marketo usage to a very small handful of power users who are deeply skilled in Marketo,” says Brett Theiss, vice president of demand generation at Xactly. “The prospect of expanding usage to other marketers, while maintaining the control we count on, is an exciting proposition.”

Pendo VIA is different from most solutions in that it is natively installed within the app, Sorofman says.

In addition, this is a departure for Pendo — it has specialized in serving builders and developers with software solutions, but in this instance it is targeting buyers, Sorofman says.

Pendo VIA for Marketo is aimed at the marketing operations team -- “the people responsible for Marketo but not necessarily day-to day-users,” Sorofman states. “They’re rolling up analytics to help email marketers get more value from Marketo.”

The product also simplifies the email task, he notes. 

“I can imagine there will be partnerships with other complementers within the marketing stack,” Sorofman predicts.

The five year-old firm is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina and has offices in New York, San Francisco, London and Tel Aviv. It has 325 employees.