Eloqua Lead Scoring Applications Increase Revenue and Close Rates for Customers

Market Wire, November, 2007

Eloqua Corporation, the leading supplier of automated demand generation applications and expertise for business-to-business (B2B) marketers, today announced that its customers that deploy applications that score sales leads are seeing remarkable improvements in lead quality and revenue. A survey of Eloqua customers over a six-month period found that customers' total revenue increased by 30%, revenue per deal increased by 17% and close ratio increased by 30%. Lead scoring is available in all three versions of the Eloqua Conversion Suite -- Express, Team and Enterprise.

Lead scoring helps companies eliminate a key source of tension between corporate marketing and sales departments around the quality of sales leads generated by marketing campaigns. This disagreement often escalates into acrimonious disputes, wasted resources and missed business opportunities. Lead scoring lets companies automatically evaluate leads based on criteria mutually agreed-upon by marketing and sales. Those leads that are deemed "ready" are passed along to sales, while those that aren't continue to be nurtured by marketing programs.

"It's critical for companies to agree on the definition of a good lead and how it should handle the leads generated. Too many leads fall out at the top of the sales funnel, wasting valuable marketing dollars for companies," said Jonathan Block, research director of Sirius Decisions. "By using lead scoring, businesses are able to take an analytical approach to leads, quantifying their leads based on their expected value and defining which leads sales should act upon. This brings enormous value to companies, and ultimately, helps them improve conversion rates throughout the sales funnel and increase revenue."

Eloqua's Co-dynamic Lead Scoring is the industry's most comprehensive lead scoring solution because it allows companies to prioritize leads based on both explicit data, like job title, business or industry, and implicit data demonstrating prospect interest, like website visits, downloads and email response. Lead scores are not fixed, but may increase or decrease over time according to prospect behavior. Customers using the Express version of the Eloqua Conversion Suite are also able to do lead scoring based on explicit data gleaned from the customer.

"Co-dynamic lead scoring has taken our evaluation of prospects to a new level as it allows us to read the signals sent through the activity and interactions with our marketing programs and in turn send only the hottest leads to our sales team," said Simon Peel, SVP of marketing and strategy at Cast Iron Systems. "By sending fewer, but more qualified leads to our sales team, we have significantly increased the speed at which deals move through our pipe and filtered out the noise from the leads that will ultimately close."

Eloqua Conversion Suite, available in Enterprise, Team and Express versions, meets the needs of a wide range of businesses, from small companies to global enterprises. It has become the industry's leading family of integrated demand generation applications for businesses that expect measurable results from their marketing efforts. An on-demand solution, Eloqua automates and integrates the key marketing and sales functions of email, direct mail , prospect profiling , website analytics, campaign analytics and sales force automation to improve the quality and quantity of sales leads, eliminate waste and accelerate the entire selling process.

"By using Eloqua for lead scoring, companies are able to align their sales and marketing departments, mutually identifying prospects ready for the sales cycle, and ultimately, bring in more revenue," said Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua. "In addition, Eloqua's lead scoring also allows marketing departments to assess the value of their programs and processes and align their resources in a way that achieves higher value outcomes."

About Eloqua Corporation

Eloqua provides the leading integrated demand generation applications and expertise for executing, automating and measuring highly effective B2B marketing programs. Eloqua drives the entire marketing process from contact to close, while making prospect interest and intent visible at every step. With leading technology backed by expert professional services, Eloqua automates best practices in demand generation for marketers who need to produce a continuous flow of qualified leads for a professional sales force. Eloqua's customers include Sybase, Seagate, Nokia, MySQL, Administaff, Nuance and many other leading B2B marketers. Eloqua Corporation is headquartered in Toronto with offices throughout North America and in London. For more information, please visit www.eloqua.com or call 866-327-8764.

MEDIA CONTACTS: Carrie Maynard Eloqua Corporation 416-642-7789 carrie.maynard@eloqua.com www.eloqua.com Kathy Sucich Davies Murphy Group, Inc. 781-418-2409 eloqua@daviesmurphy.com www.daviesmurphy.com