I was happy to get an invite from a good friend to attend this event last night in Bellevue.  The speaker was Michael Hilton who is EVP of Marketing at Concur and was the company's founding CEO.  Concur is a great company here in the Seattle area that provides enterprise expense management software and, more interestingly, made the transition from premise-based, perpetual software licenses to SaaS, subsricption-based licenses and lived to tell the tale (although they certainly took their lumps along the way).

Michael and I chatted briefly before the event about the evolution of enteprise marketing strategies and if all the social media hoopla (my word) can lead to measurable results and booked new revenue.  I think we both agreed that you have to be doing something with it and Concur has made it part of their overall marketing mix.

During the presentation, Michael shared some great insights with the group and I wanted to share a few of the highlights:

• Search is the awareness king and their #1 source of leads that lead to new business.  They derive about 2/3 of their traffic from natural vs. paid search
• In 2009, they are 100% on-line for ad spend (no more print advertising).
• They measure their marketing success based on "qualified leads" generated and Sales applies this label based on a defined acceptance criteria
• Big users of webinars preferring scheduled events vs. on-demand content
• Experimenting with Twitter, Facebook, & LinkedIn
• Doing some really cool things around enabling customer communities and allowing customers to provide feature suggestions and vote on their importance as a community.