0 Oracle Buys Market2Lead Intellectual Assets

Oracle tersely announced today that it had purchased the intellectual assets of demand generation vendor Market2Lead. This is an excellent fit for Oracle in that Market2Lead is a sophisticated product that is best suited to large, demanding marketing operations. Those are presumably the firms in Oracle's target market.

Market2Lead CEO Geoff Rego explained some of the mechanics of the deal to me in a private conversation, but the details were not for publication. However, a blog post by Eloqua's Joe Payne confirms that existing Market2Lead customers will remain clients of Market2Lead, while Oracle itself will be purchasing the technology itself. The effect is that those customers will have the option to stay with Market2Lead or migrate elsewhere over time. Payne's post says that Eloqua and Market2Lead have been discussing a path for Market2Lead clients who prefer Eloqua to an Oracle relationship.

The entry of Oracle into the demand generation space certainly reflects growing interest in the field. Note that Oracle's Seibel group already had a robust marketing automation solution for consumer marketers, so this does clarify that B2B marketing automation is different from B2C marketing automation. (This is why I prefer the term "demand generation" for B2B marketing automation, although it's been a losing battle.) If there's a single major distinction between the two types of systems, it's the heavy reliance of B2B marketing automation on sales automation data, which in practical terms means reliance on Salesforce.com. Part of the reason the deal was structured as a purchase of assets may be that Oracle is a major rival to Salesforce.com, and thus neither firm is all that interested in cooperating with the other.

I've been arguing for some time that we can expect an eventual merger of CRM and demand generation systems. The Oracle / Market2Lead deal seems a step in this direction: at the ownership level, those systems will now be integrated, even though they may remain fairly distinct technically. This would actually mirror the structure of Siebel's own merger of CRM and marketing automation components, which also used separate-though-synchronized databases the last time I looked.

A related question is whether this deal also heralds the start of consolidation among demand generation vendors. I do think the industry is overcrowded, but growth rates are still so high that I don't see that consolidation happening quite yet. Most of the activity has been among smaller businesses, who are not the primary clients for Oracle or Market2Lead. So I don't see other vendors as feeling much pressure as a result of this deal. Of course, this could change if Oracle pursues small business marketers directly, but I'd guess that it will take some time before they have a major impact.

0 Market2Lead User Interface: Attention to Detail Pays Off

Summary: Market2Lead's revised user interface has plenty of refined details. But what's most important is it offers different ways to build simple and complex campaigns. This beats even the best "one size fits all" approach.

Time flies. I saw a demonstration of Market2Lead’s new user interface last December, and they released it in February. But I’m only now getting around to writing about it.

It’s a good thing that Market2Lead moved more quickly than I did, because the new interface is a huge improvement. Their previous offering was a good example of what happens when technicians design a user interface: you get the thinnest possible skin stretched over the underlying components. It’s all perfectly logical and functional, but makes no accommodation for how users actually work.

For the redesign, Market2Lead had the good sense to bring in a usability consultant who focused them rigorously on intuitive navigation, fewer mouse clicks, presenting options only as they are needed, and accommodating both novice and expert users. The results included:

- tabs structured around user activities rather than system tables
- wizards to lead users through creating campaigns, programs and Web forms
- floating menus that show options related to the user’s current activity
- pleasant and consistent color schemes that highlight the commonly-chosen menu options
- searches entered directly into form fields and allowing advanced syntax such as lists and value ranges
- different interfaces for creating simple and complex campaign flows

These are not especially novel concepts, so what really matters is how rigorously they are executed. One objective metric is mouse clicks: Market2Lead reports these were reduced by 300%. The others are largely verifiable by sight – yep, the wizards and floating menus really exist.

But listing these items doesn’t convey their combined effect. The resulting system simply feels less stressful than the original version. Even though you may not know in advance how it works, the next step is usually clear.

The campaign interface is the acid test. Market2Lead offers three versions, each tailored to a different level of complexity.

- The simplest are static campaigns, which use predefined flows and typically present a single marketing program. The program itself represents a single offer, but may contain a sequence of contacts such as an outbound email, landing page, and confirmation email. These elements are predefined for different program types, and users simply fill out forms to specify the details. There is no visual flow chart for the program.

Static campaigns wrap some additional rules around a program, such as which campaign the prospects should enter next. These rules can have some conditional logic, creating the equivalent of a branching workflow. But the structure of the flow is predefined for each campaign type and users cannot change it. As with programs, they use forms to fill in the details.

- A second type of campaign does allow users to build their own workflow. For these, called "workflow campaigns", Market2Lead has provided a Visio-style flow builder but kept it simple. Decisions can only have two results (true or false), branches cannot merge within the flow, and prospects always enter a new campaign at the beginning. This eliminates some options but avoids the complicated paths that can make conventional flow charts so confusing.


In fact, the drag-and-drop interface offers just five icons: send a program, make a decision, wait a specified number of days, send to another campaign, and exit. As in other systems, users can click on each icon to define its parameters. Market2Lead has posted an online demonstration.

- For really complicated projects, Market2Lead provides “adaptive” campaigns. These are designed with standard work flows, but replace the specific programs with rules that select the most appropriate program for each prospect. This allows one simple campaign to deliver different messages to different prospects simultaneously, and to deliver a sequence of messages to the same prospect over time.

Of course, the user must still define the rules used to make the program selections. But Market2Lead argues, and I agree, that this is easier than trying to build the rules within the flow chart itself. It also opens the way for increasingly sophisticated selection capabilities, such as the automated statistical approaches that I described last month.

Choosing from three different campaign types may sound confusing. It certainly will take some time for new users to learn when to select each one. But the Market2Lead interface makes the options readily apparent, which will help to some degree.

More important, each choice makes building its particular type of campaign about as easy as possible. This is a much more effective approach than trying to build a single interface that is good for everything. For marketers who execute a broad variety of campaigns, ranging from simple to complex, this will ultimately make their jobs easier.

0 Ranking the Demand Generation Vendors by Popularity (Yes, Life Really Is Just Like High School)

As you might imagine, I’ve been trying to decide how to expand the set of products covered in the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems. My original plan had been to add several marketing automation vendors with significant presence in this market. The tentative list is Unica, Aprimo, Alterian, and Neolane.

But I’ve also been approached by some of the other demand generation specialists. My original set of products was based on a general knowledge of which companies are most established, plus some consultation with vendors to learn who they felt were their main competitors. So far the original list of Eloqua, Vtrenz, Marketo, Manticore Technology and Market2Lead has proven a good set of choices. Yet there are so many more vendors I could add. How to choose?

The general rule is pretty obvious: pick the vendors that people are most interested in. We do, after all, want people to buy this thing. Of course, you want some wiggle room to add intriguing new products that they may not know about. Still, you mostly want to the report to include the vendors they are already asking about.

But although the general rule is obvious, which vendors are most popular is not. Fortunately, we have the Internet to help. It offers quite a few ways to measure interest in a vendor: Web searches, blog mentions, Google hits, and site traffic among them. All are publicly available with almost no effort. After a close analysis of the alternatives, I have decided the Alexa.com traffic statistics are the best indicator of vendor market presence. (You can read about the analysis in fascinating detail on my marketing measurement blog, MPM Toolkit.)

The table below shows the Alexa rankings and share statistics for the current Guide entries, the four marketing automation vendors already mentioned, and a dozen or so contenders.

	Alexa	Alexa
	rank	share
Already in Guide:
Eloqua	20,234	0.007070
Silverpop	29,080	0.003050
Marketo	68,088	0.001700
Manticore Technology	213,546	0.000610
Market2Lead	235,244	0.000480
Vtrenz	295,636	0.000360
Marketing Automation:
Unica / Affinium*	126,215	0.000850
Alterian	345,543	0.000250
Aprimo	416,446	0.000220
Neolane	566,977	0.000169
Other Demand Generation:
Marketbright	167,306	0.000540
Pardot	211,309	0.000360
Marqui Software	211,767	0.000440
ActiveConversion	257,058	0.000340
Bulldog Solutions	338,337	0.000320
OfficeAutoPilot	509,868	0.000200
Lead Genesys	557,199	0.000145
LoopFuse	734,098	0.000109
eTrigue	1,510,207	0.000043
PredictiveResponse	2,313,880	0.000033
FirstWave Technologies	2,872,765	0.000017
NurtureMyLeads	4,157,304	0.000014
Customer Portfolios	5,097,525	0.000009
Conversen*	6,062,462	0.000007
FirstReef	11,688,817	0.000001

The figures themselves need a little explaining. The Alexa rank is a “combined measure of page views and number of users”, with the most popular site ranked number 1, next-most-popular ranked number 2, etc. (In case you're wondering, the top three are Yahoo!, Google and YouTube.) Alexa share represents “percent of global Internet users who visit this site”. The rank and share figures correlate closely, but share is probably for comparing sites, since the ratio directly reflects relative traffic. That is, a share figure twice as large as another share figure indicates twice as many visitors, while a rank that is one half as large as another rank doesn’t necessarily mean twice as much traffic.

The figures for the existing vendors, in the first block of the table, give pretty much the ranking you’d expect. One wrinkle is that Vtrenz is owned by Silverpop, so Silverpop.com presumably siphons off a great deal of traffic from Vtrenz.com. On the other hand, Silverpop is a major email service provider in its own right, so a large share of the Silverpop.com traffic probably has nothing to do with Vtrenz. In any event, I’ve listed both sites in the table. Vtrenz is clearly a major vendor, so nothing is at stake here except bragging rights.

What’s more interesting is the figures for the Marketing Automation group. Unica is quite popular, while the other vendors are much less visited. This doesn’t particularly surprise me, although seeing Alterian, Aprimo and Neolane rank well below Manticore Technology and Market2Lead is odd. Perhaps these vendors are more obscure than I had realized. Still, they are much larger firms and do much more marketing than Manticore or Market2Lead. Interestingly, the other measure I found somewhat credible, IceRocket’s count of blog mentions, ranks Alterian, Aprimo and Neolane considerably higher than Manticore and Market2Lead. (See the MPM Toolkit post for details.) So the marketing automation vendors are probably a little more important to potential Guide buyers than the Alexa numbers suggest.

But my real concern was the Other Demand Generation group. Here, the Alexa figures do provide some very helpful insights. Basically they suggest that Marketbright, Pardot, Marqui and ActiveConversion, are all pretty much comparable in market presence to Manticore and Market2Lead. I spoke with Marketbright and Pardot this week and connected with ActiveConversion some time ago. Based on those conversations, this seems about right. (Marqui is a special case because they fell on financial hard times and the assets were recently purchased.) Rankings fall off sharply for the other vendors on the list, providing a reasonable cut-off point for the next round of Guide entries.

Of course, nothing is set in stone. Perhaps one of the smaller vendors can convince me that they have something special enough to justify including them. Plus there is still the question of whether I should invest the effort to expand the Guide at all, and what sequence I do the additions. But, whatever the final result, it’s nice to have an objective way to measure vendor market presence.