0 ClickDimensions Grows Quickly by Offering B2B Marketing Automation as a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Add-On

When I first wrote about ClickDimensions in a February, 2011 post, the concept was intriguing – a marketing automation add-on to Microsoft Dynamics CRM – but the product itself had been available for less than six months and claimed barely 50 clients. Since then, the company has grown its customer base more than ten-fold (it won’t release specific figures), won the Dynamics Marketplace Solution Excellence Partner of the Year award, signed up more than 250 channel partners around the world, and attracted outside funding. Sounds like the idea has legs.

The product has matured as well. The most important addition is a flow builder that supports branching campaigns. This is a bit limited – each node can only have yes/no branches – but it includes a reasonable set of actions including send an email, wait, notify user, add or remove from list, and run CRM workflow. It can also check for whether a contact has opened an email or clicked on a link. This is comparable to standard marketing automation products.

Other enhancements include an expanded survey builder that can skip questions or pages based on previous answers; a/b testing (two splits only) within emails; subscription management; and improved builders for email, landing pages, and forms. The system already provided dynamic email content, although users have to write the selection rules in a scripting language – something many marketers will find intimidating. Web behavior tracking, lead scoring, and social discovery (searching for and importing public data on LinkedIn) are also available.

None of this would make ClickDimensions stand out from other marketing automation systems if it weren’t for its fundamentally different architecture. ClickDimensions works directly from the Dynamics CRM data files, rather than creating a parallel, synchronized database like most marketing automation products. Additional tables needed by ClickDimensions are also custom objects within the Dynamics system. The result is direct connection between the two systems. ClickDimensions functions are also accessed within the Dynamics interface.

ClickDimensions isn’t the only vendor to take this approach. CoreMotives (purchased last March by Silverpop) has a similar architecture within the Microsoft Dynamics world and Predictive Response (which I haven’t looked at in detail) is a similar add-on to Salesforce.com. Still, as the shortness of this list suggests, the dominant approach to marketing automation remains separate, synchronized data files.

This could well change: as marketing automation becomes more widely understood, it will be purchased by less sophisticated companies. These buyers are already customers of CRM resellers who can easily offer ClickDimensions and similar CRM add-on products. That gives the add-on vendors efficient access to a huge market. The CRM vendors themselves would have the same advantage should they choose to add marketing automation  features. 

In practice, most buyers neither know nor care about the architectural differences between the two approaches. So long as the add-on architecture will work – and there’s no reason to doubt it does for all but the very largest implementations – success may well be determined by who reaches the most buyers first. As ClickDimensions’ fast growth already suggests, its reseller-based approach could be a decisive advantage as the marketing automation industry enters its next stage.  Only time will tell.

0 HubSpot Spreads Its Wings

The folks at HubSpot have been busy this summer, announcing their acquisition of Performable in June and their HubSpot App Marketplace last week. Both events mark a continued expansion of their product.

The company gave me a brief preview of the App Marketplace back in May, when the public beta had just launched. App markets are quite the fashion right now, and HubSpot’s joins the Eloqua AppCloud announced in June. In both cases, what’s really happening is the vendor has published APIs that make it easier for other vendors to build products that integrate with their systems. Such APIs are available to varying degrees for other marketing automation products too, so an app marketplace isn’t quite as huge a leap as it may seem. But marketplaces do make it easier to find compatible applications and, done right, ensure that deployment is very simple.

I couldn’t find a public list of the available HubSpot apps, but their press release cites a connector for Microsoft Dynamics CRM and my notes from May mention custom analytics and shopping cart integration.

Unlike smartphone app stores or Salesforce.com AppExchange, the marketing automation vendor app markets won’t establish their products as “platforms” for a broad range of tasks (although the vendors can dream). They instead extend the functionality of the core product and, mostly, simplify integration with other products that already exist independently. In other words, the app markets are useful but not huge strategic differentiators.

Acquisitions, on the other hand, can be strategically decisive. HubSpot didn’t make that claim for its Performable deal, which shows an admirable sense of reality. Performable offers some interesting capabilities but nothing that radically alters HubSpot’s market position.

The main feature of Performable is an ability to define “events”, which can be page visits, form submissions, or other Web behaviors. This is a useful extension of standard Web behavior tracking techniques. Like other Web tracking, it requires users to install a small Javascript tag on their Web pages. Performable also has existing connectors with a variety of social media, help desk, email, billing, chat and CRM systems. Events and connectors make it easy to build a central database of customer behavior.

Performable leverages this central database with some impressive reporting, showing the first, last, and intervening sources (i.e., the Web site they came from) for visitors who reach each event. Although HubSpot already had reasonable Web analytics, Performable's ability to incorporate additional external activity is a substantial improvement.

Events can also trigger multi-step campaigns that send an email or call an external URL. The URL calls can including parameters with customer information or other data, providing lightweight integration with nearly any external system. Performable also has an impressive landing page builder that supports a/b testing and can ensure that visitors assigned to a particular test group are treated consistently in later visits.

However, the multi-step campaign engine is quite basic. It allows wait periods and conditional steps, but does not allow grouping to automatically exclude customers who meet one condition from subsequent steps. That's a pretty basic feature, typically used to send different messages to different segments at the same stage of a campaign. Users who wanted to do this would need to write conditions for each step that exclude conditions for previous steps. This can be a pain-staking and error-prone chore.

Multi-step campaigns are a weakness in the existing HubSpot system, so it's disappointing that Performable doesn't provide much help. Somewhat similarly, Performable relies on third-party email systems, so it doesn't directly improve HubSpot’s existing email engine, which also lags competitors.

But HubSpot made clear that the Performable acquisition was as much about getting first-rate development talent as about the product itself. In fact, the entire Performable staff joined HubSpot after the acquisition and Performable CEO David Cancel is now HubSpot’s Chief Product Officer. So in that sense, at least, the acquisition is indeed strategic.