0 How RightWave Solves the Marketing Automation Skill Shortage

One of the main reasons that marketing automation has not been adopted more quickly is that too few marketers know how to fully use it. For example, a recent Gleanster report found that 73% of top performers listed lack of skilled staff as one of the top challenges to success. Marketing automation vendors have adopted different strategies to deal with their problem, including making their systems easier to use, offering extensive training, and providing services to run the systems for their clients.

RightWave has taken that final option to an extreme: it doesn’t even give clients the option of running the system for themselves. Instead, RightWave offers what it calls “marketing automation as a service,” gives each client access to staff members who will set up and execute campaigns for them.  There’s nothing especially new about marketing service providers offering this type of service, but  RightWave does it at a price point – starting as low as $60,000 per year – that is comparable to what a good-sized company would pay for most marketing automation systems alone. Because RightWave charges are based on staff resources -- $5,000 per month buys one-half a full time equivalent person, and $8,000 buyers one full time equivalent, fees don't rise for bigger databases or higher message volume.  This means it could actually be cheaper than a self-service system for big companies.

It’s a little hard to review software that isn’t used by its buyers.  Still, the vendor comparison in our VEST report shows that RightWave’s core functionality – for lead generation, campaign management, scoring and distribution, and reporting – is on par with mid-tier leaders Pardot and Marketo.  Where it loses are usability and pricing, but only because it doesn't fit the scoring model: usability suffers from lack of training services which RightWave clients don’t need, and pricing is penalized by the high starting cost which doesn't take into account the lower cost at high volumes.

In other words, RightWave has the features to support pretty much any program marketers might want. More important, RightWave clients are more likely to actually run sophisticated programs because the RightWave staff will build them without the clients needing to learn how. RightWave staff also helps with data quality and analytics, two other areas where many marketing departments lack expertise.


RightWave actually does let marketers import files, create segmentations, and build emails, although few clients do these for themselves.  What clients do use are extensive reporting tools that show marketing calendars, campaign results, customer profiles, Web tracking reports, funnel analysis, return on investment, and other information. The system also gives sales users reports on new leads, activities of existing leads, and visits from target accounts.  Most of the sales information is presented within the Salesforce.com interface, although users can drill down into details held with RightWave.

The details of RightWave functionality are less important than the appeal of its fundamental business model. After seven years of development, the company has about twenty clients.  This sounds considerably short of setting the world on fire, but it really reflects intentionally slow growth as the product matured. Company founder Anurag Khemka, who also started an earlier generation B2C marketing automation system MarketFirst in 1996, said he’s found it relatively easy to sell the system to senior managers, but sometimes run into resistance from lower level staff who want to gain hands-on experience. The company is now starting to ramp up its sales efforts, so the true scope of its appeal will soon be clear. I’ll be watching with great interest.

0 SetLogik Offers B2B Marketers a Real Marketing Database

I’ve now done more detailed research into the SetLogik B2B data management system I mentioned in my Dreamforce post.  If anything, I’m even more impressed.

I originally saw SetLogik as a tool to associate marketing leads with sales opportunities, even when they are not connected directly within Salesforce.com. That’s important in itself, since those missing links are the greatest obstacle to showing the value of B2B marketing efforts through revenue attribution.

But the bigger story, which SetLogik itself recognizes clearly, is that they’re creating a real marketing database. This has been sadly lacking in most B2B marketing automation systems, which supplement the Salesforce.com database with barely-extensible lead profiles and contact histories. In fact, I’ve recently taken to citing the B2B systems' fixed, built-in database as the fundamental difference distinguishing them from B2C systems, which connect to externally-managed databases with any structure.

SetLogik doesn’t replace the database built into the B2B systems.  Rather, it creates a separate database that merges data from marketing automation, Salesforce.com (or, potentially, any other CRM system), and whatever other sources a company has available. The matching capabilities that initially caught my eye are just one part of a larger suite of functions to load, clean, standardize,  merge, and enhance B2B data, ultimately storing it within a database where it can be used with SetLogik tools for segmentation, selection, reporting (including attribution), and predictive model-based lead scoring. Cleansed data and results such as lead scores can be fed back into CRM and marketing automation systems for direct access by their users. SetLogik’s own diagram expresses this separation reasonably well, although I would have suggested they clarify that there’s an independent, persistent database within their cloud.
 

As consumer marketers learned long ago, building a serious marketing database is a big project. The challenge is even greater in B2B, which manages two data levels, companies and contacts, instead of just one level of consumers.  It’s no wonder that B2B marketing automation vendors avoided the issue by piggybacking on the Salesforce.com structure: otherwise, the cost and complexity of building a separate database would have severely limited their growth.

SetLogik’s addresses the problem directly, by creating a nearly-automated system to build the database. The company promises to deliver a completely functional database within 60 days, and to deliver the database plus predictive lead scoring models in 90 days. Compared with the many months or years needed to deploy a traditional marketing database, this is lightning quick.

I call the system “nearly-automated” because a SetLogik analyst works with each client to set up the data preparation steps, tweaking the standard rules and processes as necessary, and because the predictive models are also built by human analysts. These are advantages, not flaws, since a skilled user adds substantial value to both processes. The system still does most of the work, so the initial data quality set-up takes just a few hours of labor – although the full process typically takes several days because clients need time to make decisions. Similarly, modeling takes about two weeks – again, more wait time than work time.  In fact, the model building is so efficient that the company includes it for free in its Enterprise edition, which starts at $1,400 per month for up to 25,000 records.

None of this would matter if the quality of SetLogik’s results were poor. But, while I haven’t run a test, the company certainly describes the features I'd want. Standard inputs include leads, contacts, campaign members, accounts, and opportunities from Salesforce.com, plus leads and activities from marketing automation. Data preparation includes standardization and verification of addresses in the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Australia; phone numbers verification for North America; email format verification (but not sending test emails); table-based transformations and coding for elements like titles and sales territories; and enhancement with client-licensed external data such as D&B listings.

The matching engine uses multiple rule sets, supports both similar and exact matches, and can compare data across several fields (such as mobile vs. home vs office phone number). The system will match at individual and company levels and can link individuals to companies. It will choose the best value for each field and return a consistent best record to all source systems. Predictive modeling can include derived variables, such as number of emails received, as well as raw inputs. The system’s database stores snapshots of old data values so it can track changes and trends. New and changed records run through the system at user-determined intervals that can be frequent as hourly.

The system doesn’t provide an interface for end-users to set their own data processing rules, although one is planned. As SetLogik correctly argues, very few B2B marketers have the interest or skills to do this. In fact, the company’s larger problem is that so few marketers even recognize they need better data cleansing, let alone a separate marketing database. This will likely limit SetLogik's initial clients to the upper tier of sophisticated marketers who do see the problem.  We can hope that the importance of a serious marketing database will eventually become clear to everyone.

SetLogik is a Software-as-a-Service application, available directly from the company or through the Salesforce.com AppExchange. The system has an Eloqua connector today and a Marketo connector in the works. The company promises basic implementation in 60 days, although it is usually much less, and full implementation including predictive modeling in 90 days.

Pricing is based on the system edition and number of records (unique individuals and companies). The Express Edition, starting at $500 per month for 25,000 records, builds the database and feeds the cleansed, enhanced records back to Salesforce.com and marketing automation. Professional Edition, starting at $1,000 per month, adds segmentation, list building, attribution, and other reporting. Enterprise Edition, starting at $1,400 per month, offers all the other features plus predictive lead scores. The price tag gets more serious for large systems – Enterprise costs about $11,000 per month for one million-records – but is still much less than a conventional marketing database. In fact, SetLogik points out that some services built into the price, such as address and phone verification or access to lead profiles within Salesforce.com, would ordinarily cost nearly as much as the entire SetLogik fee if purchased separately.

SetLogik officially released its system in October 2011 and now has several large enterprise clients.

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 Marketing Automation Skills are Scarce: Vendor Strategies to Close the Gap

The marketing automation industry continues to grow quickly, with many vendors announcing their client bases have more than doubled in 2011. But there’s also a growing realization that many marketing automation systems are used for only simple tasks – often no more than email, landing pages, and CRM integration. For example, LoopFuse found that nearly twice as many used email and web landing pages as lead scoring.

Even more worrisome are increasing reports of user dissatisfaction – not enough to stop people from using the systems, but perhaps enough to prevent them from expanding their deployments or recommending marketing automation to their friends. Act-On Software recently reported that 40% of marketers are dissatisfied with their campaign management program.

Surveys, like this one from IBM, show many obstacles to successful deployment.  But the ultimate problem is staff skills: marketers who know how to use their systems and understand their benefits can make a compelling case for investments in programs, integration, technology, data, process change, and whatever else is required.

Marketing automation vendors are painfully aware of these issues. They've taken a range of approaches to addressing them. I've seen four distinct strategies:

• training. This is the most direct approach: if users don’t have enough skills, then teach them. I’m using “training” in a broad sense to include all types of preparation before deployment: these include marketing planning, process change, content development, metrics definition, and organizational realignment as well as actual training in system use.  This is the traditional strategy for B2C marketing automation and at B2B firms large enough to afford substantial pre-deployment investments.  It’s also the preferred option of most industry consultants (myself included) because it provides the strongest platform for future success. Among B2B vendors, Eloqua is the poster child for this approach. (And I should note that many vendors are supporting the Marketing Automation Institute's training program too.)

But not everyone can afford through training and preparation for a marketing automation deployment. The remaining strategies are designed to help those who cannot.

• ease of use. Simple systems let marketers get started with minimum preparation. This is by far the most popular strategy among vendors, presumably because it increases sales by placing the fewest demands on buyers.  It's applied by Marketo, Pardot, Act-On Software, Genius, Net-Results, and many others. It’s also the most popular strategy among buyers, judging by how many installations never grow past the basic functions. But the approach is also probably the reason for high dissatisfaction: marketers must find they face a much steeper learning curve than they expected to use their systems' fully. For long-term success, vendors who take this approach must ensure that their clients keep growing after the initial deployment.

• automation. Instead of training marketers to do hard things or making those things easier, automation has the system do them instead. This is a much less common strategy, in part because it's technically demanding and expensive to execute.   It's also a partial solution at best, since no one thinks marketing can be fully automated.  Still, it's being applied to lead scoring (creating the actual scoring formulas automatically, instead of asking users to define them); to content selection (letting the system predict which content a visitor is likely to want); and to contact frequency (letting the system determine how often a lead should be contacted). HubSpot is following this approach most aggressively although others are also applying it in places.

• full service. This strategy argues that it’s ultimately more efficient for the vendor to do complex marketing automation tasks than to teach marketers to do the tasks for themselves. That’s not as crazy as it sounds: marketing automation tasks like setting up a new program are often complex, rarely required, and quick for a well-practiced expert. So buying a couple of hours or days of service each month really does save time and money.  It also gives access to more expertise than a small marketing department could ever build internally. As you might expect, this approach is most common among at the small business end of the marketing automation spectrum: Genoo, MakesBridge, and OfficeAutoPilot are good examples. But it seems to be creeping upstream: LeadLife, Treehouse Interactive, and Manticore Technology apply it to larger customers.

Although I’ve associated specific vendors with each strategy, the reality is that most companies apply a mix of several. This violates the classic strategy rule to select one clear goal and focus all resources on reaching it.   But a mixed approach probably makes sense for marketing automation, where a tactical choice like making your system easier can support several strategies and where different buyers may need different treatments.

This doesn’t mean that vendors can get away with being sloppy.  The market is too competitive and marketing automation is too complex to succeed despite poor execution. It’s also likely that a dominant approach will emerge within each customer segment.

But even then, one size won’t fit everyone. Both vendors and buyers will still need to match the deployment strategy to the buyer’s situation.

0 LeadLife Bundles Services with Marketing Automation

LeadLife released a completely rebuild version of its marketing automation system last month.
The new system features a cleaner interface and revised capabilities that reflect what LeadLife has learned about the needs of small to mid-size companies since its original product launch in 2008. This involves a careful balance between complexity and power.

The best example of this balance, and the most notable change in the system, is campaign design.  LeadLife originally used a linear sequence of steps, while the new system uses a branching flow chart. This is a somewhat unusual choice for a small business-oriented system, whose clients tend to find flow charts difficult to work with. But LeadLife – like many other marketing automation vendors – found its clients tend to design campaigns as flow charts. It therefore chose to build the flow chart interface but to exclude the more confusion-inducing features, like the ability to send leads back to previous steps in the same flow or to start new flows in the middle.

On the other hand, the system does include some features not usually found in small business systems.  These include rule-driven, dynamic content blocks within emails, which LeadLife found many clients applied fairly easily. The system rule-builder also combines power with simplicity: for example, rules can reference specific links within an email (powerful) and the system automatically presents a list of links within the specified email (simple).

Probably more important, LeadLife has also bundled marketing services with its software. For example, vendor staff will design the campaign flows for the client, further reducing the risk that the flow chart will cause confusion.  Vendor staff will teach the client best practices such as building several small campaigns instead of a single complicated one.

Services are provided with every level of the product, including the lowest price of $750 per month. Specific options include marketing strategy, content creation, design, lead nurturing campaigns, lead process definition, and analytics. Most are performed by LeadLife’s internal staff although copywriting and design may be sent to subcontractors.

Bundled services are LeadLife’s solution to the skill gap that keeps so many companies from adopting marketing automation or using it fully. Other companies have taken a similar approach.  Still others have tried alternatives including keeping the system very simple, providing extensive training to use more complex systems, and using automation to handle complicated functions. Although most vendors apply them in combination, their emphases do vary.  It's not clear which choice will prove most effective -- but a lot of money is riding on the outcome.

Back to LeadLife. The scope of the new product includes typical marketing automation functions: campaigns, email, landing pages and forms, lead scoring, behavior tracking, CRM integration, sales alerts, segmentation, and reporting. Reports and some other features are still a work in progress but the basics are in place. LeadLife is migrating its existing 70 customers to the new system over the next few months. The system is sold on a month-to-month basis (no long-term contract) and prices are based on email volume and services.  Clients at all levels get the full set of system features.

0 Dreamforce 2011: Salesforce.com Will Leave Marketing Automation Alone. But Revenue Performance Management Might Be Another Story.

I spent most of this week at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference. With 45,000 registrants, the company says that Dreamforce is now the largest technology industry gathering. I don’t know whether that’s true (as someone pointed out, the Consumer Electronics Show is much bigger, for starters). But I did notice about two years ago that pretty much everyone in the B2B marketing automation space was more or less assuming I’d attend. Peer pressure worked, and there I was.



If the big question on the mind of the marketing automation industry has been whether Salesforce would launch its own product, the show provided what I consider to be a definitive answer: No (at least for now; never say never). In both public announcements and private conversations, Salesforce leaders made clear their focus is on much bigger game: becoming a strategic enterprise technology supplier on par with IBM or HP. They plan to do this by becoming the platform for the “social enterprise”, which they see as the next major generation of computing.



More precisely, they are almost mechanically mimicking Facebook, which they see as the new center of online life. Their equivalent is Salesforce Chatter, the social network for company workers they see as connecting all company systems. Part of the strategy is to build enterprise applications on Salesforce platforms, and part of it is to access other enterprise applications from within Chatter. The still broader goal is to add customers and suppliers to each firm’s Chatter network, and to incorporate non-human objects such as orders and equipment. For better or worse, this is already happening today: the company demonstrated networks where an automobile can warn you that its tire pressure is low or a network switch can report on its status.



As someone who gets pretty darned annoyed when my printer tells me it wants an expensive new cartridge, I have mixed feelings about letting so many new and completely self-centered voices clamor for my attention. In fact, I’d say most people's biggest computer-related problem today is social media overload: people need better ways to structure and filter their social messages, not ways to get more of them. The Chatter group that Salesforce set up for Dreamforce itself struck me as a perfect example: it was filled with largely irrelevant noise that made it nearly impossible to see the useful information. If Salesforce hadn’t also sent nicely structured emails with schedules and contact information, I wouldn’t have known what to do when I got there.



Of course, any true believer would dismiss me as part of a pre-digital generation, and therefore both obsolete and irrelevant as a human being. Maybe so. I do recall that some (traditional, structured) research has shown that human brains physically adjust when they must process unstructured inputs. But even if people get better at filtering noise, that filtering still takes energy from other, more directly productive purposes. So unless the value of the nuggets captured by that filtering exceeds the effort consumed by the filtering, the result is a net loss.



Oh dear, I do sound pretty crotchety, don’t I? Blame lack of sleep from social networking of the old-fashioned, face-to-face kind. Cranky or not, I came away from Dreamforce very impressed how clearly Salesforce has defined their vision and aligned their actions to execute it. Although I heard some grumbling that there was nothing really new in the show’s announcements, I took that as evidence that Salesforce had previously decided what it wants to do and is now doing it. The specific announcements were all tied directly to the “social enterprise” strategy: things like adding Java support to the Heroku platform (making it easier to deploy applications on the Salesforce infrastructure) and adding presence and external parties to Chatter (making it easier to replace other collaboration systems).



That said, there’s a difference between a clear strategy and a successful strategy. I’d say that Salesforce has a pretty good chance of evolving Chatter into a ubiquitous enterprise social network. But whether that translates to becoming the core platform for all enterprise systems is another question. After all, there are other ubiquitous enterprise systems – for example, the telephone and email – that didn’t end up controlling everything else. But maybe I’m missing the point; perhaps all Salesforce wants or needs from this is continued revenue growth from processing on its platforms. “Social enterprise” offers a nice theme to make this possible by attracting application developers. Although Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff clearly has a more messianic vision than that, fulfilling the grander vision isn’t really necessary from a business standpoint.



All of which brings us back to B2B marketing automation. As a $2.1 billion company, Salesforce is looking where its next $2 billion in revenue will come from. Marketing automation is clearly too small to make a serious contribution to that goal. Existing B2B marketing automation systems already support Salesforce, so it has no particular strategic reason to replace them with its own applications.



On the other hand, Salesforce would probably like marketing automation to run on its own platforms, rather than simply synchronizing with Salesforce data and campaigns. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see Salesforce encourage third party developers to build marketing automation systems using Salesforce's Force.com and Heroku platforms and Database.com database, or to see them encourage existing vendors to migrate to the Salesforce.com infrastructure. This is pretty much the notion of “Salesforce add-ons” that I wrote about on August 16 (see "Can CRM Add-Ons Replace Marketing Automation?")



I also still expect that Salesforce will continue to enhance its core Sales application with features that make it better at specific marketing automation functions like complex campaign flows and Web tracking. Between native apps and organic product growth, today’s B2B marketing automation vendors definitely face some serious threats from Salesforce even if it doesn’t target them directly. It’s like sleeping with an elephant: it could roll over and crush you without even noticing.



Speaking of which, one thing you don’t do when sleeping next to an elephant is to poke it awake. There’s an element of that in Revenue Performance Management, which stakes a claim to a much larger territory than marketing automation by itself. I discussed RPM with both Eloqua and Marketo during Dreamforce. Both share a vision of combining marketing automation data with sales data, and ideally with data from other sources. This expanded database is really the core of RPM because it’s what gives the end-to-end view of the revenue cycle.



I agree with the goal, but Salesforce also has its eye on storing all that data. The bigger the pool of data the marketing automation vendors assemble, the more appealing it looks to Salesforce. And if you combine the data with a claim to managing strategic decisions about marketing and sales programs, you’re definitely poaching on their turf. At the moment, it’s a bit of a blind spot because analytics and business intelligence have not been Salesforce strengths. But that could well change – in fact, it must change if Salesforce is to provide a comprehensive alternative to existing enterprise platforms. When it does, they won’t just accidentally crush RPM vendors by rolling over: they’ll take aim with their giant feet and stomp them directly.



Or maybe I'm being naive. Perhaps RPM is a way for marketing automation vendors to attract Salesforce's attention as a potential strategic acquisition. In that case, poking the elephant is exactly the right approach.

0 Can CRM Add-Ons Replace Marketing Automation?

I’ve long believed that B2B marketing automation is just a passing phase: that, ultimately, B2B marketing automation systems will be absorbed into CRM systems instead of operating independently. It’s a view I discuss sparingly in public, since so many of my friends in the marketing automation industry have a vested interest to the contrary. But there are also a few vendors who have bet in favor of merged systems, so it wouldn’t be fair to ignore their view entirely.



Vendors have made the bet by building marketing automation add-ons to a CRM system instead of building a stand-alone marketing automation product.* I wrote in February about ClickDimensions, which adds advanced email campaigns and Web tracking to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Of course, the jackpot here is Salesforce.com. At least two vendors have tried to hit it: Predictive Response and BizConnector, whose product is Lead Follow-Up.



Of the two, BizConnector’s Lead Follow-Up is more tightly focused, offering primarily a rules engine that allows lead nurturing and other workflows. It also provides real-time alerts and landing pages. Predictive Response has a broader range, with more advanced email features, including split tests, content templates, and branching campaigns, as well as Web visitor tracking, lead scoring, dashboards, and some data cleansing on form entries. Neither matches the scope of even a mid-tier marketing automation product, but many of the “missing” features would be available in other Salesforce add-ons. So the real question is whether the core campaign management features are adequate substitutes for a marketing automation product.



That question has no simple answer. Lead Follow-Up would probably suffice for small organizations, although it’s targeted more at individual salespeople than marketing departments. Predictive Response (which I have not examined in depth) might serve small and mid-tier marketing groups but probably not large enterprises.



Beyond these particular products lies the larger question of whether their CRM-based approach makes more sense than the separate-but-synchronized platforms offered by most marketing automation vendors. Each method has advantages:



- separate systems can present specialized marketing functions without getting in the way of sales activities.



- separate systems can use database designs optimized to process the entire database at once, instead of the one-record-at-a-time transactional processing needed for sales and service interactions.



- separate systems give each department complete control over its own system, something both groups often prefer.



On the other hand….



- unified systems avoid the need for data synchronization, which reduces complexity, eases cross-department coordination, and eliminates most risk of inconsistency.



- unified systems simplify deployment and support, especially from the perspective of the IT group (although this should be a minor factor in Software-as-a-Service systems, since most work is handled by the vendor).



- unified systems should save money, although it's not clear they do in practice.



The main technical issue here is whether marketing and CRM systems need different database structures. But even if that’s true, one vendor can provide and synchronize both structures at least as easily as separate vendors. Similarly, if separate user interfaces are really necessary, one system can offer both. So the technical differences are largely irrelevant.



Instead, the argument for separate systems really comes down the political desire of each department to have its own system, and a somewhat related expectation that a vendor focused exclusively on marketing automation will build a better system than a small division within a CRM company.



I actually accept those arguments. Vendors serving either marketing or sales will probably do a better job than vendors trying to serve both. But I don’t think this will matter in the long run. As marketing automation requirements become better understood, the CRM-based products will come closer to meeting marketers’ needs. As the functional gap narrows between the two sets of products, the convenience and cost advantages of a unified system will swing the balance in their direction. This will be reinforced by the business need for tighter coordination between sales and marketing, as well as the larger role played by corporate IT groups in selecting customer-related systems. Only marketing departments with very sophisticated needs will be able to justify buying a specialized marketing automation product.



In short, the merger between B2B marketing automation and CRM seems inevitable. In the B2B world, where sales is generally the dominant department, this means that CRM will encompass marketing automation rather than vice versa. The mechanics of the process are less predictable: CRM vendors might expand their features incrementally, acquire add-on systems, or buy a marketing automation product and integrate it. Different vendors may take different paths and move at different rates. But however they get there, I think the destination is clear.



_________________________________________________________

* For very small companies, vendors including Infusionsoft and OfficeAutoPilot have made the bet by offering their own CRM / marketing automation combination.

0 Act-On Buys Marketbright Assets

Act-On Software announced last week that they had purchased the assets of Marketbright, a pioneering marketing automation vendor that has struggled in recent years. Marketbright’s problems have been obvious for months, so that they would vanish is not news. The interesting question is why Act-On made the purchase.

I discussed this last Thursday with Act-On CEO Raghu Raghavan. Part of his answer was because they could: having raised $10 million in June, Act-On can now consider acquisitions of less-well-endowed competitors. Beyond that, Raghavan cited several narrow benefits, including the chance of converting Marketbright customers to Act-On, the business knowledge and skills of key Marketbright employees, and some design features of the Marketbright system. He made clear that the actual Marketbright software will not be merged into Act-On because they are built with different technologies.

In other words, the Marketbright acquisition was a tactical measure to pick up some modest assets at a modest price. It is neither central to Act-On’s current strategy nor a shift towards a new strategy.

That strategy has remained remarkably consistent. It boils down to providing an easy transition between basic email systems and full-scale marketing automation. Raghavan said that Act-On has now deployed a consistent sales process to convince marketers they can benefit from replacing multiple point solutions with a single Act-On installation, even without the major process reengineering or staff training recommended by other marketing automation vendors.

This is clearly a successful argument: Act-On just added its 350th client, and is on pace to triple its total over the next twelve months. Most buyers are small businesses, and many are in financial services, insurance, retail, healthcare, and education rather than high-tech. Installations at large companies are often used by small groups who want an alternative to the existing corporate marketing automation system. The system’s $500 per month starting price and no-annual-contract policy encourage such casual implementations by reducing the financial risk.

In fact, the risk is so low that Act-On has actually reduced its free trial period from 30 days to 14 days and eschewed the freemium offers used by competitors Genius and LoopFuse. Raghavan argues that marketing automation systems are too complicated for freemiums to work well. (For what it’s worth, Genius and LoopFuse seem satisfied with their freemium results. Beyond inducing trial, freemiums can also attract long-term users who will move up to the paying version when their needs expand. Agencies who use freemium versions at small clients may also use the same product for larger clients who will pay for the system.)

If it sounds like my discussions with Act-On have centered more on strategy than product features, that’s correct. Raghavan argues marketing automation vendors' success is now determined less by product features than repeatable, profitable processes for sales, deployment, and support. He said Act-On has developed these processes and can now safely accelerate its growth with predictable results. One change the company plans is to expand its managed services, such as help with deploying campaigns. Some of these services will come from Act-On and others by agency partners.

Although Act-On sells the product as a replacement for existing point solutions, the company says clients do use additional features fairly quickly. The most popular are drip marketing, anonymous visitor identification, sales integration, and Web traffic analysis. Complex nurture campaigns and lead scoring are used much less. Under-utilization of advanced features is common across all marketing automation systems, but it may also reflect Act-On’s sales pitch that clients don't need extensive changes to their marketing processes. Similarly, it's tempting to argue that clients' demand for managed services reflects the company’s deploy-first, change-later approach, but that’s also something that clients of all vendors consistently request.

In short, Act-On is doing quite nicely by ignoring the industry conventional wisdom that process change and planning are necessary for marketing automation success. But that doesn’t mean the conventional wisdom is wrong. After all, Act-On’s main sales proposition isn't about marketing automation: it's about making existing tasks easier. It also helps that Act-On is selling to small, consumer-oriented firms, whose marketing automation needs are genuinely simpler than at larger, B2B marketers. In fact, although Act-On is selling to slightly larger companies than micro-business specialists Infusionsoft and OfficeAutoPilot, its resembles them in several ways.

The real test of Act-On comes after clients have gained experience with it and find they do need marketing automation training and process change. So long as Act-On has the features and services to support this – which I believe it does -- the clients should be happy and renew. But if they find they’ve outgrown Act-On because they need more change more than they originally realized, they’ll have to look elsewhere.

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.

0 ExactTarget and Eloqua Stake Their Claim To Centralized Customer Management

You probably saw ExactTarget’s June 13 announcement of its strategic partnership with Marketo and Eloqua’s June 21 announcement of its new AppCloud marketplace for connectors with other systems. So did I. But it took a little while to connect with the vendors to get the details, so I’m only now ready to write about them.

Both announcements shared a theme of integration between core marketing platforms and other marketing systems. That Eloqua sees itself as the center of a marketing infrastructure isn’t surprising, although it does show how far we've traveled from the once-common view of marketing automation as an auxiliary to the sales automation “system of record”. ExactTarget’s aspiration to a central role was less expected, since its original and still primary business is email delivery. But ExactTarget has added mobile, Web pages, and social in recent years. They've been pulling these together with an “Interactive Marketing Hub” in beta since last September, which is now used by 500 of their 4,000 clients. The IMH, as we cognoscenti call it, combines ExactTarget's email, mobile, Web pages, Web visitor tracking, and social media with external touchpoints as well as Salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM.

The IMH sports a slick user interface with a very nice dashboard showing real-time updates of summary statistics for each channel. It also provides a central marketing calendar of campaigns across the channels. The underlying database can be simple lists, as in traditional email system, or a proper multi-table structure acting as the primary marketing database. As Captain Planet used to say, The Power Is Yours.

It’s perfectly sensible for ExactTarget to move in this direction, since it otherwise risks being pushed to the unprofitable edges of the marketing world as a commodity email engine. In fact, the real head-scratcher was why ExactTarget would deal with Marketo if it had ambitions to occupy the same central turf. (Marketo’s motivation is obvious: to gain broader distribution.)

ExactTarget’s answer was refreshingly honest: IMH lacks key B2B marketing automation features including lead scoring, advanced segmentation, and multi-step campaigns. The campaign engine will be improved before IMH's official launch this September, but other specialized B2B features probably won’t be added. ExactTarget also sees Marketo as the first of many partner applications for IMH, further clarifying that they see it in the central position.

Eloqua’s AppCloud is obviously modeled on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and other application stores. The goal is for third parties to extend the value of a core platform by building tools that enhance it. In Eloqua’s case, most of the initial applications are connectors with other systems for Webinars, social communities, messaging and data acquisition. These will be joined over time by apps that add functionality within Eloqua itself. The AppCloud is an extension of Eloqua’s earlier Cloud Connector initiative, which provides APIs for external systems to access Eloqua data and functions. Basically, AppCloud makes it easier to find and deploy those connectors.

I did ask Eloqua how AppCloud relates to its Revenue Performance Management positioning. This felt like a pretty clever question until I later saw it was addressed in the AppCloud press release. Oh well. The answer came smoothly enough: AppCloud makes it easier to gather the activity data needed for Revenue Performance Management analysis. That makes sense, although AppCloud implies a more active integration with external systems than simply reporting against them.

Both the ExactTarget and Eloqua announcements reflect a strategy of positioning their products as a company’s primary customer management system. If you recall my post last week on Adobe and Oracle announcements, those firms also wanted to place themselves at the center of the customer management universe. So does pretty much everyone else.

Obviously they all can’t win this game. At the end of the day, I’d still put my money on the big CRM systems as the logical central repository for customer data. But I do believe that many auxiliary systems will continue to feed data to the central system and somehow coordinate treatment decisions with it. Connectors created to service ExactTarget, Eloqua, and others will make it easier to integrate the peripheral systems with whichever product ends up in the middle. So it’s all good.

0 Dueling Strategies: Adobe and Oracle Take Opposite Paths to Customer Experience Management

Adobe on Monday announced a new “Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experience Management”. The platform fills the center of Adobe’s three-part corporate mission to “make, manage, and measure” digital content and experiences. The other two pieces were already in place: “make” is Adobe’s original content creation business, while “measure” is Omniture Web analytics.

The strategic significance of the announcement seems more important than the actual product enhancements. These include improved integration of the company’s Web content management system (formerly Day C5) with Scene 7 dynamic content and Omniture Survey and Test & Target; features for salespeople and customer service agents to customize standard documents in a controlled fashion; integrated content reviews and workflows; and a platform to build and share content in multiple formats. The announcement also included beta versions of tools for social engagement, online enrollment, and agent workspaces. Good stuff but nothing earth-shaking.

Adobe's strategy itself is a curious mixture of broad ambition and narrow execution. Adobe describes its scope as nothing less than optimizing customer experience and marketing spend across the entire customer journey, from first learning about a company through validation, purchase decision, product use, and commitment. But Adobe also explicitly limits its scope to digital channels, and implicitly limits its concern to content creation, delivery, and evaluation. In fact, the only customer-facing technology Adobe offers is Web site management. Otherwise, Adobe expects even digital content such as emails to be delivered by third party products. Offline interactions, such as telephone and retail, are definitely out of the picture. Nor does Adobe manage the underlying customer database, marketing campaigns, or deep analytics. The only exceptions are customer profiles, segmentation, and content to support Web personalization.

The company argues the tools it does provide, combined with the cross-channel content sharing, are enough to build a unified digital customer experience. I’m not so sure that’s correct, and even if it is, I question whether customers will be happy to have only their digital experiences be unified. Either way, marketers will certainly need other vendors' products to manage their full customer relationships.

On the other hand, I do agree with Adobe’s argument that its approach lets clients create a unified digital experience without replacing their entire enterprise infrastructure. This is certainly an advantage.

Adobe’s announcement was released on Monday, but I didn’t get around to writing about it until today. The delay is unfortunate, since the attention of the enterprise marketing automation world has already shifted to yesterday’s announcement that Oracle is acquiring Web “experience” management vendor FatWire Software. I’m not sure I accept “Web experience management” as a legitimate software category, but FatWire does combine conventional Web content management with unusually strong targeting, personalization, content analytics, digital asset management, mobile, and social features. Perhaps that justifies calling it more than plain old Web content management.

The strategic purpose of the FatWire acquisition is self-evident: to fill a gap in Oracle’s customer-facing technologies, which already had ATG ecommerce and general Enterprise Content Management for Web sites, as well as Oracle CRM and Oracle Loyalty. (Oracle isn’t very creative with product names.) FatWire will allow much richer, more personalized and targeted Web site interactions. It also provides some Web analytics, although I still think Oracle has a gap to fill there.

The Oracle and Adobe announcements do highlight a clear strategic contrast. Adobe has largely limited itself to digital interactions, and has largely avoided customer-facing systems except for Web sites. Oracle has embraced the full range of online and offline interactions, including customer-facing systems in every channel. Oracle has also hedged its bets a bit with Real Time Decisions, which can coordinate customer treatments delivered by non-Oracle systems and powered by non-Oracle data sources. Of the other enterprise-level marketing automation vendors, IBM, SAS and Teradata share Adobe's focus on digital channels and its avoidance of customer-facing systems, although they resemble Oracle in offering deep analytics and customer database management.

Based on my fundamental rule that “suites win”, I think Oracle’s strategy is more likely to succeed. But only time will tell.

0 Oracle Integrates On Demand Marketing with On Demand CRM

Summary: Oracle has integrated marketing automation with its on-demand CRM product. Will competitors do the same?

If I were more on the ball, I would have noticed that May 25 marked a full year since Oracle bought the intellectual property* of high-end B2B marketing automation vendor Market2Lead. I was actually briefed on May 17 by the Oracle team handling the resulting product but hadn’t noticed that the anniversary was approaching. I wonder if they had cake?

I hope so, since they’ve clearly been working hard. In February they released the first “Oraclized” version of the product, now Oracle CRM On Demand Marketing. This included a redesigned user interface that matches the look, feel, and terminology of Oracle’s on-demand CRM product, is available in the same 20 languages, and allows unified user IDs and log-ins.

The new system uses the same data structures as the rest of Oracle CRM On Demand. It shares many physical tables as well, but keeps the major contact tables separate yet synchronized. This is largely because Marketing systems typically contain many more leads than Sales wants in CRM. Marketing systems also run large, complex queries that would interfere with CRM performance if both systems used the same physical files.

The unified data structure allows unified reporting across the customer buying process. Although Oracle doesn’t use the term, this is very consistent with the revenue management concepts described by other B2B marketing automation vendors. Oracle’s new Marketing system supports this with a separate analytical database, which is essential for advanced revenue reporting such as time-series analysis.

Except for improved reporting, the features of the new Oracle product are pretty much the same as the old Market2Lead, which I last reviewed two years ago. This was, and remains, one of the most powerful in the industry. Important capabilities include “adaptive” program flows, which vary depending on customer behavior; advanced Web pages and forms; automated content recommendations; and several types of asset templates. These are mostly relevant to large companies, which fits nicely with Oracle’s customer base.

In fact, most On Demand Marketing sales are part of an Oracle CRM On Demand installation, either at current Oracle CRM users or at clients buying both CRM and marketing automation simultaneously. It doesn’t hurt that On Demand Marketing is the only choice for companies who want a Software-as-a-Service marketing system from Oracle. The company’s other big marketing automation product, Siebel Marketing, is on-premise software.

All this makes Oracle a poster child of sorts for the proposition that CRM and marketing automation should be part of a single system. I’ve argued this for a long time but it’s still a minority view, especially (and for obvious reasons) among the vendors of stand-alone marketing automation products. Oracle itself has announced an initiative for “cross channel customer experience management” which incorporates its products for CRM, marketing, loyalty, real-time decisions, and ecommerce.

It will be interesting to see whether Oracle’s integrated marketing-plus-sales product leads its not-so-friendly competitors at Salesforce.com to respond with an integrated solution of their own. Or, more broadly, whether IBM sticks to its position that it doesn’t need a CRM product to dominate the integrated marketing world. The B2B marketing automation vendors are definitely mice at an elephant dance. It’s a dangerous but exciting position.

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* It wasn’t an outright acquisition because Salesforce.com wouldn’t permit integration with an Oracle-owned product. So existing Market2Lead clients remained with the old company until it could migrate them to other marketing platforms. Once this is done, Market2Lead will complete its shutdown.

0 Pirates, Train Wrecks, and Marketing Automation

Summary: Selecting a marketing automation system is an adventure. Here's the screenplay. Ready when you are, CB.

I spent most of this week at the inaugural DemandCon conference in San Francisco. My presentation, How to Avoid a Marketing Automation Train Wreck, was based largely on the Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Workbook I released last month (available for free on the RaabGuide Web site). But the heart of the Workbook is a series of checklists like the one below, whereas DemandCon asked presenters to avoid long lists of bullet points. So I had to rethink the format.


After some pondering, I decided it would be more memorable to structure the presentation as a story. This made sense: deploying a marketing automation system is literally a quest, and one that can end in either triumph or the train wreck of my title. Although my actual delivery was marred by a few technical hiccups, I liked the result enough to offer a version of it here.

Prologue

A good adventure begins with a map. This one starts with our hero, a young prince, accidentally uncovering a box containing a map of the marketing technology landscape, showing where B2B marketing automation fits among other types of customer management systems. Since any story is better if you add pirates, this is a treasure map, where X marks the spot. (Sadly, one of the technical hiccups meant the DemandCon audience never saw this image, but I personally find it hilarious. Note the pirate-style headline.):

The box also holds a chart that lists the features of different types of marketing automation systems. I didn't have time to reformat it, but in the story these are presented as clues to identifying the treasure.


He also finds a set of puzzle pieces that, when assembled, present a flow chart of standard B2B marketing tasks: program setup, lead generation, nurturing, scoring, transfer to sales, and reporting. This teaches him that marketing automation is a process, not a technology.


Our Story Begins...

The young prince is intrigued by his discovery, but reluctant to take on the quest. He is moved to action by a village of marketers and salespeople crying out for more leads and better nurturing. Specific benefits include replacing point solutions with an integrated system; running larger numbers and more types of marketing programs; less reliance on non-marketing resources to manage Web content and process data; and closer integration with sales. Who could resist?

After the hero announces his decision, he is warned about the perils ahead by a wise old consultant. These include:

- buying without concrete objectives
- choosing systems based on who has the most, best, or coolest features
- only considering industry leaders
- not using scenarios to test systems against your needs
- ignoring the information you can gather from references
- not investing in training, planning, program design, content, and other resources for successful deployment

Thus forewarned, our hero starts his quest. He starts by making a plan, which means he identifies the business benefits expected from this project. These should be quantified and linked to marketing programs that will deliver them. Then he defines the requirements implied by these programs, by listing the tasks to be completed for each project and the system features needed to execute these tasks. I represented requirements as a kitten who “requires” a bowl of milk – except that now it’s a pirate kitten (my second-favorite slide in the deck. Yes, I am easily amused.)

Planning complete, the hero sets out on his search. Along the way, he meets several companions with different traits. Recognizing that he can't succeed alone, he knows he must choose one of them to help him find the treasure. His task at this stage is choosing the right one. (We somehow seem to have lost the pirates. Pity.)

These companions represent the different marketing automation systems. To choose wisely, the hero must understand the type of product he needs. I divide the B2B marketing automation world into three segments: systems serving “micro-businesses” (very small firms where marketing is a part-time job, often for the owner); small to mid-size business (a separate marketing department but typically in one location and serving one product line); and enterprises (huge companies with dozens of marketers serving multiple markets and products). Each type of business has different requirements and is served by different vendors: I won’t list the details here but they’re in the Workbook.

The Journey

Our band of travelers now faces a series of challenges, escaping from traps, crossing rivers, and beating off attacks by wild animals. At each stage a different member demonstrates his special skills. In concrete terms, this means defining scenarios based on the goals you have set for your marketing automation system. What matters is seeing how well the systems perform the tasks you need, not the ones the vendor likes to demonstrate. This means the real challenge is understanding your requirements – our hero must learn about himself before he can complete his quest. It’s a cliché but how else can I sell this to Disney?

Now the scene switches: it’s the tavern after a day of adventures, and our little group are warily eating together, trying to decide who they can trust. In other words, they’re checking references. You’ll remember that skipping references is one of the dangers I warned against. It’s true that the company will hand-pick happy customers, but you can still learn a lot if you ask the right questions:

- why did they pick the system (maybe the cared about something that’s not important to you);
- what do they see as strengths and weaknesses;
- are they using the system the same way you expect to;
- are their skills and resources similar to yours.

If a vendor can’t connect you with a reference whose situation matches your own, be very cautious.


And while we’re on the subject – don’t think social media queries replace reference checking. What comes back is typically a “yes, we love it” from highly motivated fans. Apart from dedicated grudge-holders, few businesspeople will volunteer negative feedback in social media: they can only get in trouble and there’s nothing in it for them. If you do rely on the social media, contact the people who respond and have an in-depth conversation asking the same questions you would ask the vendor’s own references.

Back to our story. The hero still hasn’t chosen on a single companion, and now the group faces the final test: it must cross the desert, storm the castle, and find the treasure. Who will stay and who will run away? Who will is a good long-term partner? The only way to find out is to move ahead.

In marketing automation terms, this means setting up a trial so you can understand the day-to-day details of working with a system. Most vendors will give you a trial license if they know you’re seriously considering their product. The trick to an effective trial is to test the system thoroughly: this means setting up programs are as demanding as those you’ll actually run once you own it and then running them from start to finish.

Here’s where all that early planning and goal-setting comes in handy, since you’ll have defined those programs already. If that sounds like too much work, bear in mind that you’ll need those programs after deployment anyway. So you might as well do the work a bit sooner and have the programs available to help make the right selection.

Triumph and Return

The group now wins the final battle and finds the treasure, only to meet a new crisis: there’s only enough water for two people to recross the desert. The hero must finally choose. In our story, this is easy because everyone else has failed or died nobly – oh, and it turns out that the remaining companion is really a disguised princess, with whom the hero has fallen in love. Didn’t see that coming, did you? Even better, she’s a pirate princess. Disney’s gonna love it.


But the real world isn’t a fairy tale. You may actually find several qualified vendors. Do what you can to make a rational choice – the Workbook provides a list of criteria to consider. But even if there is no clear winner, make a choice and get on with it. Remember your real goal is to get value from using the system, not to run the world’s finest selection project.

Epilogue

The story doesn’t end with the hero’s triumphant return. Treasure is only valuable if you spend it wisely; relationships don’t end with the wedding. It’s hard work to live happily ever after. So we have an epilogue showing how the happy couple used their riches to improve the lives of the villagers for years to come.

In marketing automation terms, this means avoiding the final mistake of underinvesting in deployment. Be prepared to spend money training your staff, developing content, cleansing data, and measuring results. Expect to spend time on organizational changes and coordinating with sales, finance, and IT departments. Hire consultants and agencies if you don’t have the necessary skills in-house – which few firms do when they start. And don’t get stuck in a rut: make a long-term plan to steadily expand use of your system after your initial deployment.

The End

I have to admit this isn’t exactly what I presented at DemandCon, although I wish it had been. The one thing I’d still want to change is to give more emphasis to the section on deployment. It’s problems with process, content, data quality and staffing that cause most marketing automation train wrecks, not the technology.

Do I smell a sequel?

0 Silverpop's Latest Release Targets Sophisticated Marketing Automation Buyers

Summary: Silverpop has continued to extend the marketing automation capabilities of its Engage platform. The latest release adds features that are most important to enterprise marketers.

More than a year has passed since Silverpop merged its email and marketing automation systems into a single product, Engage 8. The combined product offered advanced email but was missing some capabilities available in the previous marketing automation product. These included revenue reporting, anonymous visitor lookups, marketing calendars, and advanced scoring features such as caps on points from one event type. Clients who needed those features had to remain on the previous system (Engage B2B). Prospects who wanted them had to look elsewhere.

Silverpop has been steadily enhancing its new product since that time. The latest version, Engage 8.3, was released last month. It still doesn’t offer all the features of the oldl B2B product because Silverpop decided that some were not worth duplicating. But it does offer other capabilities that are improvements. Here are some highlights from the latest set of additions:

- multiple scores per lead. This is important in large companies that need to score leads against multiple products. It also allows different scoring rules for different customer segments. Scoring models can now include data values, such as a score that was calculated externally and imported.

- progressive profiling. Online forms can automatically remove questions a visitor has already answered and replace them with new questions in a user-specified sequence. Silverpop's form builder handles this quite elegantly, without requiring the user to embed rules or a scripting language.

- social sharing. The system can publish directly to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Content can include sharing buttons for a wide range of other systems. The system can track the number of shares and reshares for each message and identify traffic from those shares. It also captures the identity of the original sharer although this is not currently exposed.

- revenue tracking. Engage still relies on Salesforce.com to produce revenue reports. But it now feeds Salesforce all campaigns that touched the lead and flags both the original source and the campaign that generated contact information. This will allow advanced attribution analysis.

- Salesforce.com integration. Users can now embed campaign codes within a URL link, making them easier to capture. They can have the system create Salesforce.com tasks when a new lead is created, use Salesforce.com opportunity stages within campaign rules, and add leads to a Salesforce.com campaign at any step in a marketing automation program.

- enhanced security. Silverpop suffered a widely-publicized security breach in December 2010. The new release tightens access in several ways, including user-specific IP restrictions, challenges to log-ins from new IP addresses, two-factor authentication, and narrower restrictions on administrative rights. Given subsequent breaches at other firms, most recently Epsilon and Sony, it's possible that vendors and marketers will start paying more attention to security issues.

- email controls. Merging the email and marketing automation systems does have the advantage of giving B2B marketers access to features developed for Silverpop’s advanced email business. These include send-time optimization, which automatically sends campaign emails at the most effective time of day, and a “snooze” option that lets recipients halt email messages for a specified time period instead of opting out completely.

These are all valuable additions to Silverpop’s B2B capabilities. But Silverpop faces an uphill battle in regaining lost momentum and competing with the advanced analytics now touted by several competitors. Silverpop may be positioning itself to serve the upper end of the market, where companies with multiple products and world-wide organizations need advanced features like multiple scores, dynamic content, enhanced security, and high scalability. That’s a plausible strategy, although it means competing against both high-end B2B marketing automation vendors and B2C products like Neolane and Teradata/Aprimo. Given the costs of product development, it would be tough to remain a first-tier system by selling to large enterprises alone.

0 Intuit / Salesforce.com Alliance Is No April Fool's Joke

Am I the only one who missed the April 1 announcement of a strategic alliance between Salesforce.com and Intuit? Given our industry's endless nattering about whether Salesforce.com will move into marketing automation, this should have attracted more attention (or, at least, enough attention that I would hear about it sooner than I did).

In case you too missed the news, it comes down to this: Salesforce.com will be available on Intuit’s App Center and be deployed so that the Intuit and Salesforce.com databases are synchronized. For those of us used to thinking of Salesforce.com as the 900 pound gorilla, it’s disorienting to see Salesforce on the Intuit App Center, rather than the other way around.

But it does make sense. Intuit has more than 4 million customers, compared with 90,000 for Salesforce.com. The revenue differential isn’t as large ($3.5 billion for Intuit vs. $1.7 billion for Salesforce) and Salesforce.com actually has a slightly higher market cap ($17.5 billion for Salesforce.com vs. $16.5 billion for Intuit). But Intuit represents a gateway to the small business market for Salesforce.com, so it’s clear who needs whom.

What has this to do with marketing automation? Pretty much everything, I’d argue, at least for companies like Infusionsoft, OfficeAutoPilot, and Genoo, who target “micro-businesses” at the lowest end of the market. Those vendors base much of their appeal on the convenience of using one system for marketing, Web pages, CRM, and even order processing. The one thing they don’t offer is accounting, in good part because Intuit’s QuickBooks has such a dominant position.

The lack of accounting data is an important gap, because the accounting system is the ultimate source for information on customer identities and transactions. That data is important for effective marketing. Having it automatically available to Salesforce.com makes Salesforce a much more attractive marketing option for small businesses.

I suppose I should backtrack a bit here and acknowledge that I’m talking about marketing to customers – that is, people who have already made a purchase – rather than marketing to prospects or leads. Business-to-consumer marketing automation systems manage relationships with both groups, while B2B marketing automation is concerned primarily with just prospects and leads. The “micro-business” marketing automation vendors are more like B2C systemsbecause they do deal with customers as well as leads and prospects.

In other words, the Intuit / Salesforce.com alliance poses a very large threat to the “micro-business” marketing automation vendors but doesn’t have much impact on the rest of the B2B marketing automation industry, which sells to larger companies. Indeed, those larger firms are typically not QuickBooks clients at all.

But here’s the thing: let’s say that Salesforce.com does succeed in selling to a lot of Intuit clients, and in the process adds marketing automation features to serve them better. Those marketing automation features will be available to all sizes of Salesforce.com clients, including the larger ones who currently purchase marketing automation systems. Even if those firms continue to use marketing automation just to target leads and prospects, they’ll suddenly have a stronger reason to adopt Salesforce.com as their marketing platform. So marketing automation vendors who thought the Salesforce.com / Intuit deal didn’t apply to them, might want to think again.

0 MakesBridge Offers Powerful Features to Small Business Marketers

Summary: MakesBridge offers a full set of marketing automation features with some special strengths that will appeal especially to small companies.

I’ve written quite a bit recently about marketing systems for very small businesses – a category I’ve tentatively labeled “micro-business” and pegged at under $5 million revenue. This group of marketers has different needs from even slightly larger companies. In particular, they want a highly-integrated combination of standard marketing automation (email, landing pages and individual-level Website behavior tracking) with customer relationship management (tracking personal and telephone contacts with individuals). Leaders in the space are Infusionsoft and OfficeAutoPilot, which both also provide integrated shopping carts for e-commerce. HubSpot also has many micro-business clients but is not focused on them exclusively and – probably as a result – has a slightly different feature set: more Web traffic generation and no built-in contact management or shopping cart.

There are plenty of other vendors serving micro-businesses. I’ve previously reviewed Genoo, which supplements the standard marketing automation features with Web hosting and built-in CRM but no shopping cart. Canterris , NurtureHQ , and mKubed all provide email, Web visitor tracking, nurture campaigns, lead scoring, and CRM integration ((Salesforce.com for Canterris and NurtureHQ; its own CRM for mKubed) for under $500 per month. Canterris and mKubed also host Web forms and landing pages but NurtureHQ apparently does not. See my List of Demand Generation Vendors for other options.

MakesBridge is another contender. The company started in 2001 as an email service provider and still offers a $29.95 per month email product. It greatly expanded its features in 2010 and now offers a marketing automation system starting at $500 per month. This includes the full rig: outbound email, multi-step nurture campaigns, landing pages and forms, lead scoring, Web visitor tracking (licensed from VisiStat and quite impressive), and a sales automation module that can work as a stand-alone CRM system or integrate with Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Google Apps, or Capsule CRM, a $12 per month per user system also aimed at small business. There’s no shopping cart or Web site hosting but I don’t yet consider those standard features, even for micro-business systems.

MakesBridge does a particularly good job of taming the mass of Web pages that are critical to reacting to lead behaviors. It does this by letting users write rules that reference sets of Web pages rather than individual pages. This can be done by either assigning a shared label to several pages or by assigning page attributes and selecting on those. This is a helpful middle ground between rules that treat all pages the same (e.g. “visited any Web page”) and those that require users to list a specific page or several individual pages. These rules can be used in segmentation, lead scoring, and sales alerts.

The system also has a solid campaign engine, which breaks campaigns into steps and allows multiple options within each step. Each option has a filter that determines which leads are eligible, in addition to actions and an execution schedule that apply to those leads. Users can view reports on performance for each step and for each option within the step. A “circuit breaker” enforces limits on the total number of emails sent during any time period, alerting the user and limiting the damage from what MakesBridge calls "automation run wild".

MakesBridge also supports automated direct mail production, another feature favored by micro-business marketers. For this, the company has integrated with Cloud2You, a Salesforce.com App Exchange partner that loads selected records directly into templates to produce personalized mailing pieces. Cloud2You handles the actual printing and mailing without any additional effort by the user. Mailings can be triggered by steps within a MakesBridge campaign,

The sales automation module gives salespeople access to detailed information about their leads, including their current campaigns. Salespeople can remove a lead from a campaign, suspend the campaign, or skip a particular message. Although MakesBridge is designed to integrate with external CRM products, some clients use its sales automation module as their primary CRM system.

Pricing of MakesBridge is based on the modules used, number of users, email volume, and number of leads in the database. The system currently has more than 150 clients. Most are small businesses but some are large corporations.