0 Rapid Insight Provides Low-Cost Options for Desktop Data Transformation and Predictive Modeling

Summary: Rapid Insight offers low-cost desktop tools for data transformation and automated regression modeling. They're a good choice for companies that need something simple yet powerful.

Predictive modeling is widely used by consumer marketers to select names for mailing lists and to decide which products to offer existing customers. These models are typically built by statisticians with tools like SAS and SPSS. In other cases, marketers can build them for themselves with automated tools like KXEN that are tightly integrated with the marketing automation system.

But most marketers still don’t have a marketing automation system or even an integrated marketing database. Nor do they have the skills to use a product like SAS. This group needs stand-alone tools to do two key things: assemble data from multiple sources, and build and execute the models themselves. (Okay, three things.)

Rapid Insight offers exactly those two (or three) capabilities in a reasonably priced package.

Veera is the data assembly tool. It lets users connect to most standard data sources and then define a processing flow to filter, merge, aggregate, transform and otherwise manhandle data into a form that makes it useful. Veera also provides some basic analytics including descriptive statistics (mean, median, value frequencies, etc.), cross tabs and graphing. The flow is set up as a sequence of icons with a drag-and-drop interface, which means users don’t have to learn a scripting language. Rather than go into more details, I'll just point you to the vendor's on-demand demo.


The predictive modeling tool, prosaically named Analytics, builds logistic and least squares regression models. (Logistic models predict yes/no outcomes such as whether someone will respond to a promotion; least squares models predict continuous numeric outcomes such as lifetime value.) The Analytics interface is more sequential than Veera: users get a set of tabs that lead them through the steps of loading data, selecting variables, building the model itself, assessing the results, and scoring an audience. At each step along the way, users can make their own decisions or allow the system to choose for them.

I’ve seen quite a few automated modeling systems over the years, and was impressed at how well Analytics provides users with information to understand what's happening and take control when desired. This should let the system satisfy knowledgeable statisticians looking for a productivity enhancer, as well as novices who want to rely on the system's choices. Analytics also has a good online demo.


Veera and Analytics both run in client/server or desktop configurations. They load data into system memory (RAM), which means very large projects could be problematic. The vendor says a half-million rows with a couple hundred variables is a reasonable universe to model.

The two products are sold separately. This makes sense: many companies could use a generic data assembly tool like Veera for purposes other than modeling. For example, marketers might use it to construct a multi-source marketing database for promotions or analytics.

Pricing is $3,000 for the first Veera user and $5,000 for Analytics, with discounts for additional licenses. This is quite reasonable compared with other automated modeling systems, although other products often provide more than just regression models. Annual maintenance for each product is $1,750 per license. Rapid Insights has been selling its products since 2005 and has more than 150 clients with over 200 licenses.

0 Prediction: Statistical Methods Will Replace Conventional Rules for Marketing Decisions

Summary: basic demand generation features are close to a commodity. Vendors who replace conventional decision rules with automated statistical methods may gain a key competitive advantage because the automated methods produce substantially and measurably better results.

One of the most popular posts ever on this blog is Low Cost Systems for Demand Generation, which listed several options that started at under $500 per month. But it seems that nearly every day brings yet another possibility to my attention. Some really frugal alternatives include Genoo starting at $199 per month; Net-Results starting at $79 per month; and Nurture starting at $495 per month. I haven’t looked closely at any of these but they all seem to promise the core demand generation capabilities of email, landing pages, automated nurturing, lead scoring, and sales system integration.

The question this raises in my mind is where the industry goes from here. Basic demand generation is on the verge of becoming a commodity if it isn’t one already. The more sophisticated vendors will of course continue to add features, but it’s not clear that most marketers will be interested in the additional capabilities or be able to handle the added complexity. Perhaps the key competitive battleground is the ability to add that complexity without making the systems harder to use. But even though there are certainly substantial differences in usability among today’s systems, it’s hard to see why everyone won’t eventually be able to do roughly equal jobs of simplifying their interfaces.

Another possibility is that vendors will compete on their ability to help marketers use their systems – that is, by providing marketing training, usage reviews, and professional services. In other marketing automation segments, including MCIF systems and campaign management for consumer marketers, the ability to provide such services was the single most important difference between winners and losers. The same applies to CRM systems – it was Siebel’s partnerships with big system integrators that ultimately let it pull away from the pack. I do think these services will be a key success factor in the demand generation market, but there’s a big difference: because demand generation systems are offered as on-demand services rather than on-premise software, the actual deployment is much simpler. This means independent consulting firms can more easily learn to work with multiple systems. Because it’s much harder for vendors to build a loyal, locked-in base of resellers, it’s easier for new players to duplicate the service infrastructure of established competitors.

This brings us back to features. Certainly there is a list of hot items right now: Webinar integration, digital asset management, dedicated IP addresses for outbound email, APIs to post data from external forms, integration with Google Adwords, providing contact names from external databases when a visiting company is recognized by its IP address, pulling data from social networks to flesh out a prospect’s profile, and interacting through social media in addition to traditional channels.

The question is which of these features will turn out to be really essential. The only one I personally see as important to a large number of marketers in the immediate future is the Webinar integration, because Webinars are widely popular and integration makes the marketer’s life significantly easier. Everything else on that list strikes me as either of interest to a relatively small fraction of marketers or as simple enough to add that it won’t be a competitive advantage.

So is there something else that could be really important? Well, I wouldn’t ask the question if I weren’t leading up to something.

My particular insight, if it is one, is that consensus has crystallized within the past month that marketing now remains dominant much deeper into the buying cycle, and that sales and marketing must work much more closely together as a result. The idea itself isn’t new, but I suddenly see it referenced everywhere I turn. Part of the reason may be that I’m paying more attention because I wrote a paper on the topic myself (see When Best Practices Go Bad: New Rules for Sales and Marketing Management) although I’m under no illusion that my paper was anything other than one voice among many. It’s simply one of those ideas whose time has come.

As I and others have written, the immediate implication of this change is that marketing systems should provide salespeople with more information about prospect behaviors – what Steve Woods of Eloqua elegantly calls “digital body language”. This gives the salespeople insights into customer interests, replacing to some extent the information that they previously gathered for themselves when dealing with prospects directly.

But those direct interactions also built a relationship between the salesperson and the prospect. Watching their behaviors doesn’t do that. To the extent that anything does build the early relationship today, it’s the automated nurturing programs and behavior-driven responses executed by marketing systems. I don’t really believe that even the cleverest marketing systems can really replace the trust built by a good salesperson, but at least the automated programs can educate prospects and leave a positive impression about the company’s responsiveness to their needs.

I haven’t seen much written about the burden that this change places on the marketing systems. We’re not talking about some simple drip marketing to keep leads warm and educate them a bit until they move closer to their purchase. Rather, marketing must come as close as possible to simulating the interactions between a prospect and a good salesperson to build an essential relationship. This means that the marketing system has to be really smart. And I think providing this sort of intelligence might be a major competitive battleground for the vendors.

That last sentence was a bit of a leap, so let me fill in the blanks. Today’s demand generation systems are largely rule-driven when it comes to selecting prospect treatments. Whether those rules are embedded in list definitions, campaign flows or dynamic content doesn’t matter. The problem is that rules are hard to build and remain unchanged until somebody writes a new one. They’re generally based on somebody’s best guess about how the world works and they tend to be fairly simple. As a result, rule-driven systems just can’t be very smart, in the sense of reacting appropriately to subtle clues or changes in behaviors.

The limits of rule-driven systems don’t matter when there isn’t much data to work with and there aren’t many choices to make. That was arguably the case in the past when lead management systems worked with only a small amount of data from a postal reply card or brief telephone survey. But today’s demand generation systems are dealing a flood of behavioral data related to emails and Web visits. Rules can’t deal optimally with that much information. In addition, the demand generation systems have many more decisions to make, since every personalized email and Web page involves many choices for information to display. No one can create enough rules to handle all the possibilities.

Nor is the challenge limited to rules for selecting messages. Demand generation systems also use rules to decide when to alert salespeople about prospect behaviors. Lead scoring formulas are essentially rules as well. In addition to the fact that these rules are all defined manually and pretty much arbitrarily (that is, based on users’ best judgments), there is little feedback to check whether they are effective.

All of this absolutely guarantees that demand generation systems will produce suboptimal results. That would be annoying under any circumstances, but if the demand generation system takes on the primary responsibility for early relationship building, it’s more than merely annoying. It could destroy your company.

There is an alternative. Marketing systems can deploy automated statistical techniques to select messages, issue alerts and send leads to sales. Consumer marketers have used such methods for years with proven success. In addition to dealing with many more options than rules can handle, such systems can automatically learn from past results to improve their accuracy and adjust to changes in behaviors. Nicer still, marketers and salespeople can actually observe the success or failure of the decisions by watching objective criteria such as return visits and close rates. This last point is critical because it means marketers have a way to actually compare the value of decisions made by different systems. This means that vendors can meaningfully compete to offer the best decision-making capabilities, and marketers can choose the system that does a better job. And, unlike a feature that appeals to just a small fraction of marketers, better decisions are important to everyone. A system that could show it made better decisions would therefore have a very major competitive advantage.

So far, everything I’ve written here is just my private little theory. I haven’t heard any vendor, pundit or client suggest anything similar. This could well mean that I’m wrong; after all, I do like fancy automated systems with their cool bells and whistles. But I think maybe I’m right. Demand generation systems are getting more and more complicated, and something is needed to radically simply them before they collapse into chaos. Given that the stakes are nothing less than the sales process itself, allowing this to happen is unthinkable.

0 How Demand Generation Systems Handle Company Data: Diving into the Details

Back in early January I posted a discussion on treatment of Company-Level Data in Demand Generation Systems . At that time, I posed a set of specific questions to the demand generation vendors in the Raab Guide. Yesterday the final answer trickled in. Results are summarized in the table at the end of this post.

More than anything else, this exercise reinforced my understanding of how hard it is to answer a seemly simple question about a software product’s capabilities. My original approach in the Guide had simply been to ask vendors whether they had a separate company table in their system. In theory, this would imply that company data is stored once and applied to all the associated individuals, and that the demand generation system could aggregate data by company, use that data to calculate company-level lead scores, and change which company an individual is linked to. This turns out not to be the case. So I had to specifically ask about each of those capabilities, and even those questions don’t necessarily have simple answers.

This type of complexity is why I’ve always avoided simple summary grids that hide all the gory details. I’m perfectly aware – and people remind me quite often, should I forget – that most people find the details overwhelming and really just want a simple way to sekect a few systems to consider.

But it just doesn’t work that way. Yes, you can screen on non-functional criteria like cost, technical skills required, and vendor stability (not that those are exactly simple, either). But let’s say that leaves you with a dozen vendors, and you use some gross criteria to select the top three. If it turns out once you drill into details that two are missing some small-but-critical feature, you have to either go with the one remaining or start the process again with another set of candidates.

Starting again would be fine if you had the time, but let's face it: here in the real world you'll be under pressure to make a choice and will probably just choose whichever vendor remains standing. This isn’t necessarily so terrible, although your negotiating position will be weak and you might have missed another, better product.

But what if all three vendors fail on one detail or another? Now you’re really in trouble.

The only way to avoid these scenarios is to review the details up front. Thankfully, you don’t have to review all the details, but can limit yourself to the details that matter. Of course, this means you have to know what those details are, which in turn requires still more preliminary work. I was going to (and still may) write a separate post about this, but basically that means you have to lay out the details of the marketing programs you expect to execute with the system, and then identify the features needed to support those programs.

The good news here is you’ll need to lay out those programs anyway once you start using the system, so this is just a matter of time-shifting the work rather than adding it. Of course, doing more work now isn't easy, since you probably don't have a lot of free time. But knowing what you need will actually make the project go faster as well, so the payback will come fairly quickly.

So, the bottom line is that you really do need to look at product details early in the selection process. That said, I do think it’s possible to produce summaries that are linked to details, so people can more easily screen vendors against the summary criteria and then only look at the details of the most promising. I’m working on incorporating something along those lines into the Raab Guide.

Ok, now for the company-level data itself. Here are the questions I asked, with summaries of answers from the five vendors in the current Raab Guide (Eloqua, Manticore Technology, Market2Lead, Marketo, Vtrenz) plus two I’ll be adding shortly (Marketbright and Neolane.) As usual, even though I’ve looked at these products in detail, I’m ultimately reporting what the vendors told me. ("SFDC" stands for Salesforce.com.)

Question	Eloqua	Manticore Technology	Market2 Lead	Marketo	Vtrenz	Market bright	Neolane
Is there a distinct company table linked in a one-to-many relationship with individual records?	yes, link set by Eloqua matching	no	yes, link set by SFDC	yes, link set by SFDC	no	yes, link set by SFDC	yes; typically use SFDC link but client could set own
Are changes in company-level data copied to CRM company (account) records?	yes, if client chooses	no	no	not now; next release will allow client to choose	no	yes, if client chooses	yes, if client chooses
Can the demand generation system establish or modify company-to-individual relationships, and have these changes apply to CRM records?	yes	no	no	not now; might be in new release	no	no	yes, if client chooses
Do demand generation reports give a consolidated company-wide view of activities (i.e., combined activities for all individuals associated with a company)	no; available in SFDC	no; available in SFDC	yes	no; available in SFDC	possible with special effort	yes for Web activities	yes
Can demand generation lead scores be based on company-wide data (i.e., create a company-level score in addition to individual level scores)?	yes for attributes, no for behaviors	no	yes	yes	no	yes	yes
If company-level scores are possible, can they be created within the normal score-building interface?	yes	n/a	yes	yes	n/a	yes	yes

As you see, the answers even at this level of detail are more than simple yes or no. In the case of the first question, which is a restatement of the original question about whether a separate company table exists, “yes” answers must be extended to clarify whether the link between that table and the individual records is imported from Salesforce.com or can be set within the demand generation system. I explored this in most depth with Marketo, who clarified that any individual NOT linked to a company by Salesforce.com will be given its own company record (a one-to-one relationship), even if the database contains several individuals from the same organization. Users can edit that company data, but not the company data imported from Salesforce.

Market2Lead and Marketbright also use the company data and links imported from Salesforce.com. But while Market2Lead matches Marketo's policy of not changing company data in Salesforce.com, Marketbright lets clients determine what do to a field-by-field basis and actually have rules for different cases for the same field. (For example, you might want to let a demand generation user add data to a blank field, but not overwrite data where it exists.)

Just to add a bit more confusion: Marketo itself is changing its system to let clients decide during implementation whether to let users to override the Salesforce links and company data. Apparently some Marketo clients really wanted to do this, while others were firmly opposed.

The other especially knotty question is the one about company-level lead scores. All vendors with company tables can generate scores based on the data attributes in the company records. But I had also intended that question to include aggregate behavior of all individuals associated with a company – such as total emails opened or the date of the most recent Web site visit by anyone in the group.

Eloqua volunteered that they couldn’t do this, which I appreciated. The only other vendor I explored this with in detail was Marketo. They can in fact use behaviors in company scores, but only for individuals linked in Salesforce.com and only by using separate rules to assign points to individuals and to companies. That is, a Web download would have one rule to assign points to individual-level scores and another to assign points to the company score. This isn’t quite the same as building the company calculation by examining each individual independently . For example, Marketo's method can't limit the impact of a single hyperactive individual on the company score.

This is pretty picky stuff, but that’s exactly the point: people who really care about these things tend to be pretty picky about the details. They should make sure they understand them before they buy a product, rather than risk unpleasant surprises after the fact.

0 Infusionsoft: Impressive Marketing Power for a Very Low Price

Two economists are walking on the street. One looks down and sees a $100 bill. He points it out to the other, who says, “It must be counterfeit. If that were a real $100 bill, someone would have already picked it up.”

The point of the story, other than showing why economists are poor comedians, is that the market is not always perfectly efficient. I suppose no one needs reminding of that in today’s economic situation. But most of us still assume there is a reasonable relationship between price and value. This is why it’s hard to imagine that low-priced software can deliver similar performance to mainstream products.

Now we come to Infusionsoft, which offers marketing automation, CRM and ecommerce for as little as $199 per month. Like a free breakfast at Denny’s, that sounds too good to be true. But the company has been around since 2001 and has thousands of customers, so there must be something to it. At least it’s worth a closer look.

I took that look last week and came away impressed. The company’s marketing is tightly targeted at very small businesses (under 25 employees) but its marketing features are competitive with demand generation products aimed at much larger firms. Three of the five core demand generation functions are clearly there: outbound email, Web forms, and lead nurturing campaigns. Of the other two, lead scoring is primitive at best (I only saw an ability to apply segment tags, which I suppose is all you really need; the company says lead scoring is available “but we don’t advertise it because we haven’t made it easy enough within the software yet”). The fifith core function, integration with Salesforce.com, is not provided because Infusionsoft has its own sales automation capabilities. If you really wanted it, the system does provide an API that would let someone with the right skills set it up.

If advanced lead scoring or Salesforce.com integration are show stoppers for you, then read no further. If not, the marketing automation functions in Infusionsoft are worth considering. Although I mentioned only email campaigns before, users can in fact import lists and then execute email, fax and voice broadcast from within Infusionsoft, or extract lists for direct mail, call center or other external vendors. Simple telemarketing could also be handled within the system using its CRM features. The system includes an email builder with the usual features such as personalization and required “unsubscribe” links. Infusionsoft enforces double opt-in email procedures, monitors its clients results closely, and has a ‘three strikes” policy to educate and if necessary remove clients who violate the rules.

Users can create landing pages and forms within the system, although they must load the HTML onto their own Web sites since Infusionsoft doesn’t host them. This differs from other demand generation vendors, who nearly always host those pages themselves. The practical impact is nil, since the Infusionsoft forms do post data to the client's Infusionsoft-hosted marketing database. I suspect the difference reflects the small-company orientation of Infusionsoft: while marketing departments in larger companies want to be independent of their Web team, Infusionsoft clients probably don't have a Web team separate from marketing (if they have a Web team at all).

Users can also specify the activities that follow submission of a form or other customer interaction. This is where the real power of Infusionsoft shines through. The activities can include assigning the lead to a sequence of follow up messages, assigning it a tag for later segmentation, or sending it to a salesperson or affiliate, either directly or through a round robin distribution. Different answers on Web forms can be linked to different sequences, and users can add filters that determine whether these actions take place. Subsequent events can add leads to new sequences and remove them from existing ones, thereby adjusting to customer behavior.

The result is enough fine-grained control over lead treatment to satisfy all but the most demanding marketers. To me, this is the essence of a lead nurturing system and probably the critical feature of demand generation in general. After all, any email client can send an email and any Web system can put up a landing page. It’s the multi-step, behavior-dependent campaign logic that’s otherwise hard to come by.

That said, the campaign manager you’re getting here is not as polished as the best mainstream demand generation systems. To that extent, at least, you get what you pay for. There’s no flow chart to visualize campaign flows and no easy way to do split testing. Nor is there branching within a sequence, although you could achieve the same effect by having one sequence feed into several other sequences with different entry conditions.

(Side note: Infusionsoft has a public ideas forum for users to suggest and vote on enhancements. Split testing currently ranks number five, behind four refinements to the ecommerce features. This probably means that most users find the marketing features relatively adequate, at least compared with the ecommerce capabilities which definitely looked much less mature. The public forum itself certainly shows a healthy attitude by Infusionsoft towards its own customers. The company also has excellent online documentation and an active user forum for questions and answers.)

On the other hand, Infusionsoft actually does a better job than some demand generation systems of tracking marketing costs. Users can attach a fixed cost and per-response cost to each lead source, which can be an outbound marketing campaign or an inbound source such as Web ads, trade shows, or traditional advertising. Users can also attach a piece cost to each message in a sequence. Revenue for individual customers can be captured with the shopping cart or from opportunities in the CRM system.

This information is presented in a variety of standard reports, although, perplexingly, I couldn’t find one that related the cost of a campaign to the revenue from its respondents. Reports do track response rates, conversion rates, and movement of opportunities through stages in the sales funnel. Standard reports can be run against user-specified date ranges and sometimes against user-specified customer segments. Users can’t create their own reports within the system, but can export their data to analyze elsewhere.

User rights (i.e., which users can do what) are actually more fine-grained in Infusionsoft than in many demand generation systems. Infusionsoft needs the control because it will be used by people throughout the company than a typical marketing system. Infusionsoft also includes contact management and project workflow features, such as tracking tasks and appointments, that aren’t found in most demand generation products.

Infusionsoft pricing starts at $199 per month for a system limited to 10,000 leads and 25,000 emails per month. This version has pretty much all the features needed for demand generation. Going to $299 per month adds ecommerce, sales automation, affiliate management and the API. Even people who don’t need those features might pay the extra money just to move the volume limits to 100,000 leads and 100,000 emails and go from two to four users. $499 per month buys the same features but higher volumes and one more seat. Clients can also add seats for $59 for the base version or $79 per month for the higher two. Implementation costs range from $1,999 to $5,999 depending on the version. [Note: in July 2009, Infusionsoft dropped its implementation fees. Other prices were unchanged.]

Any way you slice it, Infusionsoft would be a tremendous value for a marketing department that could use it instead of a mainstream demand generation system. That’s not to say the choice is a slam-dunk: you may need some of the missing features, and there are other demand generation products that also underprice the mainstream vendors (see last week’s post). Still, if money is tight and your needs are limited, Infusionsoft is certainly an option to consider.