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Business marketers can find plenty of books on broad strategies and plenty of other books on specific tactics. But a framework for connecting tactics to strategic goals has been missing. Adam Needles’ new book Balancing the Demand Equation (available here from Amazon ) closes the gap. Needles is a well-known industry leader who is Chief Strategy Officer at demand generation agency Leftbrain DGA.
In this video I discuss the art of delivering a positive customer experience, even when things are hectic and you have to move quickly. If you receive my blog via email, you may need to click here to view the video.
Business are spending more and more each year to bring in new clients. In management and business courses, one of the classic ideas in business is that it costs much more to bring in a new customer than to keep a customer. With advertising, online ads, marketing campaigns from a White Label SEO Services , etc. It’s each to overlook one of the greatest assets business have in their marketing efforts: the existing customer base.
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.
What does customer service excellence look like in 2024? According to our report with insights from CX expert Shep Hyken, customer expectations are at an all-time high, and there’s a bigger shift toward self-service and leveraging AI capabilities.
Summary: Is stressing the need for process change making marketing automation too complicated, or a recognition of what it really takes for success? There are vendors on both sides of the argument. Act-On Software officially relaunched its system earlier this week, offering a new interface and a new positioning. The interface is perfectly nice but the positioning is ultimately more important.
Thanks to the heroic efforts of my friends at OfficeAutoPilot , the new B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) is finally available for online sales. You can click here to access the new landing page and order forms. There's a long story behind this, with many lessons that reinforce and illuminate the basic premise behind marketing automation: that is, marketers need a system that makes it easy to do their jobs.
Summary: A close look at which vendors have the least common features finds some are widely distributed, while others are concentrated among products for big companies. As always, you need to look at the details to see which products have what you need. Last week’s post used data from our B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) to identify leading vendors in categories such as lead generation, campaign management, and technology.
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Summary: A close look at which vendors have the least common features finds some are widely distributed, while others are concentrated among products for big companies. As always, you need to look at the details to see which products have what you need. Last week’s post used data from our B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) to identify leading vendors in categories such as lead generation, campaign management, and technology.
Marketo today announced the launch of Spark , a new brand aimed at small and mid-size business. Functionally, Spark is pretty much identical to the standard Marketo system. Exceptions are advanced features including revenue cycle reporting, email deliverability assistance, API access, fine-grained user rights management, and the Sales Insight salesperson application.
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.
Several vendors have shown me their new campaign management interfaces recently. All were refined, attractive, and thoughtful. Each had subtle features that appeal to a connoisseur: floating tool pallets! Fly-over icon labels! Dynamic menus! But they’re all still basically the same flow charts that Frank Gilbreth (of Cheaper by the Dozen fame) introduced in 1921 and I’ve been seeing in marketing systems for more than 20 years.
You know that red-hot B2B marketing automation industry? Don’t look now, but growth is already slowing. Our just-released update to the B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Toolkit (VEST) shows that client counts grew just over 50% over the year ending in June, compared with nearly 100% growth for the year ending last December. That’s a marked decline, and the pattern is consistent across individual vendors: although some grew faster than others, each grew slower than during the previous pe
Speaker: Benjamin Woll, Tiffany Spizzo, and Jaime Santos Alcón
Enterprise commerce is at an inflection point. Rigid, monolithic platforms slow brands down, but a full replatforming is disruptive and costly. Modular architecture offers a flexible, scalable alternative - allowing enterprise brands to modernize without ripping and replacing their entire stack. Learn how a composable approach helps modernize commerce stacks while maintaining control over critical systems.
As I mentioned yesterday, our new B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) asks vendors to estimate the number of clients in each of four size categories. This provides an interesting overview of the industry. The segments are defined based on revenue. Installation counts are: Looking at the raw percentages doesn’t make much sense since businesses in each group are quite different.
As you might have guessed from my recent list of B2C marketing automation systems , I’ve recently been spending some time helping consumer marketers to select vendors. This is more a return than a departure: although I’ve written mostly about B2B systems for the past few years, my earlier work was largely in consumer marketing. Like any traveler, I’ve returned home with some new perspectives.
I caught an all-star panel on social CRM today at the CRMEvolution conference in New York. Up on the dais were Jim Berkowitz of CRM Mastery, Esteban Kolsky of ThinkJar, Brent Leary of CRM Essentials, Ray Want of Constellation Group, and Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research Group. You won’t find a more distinguished set of gurus, and moderator Berkowitz asked appropriately incisive questions.
Summary: Here's a closer look at revenue per employee and marketing automation revenue in general. I get the same answers as before but now have more detail to back it up. Some of the comments on last week’s post on the size of the B2B marketing automation industry led me to dig a bit more deeply into the question of revenue per employee. Looking through my files and asking a few questions, here are vendors for whom I have reasonably reliable information: This gives an average of $171,000 per em
Forget predictions, let’s focus on priorities for the year and explore how to supercharge your employee experience. Join Miriam Connaughton and Carolyn Clark as they discuss key HR trends for 2025—and how to turn them into actionable strategies for your organization. In this dynamic webinar, our esteemed speakers will share expert insights and practical tips to help your employee experience adapt and thrive.
Marketo this morning announced a new $50 million funding round, almost exactly one year to the day after raising $25 million in November 2010. In accompanying commentary, the company also revealed its 2010 revenue was $14 million, that it expects 140% revenue growth in 2011 (meaning about $34 million), and that it has about $70 million remaining of its total $107 million raised to date.
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.
Summary: Here are my estimates for the size of the B2B marketing automation industry, broken down by customer segments. Enjoy. I've been working madly on my new report on B2B marketing automation vendors. One of the things this has forced me to do is come up with an estimate of industry size that I'm willing to defend in print. I based my figures on several approaches: revenues for the few vendors who release their figures; the number of vendor-reported clients multiplied by an estimated revenue
So, it turns out that while I’ve been obsessing over vendor selection workbooks, our friends at marketing automation vendor Alterian up and got bought last week by language technology vendor SDL for about $107 million. Why didn't somebody tell me? I’m most familiar with SDL as a Web content management vendor, although their financial statements show that just over 75% of their revenue comes from manual and automated language translation.
Speaker: Michael Veatch, Senior Director, Implementations & Ella Aguirre, Director of Solution Consulting
Embedding payments can be a transformative step for software companies looking to enhance their platform capabilities, boost customer satisfaction, and drive long-term growth. However, the success of payments hinges on a single thing: implementation. Drawing on real-world insights and experiences, payments implementation experts Michael Veatch and Ella Aguirre will explore actionable strategies that can lead to a transparent, friction-free launch and mitigate potential challenges like technical
Summary: HubSpot announced a $32 million investment yesterday by Sequoia Partners, Google and Salesforce.com. This could be a real game-changer in the small business marketing automation landscape. If you heard a loud thud late Tuesday afternoon, it was the sound of two shoes dropping. Salesforce.com and Google announced their long-anticipated entry into the marketing automation industry, in the baby-step form of investments in HubSpot.
Exploring a new marketing automation system is like biting into a bonbon: part of the fun is you never know what you’ll find inside. Thinking in those terms, Beanstalk Data is a tasty morsel. It provides all the basic B2B marketing automation functions: mass email, landing pages and surveys, behavior tracking, lead scoring, nurture campaigns, and CRM integration.
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.
My review of Coremetrics Lifestyle raised the issue of measuring the impact of marketing materials on customer behavior. Of course, this is just one piece of the marketing attribution puzzle. But it’s worth a separate discussion because it’s such a common question – and, unlike so many measurement problems, this one actually has an answer. Let’s start with the original impetus.
Understanding and improving your customer experience (CX) can have a massive impact on your bottom line. Choosing the right voice of customers (VoC) solution is a critical step to elevating CX. Frost & Sullivan researched more than 50 leading VoC vendors, analyzing both their “innovation index” and “growth index” to independently select the top 10 performers in each of these categories.
I spent yesterday prowling the exhibit hall at the Direct Marketing Association annual conference in Boston. This uncovered several additional candidates for mid-tier business-to-consumer marketing automation. I’ll list them here and also add them to my previous list of mid-tier marketing automation systems so that future visitors will find the complete set in one place.
Marketers recognize the potential reach of social media, but are rightly frightened that they can’t control the message. Most social marketing applications sidestep the issue by focusing on creating communities ( Jive , Lithium ), monitoring conversations (Radian6 , Trackur ) and running promotions ( CrowdFactory , Nextbee ). Marketing automation vendors have mostly worked on making it easy to post and share messages and to capture social data.
Social media is arguably overhyped as a marketing trend: it gets well under 10% of marketing budgets (different surveys have figures from 3% to 8%) and results are questionable (it was rated the least effective content marketing tactic in a recent MarketingProfs study ). But social is clearly growing fast and has great potential. So marketing automation vendors are understandably eager to support it in their systems.
I spent three days last week at the Inbound Marketing Summit and Hubspot User Group in Boston. These featured a flock of first-rate speakers who presented more useful information than I can jam into a single blog post. That said, here are highlights from my notes. Youngme Moon, Harvard Business School - when all competitors address the same customer problems, their products all seem the same - to differentiate, embrace your negatives and make them into positives - her examples: - the Mini Cooper
Speaker: Jay Allardyce, Deepak Vittal, Terrence Sheflin, and Mahyar Ghasemali
As we look ahead to 2025, business intelligence and data analytics are set to play pivotal roles in shaping success. Organizations are already starting to face a host of transformative trends as the year comes to a close, including the integration of AI in data analytics, an increased emphasis on real-time data insights, and the growing importance of user experience in BI solutions.
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.
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.
This started as a post about Empathy Logic , a company that merges data from marketing automation, CRM, Web tracking, order processing, social monitoring, and other systems; lets marketers segment and select from this more complete set of data; and sends the resulting lists back to message delivery systems such as email and Web sites. You might think that Empathy Logic isn’t needed because a marketing automation system is supposed to build that integrated database.
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.
Speaker: Aaron Jacob, VP of Accounting Solutions & Reagan Cook, GTM Lead
Are you struggling to navigate the complexities and challenges that come with crypto accounting? 🤔 This new webinar will cover everything businesses need to know to get started with crypto accounting after incorporating crypto into their business models! Industry experts Aaron Jacob and Reagan Cook of TaxBit will thoroughly explore the prevalent operational hurdles encountered by accounting teams when interacting with crypto on the books, and detail how software solutions can effectively
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