Lots of Vendors Can Help You Find Leads on the Web

Few people would suggest you learn salesmanship from the play Glengarry Glen Ross,* but its central message rings true: good leads are the lifeblood of a sales organization.** That’s why scanning the Internet to find new  prospects is such an exciting opportunity. At least a dozen firms are now following that path.

These firms scan company Web sites, social media, news sites, directories, and other sources to identify companies, extract attributes like revenue, growth rates, and technologies used, and flag events that might indicate a sales opportunity, such as opening a new office, launching a new product, or hiring new management. Of course, there are plenty of important differences which impact which might make sense for you.  Some of the more important ones include:

• Specific data sources, scanning techniques, and analytical methods. Evaluating these in the abstract is interesting, but what works well for one purpose in one industry might work poorly for something else. So buyers really need to run their own tests to see what works for them.

• Types of predictive models available.  Some vendors only rank leads while others build multiple models for different purposes.

• Use of the client's internal data for model scoring, and whether this extends to sources beyond CRM.

• Whether the vendor sells prospect lists or only enhance names provided by the client.

• Whether the vendor provides lists of individuals as well as companies.  Since Web scanning is usually at the company level, the individual names usually come from other sources.

• Coverage outside the United States

• Information returned beyond names and lead scores, such as recommended treatments and social profiles.

• Whether the company maintains a permanent database on all businesses or only scans when clients request information about specified businesses or segments.  The permanent database costs more to maintain but stores history and trend information that is otherwise unavailable.

Here are brief profiles of the vendors I’ve identified in or near this space. There are probably others.  I’ve grouped them based on how much information I have available.  This correlates to some degree with market presence.

Vendors I’ve Reviewed

• Mintigo both returns new prospects and applies scores to prospect lists provided by the client. It is currently stressing uses of predictive modeling beyond traditional lead scoring and making it easier for clients to set up new models on their own. I last reviewed them in June 2013.

• Lattice Engines runs different types of models against names provided by the client. It provides recommendations for customer treatments in addition to scores. I wrote about them in April 2013.

• Infer runs multiple models against leads provided by the client. It originally returned only lead scores, although they are now adding multiple applications that create different scores for different purposes. I wrote about them in August 2013.

• Fliptop returns scores and some summary data on names provided by the client. It stresses quick model building. I reviewed them in June 2014.

• LeadSpace scans for data on demand, rather than maintaining its own master database.  It can find new prospects in specified segments and enhance names provided by the client.  It returns individual names as well as companies. I wrote about them in June 2013.

Vendors I’ve Spoken with But Not Reviewed

• Growth Intelligence is a relatively recent UK-based startup that provides lists of companies and associated contacts that are likely to become customers.  It draws from Web information, government lists, and similarity to the client’s current customer base.

• Kemvi is just emerging from stealth and plans to launch formally late this year or early 2015. It expects to focus on finding trigger events and advising salespeople about the best ways to approach each prospect.

• 6Sense finds new prospects using behavioral data gathered from a network of "several thousand" Web publishers rather scanning public sources like others in this list. So it doesn’t quite belong here, but it’s interesting nevertheless.

• Radius finds small business prospects that resemble current customers and deploys them to Salesforce.com, along with key profile information and lead scores.


Vendors I’ve Only Seen on the Web

• Avention (formerly OneSource, now part of D&B Hoovers) scans an eclectic collection of data sources to find prospect companies based on attributes and signals. It can rank companies with scoring but the scoring formulas are built manually.

• Gagein sends alerts on trigger events in media, social or public Web sites. It can track companies named by the client or build prospects lists for client-specified segments. It’s primarily a sales tool, with other features such as social selling and apparently without any predictive modeling.

• RealSociable is another sales-oriented product that tracks social media for trigger events related to target accounts. It appears to let users decide which events are important without using predictive models.  But it seems to have some clever technology to extract the trigger events from unstructured social streams. That (presumed) semantic filtering is the only reason to include it on this list -- otherwise, the limit to social sources and lack of predictive models would rule it out.

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*and the one person who admitted to it now makes his living as an arts critic.

** Also, coffee really is for closers.

The Marketing Funnel is Dead: Here's What Will Replace It

Okay, I freely admit that headlines like “the marketing funnel is dead” are a cheap trick to attract attention.
But I swear I came by this one honestly. Too tired to do any serious work on a recent plane flight, I scanned a random white paper that argued the traditional idea of a funnel didn’t capture the need to treat customers individually as they move towards a purchase. So far my head was nodding in agreement plus maybe a little drowsiness. But then came the punch line: instead of a funnel, marketers should think of managing each customer’s progress as a process, which is best represented – wait for it – as an escalator.

Now I was fully awake, and not in a good way. How is an escalator any less linear than a funnel? Have I missed some crazy new form of multi-path escalator networks? Maybe so: I don’t get out much, and who knows what these kids today are up to? But assuming that’s the not case – and I do after all read Twitter – the escalator analogy is no better than a funnel at illustrating today’s situation.

Nor, to be a bit more serious, is the concept of managing buyers as a process. It’s true that a process can have branches (although not the escalator-like linear process this paper described). But a process is still something the marketer controls. Whereas, the dominant fact of marketing today is precisely that marketers don’t have control: the buyer does. It’s the buyer who decides at every step what she’ll do next.

The picture that comes to my own mind is a tornado: a totally uncontrollable, unpredictable force that leaps across the landscape setting down wherever it wants. By this analogy, the best a marketer can do is to build storm-proof structures that will function successfully no matter what buyer does. I don’t think that’s quite the right image – after all, buyers are not destructive – but it does convey the frightening powerlessness of marketers in today’s world.

The better analogy is probably a maze. Marketers can build an environment that defines the options available to buyers, even though the buyers still make their own decisions about the path they take. The maze also shows how buyers can follow different paths and still end up at the goal, can go in circles indefinitely, and can exit without reaching the goal. It also implies correctly that the marketer’s skill determines quality and effectiveness of the buyer experience, just as the maze designer’s skill determines how much fun it is for visitors. If you really want to push the analogy, you can argue that we’re talking here about a corn maze – because ultimately customers can break out of the predefined paths if they want to.

I guess we’re all lucky that my flight didn’t last much longer, since I was beginning to think about how corn needs water (funding?) and if there’s a drought the ears of corn will have small kernels (customer value?). A more useful insight is that mazes have different regions, so the maze analogy replaces the notion of sequential lead stages with a more nuanced view of non-linear buyer states that can be the same distance to the goal yet differ in other significant ways. Buyers can also jump from state to state without necessarily moving through regions that are adjacent – like a tornado touching several spots within a maze, come to think of it. But enough with the metaphors.

Let’s just stick with the main point: the marketing funnel is really and sincerely dead. The purchase process is no longer linear and, even if it were, marketers couldn’t control how buyers move through it. The image of maze may not be perfect but it does show that buyers can follow many routes, that they’ll make their own choices, and that marketers still play an important role by defining the buyers’ environment. At least it’s a start.

Of one thing I’m certain: the buying process is not an escalator.

Treehouse Interactive Refines Its Features and Targets Larger Firms

Summary: Treehouse Interactive has been slowly enhancing its marketing automation system with features that appeal to experienced users. Its new clients are larger firms and half are switching from another marketing automation product that they found inadequate. This might foreshadow attrition problems at other vendors.

It’s been nearly two years since my last review of Treehouse Interactive. Here's an update.

The big news is, well, that there’s no big news. Treehouse has been quietly but steadily growing its business (up 30% this year), improving its product, and attracting more demanding clients. One telling statistic is that about half its new customers are replacing an existing marketing automation system – a sure sign that Treehouse offers features that only an experienced marketer will realize are missing from other products.

A bit of background: Treehouse started in 1997 with the Sales View sales automation product. It added Marketing View marketing automation in 1999 and Reseller View partner management after that. Its marketing automation system offers the usual range of functions: email, Web analytics, landing pages, multi-step campaigns, lead scoring, CRM integration, ROI reporting. The greatest divergence from industry norms is Treehouse contacts always enter campaigns by completing a form. Other systems select campaign members with rules that can access a broader set of data.

In addition, Treehouse originally required all subsequent campaign steps to execute the same actions on the same schedule. This is considerably more rigid than the branching capabilities built into most marketing automation products. Treehouse has since enabled imported data to trigger campaign actions, and promises behavior-based triggers in the near future. See my original post for more details.

Treehouse’s developments since that post have largely played to its strengths. I’ll group these into themes, with the caveat that I’m combining enhancements introduced at different times in the past year and a half.

- form integration. Treehouse has continued to expand how clients can use its forms, which were already more powerful than most. The system can now generate HTML code to embed forms within external Web pages, allowing users to create standard Javascript or Facebook-compatible non-Javascript versions, or both. It can also post form responses using HTTP Send commands, which can send data to GoToWebinar (replacing GoToWebinar’s own registration forms) or to other systems such as product registration, CRM and customer support. The HTTP Send avoids API calls or Web Services, although Treehouse offers data exchange through Web Services as well. The system also has an “instant polling” feature to embed surveys within any Web page.

- CRM synchronization. When I last wrote about Treehouse, it had just added Salesforce.com integration. It has since added a connector for Oracle CRM On Demand. It has also improved its CRM integration to synchronize data in real time, show Treehouse events within the CRM interface, and allow salespeople to add leads to campaigns and remove them. CRM integration is handled through forms that map fields from one system to another. These forms also contain update rules (controlling when data from one system replaces data in the other) and action rules (specifying when to take actions such as sending an email or updating a list subscription). The action rules are particularly significant in the context of Treehouse’s forms-based campaign design, since they provide a way to modify lead treatments that isn’t based on the original form entries.

- Web analytics. The system now builds separate Web activity profiles for individuals (whether identified or anonymous, so long as they have a cookie), for all individuals associated with a company, and for companies identified via IP address but lacking an associated individual. An individual’s lead score can be based on both individual and company Web behaviors. The system has expanded its referral reporting to track results by the exact referring URL. The CRM integration can now capture the search phrase and other referral details for leads imported from Salesforce.com Web to Lead forms: this required special processing since Salesforce.com embeds the information within a text string.

- download and document management. Treehouse can now tie multiple downloads to a single request form. It can list the leads that downloaded a specific document (a feature Treehouse says is unique, although I can only confirm that it's rare), as well as counting total downloads and downloads by unique leads. Downloads are now part of contact history along with emails, campaigns, purchases, click-throughs and form actions. The system also maintains a library of available documents. These can be stored outside of Treehouse so long as there’s a tag for Treehouse to call them.

- social media integration. Marketing messages can include a button that lets recipients create social media messages with an embedded URL. The messages will be sent under the recipient’s own identity in systems including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and Digg. Although many demand generation vendors now offer some type of social sharing, Treehouse introduced this feature back in May 2009. Emails and forms can also include a forward-to-a-friend button that allows recipients to enter several email addresses at once.

- other advanced features. These include fine-grained access permissions, split and multivariate testing, easy addition of new tables linked to contact records, and support for non-Roman languages such as Chinese. All are features particularly relevant to larger or more sophisticated clients.

Treehouse pricing has changed a bit since my original post, now starting at $749 per month for up to 7,500 contacts in the database. This is still firmly in small business territory, although Treehouse’s advanced features really make it a better fit for more sophisticated marketers, who are usually at larger companies. The company is a particularly good fit for channel marketers who can benefit from its Reseller View system.

Treehouse now has nearly 200 total clients, of which more than half use Marketing View. This makes it one of the smaller players competing for mid-to-upper size clients, a particularly crowded niche. But the firm is self-funded and profitable, and it's selling on features, not cost. So I'd expect it to be a reliable vendor, even if someone else eventually dominates its segment.

Alsa Marketing Adds Multi-Language Capabilities to Low-Cost Marketing Automation

Summary: Alsa Marketing is a late entry to small business marketing automation. They support multiple languages, which should gain them some business. Otherwise, though, it will be tough for them to compete with better-established players.

It’s harder every day for a new company to enter the business-to-business marketing automation industry. Of the three classic competitive strategies – low price, great service and innovative products – there are plenty of low price options and leading vendors work aggressively to help their clients succeed. This leaves unique features as the only viable strategy for a new firm.*

Alsa Marketing, a Montreal-based firm that launched its product in June, has one significant differentiator: it supports multiple languages (French, Spanish and English) in its user interface and in lead profiles. So far as I know, this is unique in the lower end of the market (Alsamarketing starts at $750 per month for up to 10,000 leads and 25,000 emails). Not surprisingly, the company’s 35 or so clients are mostly Canadian and European.

Alsa has some other unusual features. These include support for multivariate tests on landing pages (but not emails); automated posting of Jigsaw and social media data into lead profiles; fractional revenue attribution; and SugarCRM synchronization. These can all be hard to find, although they’re certainly not unique. (As I discussed last week, I’m no fan at all of fractional attribution – but Alsa tells me their clients like having it as an option. **sigh**)

The system also provides a solid set of standard capabilities. Users can import lists, compose and send emails, build landing pages, execute multi-step event-triggered campaigns, monitor Web behaviors, score leads, exchange data with SugarCRM or (soon) Salesforce.com, and run reports. Also can capture results of Google Adwords campaigns and has a URL-shortener to track traffic from social media. The user interface and functionality are perfectly nice but not exceptional.

Alsa also provides prebuilt templates for standard campaign workflows. The vendor argues that this removes a critical roadblock for many marketers, who have trouble building such workflows on their own. I’m not sure it’s really a big issue and, in any case, other vendors provide similar help. In general, Alsa says it has concentrated on helping its initial clients to use the system successfully: again, while this is clearly important (and might save some consulting fees), similar help is available from its competitors.

At best, superior support could built Alsa a small but loyal customer base. Multi-language might open a larger market, at least until competitors match it. I wish Alsa nothing but the best and will be interested to see how things work out.

True Influence's LeadPAC Offers Pay-Per-Click Email. Think About It.

Summary: LeadPAC lets marketers pay for email responses as easily as they pay for search responses. It’s a major improvement over traditional lead generation.

I can’t recall a vendor with the same business model as LeadPAC from marketing automation vendor True Influence. That's pretty rare in itself, but what really matters is that LeadPAC's model offers some powerful benefits. That's worth some excitement.

So what, exactly, makes LeadPAC so special?

LeadPAC lets marketers order prospect lists based on segmentation criteria such as title, industry and company size. Nothing new there. The system will also send emails to those names without the marketer loading them into a separate system: a little harder to find but still far from unique. But here's the new part: users only pay for responses.

I’ve seen marketing agencies and direct response media that work on a cost-per-lead basis. But I’ve never seen it baked into the email engine of a marketing automation system. If you're aware of a similar product, please let me know.

Of course, the classic pay-per-click medium is paid search, and above all Google AdWords. It's no accident that LeadPAC resembles AdWords in both function and appearance. True Influence CEO Brian Giese said the goal with LeadPAC is to give marketers a way to create real leads quickly, using AdWords as a model.

Like AdWords, LeadPAC lets clients set a target cost per name and a weekly budget for their spending. Again like AdWords, the system keeps sending promotions – in this case, emails – until the budget is reached. The system further resembles AdWords in having some automated intelligence: in the case of LeadPAC, this means spacing the emails, limiting any name to one contact per week, and taking into account different response rates based on time of day and day of week. One thing it doesn't do – yet – is build predictive models to select the most responsive names within the specified universe. Nor is pricing based on AdWords-style bidding: clients pay a fixed fee ranging from $10 to $30 per name depending on the level (senior executives cost more than department managers). Just to be clear, that's all they pay: there's no fee for the marketing automation system itself.

Setting up a campaign in LeadPAC involves three basic steps.

- Select the audience by choosing from personal and company attributes including title, department, level, location, company size and ownership. The prospects come through LeadPAC’s partnerships with major consumer and business list vendors.

- Define the email to send, starting either with vendor-provided templates or by uploading a client's own template. LeadPAC provides a typical editor and standard features such as previewing the email and sending test messages.

- Define the campaign start date and weekly spending limit. Once clients submit their campaign, LeadPAC reviews it for content, reasonableness and compliance with anti-spam regulations.

Clients receive lists of responders on a regular basis. They can load these into any marketing automation system or True Influence's own marketing automation product, which lets them run multi-step nurture campaigns, apply lead scores, and synchronize data with Salesforce.com.

The beauty of all this, as with AdWords, is simplicity. Clients still need to specify their audience and create their email offer. But the cost-per-response model saves them the effort of managing details such as importing and refreshing lists, spacing their mailings over time, and tracking which segments respond best. This takes usability beyond the interface, by actually eliminating tasks rather than just making them easier to do. It makes email lead generation possible for companies that lack even basic skills in managing such programs.

Indeed, clients paying only for responses have little incentive to optimize their list selections or their copy. The vendor alone bears the cost of low response rates. This is probably part of the reason that True Influence reviews the campaigns for reasonableness.

Interestingly, one cure for this problem is to have clients do even less. If TrueInfluence deployed automated response modeling, it could avoid having anyone define target segments and still improve its response rates. Add some automated copy testing and marketers would be about as close to push-button lead generation as I can imagine.

Of course, email is just one part of lead generation and an even smaller part of full-scale marketing automation. So marketers will have plenty of work whether or not they use LeadPAC. But as an example of ways to really make marketing easier, LeadPAC is food for thought.

LeadForce1 Adds Mind Reading to Marketing Automation

Summary: LeadForce1 infers Web visitors' intent and sales stage from the contents they read. It combines this with standard B2B marketing automation features to provide better-qualified leads to sales people.

The B2B marketing automation industry has reached the stage where product features are similar and companies compete primarily on business and marketing savvy. This intrigues me in its own way although it's not as much fun as looking at cool new technologies. Of course, if you’re a vendor offering a cool new technology, the stakes are higher.

Such is my take on LeadForce1. The company’s product touches the standard marketing automation bases: outbound email, landing pages and forms, lead nurturing, scoring and integration with Salesforce.com. It adds some less typical features for telephone lead qualification, which makes sense for reasons we’ll get to later. But its most intriguing claim is that it supplements the usual Web behavior tracking with reports on visitors’ intent and sales stages.

LeadForce1 does this by capturing the text that visitors hover over, click on, highlight or copy, and comparing it with keywords that indicate intent and sales stage. The system starts with a standard list of keywords which clients can modify to match their business. “Intent” is usually related to customer interests, such as a particular problem or product line. “Sales stage” uses a standard progression of research, consideration, trial and purchase, which clients can change if they wish. Because B2B purchases are often made by a team of specialists, the system assigns interests separately to each individual but assigns a single sales stage to everyone from the same company.

Intent and sales stage reporting are not merely random cool features. They help rank leads and send alerts as part of a larger focus on delivering qualified names to sales people. Related capabilities include reverse IP lookup of the company of anonymous visitors, connections to Jigsaw to provide contact names of those companies, and the aforementioned telephone lead qualification. In fact, LeadForce1 is targeted in part at Web publishers who collect leads and resell them to other businesses. Its ability to enhance these leads with intent and sales stage makes them more targeted and, thus, more valuable. This is why LeadForce1 sometimes refers to itself as being in the “lead exchange” business, although it currently seems to prefer the label “marketing automation 2.0”.

Sales people would certainly benefit from knowing the intent and sales stage of their leads. Of course, you do have to wonder about the accuracy of the information. LeadForce1 currently does some response tracking but mostly relies on clients to decide for themselves which keywords are effective. It does plan to add more rigorous analysis using the data it already collects. The same data will also be used to measure the impact of marketing contacts on changes in intent and sales stage and to forecast movement of leads from one stage to the next. The results will be interesting and, assuming the system proves reasonably accurate, should be quite valuable.

LeadForce1 was launched about two years ago and currently has 224 customers. Pricing is based on the modules purchased, number of users and number of leads. Monthly cost can be as low as $500 although a typical clients spends about $3,000 per month.

With so many customers, and growing quickly, LeadForce1 may survive the marketing automation industry consolidation as an independent firm. If not, its technology is useful enough that there's a good chance it will find its way into other systems.

Genius.com Offers Free Edition: How Much Does It Lower True Cost of Entry?

Summary: Genius.com has added a free version of its system. But I think its strategy of offering an intermediate product between email marketing and full marketing automation may actually be more useful in attracting new customers.

On Monday, Genius.com announced “the first free, instant-on demand generation solution”, a description carefully crafted to distinguish their offering from the free version announced by LoopFuse in June. The key term here is “instant-on”, which Genius defines to mean “instantly integrated website tracking, email marketing and social media campaign tracking” along with fully automated integration with Salesforce.com, including custom fields in standard objects. LoopFuse also provides automated Salesforce.com integration, but doesn’t have Genius’s Web tracking technology.

Since Genius has highlighted the issue, let's dive into its Web tracking. How it works it this: Genius creates URLs that send visitors to a proxy server, which in turn forwards their page calls to the client’s actual Web site. The proxy server continues as an intermediary through the entire visit, so it can track all pages the visitor sees. The same method is used in Web advertising, email links and linked embedded within social media messages. Because the tracking is done by the proxy server, there’s no need to make changes (i.e., add a tracking tag) to the Web site itself. This is what makes the tracking truly “instant”.

So far so good, but let’s be clear: the proxy server only captures visits that begin with a Genius-generated URL. So if I respond to a Genius-generated email, all the details of my initial visit are captured. But if I come back later by typing www.genius.com into my browser or searching for Genius on Google, the proxy server isn’t involved and Genius won’t know about me unless a traditional tag has been added to the Web pages. Genius does support such tags but now we’re beyond the realm of “instant on” and, indeed, of the free Genius system.

Genius' tracking technology is clever and unique enough that they’ve been able to patent it. But conventional marketing automation systems automatically track their own emails, landing pages and Web forms, also without touching the corporate Web site. This is not quite as powerful (or cool) as the Genius approach, but does reduce practical difference.

I wouldn’t have gotten into this had Genius not made “first free, instant-on” the focus of its announcement. What really matters is that they have a free offering, which implies two things about the system itself:

- they can provide fully automated, instant provisioning, which means their technology is sophisticated and their operating costs are low.

- the system is easy enough that new clients can use it with a minimum of support. Genius Marketing Vice President Scott Mersy told me yesterday that the company expects most users will learn what they need from a sequence of educational emails and online materials. He did add – and this and this is important – that limited phone support will be available to free users.

What does the free offering mean from an industry standpoint? I discussed this at some length in my June post on the Loopfuse’s free product. Bottom line: a free version will gain vendors some customers they wouldn’t get otherwise, but probably not create a huge difference in their market share or growth of the market itself. A marketing automation system is a highly considered purchase. Buyers recognize they will make a substantial investment in time and materials, so an extended free trial (which is what most free versions boil down to) is just one of many factors they weigh in selecting a starter system. Free systems may also attract companies so small that the free system is all they need. But those companies will never be a source of much revenue, even if the vendors manage to sell them some additional services.

In other words, the true purpose of a free system is to lower buyers' full cost of entry enough to attract a large number of new customers. This cost includes not just the software, but also the time spent to learn and operate the system, to develop new campaigns, and to design new business processes. This is why automated provisioning and self-service support really matter: they imply time savings for the users as well as the vendor.

In terms of entry costs, it's significant that Genius’ free version is based on their “Demand Generation” system, which occupies a middle ground between their “Email Marketing” and “Marketing Automation” products. The company provides a handy comparison table which shows that Demand Generation includes social media and Web tracking, triggered actions, Web forms and progressive profiling, but not drip campaigns, automated lead nurturing, lead scoring and landing pages. That is, it captures and tracks leads but doesn’t do sophisticated lead nurturing. This greatly lowers entry costs by asking users to start with a smaller, simpler set of tasks.

Although competitors will no doubt cite the limits of Genius Demand Generation as a weakness of Genius’ free offering, Mersy said the company will actually make the full Marketing Automation version available to free users who want it. He said they chose to start free users on the simpler system only to simplify their initial deployment.

That’s probably a very clever move – as is offering the Demand Generation version. Many marketing automation vendors have a “lite” system that is similar to the Genius Email Marketing, which includes Web behavior tracking and Salesforce.com integration as well as outbound email. But the next leap is typically to full marketing automation. An intermediate product provides a smoother growth path for marketers who want to start small and slowly expand their marketing automation efforts. This addresses two key obstacles to first-time purchase:

- it lets Genius offer a substantially lower entry price than competitors, without dropping the price of its full system. Starting price of Demand Generation is around $800 per month, slightly higher than the $600 per month of Email Marketing but significantly below $1,100 per month for Marketing Automation.

- it lets marketers grow into the complete system at their own pace, rather than purchasing something that requires extensive campaign development and process redesign to use fully. Of course, marketers could also just not deploy these features in another system, but the psychology of that is quite negative.

It remains to be seen whether having an intermediate Demand Generation product really gives Genius a substantial competitive advantage. If it does, it won't last long because the approach could be easily copied. Still, Demand Generation represents a creative approach to a fundamental challenge in the market. For that reason alone, it’s worth watching.

Day Software Acquisition Adds Some Marketing Features to Adobe, But Gaps Remain

Summary: Adobe added Web content management, digital asset management and social media features to its arsenal when it purchased Day Software last month. But it still lacks key pieces of a complete marketing solution.

Last month, Adobe announced their $240 million acquisition of Web content management vendor Day Software. Adobe was already a major force in Web development through its Dreamweaver, Flash and ColdFusion products, not to mention Omniture for Web analytics. But Day fills out its line by adding enterprise-class content management, digital asset management and social (blog, Wiki, etc.) publishing. In fact, the fit is so obvious that it doesn’t seem to have generated much comment, at least among the marketing gurus I read.

But the significance to marketers may be greater than they think. Back in February, Day released its 5.3 version, which specifically aimed at letting marketers manage their Web promotions without help from technical specialists. Of course, this is a goal shared by so many vendors that it verges on cliché. In particular, it’s also one of the main benefits offered by the landing page, Web form and microsite features of marketing automation systems.

Still, as I’ve argued many times, it ultimately makes more sense for marketers to build their pages in the company’s core content management system than in separate marketing automation tools. This can only happen if the content management system provides the features that marketers need to do their jobs.

Day’s 5.3 release attempted to do this by adding targeting capabilities, including segmentation and segment-driven personalization. Segments can be based on anonymous visitor characteristics such as referring site, search keywords and geolocation; on history captured in a registered visitor’s profile; and on attributes of the pages viewed. Profiles can also be enhanced with non-Web data, such as purchase history.

As you might expect, Day does a particularly good job of tracking visitor activities within the Web site. The system uses Javascript on each page to track cursor movements and capture the details of what each visitors has looked at within the page. It can also read the visitor’s browser cache to check for visits to specified external sites, a technique that’s legal although many privacy advocates think it shouldn’t be. The system also supports multi-variate content testing, which can be related to customer segments or operate independently. Tests are judged on click-throughs, which are captured within the system.

Are these features really enough to replace a dedicated marketing automation system? Surely not: marketers still need to maintain a marketing database, send emails, respond to trigger events, score leads, and integrate with CRM. In fact, Day itself expects clients to integrate with marketing automation products for campaign execution. The system does have connectors that let marketers create their emails and Web pages within Day and use an external system to deliver them.

Day’s Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Cochrane told me yesterday that he sees marketing automation as separate from Day’s business of building “customer facing solutions”. But companies that want to integrate all their online (and ultimately offine) marketing will want to combine both sets of features. Although Adobe already owns many tools used in marketing departments, it lacks the campaign management features at the heart of marketing automation. I expect that Adobe and other major Web content management leaders will eventually acquire email and/or marketing automation vendors to fill the remaining gaps.

Don't Fix Your Marketing Process

Summary: In a constantly changing world, flexibility is more important than optimization. Marketers need people, processes and technology that allow them to react quickly to new opportunities.

The always-insightful Adam Needles is running a series of blog posts this week that summarize the “real state” of B2B demand generation. So far, his main points have been that the role of B2B marketing has expanded to cover the entire buying cycle from initial lead generation through closed deals and that new technology must be accompanied by changes in people, process and content to have an impact. Tomorrow’s post will apparently discuss the need to tie marketing efforts to revenue.

This is good stuff and well articulated, but industry gurus have been making similar points for a long time. The real question is what to do about it. HOW can marketers adjust their staffing and processes, given the practical constraints of time and budget? And can systems provide specific capabilities that will make the adjustment easier?

The conventional wisdom is that marketers need to become more efficient, more attuned to individual buyers’ movement through the purchase cycle, and better coordinated with sales departments. But although these are certainly valid goals, I think they understate the problem.

Specifically, they make an implicit assumption that marketers are facing a stable situation. This is what allows them to design a new set of processes and techniques optimized for that situation.
I’d argue that the situation is highly unstable. Marketers face continued rapid change in the methods and media they have available. In this situation, any optimized process will rapidly become obsolete. So, the key requirement is flexibility itself. The most successful organizations will be those whose people, processes and technology can most effectively exploit new opportunities as they appear.

(The classic example of the conflict between stability and flexibility is the competition between Ford and General Motors in the 1920’s. Henry Ford relentlessly, even obsessively, optimized his company to make Model T’s more efficiently. But even though Ford kept driving down his costs, he ultimately lost to a General Motors that was able to change its products more quickly. Just thought I’d throw that in there.)

What does an organization optimized for flexibility look like? I think it keeps its processes simple, so they can be easily adjusted. This may mean they’re broken down into many small, connected processes that can be changed individually without affecting the other processes around them. (“Modular” and “loosely coupled” are better terms for this but sound too geeky.)

It certainly means that results are measured closely and frequently, so successes and failures are identified quickly and exploited or discarded as appropriate. It also means the organization makes experimentation easy, in terms of funding, staff time and tolerance for mistakes. It probably suggests that staff members should be more generalists than specialists, which implies greater willingness to pay for training and perhaps wider use of outside resources to provide particular skills on demand.

From a technology standpoint, flexibility implies ease of integration with new data sources, marketing methods and external systems. That’s very different from one vendor trying to include as many functions as possible. (On the other hand, multi-function suites always do seem to win in the market, precisely because they require less integration. Perhaps this will change if integration itself becomes easy enough.)

Flexibility also implies greater ease of use, particularly in terms of setting up and modifying marketing programs and processes. The need for many small, loosely connected processes has some specific implications for interface design. The need for measurement also implies better reporting technologies – a topic that several marketing automation vendors have recently begun to address.

Circling back for a moment to staff skills, all this integration, process coupling and analysis seems to mean that those "generalists" are going to be more technically adept than today's marketers, even if they are not as specialized in terms of the particular media. I'd like to believe that really great technology and interfaces can reduce the level of technical skill required, but suspect that won't happen any time soon.

I’ll admit these are somewhat half-baked notions, since they were largely triggered by Adam’s posts this week. On the other hand, I’ve been thinking for quite some time that we need to move beyond just telling marketers to nail down their processes. Perhaps a recognition that we must manage in a period of continuous change is a good next step.

Marketo's Enterprise Edition and Revenue Cycle Management: Looking Under the Hood

Summary: Marketo continues to follow its own path. Enterprise Edition adds the complex security needed by large organizations but sticks to simple campaign flows. Revenue Cycle Management blazes an important new trail for others to follow.

I finally caught up with Marketo for a briefing on their Enterprise Edition (announced in March) and Revenue Cycle Analytics (announced in May). Since both are somewhat old news, and Marketo describes them in detail on its Web site, I’ll just make a few comments.

Executive Edition shows what Marketo believes is needed to service large marketing organizations. The most extensive enhancements provide finer-grained control over user rights. This is critical in large organizations, where regional and product groups may be responsible for different market segments and where users will have different functional specialties and approval authorities. Enterprise Edition supports these by adding user roles, “lead partitions” to control access to database segments and “workspaces” to make Marketo objects (contents, campaigns, lists, etc.) available to different user groups. User roles (but not lead partitions or workspaces) are now available in Marketo’s Professional Edition as well.

These changes are a big advance over earlier versions of Marketo, which distinguished only between users and administrators and let all users access pretty much everything. Enterprise Edition also adds a “sandbox” environment for training, testing and development – the sort of things that small companies might do on a live system, but large organizations cannot safely allow.

The other major big-company need that Enterprise addresses is more sophisticated integration with other corporate systems. Related features include LDAP integration with enterprise security systems and a Web services API to call Marketo functions and access its data.

Perhaps most interesting is that Marketo did NOT expand the complexity of its actual campaign flows. These remain fundamentally linear: that is, all leads follow the same flow from step 1 to step 2 to step 3, etc. Rules within each step can deliver different treatments to different segments, but everyone still moves to the same next step unless they leave the campaign altogether. Other enterprise-level marketing automation systems can create different branches within their campaigns, so different segments follow entirely separate paths. This makes it easier to design and visualize fundamentally different treatments for different types of leads, something that matters more in a large enterprise with many different lead types. I’ve always considered branching campaign flows to be one of the key requirements for an enterprise-level marketing automation system. It seems that Marketo disagrees.

(Actually, Marketo disagrees with much of the preceding paragraph. Everything in it is factually accurate, but I'm happy to clarify that (1) several campaigns can run simultaneously, sending leads through different flows and (2) steps within Marketo campaigns can remove leads or send them to other campaigns (3) Marketo can connect several campaigns to produce the same flows as single branching campaign in other systems.)

Revenue Cycle Analytics breaks some important new ground. As I commented in an earlier post on purchase funnel measurement, Marketo’s approach is not conceptually unique. The basic idea is to track leads through stages in a purchase funnel, which is similar to pipeline reporting in many sales automation systems. It just starts earlier in the process.

However, Marketo's implementation brings this reporting to a new level. Most specifically, Marketo has introduced a star-schema reporting database, which I’m pretty sure no other marketing automation system currently offers. (Market2Lead had something similar but is no longer sold.) This is important because the structure of an operational marketing database, which most B2B marketing automation systems also use for reporting, makes it hard or impossible to do the necessary time-based analysis.

Other components are similarly sophisticated. These include graphical models that track movement of leads through the stages, detailed analytics with specialized measures such as conversion rates and speeds, statistical projections based on current inventory and historical flow rates, and executive dashboards. The models capture more than a simple linear pipeline: they support skipping and backwards flows among stages, splits within flows for different lead types, complex stage definitions, and transitional stages where leads are processed and reassigned.

Marketo is also tackling the difficult issue of allocating revenue to multiple individuals and marketing touches. Its methods are not particularly advanced: credit can be spread evenly or based on marketing-assigned weights. But no one else has found a much better solution, particularly at the low volumes of most B2B marketing programs.

My only real complaint is that you can't actually buy it all today. Marketo is releasing Revenue Cycle Analytics in stages. The database itself was available for the May announcement and the modeling engine was released in July. Initial analytics are set for delivery this month (August), with the really cool projections and dashboards out during the first half of next year. This delay could prove costly, since funnel-based marketing measurement is a hot topic and other vendors could well build or partner to deploy something similar in the interim.

Pricing of Revenue Cycle Analytics starts at $1,500 per month and grows with database size. Incidentally, I don’t think they’ve published that figure anywhere before, so there’s a bit of news in this post after all. Huzzah.

Manticore Technology Sees Expertise as Key to Success as a Demand Generation Vendor

Summary: Manticore Technology released some modest enhancements to its demand generation platform today. The company takes a conservative approach to marketing automation, stressing the importance of process over flashy software. I’m not sure this will be enough to thrive as the market develops, but customers will benefit regardless.

Manticore Technology today released the latest version of its marketing automation system. Changes include a drag-and-drop design tool (similar to Microsoft Powerpoint); integration of opportunities and custom objects from Salesforce.com; better reporting on Web site visitors; and, real time sales alerts on Web activity.

Each of these makes Manticore a bit more useful but none breaks new ground for the industry. So rather than review them in depth (you can read Manticore’s press release for details), I’ll look at Manticore’s broader business approach as outlined by Marketing Vice President Christopher Doran.

First some background. Manticore launched its B2B marketing automation system in 2003, making it one of the older vendors in the industry. With a $2,000 per month starting price and a solid mix of features, it sits squarely in the middle of the market. The firm has grown steadily but slowly, reaching just under 125 active clients. These include a few very large firms but mostly mid-size businesses and divisions of larger companies. Unlike faster-growing competitors, Manticore has been largely self-funded.

In a stable industry, this would be a comfortably conservative position. But the marketing automation space is changing rapidly. A mid-tier company which is neither growing quickly nor dominating a particular niche could easily be left behind. At least, that's my opinion.

Manticore doesn’t see it this way. According to Doran, the company has found that the real key to success is guiding clients through successful execution of demand generation programs. Manticore wants clients to understand that demand generation is a business process. It positions itself as a "trusted advisor" that sells based on its expertise, not on technology.

Part of this approach is to give clients a methodology. Manticore offers a straightforward one: define the stages in your marketing funnel; benchmark performance at each stage and identify bottlenecks; create transitional content to move prospects into new stages; define nurture programs to reduce bottlenecks; execute the programs; measure the results and compare them with your goals. The product supports this methodology but does not insist on it.

Doran sees Manticore's customer support group as playing a key role in delivering its expertise. Support staff are trained to help clients address their business issues. This fills a key gap between buying the software and hiring an actual marketing consultant. Manticore relies on business partners for such consulting services.

Of course, Manticore recognizes that it cannot succeed unless the product itself remains competitive. As the latest round of enhancements illustrates, Manticore remains focused on the core demand generation features of email, landing pages, lead nurturing and sales integration. The company is avoiding extensive investments in “inbound marketing” technologies such as search engine optimization and paid search advertising. Nor will it expand into marketing resource management features for planning and budgeting. Doran did say he expected to add some social media features and deeper reporting. And the company will continue to stress its traditional message of ease of use – although at this point, most other demand generation vendors make a similar claim.

I remain skeptical about Manticore's approach. It's true that process is more important than technology and that services to new users were the key to success in earlier marketing automation generations. But today there are plenty of consultants and agencies to provide that support, so it's probably not necessary for vendors to do it themselves. As a practical matter, I think most buyers will prefer systems with a broader scope, flashier presentation and more aggressive marketing. But so long as Manticore and similar firms remain financially sound, they can sell to the minority of buyers who understand the value of expert service. Perhaps that's all Manticore really needs.

LoopFuse Offers Free Marketing Automation System: Another Step Towards Industry Consolidation

Summary: LoopFuse has launched a free entry-level version of its marketing automation system. It's one example of how vendors are now competing to attract new users. Only the winners will survive industry consolidation, which may be here sooner than you think.

LoopFuse today promised to “transform” the marketing automation industry by offering a free version of its system. Although LoopFuse and others already provide free trials, this is indeed different: while most free trials expire after 30 days and often have limited functionality, LoopFuse’s FreeView can be used for as long as you like and provides pretty much the same features as the paid version of the system. The critical constraint is that volume is limited to 2,500 prospect names, 5,000 emails and 100,000 page views per month. In practice, this means that only very small companies will actually be able to use the free system as their primary long-term marketing system.

LoopFuse knows that, of course. When they briefed me last week, they said the main purpose of the new system is really to entice trial among companies just starting with marketing automation. They’ll make their money when users see the value they gain and pay for higher volumes and add-on features.

Personally, I’d argue that the really significant news out of LoopFuse is their newly tiered pricing structure. The entry point of $350 per month (for up to 10,000 prospects with unlimited emails and page views) is much lower than the $1,000 to $2,000 starting price of most full-function marketing automation systems. Prices at higher volumes are also much lower than competitors. This will put substantial pricing pressure on vendors who, in many cases, are already struggling to reach sustainable margins.

Here’s where the free system comes back into play. To make a free product viable, LoopFuse needed to engineer as much cost as possible out of the entire client life cycle. This means it had to be possible for clients to purchase and configure the system, learn how to use it and resolve support issues with next to no involvement by LoopFuse staff. Once this was accomplished, LoopFuse was in a position to charge lower fees to its paying clients as well. Other vendors – notably Pardot – have followed a similar cost-removal strategy. But LoopFuse may have been more focused than anyone else.

This doesn’t mean that LoopFuse’s success is guaranteed. Other vendors have similar price points for the small business market (see my list of demand generation vendors) although I suspect their internal costs are higher.

More important, price is just one factor in picking a system. Features, ease of use, and support from the vendor and business partners are usually (and rightly) the main considerations. The free product should increase the number of companies that try LoopFuse first, which will gain it paying customers down the road. But I think that most buyers will recognize that they are likely to stay with their first system and conduct a careful evaluation before they start.

For evidence that a free entry-level product does not automatically drive out higher priced systems, consider the hosted CRM market. Salesforce.com easily dominates despite the presence of surprisingly capable free products like ZohoCRM and FreeCRM .

Whatever the result for LoopFuse, the new offering is part of a larger pattern within the industry. Marketing automation (more precisely, B2B marketing automation) has now passed beyond the pioneer stage where fundamentally different approaches compete for acceptance. At this point, we all pretty much know what a marketing automation system does and, truth be told, the major systems are functionally quite similar.

Competition now shifts from building a technically better system to surviving the inevitable industry consolidation. This requires finding ways to attract masses of new customers as they enter the market.

LoopFuse’s price-driven approach is one such strategy. But many vendors have recently taken others:

- Eloqua, Silverpop, True Influence and at least one other vendor I can’t name are planning new interfaces that they believe will substantially improve ease of use, which they see as the critical barrier blocking many potential buyers. I’m skeptical that truly radical improvements are possible but am certainly eager to see what they come up with.

- LeadLife has embedded best practice hints throughout its system, another way to support adoption by users who lack marketing automation knowledge.

- Infusionsoft has repositioned itself as “email 2.0” rather than marketing automation. They believe this makes it easier for their target customers (under 25 employees) to see them as the next logical step beyond standard email.

- Genius.com added a new Demand Generation edition that falls between its basic Email Marketing and full-blown Marketing Automation products. This is another way of easing the transition from basic email marketing.

- LeadForce1 launched a solution that uses advanced text analysis to measure user intent, and thus provide much better guidance to salespeople than conventional behavioral analysis. Although their approach is based on superior technology, it's still a way to attract customers by offering radically greater value than competitors.

- Marketo now calls itself a “the revenue cycle management company”, giving equal public weight to lead management, sales insight and analytics. They still haven’t briefed me on this or their features to support large enterprises, but they seem to be seeking larger, more sophisticated clients who will presumably provide higher profit margins. Given how many other vendors are targeting small businesses, this certainly makes sense. But Marketo will also find itself competing with established marketing automation vendors like Aprimo, Neolane and Unica. who are entering this market from a different direction. It will also be competing with Eloqua, Silverpop and, perhaps most dangerously, the Market2Lead technology recently purchased by Oracle.

The Market2Lead-Oracle deal raises the other major question facing marketing automation vendors: what role CRM vendors will play? In addition to Oracle, CDC Software (owner of Pivotal CRM and MarketFirst) recently invested in Marketbright.

Of course, the really big question is whether Salesforce.com will make a similar move. There have been off-and-on rumors along those lines for months, followed by stout (if not necessarily credible) denial from Salesforce.com that it has any interest in that direction. I’ve tended to take them at their word, but Oracle and Salesforce.com are blood rivals, so Oracle’s move could easily prompt a Salesforce.com reaction.

Oddly enough, no seems to consider whether Microsoft will enter the game. That's surely a possibility, and would move towards a certainty if its two big on-demand CRM rivals both added marketing automation products. We might even see Google and Intuit participate: both already sell to small business marketers.

My fundamental conclusion is that the B2B marketing automation industry is about to enter the long-predicted stage of vendor consolidation, and that this will move quite quickly. The survivors will serve particular market segments: primarily small vs. large businesses, plus possibly some vertical industry specialization. The window for new entrants is rapidly closing, so any new player will need a major differentiator that creates a clear advantage and distinct identity.

DemandBase Adds Real-Time Access to Web Visitor Identities

Summary: DemandBase has added real-time access to its data identifying Web site visitors, enabling Web sites to deliver customized pages. It's another step in the company's systematic expansion.

It’s more than a year since my original post about DemandBase. At the time, they had just extended their product beyond basic IP-address-based Web visitor identification to provide company details and contact names. Last week they announced their next leap forward, an API to return detailed company information quickly enough to use it to tailor visitor treatments.
Specifically, ABR returns data within 10 milliseconds of the initial page request, in time to customize even the first page served. According to DemandBase, this compares with one to two seconds for conventional IP address look-ups.

ABR gains its speed by querying DemandBase’s own database rather than querying external directories. This is one of those things that is harder than it sounds. DemandBase built its database by monitoring which IP addresses most often visit its 2,000-plus clients, parsing multiple external IP directories for the owners and geo-locations of the servers at those addresses, and adding attributes from business directories including D&B, Hoovers and JigSaw. The company says it can associate three times as many visitors with U.S. business addresses as a conventional IP lookup.

Once it finds a match, ABR will return 15-20 client-selected company attributes including size, industry and corporate parent. The system can also apply and return a client’s own data, such as the salesperson assigned to a company and custom classifications for size or industry. These features were already available from DemandBase: what's new with ABR is exposing the data to other applications through a real time API.

One use for the data is to feed rules that send different messages to different sets of customers and prospects. DemandBase is also working to use the data to route chat requests to appropriate agents. Another benefit is sending shorter registration forms to system-identified visitors, improving completion rates while still capturing complete profile data. The system also improves Web analytics by flagging responses from specific companies and market segments, even when visitors fail to identify themselves, delete cookies, or reach the site without clicking on email links.

ABR is still a bit rough around the edges. In particular, there are no prebuilt connectors for specific application systems (Web site engines, CRM systems or analytics tools), so clients are on their own when it comes to integrating the information they receive. The first connectors are due shortly. Similarly, client data such as customers and sales people must currently be loaded by DemandBase staff. This will also change, first with a self-service file upload and eventually with a direct API connection.

Pricing for ABR is set at $2,500 per month for unlimited use. This is beyond the reach of many small businesses, but affordable for companies with the technical savvy and visitor volume to benefit from the system.

Beyond its intrinsic merits, ABR is an interesting illustration of DemandBase’s continuing effort to separate itself from the commodity businesses of IP lookup and compiled data. The company started by giving away its basic service, identification of company visitors to Web sites, to quickly build a large base of clients and partners. It then added value by enhancing the data with business directory information and making it easy to buy the names of individual contacts. ABR further expands the company’s footprint by using its data to enhance other systems, moving it beyond the business of selling stand-alone software. Clever folks.

Genoo Offers Web Marketing for Small Business

Summary: Genoo provides a simple Web site, demand generation and social marketing for $199 per month. It’s not the most sophisticated system or the prettiest, but some small businesses may find it's just what they need.

Genoo offers a small-business-oriented Web marketing system at a small-business-friendly price of $199 per month. I’m somewhat grandly labeling it a “Web marketing system” rather than “demand generation” because its microsite could replace a small company’s primary Web site. Demand generation features are adequate, if a bit rudimentary, and are supplemented by social marketing capabilities that do an above-average job of integrating social activities with traditional lead data. Over all, it’s an option worth considering for businesses with limited funding and limited needs. (For other small business systems, see my list of demand generation vendors from last November.)

Let’s start with the microsites. Each Genoo subscription includes a single site with unlimited pages using the client’s own domain name. Pages can be built with Genoo’s free standard design templates or clients can pay Genoo $500 for a custom template. Each page can incorporate CSS style sheets, tags for search engine optimization, social sharing widgets, data capture forms, and visitor comments. Commenters are automatically entered as leads into the Genoo database. The commenting system captures a URL, link text and Twitter name in addition to the usual first/last name and email address.

All pages are built and managed through a content library, which can also contain materials such as images, downloadable files and link lists. An RSS manager lets visitors subscribe to selected items, simplifying programs such as newsletters. RSS subscribers can also be automatically added as leads.

Data capture forms can be displayed within a Genoo page or linked to an externally-hosted page through Genoo-provided Javascript. Either configuration will post data directly to the Genoo database. One major limitation is that the system supports only a fixed set of data fields (29 if I counted correctly). Genoo plans to let users add custom fields but hasn’t set a date for this feature. User-defined surveys, which allow some expansion in data storage, are due this fall.

The current system lets users build forms with any of the existing fields, change formatting, labels and sequence, and designate fields as mandatory. Once a form is submitted, Genoo can add a lead type and lead source to the submitter’s record. Submission can also trigger a confirmation email, send the visitor to a confirmation Web page, and send an alert email to company staff.

Each lead can be tagged with multiple lead types. These can be set by page comments, content downloads and list criteria in addition to form submissions. List criteria can be based on combinations of existing lead types, other lead attributes (location, industry, company size, budget, etc.) and behaviors such as number of site visits, time since last visit, and number of emails.

The system can send emails through list selections or nurture programs. Leads enter nurture programs through triggers, which can be based on assignment of a new lead type or Web events such as email clicks, page views and downloads. Nurture programs contain one or more emails, each sent a specified number of days after the initial trigger event. Genoo’s nurture capabilities are barebones by today’s demand generation standards – email is the only type of message available, there’s no way to send different emails to different leads within the same step, and there's no way to skip a step. Genoo does plan to add direct mail and telemarketing options.

Let me modify that last statement just a bit: most of Genoo’s nurture capabilities are barebones. The scheme to coordinate movement of leads across sequences is quite elaborate – in fact, the term “Byzantine” comes to mind. For each sequence, users can a specify a trigger that will remove leads from the sequence and can decide whether entry to the sequence will remove a lead from all other sequences or a list of specific sequences. So far so good.

But if users really want to get fancy, they can also assign each sequence to a numeric level within track. They can then specify, separately for each sequence, whether entry to the sequence will suspend a lead from all other sequences within a track, from all sequences at lower levels within the same track, or all sequences at lower levels in all tracks. They can also block leads from entering a new sequence if the lead is already active at a sequence on a higher level. This is a very powerful and flexible approach, although users must be well organized to apploy it effectively. Of course, users can ignore these features if they wish.

Lead scoring in Genoo is more straightforward. Points can be assigned for attributes and activities, including the usual Web behaviors (page visits, form submissions, downloads) and social behaviors (sharing, commenting, RSS subscription). This is a closer integration of social into lead scoring than I recall seeing elsewhere. Users also specify how far back to look when assigning points and set a score threshold to submit a lead to CRM. Genoo maintains only one score per lead – a big problem for companies that want to score leads against different products, but a limit that Genoo shares with many other demand generation products.

Genoo offers bidirectional synchronization with Salesforce.com, although only a handful of the company's 32 current clients actually use it. Users have considerable control over which leads are shared, with options to create queues for leads to send to Salesforce and to specify which Salesforce.com campaigns will send leads back to Genoo.

Users can also create shared and personal follow-up queues within Genoo, complete with notes and scheduled activities for individual leads. This lets Genoo to provide basic contact management for clients without a separate CRM system.

Reporting in Genoo is reasonably complete, including source tracking, referrals, search keywords, email campaign results, links clicks, forms filled out, and forward-to-friend forms. The system doesn’t use IP addresses to report on the companies of anonymous Web site visitors, although the vendor is exploring an alliance with a third party to add this feature. As I mentioned in an earlier post on social marketing, Genoo is among the handful of systems that track social click-throughs to the original sharer, allowing marketers to see which leads are actively driving traffic through social media.

These features are all included in Genoo’s base price of $199 per month, regardless of file size or Web activity. Users pay another $8.50 per thousand for emails sent, which won't add much to most clients' bills. Clients wishing to use Genoo as a sales automation system pay another $9.95 per sales user per month. Set-up and support are free and there’s a 30 day free trial.

OneSource Survey: Salespeople Accept Value of Leads from Marketing

Summary: A survey of business-to-business salespeople finds they (still) consider themselves their best source of qualified leads. But marketing-generated leads are gaining increasing respect and salespeople are increasingly looking for help from outside data vendors. Marketers should work closely with salespeople to reinforce these trends, which promise to lower the overall cost per sale.

Most of my interactions are with marketers, so it was interesting to see the opinions of 136 salespeople reported in a recent survey from data vendor OneSource.

The most interesting information was what respondents saw as their largest source of qualified opportunities. By far the leader was “outbound prospecting”, which is a bit frightening given the high cost of such leads. For example, the State of Inbound Marketing 2010 survey from Hubspot found that outbound leads (from telemarketing, trade shows and direct mail) cost an average of $332, compared with $134 per inbound lead (from social media and Web sites).

I suspect that sales people have always felt they must rely on their own outbound prospecting to be successful. What’s probably more significant is that the three next-ranking sources in the OneSource survey come from marketing: Website, inbound calls and email campaigns. Events and trade shows actually rank below all of these. Bringing up the rear are social networking and direct mail, which are rated equal – a pretty impressive showing for social media if you think about it – and Webinars. All together, I see this as a perhaps-grudging recognition by sales people that marketing plays a critical and growing role in generating qualified leads.



Other survey answers were largely consistent with the theme of salesperson self-reliance. The most valuable types of information were targeted contact lists and new CRM contacts; the most useful external data was email address, direct phone numbers and segmented; and the most useful company information was the basics of location and size. These draw a picture of salespeople saying, “Hand me the leads and let me do the rest.” There’s no hint of a role for marketing in nurturing unqualified leads or building brand awareness, although those questions were not exactly asked.

One anomaly in this data is sharply increasing reliance on external business information services. Twelve percent of respondents said they had recently started using these services and a whopping 37% said they were relying on them more heavily. Just seven percent were relying on them less and only 24% are not using them at all. I see this as an acknowledgment by salespeople that outside resources can indeed make them more efficient, even if they still do the actual outbound prospecting themselves.


For what it’s worth, the survey (taken in December 2009) also found some optimism about future sales: 55% said their pipeline was significantly or somewhat better than last year, compared with 33% who said it was significantly or somewhat worse. But sales cycles are still growing: 59% said they were longer than last year vs. 16% saying they were shorter. Although I wouldn’t read too much into such a small survey, this is at least consistent with the hypothesis that there’s a long-term trend towards lengthier, more complicated sales cycles that will continue even once the economy recovers.

Altogether, the results reinforce the conventional wisdom that marketers need to work closely with sales departments to ensure they are delivering qualified leads and that sales people recognize this. Longer-term projects such as lead nurturing and branding are harder to tie to specific sales revenues, but marketers must trace this connection to justify their funding.

Eloqua SmartStart Speeds Marketing Automation Deployment, But It's Still Work

Summary: Eloqua's SmartStart gets marketers rolling in less than one week. It does require extensive preparation, but Eloqua leads you through that too. Let's face it, folks: putting a good demand generation program in place is real work.

Eloqua last week announced a money-back satisfaction guarantee for clients who participate in its SmartStart deployment program. Skeptical creature that I am, I wanted to hear the details before writing about it. By happy coincidence (OR WAS IT?), Eloqua Director of Key Accounts Jill Rowley scheduled a talk with me a few days later and filled me in.

SmartStart is a two-to-five day paid consulting engagement that helps new Eloqua clients fully deploy their systems. It’s not to be confused with the free QuickStart program (which I wrote about last May) which provides a smaller set of services. More than 150 Eloqua clients have now completed the SmartStart process, which is delivered by both Eloqua’s own professional services group and certified consulting partners.

The scope of SmartStart is indeed impressive. By the end of the program, marketers have initial email, forms, landing pages, Website tracking, CRM integration, reporting, and either lead scoring or nurturing programs. One key is preparation – the on-site sessions are preceded by extensive information gathering and technical groundwork, guided by Eloqua templates. This covers CRM integration, adding Web tracking scripts to company Web pages, assembling images and email formats, data cleansing, landing page subdomain set-up, specifying forms content and designing the lead scoring matrix. The process also includes a marketing maturity assessment that helps to define long term plans for improving the client’s marketing operations.

Rowley said most small companies can assemble the necessary information in a few days, although larger organizations take longer. Similarly, the SmartStart process itself works best for firms with relatively simple marketing operations, which Rowley said has less to do with size than numbers of regional offices and lead scoring programs, CRM integration, and existing automation. The single biggest challenge is the complexity of rules that govern CRM data synchronization, which can get very detailed when companies want different treatments in different situations.

The other key to the program is concentration during the SmartStart execution itself. The primary system administrator must devote full time to the project, while other users are brought in as needed. Because most policy decisions are made in advance, the company’s chief marketer doesn’t need to be constantly present.

The price of SmartStart varies from $4,000 to $19,000 depending on the version of Eloqua and type of CRM integration. Although that particular bit of information isn’t published, Rowley did point out to me that Eloqua’s Web site now shows basic price data, which used to be a closely-guarded secret. Pricing rules have also been vastly simplified.

That money-back guarantee? It’s good for six months and applies only to future portions of a subscription: so if you pay for a year and cancel after four months, you get refunded for the remaining eight months. That’s not quite a full refund, but it puts Eloqua on par with competitors who allow month-to-month agreements without an annual contract.

Aprimo Marketing Studio Supports Sophisticated Business Marketers

Summary: Aprimo Marketing Studio offers powerful features in an on-demand system for sophisticated business and consumer marketers. You know who you are.

When I wrote about Aprimo Marketing Studio in a post last August, I was impressed by the scope of the product but reserved judgment because it hadn’t yet been launched. I took a look at the actual product last week. Bottom line: Aprimo delivered what they promised.

Like Aprimo itself, Marketing Studio is a bit of an oddity because it serves both business and consumer marketers. The needs of these two groups don’t necessarily conflict, but they do diverge. This means that a system for both will include several features needed by only one group or the other. Placing them all in the same product adds cost and complexity, which are not a software developer’s friends.

Aprimo has not found a magical solution to this dilemma. Rather, it has conceded the lower tiers of business marketing to simpler systems and aimed Marketing Studio at marketers who need greater sophistication and will accept higher cost and complexity to get it. (For more on vendor classifications, see my list of demand generation vendors from last November.)

In other words, Marketing Studio competes with high-end demand generation systems like Eloqua, Market2Lead and Neolane. Neolane may be the most similar, since it also straddles the business and consumer marketing worlds.

(Small digression: most business marketing systems are designed around data from a sales automation system such as Salesforce.com. But consumer marketers also need inputs from transaction systems. Marketing Studio and Neolane don't have a problem because they can support any data structure. Eloqua and Market2Lead are based on sales automation data, but can incorporate external tables. Other business marketing systems generally cannot.)

As I mentioned earlier, what originally most impressed me about Aprimo Marketing Studio was its scope. This starts with the core functions of any business marketing system: outbound and multi-step email campaigns, landing pages, Web behavior tracking , lead scoring, Salesforce.com integration, reporting and content management.

The system then draws on Aprimo’s heritage in marketing management to add detailed cost tracking, project management, asset workflow including annotation and commenting on PDFs, and a flexible campaign calendar. These are handled crudely, or not at all, in many business marketing products. In Marketing Studio, they are well-implemented with advanced features and an attractive, intuitive interface.

Project management is especially powerful. Project plans include specific tasks assigned to individuals and linked with dependencies. Plans can automatically modify themselves in response to events: for example, if a piece of copy is rejected, the system can add a new set of review and revision steps. This is done by creating the project as a branching flow chart, with rules to determine what takes place at junction. These rules can insert a predefined subflow, such as the review and revision process, which itself is shared across multiple projects. Good stuff.

System scope also extends to inbound marketing. Marketing Studio offers a blog engine tailored to corporate needs: managers can review and approve posts; the system can automatically notify Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook of new post; and each blog topic is assigned a different URL, which helps with search engine rank. Another module lets marketers create Adobe Flash-based Web ads, while an offer manager module tracks the user of offers across promotions. Paid search campaigns are supported through integration with Omniture SearchCenter.

Of course, the bells and whistles wouldn’t matter if the core features were poor. But Marketing Studio handles these quite nicely as well.

Email campaigns can execute as batch projects or trigger dialogs. The system treats these separately, although they are built with the same drag-and-drop flowchart interface. Batch campaigns include powerful segmentation supported by a sophisticated query builder, splits and merges. Batch flows can also update data attributes, calculate lead scores, create personalized URLs, add and remove names from groups, send email and generate output lists for other media.

Trigger dialogs have most of the same capabilities except for the advanced segmentation. In addition, they support wait periods and can send leads and alerts to the sales system. Unlike many demand generation products, Marketing Studio supports circular and merging flows, which can simplify design of complicated programs.

People enter a campaign by being added to a group. This can happen when a list is imported from an external file or the sales automation system, when people submit a Web form or click on an email or page link, or as a step within a campaign flow. External systems can also add names through the Marketing Studio API. Because either type of campaign flow can itself add a name to a group, the possibilities for controlling campaign entry and movement across campaigns are basically unlimited. Trigger campaigns execute immediately when a new lead is added to their group, allowing real-time interactions.

Other core features are similarly powerful. Users can build HTML emails, Web pages and multi-page microsites. Emails and Web pages can dynamically select content blocks based on rules that read the attributes of each recipient. Web forms and surveys are also content blocks, so the same rule-based selections can manage branching surveys and progressive profiling (i.e., asking different questions based on what is already known about an individual). The same rule-building interface is used for content selection rules, segmentation queries, and lead scoring. This reduces the amount of user training.

Lead scoring supports multiple scores per person, which is typical in high-end demand generation systems. More impressively, Marketing Studio can also apply multiple rule-sets to the same score calculation. For example, it could use different rules for leads from different geographic regions.

The system can capture Web visitor behavior directly or integrate with Omniture SiteCatalyst. One advantage of using Aprimo’s own Web tracking is that results are available in immediately, compared to nightly with Omniture. Marketing Studio can identify the company of anonymous visitors based on their IP address and retain the history of anonymous visitors when they identify themselves by filling out a form.

Salespeole working with Salesforce.com can see a list of their leads with priority ratings. They can then click on a name to see a digital activity profile (emails sent, links clicked, forms completed, Web site visits). This profile can include activity captured within Marketing Studio or imported to the Marketing Studio database from other systems. Users can drill further into each profile to see the underlying details of each activity. Still within the Salesforce.com interface, salespeople can send an email through Marketing Studio, add a lead to a Marketing Studio campaign, and edit, convert, clone, dedupe or remove the lead record. If the administrator chooses, Salesforce.com users can also open a Marketing Studio portal to see the marketing calendar, assets, lead lists, activity requests, content reviews, project tasks and reports.

Speaking of reports: the system includes 150 standard reports, which users can customize or supplement by creating their own with a basic report writer.

Pricing of Marketing Studio is competitive with other high-end business marketing systems. Fees are based on a combination of database size, email activity, number of users and modules deployed. The starting level is about $4,000 per month, which includes the core marketing features for ten users and up to 100,000 contacts or 250,000 emails. Fees including hosting and email execution. The marketing operations module adds $2,500 per month and other modules such as social media, banner ads, Web analytics and Web alerts add $1,500 each.

Aprimo was founded in 1998 and has more than 200 clients on its original marketing system, which offers modules for marketing automation and marketing resource management. Marketing Studio was launched in September 2009 and at this writing has 22 clients, including a mix of business and consumer marketers.

Net-Results Simplifies Demand Generation for Small Business

Summary: Net-Results is simpler to use than comparable demand generation systems because it applies the same features to many tasks. The system is aimed at small business but offers an interesting design lesson for everyone.

When Net-Results’ showed me their marketing automation system, the demonstration ended so quickly that I wondered what was missing. But on reflection I realized that Net-Results offers a full set of demand generation functions. The demonstration was short because the system uses only a few features to deliver them. In an industry where every competitor is striving for grater ease of use, stand-out simplicity is an impressive achievement.

The key to Net-Results’ approach is to build everything around segments. Email campaigns are targeted at segments; Web visitors are classified into segments; behavior alerts are triggered by segments; lead scores are assigned to segments; leads are sent to the sales system based on segments; reports are run against segments. This simplifies the system in two ways: marketers have fewer features to learn, and they can reuse their work across many functions.

Let’s run through the standard demand generation process to see how this works in practice. This process has five functions: send emails to prospects; capture responses on landing pages; score leads; send qualified leads to sales; and nurture non-qualified leads with multi-step campaigns.

Prospects enter Net-Results from external Web forms (more about that later), file imports, manual data entry, or Salesforce.com synchronization. They’re assigned to campaigns by defining entry conditions for campaign steps, which the system calls “actions”. These conditions are not themselves segments but can be copied from existing segment definitions or built with the standard segment-creation interface.

Campaigns can have multiple actions, each with its own entry conditions. Actions can be arranged hierarchically with several "children" attached to the same "parent". Each lead is assigned to the first "child" action whose entry conditions it meets. This allows leads to follow different paths within the same campaign.

The approach imposes some limits, since different branches cannot be reunited. But it will meet the needs for most marketers. Net-Results plans to remove the limits by allowing actions to send leads directly to other actions, within or across campaigns.

Users can also specify a waiting period between actions, and whether to send alerts when a lead qualifies for an action. The actions themselves can send an email, adjust a lead score, or send the lead to Salesforce.com. Since entry conditions can also accept leads into nurture campaigns, the Net-Results actions by themselves account for four of the five core demand generation functions.

The fifth core function, capturing Web response, is Net-Results’ main deviation from standard demand generation techniques. Nearly all demand generation systems let marketers create and deploy landing pages outside of the company Web site. Net-Results does not. Rather, it copies data captured on existing Web forms and posts it to the Net-Results database. This requires users to add a bit of Javascript to company Web pages.

Loading data from existing Web forms requires mapping the original form fields into the Net-Results databases. Net-Results makes this as simple as possible by reading field names on the existing form and suggesting Net-Results fields that are likely to match. Such mapping may sound a scary to serious technophobes, but it’s less work than building a form from scratch.

Net-Results argues that its approach avoids the “vendor lock-in” that comes from using forms hosted by the demand generation vendor. I guess that’s true, but doubt it’s important to most marketers. On the other hand, the Net-Results approach means marketers cannot create new forms without help from whoever runs the company Web site. This strikes me as a significant drawback, which other demand generation systems are expressly designed to avoid.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Net-Results add a form builder fairly soon, although they didn’t say they were planning to. The system already has an email authoring tool, which includes a graphical editor and works from user-defined templates. Extending this to build Web forms should be pretty simple.

The Javascript tracking code also allows Net-Results to capture the behavior of Web visitors. This is another standard feature for demand generation systems. Here’s where segments reappear, since Web behavior can be used in segment definitions and system reports are run against segments.

Running reports against segments may not sound too exciting, but it greatly simplifies marketing analysis. Practical applications include reports to salespeople about their own accounts and reports on campaign results. Each report can run and emailed to specified users on a user-specified schedule. Reports include graphs as well as tabular data. The system's main reports all relate to Web behavior: visitors, traffic source, search terms, and pages viewed.

The Web visitor report is particularly impressive: it's almost a separate application, similar to the tools that other demand generation vendors use to give salespeople a view of Web activity. Users start with a list of visitors (within a segment, of course) showing key information including source, name, email address, telephone, company, most recent visit date, pages viewed, and visit duration. They can then select a lead and drill into the details of current and previous visits. They can also take actions including sending the lead to Salesforce.com and issuing an alert. Marketers could easily extend direct access to salespeople, since system security could restrict the salesperson to her own leads. An incremental user costs just $25 per month.

Net-Results can also issue automatic alerts, again based on entrance into a segment. Alerts can be directed to one or more email addresses and are summarized in a periodic report.

So what about building the segments themselves? There’s no truly easy way to define complex selections, but Net-Results does a reasonable job of balancing simplicity with power. Segments can have general attributes including security (specifying which user groups can access the segment), automatic exclusion of known Internet Service Providers (so reports can only show visitors from identifiable companies), automatic inclusion of only known contacts (to report only on previously-identified individuals), and parsing of “get” variables from the incoming Web address (to capture information passed within the URL). Treating these selections as attributes reduces the complexity of the segmentation statement itself.

Users build the segmentation statements by selecting data categories (visit activities, contact attributes, campaigns, lists, Web forms, traffic source) and then choosing attributes relevant to each category. For example, attributes for Web visits include pages visited and duration, while attributes for contacts include name, company and job title. Many vendors use a similar approach, which I consider the best method for helping non-technical users to create complex segmentations.

Users can group multiple criteria into blocks. All conditions within a block must be met for a lead to qualify; a lead must qualify for at least one block to qualify for the segment. (In more technical terms: the system uses "and" conditions within each block, and "or" conditions between blocks.) Although some subtle queries can’t be created with this approach, it should meet the vast majority of marketers’ needs. Few demand generation systems offer more power, and many offer less.

Once a segment is defined, users can view the records it selects to check that it works as intended. They can then save the segment and assign it to alerts or reports.

Is Net-Results really simpler than other demand generation systems? To some extent it depends on your definition. Net-Results supports many marketing functions with relatively few features. This is one type of simplicity. But different features tailored to different functions could, at least in theory, make other systems more efficient at each task. This is another kind of simplicity. In practice, I felt that Net-Results’ shared features were just as efficient as specialized features used in other systems. So, yes, I ultimately think Net-Results will be simpler for most users.

Net-Results’ drive for simplicity is based on its target market of small businesses. Many of its clients have just one marketer on staff. These people don’t have the time or resources to use a complicated system, and may not need the refinements, such as rule-driven dynamic content within emails, that Net-Results doesn't provide.

Pricing is also aimed at small businesses. [Note: the following is revised price information provided by the vendor as of December 2009.] Fees are based on a combination of page views, email volume, support hours and length of commitment. A client with 60,000 page views, 20,000 emails, and 5 hours of support would pay about $700 per month on a month-to-month basis and just over $600 for an annual agreement. Half of those numbers (30,000, 10,000, 2 hours) would run $400/$350 based on agreement length. The company reports its average billing per client is around $500 per month. No contract is required and Net-Results offers a 14 day free trial.

The Net-Results system was launched in April 2009 and the vendor says it now has “hundreds” of clients. Some have converted from a simpler predecessor product that was launched in 2006.