MindMatrix Adds Sales Support to Marketing Automation

One easily predictable trend in B2B marketing automation is that vendors will tailor their systems to specific industries. This is happening to some extent, but not as quickly as I had expected. The reason may be that B2B marketing automation products have a narrower scope than B2C systems, meaning there’s less advantage in creating vertical editions. For example, the data model of B2B systems is largely fixed, so industry-specific data models (a major component of vertical systems) are largely irrelevant. 


But while I see just a few general systems trying to become vertical specialists, I do keep finding specialist products trying to serve additional markets.   I wrote in February about one set of these vendors:  Balihoo and others that specialize in helping central marketing organizations work with channel partners such as dealers and franchisees. In May I wrote about Demandforce, which specializes in local service businesses such as dentists and auto repair shops and had just been purchased by Intuit.  I'm sure plenty of other specialists exist as well.

MindMatrix  is one of them. Founded 14 years ago, the company has built its business serving the real estate industry, where individual agents and local agencies work in conjunction with large national franchises. The company has nearly 250 clients and about 34,000 end-users, making it larger than most B2B marketing automation vendors. MindMatrix already has 30% of its business outside the real estate market and has recently begun to promote itself as a general purpose marketing automation system – or, more precisely, as the “next generation” of such systems.

The company’s justification for this claim is that it adds sales-marketing alignment to standard marketing automation features. Concretely, this refers to centrally-created marketing materials that are automatically personalized for individual sales people; desktop and smartphone alerts for Web activity by sales targets; and creation of personal Web sites, landing pages, and social media accounts. As the table accompanying my Balihoo post indicates, these are pretty much standard features for channel partner systems. But MindMatrix is correct in saying that they’re not part of mainstream B2B marketing automation.

Mindmatrix does a good job with these features. Content personalization is especially sophisticated, supporting dynamic content (i.e., conditional logic) within templates; drawing personalization variables from user, partner, contact, and other tables; and providing precise control over which content attributes can be edited by a salesperson or other end-user.  Personalized output formats include not just email, but also Web pages, Powerpoint, and online or pritned PDFs. The content can be sent from the smartphone app as well as the desktop. Emails can be sent through Microsoft Outlook and tracked in the MindMatrix contact history.

The system also provides a full set of standard marketing automation features. These include landing pages and forms for lead capture; email and postal mail; lead scoring on attributes and behaviors; branching multi-step campaigns; and bi-directional synchronization with Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, Outlook, and SugarCRM. Integrations with ACT! And Saleslogix are under development.

Lead scoring rules can consider response to system-generated documents, such as proposals and presentations, arguably allowing more accurate scoring than other systems. Another unusual feature, due for release in January 2013, can add personalized Web messages, polls and chat requests as pop-ups within an external Web page.

The system’s campaign flow builder is reasonably powerful, with support for test splits, filters on based on time and on complex behaviors such as number of Web page visits, updates of contact data, and sending contacts to a different campaign. The interface lays out steps in the flow like a deck of cards, making it unusually straightforward. Flows can be shared with sales users, with some or all features locked down to prevent unauthorized changes.

Does all this really make MindMatrix the next generation of B2B marketing automation? I don’t quite think so: although sales integration is indeed important, I believe the next generation will be focused on serving other groups within the marketing department, including acquisition (advertising and social media) and administration (budgets, planning, content creation, workflow, etc.). Integration with sales will be important but there’s only so far marketing automation systems can go before they compete with CRM – a contest that marketing automation will inevitably lose, since CRM will remain the primary system for sales.

Although MindMatrix has been sold primarily as system to coordinate central marketing with channel partners, it is also used with internal sales groups. The company is actively targeting small companies, with a starting price of $499 per month for the marketing features and another $25 per sales person per month. This is competitive with conventional marketing automation products for small-to-mid-size businesses.  It's a pretty good deal considering the additional sales alignment features that MindMatrix provides.

New White Paper and Eloqua Prospect Profiler

Eloqua yesterday announced Eloqua Prospect Profiler , which makes it easier for salespeople to review prospect behaviors that are captured by the demand generation system. In honor of the event, they sponsored a white paper by Yours Truly on the general topic of, um, why it’s important to make it easier for salespeople to review prospect behaviors that are captured by the demand generation system. The paper, Restoring the Balance: Why Marketing Holds the Key to Effective Selling in a Changed Business World, is available for free on the Raab Guide site and will eventually show up on the Eloqua site as well.

Despite its origins, the paper itself is quite generic and I think makes a valid argument: basically, that salespeople have less contact with prospects today because the prospects can gather so much information on their own. This makes it harder for salespeople to understand prospects and build relationships with them. The behavior data captured by marketing automation systems restores the balance by providing an alternate source of insights into prospect interests and intentions.

Replacing the relationship-building is more difficult, but demand generation systems can help somewhat by responding appropriately to prospect behaviors. This gives prospects a generally positive feeling towards the company even if no personal relationships are created. At a minimum, it keeps the company in the consideration set during the early stages of the buying cycle. Once the prospect has been assigned to an actual salesperson, the demand generation system can also send a stream of emails “signed” by the salesperson, building something of a one-to-one relationship. Obviously those emails must be appropriate, but this is what clever campaign design and good predictive modeling are about, per my last two posts.

Back to Eloqua Prospect Profiler. There’s nothing new about demand generation systems making prospect behavior available to sales people. Pretty much every major system on the market does this, and in roughly the same way: they pass activity headers over to the sales automation system, where they can be viewed as part of the normal interface, and let salespeople drill into details that are stored in the demand generation system itself. This may sound a bit awkward but it’s seamless from the user’s perspective, and moving all the details into the sales automation system isn’t practical.

Prospect Profiler’s claim to fame, so near as I can tell, is that it also presents summaries and trends of the prospect activity, per this very nice screenshot from Eloqua:

I don’t recall the other vendors doing that. The idea is to make it easier for the sales person to see patterns and then to drill into the details. This seems like a nice enhancement, and perhaps (I’m speculating here; Eloqua didn’t mention it) will be followed by additional of other marketing-gathered data with the salesperson’s interface. That would seem to be the general path that Eloqua and the rest of the industry are headed down, as part of the larger trend towards more closely intertwining marketing and sales activities.

If this isn't clear, think in terms of data from directories (D&B, Hoovers, OneSource), news feeds (Google Alerts, Lexis-Nexis, Reuters), social networks (Jigsaw, Linked-In), and social media (blogs, Facebook, Twitter). These are already assembled by various vendors, so all that’s needed is a relatively simple integration. The demand generation / marketing automation system is the obvious place to do this, rather than asking each sales person to do it for herself. The sales automation system could also be an option, but marketing already needs the data for its own purposes so it’s arguably a stronger contender.

Anther feature of Prospect Profiler is that salespeople can define their own rules for behavior-related alerts. Again, other demand generation systems also allow alerts, but I don't think they allow each salesperson to configure the rules for herself. It would be done by system administrators instead. But whether this is truly unique to Eloqua, I can't say.