VEST Report: Latest Trends in Marketing Automation, and Where's My Hoverboard?

I just finished the latest release of the B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool, a.k.a. VEST Report. The new version includes a big technical change: instead of the interactive Flash document that was very cool but people often had trouble running, it’s now a combination of PDF for the core document and Excel spreadsheet for the detailed vendor scores. That’s a technical step backwards but will actually make it easier for buyers to access the detailed vendor information, and in particular to screen for vendors with particular capabilities. Less is more, I suppose. The good news is that this format lets me expand beyond 25 vendors, which was the maximum the old system allowed before running out of memory.

Of course, none of this is your concern, Dear Reader. What’s you'll find more interesting is that the VEST provides an opportunity to see new patterns emerging in the industry. Usually I do this by taking a close look at which features have become more common since the last report. But this time there were a few more obvious changes that stood out. Here’s what struck me.

- more micro-business vendors. All six of the vendors new to this report sell primarily to small businesses, and most are “all-in-one” systems that combine marketing automation with integrated CRM. They join another six vendors from previous editions who also serve this market. I'm also aware of several other vendors, not yet in the VEST, who also compete for this business. Many of these firms are new while others have been around for a few years but just hit my radar. What this says to me is that the all-in-one segment is more crowded and more mature than it has seemed. Of course, there’s still a huge opportunity – hundreds of thousands if not millions of potential clients have yet to buy their first system. But anyone planning to enter this business had better realize they will be fighting for new customers.*

- agency relationships. It seems that just about every vendor in the VEST now touts special features to support marketing agencies that resell the system to their clients or operate the system on the clients’ behalf. This isn’t exactly new but what once seemed like a niche strategy now looks more like a standard approach. It’s always been obvious that agencies were a sensible channel for marketing automation vendors to pursue, but I’m beginning to wonder whether agencies might turn out to be the primary channel for such systems, excepting only direct sales to large enterprises. If this happens, the reason will be that agencies provide the missing skills that have prevented so many companies from taking full advantage of marketing automation systems by themselves. Vendors have been knocking themselves out for the past five years trying to educate marketers to run their systems.  Perhaps having agencies run them is the real solution instead.

- social data. Maybe my biggest surprise was finding that many if not most vendors have now added features to automatically look up new contacts in social networks and add that data to their marketing automation or CRM profile. This seemed like magic three years ago when I first saw John Ferrara's Nimble do it; but now it’s commonplace. In fact, any vendor that hasn’t developed their own technology can just integrate FullContact to do it for them. So the competitive advantage is now precisely zero. (Okay, not zero: some companies surely do it better than others.  But that’s a much weaker selling point than being one of the few firms to do it at all.)

- ad tech integration. This one isn’t so common yet, although Oracle Eloqua, Marketo, HubSpot and some others have announced some ad retargeting partnerships. Google Adwords integration and advertising through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn audiences are more widely available but I don’t include them here. But despite the slow growth, there’s no question that serious integration between Web display ads and marketing automation programs will become much more widely available. What I won't do is predict how quickly that will happen. But I’ll certainly add it to the list of VEST questions so I can track it more closely in the future.

- dogs that didn’t bark. That’s a Sherlock Holmes reference, not an insult to technologies that haven’t been as widely adopted as the industry seemed to expect. Okay, maybe it’s a bit of both. In any event, I didn’t commute to work today on my hoverboard, and you probably didn’t sit down to do advanced mobile marketing, predictive modeling or revenue analytics in your marketing automation system. Those three – mobile, predictive, and revenue analytics – are all technologies that should take off, but so far are not deeply integrated with most marketing automation platforms. Maybe mobile has become so ubiquitous that I don’t even notice it, but, so near as I can tell, few vendors have done more than make it easier to create emails and Web pages that look good on mobile devices. Surely mobile can do more than that. Predictive analytics are growing quickly but so far are still done by specialized vendors rather than built into the marketing automation platform. (Yes, there are a few exceptions like the machine learning features of dbSignals and RedPoint. But they’re exceptions.) Revenue analytics is only discussed by a couple of companies; although important, it doesn’t seem to have captured the industry’s imagination. I haven’t given up hope for any of these, but no longer expect them to quickly become part of the mainstream.

So those are my impressions while the VEST updates are fresh in mind. The report is well worth buying if you want do to your own industry analysis, or (its primary purpose) are searching for a new system. As I say, the new format does make finding vendors with specific features much easier. You can find more information or place an order at www.raabguide.com/vest. Let me know what you think.


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*In fact, the micro-business segment is even more complicated than I’ve suggested. The real competitors are companies like ConstantContact who are providing a broad range of services, such as local advertising, that extend well beyond marketing automation and CRM. There are also many vendors with specialized services for vertical markets such as plumbers and funeral homes. Come to think of it, I recently noticed that one of my many plumbers (don’t ask) uses a system developed by a funeral home website firm. If there’s a logical connection between those businesses, I don’t want to know about it.

ClickDimensions Grows Quickly by Offering B2B Marketing Automation as a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Add-On

When I first wrote about ClickDimensions in a February, 2011 post, the concept was intriguing – a marketing automation add-on to Microsoft Dynamics CRM – but the product itself had been available for less than six months and claimed barely 50 clients. Since then, the company has grown its customer base more than ten-fold (it won’t release specific figures), won the Dynamics Marketplace Solution Excellence Partner of the Year award, signed up more than 250 channel partners around the world, and attracted outside funding. Sounds like the idea has legs.

The product has matured as well. The most important addition is a flow builder that supports branching campaigns. This is a bit limited – each node can only have yes/no branches – but it includes a reasonable set of actions including send an email, wait, notify user, add or remove from list, and run CRM workflow. It can also check for whether a contact has opened an email or clicked on a link. This is comparable to standard marketing automation products.

Other enhancements include an expanded survey builder that can skip questions or pages based on previous answers; a/b testing (two splits only) within emails; subscription management; and improved builders for email, landing pages, and forms. The system already provided dynamic email content, although users have to write the selection rules in a scripting language – something many marketers will find intimidating. Web behavior tracking, lead scoring, and social discovery (searching for and importing public data on LinkedIn) are also available.

None of this would make ClickDimensions stand out from other marketing automation systems if it weren’t for its fundamentally different architecture. ClickDimensions works directly from the Dynamics CRM data files, rather than creating a parallel, synchronized database like most marketing automation products. Additional tables needed by ClickDimensions are also custom objects within the Dynamics system. The result is direct connection between the two systems. ClickDimensions functions are also accessed within the Dynamics interface.

ClickDimensions isn’t the only vendor to take this approach. CoreMotives (purchased last March by Silverpop) has a similar architecture within the Microsoft Dynamics world and Predictive Response (which I haven’t looked at in detail) is a similar add-on to Salesforce.com. Still, as the shortness of this list suggests, the dominant approach to marketing automation remains separate, synchronized data files.

This could well change: as marketing automation becomes more widely understood, it will be purchased by less sophisticated companies. These buyers are already customers of CRM resellers who can easily offer ClickDimensions and similar CRM add-on products. That gives the add-on vendors efficient access to a huge market. The CRM vendors themselves would have the same advantage should they choose to add marketing automation  features. 

In practice, most buyers neither know nor care about the architectural differences between the two approaches. So long as the add-on architecture will work – and there’s no reason to doubt it does for all but the very largest implementations – success may well be determined by who reaches the most buyers first. As ClickDimensions’ fast growth already suggests, its reseller-based approach could be a decisive advantage as the marketing automation industry enters its next stage.  Only time will tell.

NurtureHQ Offers "Dead Easy Marketing Automation". Is That Enough?

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

New-ish marketing automation vendor NurtureHQ showed me its product recently. It’s really nice. Clean interface, easy to use, all the standard marketing automation features. Particular strengths in:

• split testing (separately for email subject lines and versions)
• lead scoring (automatically reduces scores from older events)
• CRM integration (Highrise, Capsule CRM, Sugar CRM, Salesforce.com, and an open API)
• marketing analysis (users can track multiple outcomes per campaign)
• content management (nice email/form/page builder, user-defined variables can be shared across messages to make changes easy)
• selection, segmentation, and campaign flow based on list tags (highly intuitive)
• low price ($495 per month for up to 20,000 contacts and 10 users with unlimited emails and landing pages and no annual contract)

In other words, this is a worthy alternative to Act-On, SalesFUSION, Net-Results, MakesBridge, Genoo, and other small business systems. Definitely take a look if you’re in that market for that sort of product.

But there’s my problem: “that sort of product” is widely available already. NurtureHQ hopes to differentiate itself as “dead easy marketing automation”, which it arguably is. But is it so much easier than the other products I just listed? I think not.  Regardless of whether it’s the easiest of them all, the difference isn’t likely to be large enough to matter.

Naturally, NurtureHQ disagrees. Before building its system, the company spent six months talking to current marketing automation users.  Many said they never progressed beyond email because the next step was too hard. This led NurtureHQ to believe that an even easier system could find a broader market than current products.

Other vendors have asked the same questions and reached the same conclusions.  But I’m beginning to think those marketers were really saying something else. What they found “too hard” wasn’t the software, but the planning and content creation needed for serious marketing automation. Without a clear understanding of what they wanted to do, they couldn’t figure out how to get the system to do it. That’s not a software problem.  Even a system that could build programs just by reading marketers' minds wouldn’t work if those minds didn't know what they wanted in the first place.

This isn’t a new insight. Marketing automation gurus have long argued that companies need to define their processes in advance of deploying a new system. The case was made yet again this week in an excellent blog post by Joby Blume, describing his former company’s struggles with marketing automation. (Be sure to read the comments). Howard Sewell of Spear Marketing Group made a similar point on his own blog. I reached the same conclusion myself in a post using data from a Gleanster report on marketing automation.

None of this means that “ease of use” is a bad strategy for NurtureHQ and others. On a practical level, ease of use helps sell systems to people who otherwise wouldn’t buy them. But vendors can't succeed if their clients fail – especially they rely on revenue from subscription renewals. So it only makes sense to sell marketing automation to companies without adequate processes, content, and other resources if those companies understand they’ll need to add those resources later. To really ensure success, vendors must actively help their clients through training and, in some cases, services to do the work for them.   Vendors including LeadLife, Genoo, and MakesBridge already offer low-cost service packages for their clients.  Other vendors also have service arms and agency partners to help out on a project basis. Third-party training resources such as the Marketing Automation Institute (where I’m a board member) can also help to fill the gap and benefit from substantial vendor funding.

What does this mean for the software vendors themselves? If the real keys to success are marketers’ skills and processes, does it really matter what’s in the software? To put another way, is marketing automation software already a commodity?

I hate to say it, but, to some degree, yes. There are certainly differences among products, both in capabilities and ease of use. But most marketers can find several systems that will meet their needs. This means vendors are increasingly competing on other dimensions including their own marketing and sales skills, cost structures, supporting services, pricing, and financial resources. As I pointed out last week,  it’s no coincidence that four of the five largest vendors are venture-funded (six of seven, if you include Infusionsoft and HubSpot). Another factoid that makes the point even more clearly: three of the four fastest growing received major new funding in the past year.

Still, I’m not entirely ready to give up on technology as a major differentiator. What’s needed is more radical innovation than a better interface. If the real barriers to success are creating content and identifying appropriate programs, then technology must address those directly. There are some already tools to help generate content, such as systems for news curation  and video posting.  I can't think of any products that recommend the right marketing programs, but proper analytics can identify patterns that reveal opportunities, and it’s perfectly conceivable that a rule-based system could check for known issues and make recommendations. HubSpot’s marketing grader does a something like this although it only examines externally-available information.

Of course, marketers will still have to create content and design programs. But better technology could dramatically reduce the necessary effort and move marketers past the deer-in-the-headlights paralysis of not knowing where to start. Vendors who really want to expand the market beyond the resource-rich few should look in this direction.

Social Media Features in Marketing Automation Systems: Who Does What?

Social media is arguably overhyped as a marketing trend: it gets well under 10% of marketing budgets (different surveys have figures from 3% to 8%) and results are questionable (it was rated the least effective content marketing tactic in a recent MarketingProfs study).  But social is clearly growing fast and has great potential. So marketing automation vendors are understandably eager to support it in their systems.

I recently took a quick tour of vendor sites to see what social features they’re offering. Results are summarized in the table below. I need to stress that I’ve only credited vendors for features they list on their site. I strongly suspect that the data is incomplete, especially for basic features that are so common the vendors simply don’t bother to mention them. (Note: the table has been updated after the original post based on vendor feedback, so it's a bit more reliable than it was originally.)

The features fell into four broad categories:

• Basic posting and sharing: the most common features and the simplest level of social media marketing. As I wrote above, most vendors probably have most of them even though the chart doesn’t show them.

• Social media monitoring: watching social media for mentions of the company or other topics and responding when appropriate. Plenty of third party applications can do this, so providing it within the marketing automation system is mostly a matter of convenience.

• Importing social data: loading social data into the marketing automation database so it can be used for segmentation, analysis, and sharing with salespeople via CRM integration. This is harder than monitoring since it requires linking social identities to marketing leads and connecting to the social system’s API.

• Social platform integration: using native features of the social platforms by writing to their APIs. This can be tricky for the marketing automation vendors to build but it lets their clients take greater advantage of social media possibilities.


Looking at the chart as a whole, what stands out is the sheer variety: once you get past the basics, no features are common enough to consider them standard. This contrasts sharply with mature categories like email, landing pages, and nurture campaigns, where dozens of features are shared by most systems.  The reason is obvious – social media is still very young – but the disparity still provides interesting insights into what different vendors feel are most important to their clients.

The variety also illustrates that a great number of social media applications are possible (with plenty more to come). Naturally, the vendors will borrow features from each other, so we can expect some convergence over time..  A standard set of features will emerge as the industry figures out what’s really important.

The list below presents each vendor with a brief explanation of the table entries. Links on the vendor names go directly to the vendor Web page or press release that described their social media capabilities.  In cases where the data came from different sources, I've put the link on the items themselves.

Neolane
- posting: central panel to post tweets and Facebook updates
- sharing: place sharing buttons on emails
- tracking: measure clicks on links in system-generated posts.
- Facebook forms: use forms within Facebook pages and apps to gather customer permissions
- social sign-in: use social media sign-in services to replace marketing automation forms
- personalized Facebook ads: display different ad versions on a Facebook page based on the user’s profile, including both Facebook and non-Facebook data


Marketo
- sharing: place sharing buttons on landing pages
- tracking: measure visitors from the shared pages
- load Twitter feed: connector to load Twitter conversations to lead profiles and use the conversations in campaign rules


Eloqua
- sharing: place sharing buttons on emails and other marketing materials
- social sign-in: use social media sign-in services to replace marketing automation forms
- Klout segmentation: add Klout scores to lead profiles and use them in campaign rules
- show Twitter feed: let salespeople see a lead’s Twitter posts on their Profiler dashboard


IBM/Unica
- social monitoring: use CoreMetrics Social to find social media mentions of company


Aprimo
- posting: manage blog posts with review process and SEO recommendations
- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and microsites
- tracking: integrate with third party web analytics to track social referrals
- monitoring: integrate with third party social listening tools for monitoring


Pardot
- posting: central panel to schedule and send social messages
- load social profile: use Qwerly to import social media profiles and add to marketing automation lead profile
- show social profile: show social profile data in CRM


Silverpop
- posting: send posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and/or RSS feeds along with email sends
- sharing: place sharing buttons on email
- social sign-in: use social media sign-in services to replace sign-in forms
- Facebook forms: add registration forms to Facebook and blogs
- badges and buttons: embed buttons and badges in email for Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, StumbleUpon, XING


Act-On Software
- tracking: embed trackable links in system-generated posts
- social prospecting: find relevant social conversations and send to in-box; send template-based responses


SalesFusion
- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and landing pages
- tracking: embed trackable links in system-generated posts and online documents


TreeHouse Interactive
- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and landing pages
- tracking: embed trackable links in system-generated posts
- Facebook forms: build advanced forms that can work within Facebook pages


Net-Results
- load social profile: find data about visitors on Jigsaw, Linkedin, Twitter and post to marketing automation lead profile


Genius
- tracking: embed trackable links in personalized web promotions and chat messages


Loopfuse
- social monitoring: use Collecta realtime search to find social media mentions of company


HubSpot
- posting: send social media messages and blog posts
- sharing: place sharing buttons on blog posts and other content
- social monitoring: find social media mentions of company and respond
- Facebook forms: build ‘welcome’ app to capture leads on Facebook page

Demand Generation Usability Scores - Part 2

Usability Items for Simple Marketing Programs
(note: this is a slightly revised version of the original post, reflecting vendor feedback.)

Yesterday's post described the background of this usability scoring project and gave scores for several items that apply to both simple and complex marketing programs. This post will continue with the scores for items that apply to usability for simple campaigns.

Build a campaign as a list of stages. Users can build a simple campaign by defining a linear sequence of stages. As discussed in last Friday's post , I see this is one of two truly key features for making simple campaigns easy to build. The primary alternative, laying out a campaign on a Visio-style flow chart, is harder for most marketers to grasp.

In case you're wondering, the practical difference between a list and a flow chart is that stages in a flow chart are linked by separate decision icons, while stages in a list are connected directly. Many list interfaces allow decision rules within each stage, so there's not necessarily a functional difference. But embedding the rules gives a much cleaner, simpler view of the campaign flow. Of course, this only works for simple flows, because any complex branching is hidden and would soon become unmanageable.

Build a campaign as a list of stages
Eloqua	Manticore Technology	Market2Lead	Marketbright	Marketo	Neolane	Silverpop Engage B2B
0	0	1	1	1	0	1

Build linear campaigns outside of a larger campaign structure. The linear campaigns described above can be created independently, rather than as part of a larger structure involving multiple linear campaigns. This is the other key to simple campaign usability because it allows the linear campaigns to be added and removed directly. Otherwise, they must be fit into a larger structure which adds complexity that is unnecessary for a simple marketing program. The flow of leads among these independent campaigns may be managed either through explicit routing (i.e., one campaign directly sends leads to another campaign) or implicitly (i.e., each campaign has its own entry conditions, and leads flow to whichever campaigns they are qualified for.)

Build linear campaigns outside of a larger campaign structure
Eloqua	Manticore Technology	Market2Lead	Marketbright	Marketo	Neolane	Silverpop Engage B2B
0	0	1	1	1	0	0

Define campaign schedules only at the campaign level, not for individual steps. Execution schedules are specified for the campaign as a whole, and not separately for individual stages. This reduces setup labor, eliminates an item from the user interface, and makes it easier to understand how the campaign will function. The campaign schedules are often derived from the update schedules of the lists that feed the campaign. Neolane is scored with a half point because it allows stage-level schedules but can be configured to hide the capability.

Define campaign schedules only at the campaign level, not for individual steps.
Eloqua	Manticore Technology	Market2Lead	Marketbright	Marketo	Neolane	Silverpop Engage B2B
0	1	1	1	1	0.5	0

Decision rules are built with functions for specific data types, such as ‘X Web site visits in past Y days'. This contrasts with generic rule building interfaces, which require users to know which field holds a particular type of data and may require complex specifications for calculations. Every system scored here meets this requirement in one way or another, but some other demand generation products do not.

Decision rules are built with functions for specific data types
Eloqua	Manticore Technology	Market2Lead	Marketbright	Marketo	Neolane	Silverpop Engage B2B
1	1	1	1	1	1	1

Campaign stages send leads directly to sales. A stage within the flow for each campaign specifies when the system will transfer qualified leads to sales. This is easier to understand than having a separate function that scans for transfer opportunities independently of campaigns. Silverpop gets a half point because it has rules within each campaign that scan for opportunities.

Campaign stages send leads directly to sales
Eloqua	Manticore Technology	Market2Lead	Marketbright	Marketo	Neolane	Silverpop Engage B2B
1	1	0	1	1	1	0.5

Training time during implementation. This reflects the amount of training the vendors say they provide for end-users during system implementation. It is included here on the assumption that less training time indicates an easy-to-use system. Vendors providing less than one day of training are scored with a 1; those providing more than one day are scored with a 0. Where vendors offer different versions of their system, the scores are based on training for the simplest version with complete functionality. In practice, of course, vendors offer different training packages which are tailored to the client's situation.

Training time during implementation
Eloqua	Manticore Technology	Market2Lead	Marketbright	Marketo	Neolane	Silverpop Engage B2B
0	1	0	1	1	0	1

Total for Simple Items

Total for Simple Items
Eloqua	Manticore Technology	Market2Lead	Marketbright	Marketo	Neolane	Silverpop Engage B2B
2	4	4	6	6	2.5	3.5

Combined Score for Simple Programs

The total usability score for simple marketing programs is the sum of simple items listed in this post plus the shared items listed yesterday. (Figures for Eloqua were changed from the original values based on information provided by the company.) It's no surprise that Marketo has the highest score. The three-way tie for second place among Manticore Technology, Market2Lead and Marketbright is more intriguing. The rating for Market2Lead in particular reflects its just-released new interface, which goes a long way to simplifying what had previously been a very complicated system.

Combined Score for Simple Programs
	Eloqua	Manticore Technology	Market2Lead	Marketbright	Marketo	Neolane	Silverpop Engage B2B
Shared	6	6	6	4	6	6	5.5
Simple	2	4	4	6	6	2.5	3.5
Combined	8	10	10	10	12	8.5	9

Tomorrow's post will look at scores for complex campaigns.

Low Cost Systems for Demand Generation

My new obsession with Twitter (follow me as @draab) has led to several messages from people who seemed to have trouble choosing between Eloqua and Marketo . This is a bit perplexing, since those products are at the opposite ends of the spectrum: Marketo being relatively low cost / limited functionality / easier to learn, and Eloqua being higher cost / richer functionality / takes more training. It shouldn't be hard to figure out which one suits you better.

But what really concerns me is that these people are apparently limiting their consideration to just those two products. I do recognize that they are the best known vendors in the space (with apologies to Vtrenz, whose identity is somewhat blurred since its purchase by Silverpop). But there are plenty of other options, particularly for marketers with limited budgets. Marketo is certainly a fine product, but marketers should still look around before picking it by default. Here are some alternatives that will come in at or below Marketo’s published starting price of $2,400 per month (or $1,500 for their “Lite” version). (To be fair, many of the vendors below charge an installation of that can be several thousand dollars or more, while Marketo doesn't. But even including that, the first year cost for most of these will be less.) :

Manticore Technology: a full-featured demand generation product. See my 2007 blog entry for some information or buy the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems for a detailed review. (Just kidding...or am I?) Pricing on their Web site is quite close to Marketo’s: $1,000 a month for a limited edition and $2,400 per month for all the bells and whistles, and no extra charge for installation.

Pardot: another pretty powerful product; see my blog review from December 2008. But much better pricing at the low end $750 per month for the smallest complete system, and $1,250 per month for something that should be adequate for larger firms.

OfficeAutoPilot: this is the current incarnation of what used to be Moonray. I took a detailed look at a beta of the next release a couple of weeks ago and liked both the interface and breadth of functionality. I’m just waiting for the official release (due in for late February) to publish a detailed review. [Click here to read the review, published in April.] Pricing for a full-featured system was $597 per month—quite a bargain. Even cheaper options are available if you need fewer functions.

Treehouse Interactive: another company I spoke with recently, and another one I’m not writing about yet because they showed me some features that won’t be released for a while (early March). [Click read my March 18 review.] The company has a low profile but has been selling its demand generation product for nearly ten years. It offers a pretty complete set of features, with shortfalls in some areas balanced by strengths in others. More important to people who need it, the company offers partner management and channel sales management products that integrate with its demand generation offering. Pricing starts at $599 per month.

Infusionsoft: I spoke with them just yesterday, and there’s nothing preventing me from writing about them in detail except that I do like to sleep occasionally. Maybe next week. [I got to it on February 12. Read it here.] They aim to be a complete business operating system for very small companies (under 25 employees). So they offer not just demand generation but everything from contact management to e-commerce. However, marketing is their core function and they provide a decent set of features, although certainly not as polished as some other products I’ve mentioned. On the other hand, pricing starts at $199 per month for a 2 user system with pretty much all of their marketing features, and you’d be hard-pressed to spend more than $500 per month unless you want lots of users for non-marketing functions such as sales automation or order entry. Although you may not be familiar with them, the company is five years old and has more than 12,000 (yes, that's twelve thousand) clients.

Active Conversion: I had a chat with president Fred Yee last August although I didn’t publish a detailed review. [I did publish a real review in July 2009.] They focus on email nurturing campaigns and marketing measurement. The system didn’t do landing pages or forms when I spoke with Fred, although he tells me it does now. Pricing starts at $250 per month and averages around $500.

Act-On Software: a slightly different take, with strong Webinar support and an option to use its own low-cost sales automation system as an alternative to Salesforce.com Price starts at $499 per month. I reviewed it here in March.

Before I get any complaints from other vendors in the industry, let me stress that the systems I've listed above are ones that I know have low price points. My own consideration set also includes Marketbright, Market2Lead, MarketingGenius, LeadLife, LoopFuse, LeadGenesys, , eTrigue and SalesFusion360, although I haven't looked at all of those in detail.

Obviously you need to evaluate these products in depth before deciding which is right for you. There are free papers on the Raab Guide site that can help you organize this process and of course I do consult in this area for a living. But the point of today's post isn't that you should run a thorough selection project. It's simply that should recognize that you do have choices, and take advantage of them.

Company-Level Data in Demand Generation Systems

I had an interesting email conversation last month with a Raab Guide buyer about the nuances of company-level data management in demand generation systems. He started from the perfectly reasonable premise that the demand generation system should give an overview of activity for all leads associated with a given company. This is a topic we do cover in the Guide, but not in the detail he needed. The conversation has sharpened my own thinking on the subject and prompted a couple of conversations with vendors. I think it’s worth discussing here in some detail.

There are really two separate issues at play. The first is how the demand generation system treats company-level data. This, to start at the very beginning, is data about the company associated with an individual. Typically this is the company they work for, although there might be another relationship such as consultant or services vendor. From a database design standpoint, having one company record that is linked to multiple individuals avoids redundant data and, therefore, potential inconsistencies between company data for different people. (The technical term for this is “normalization”, meaning that the database is designed so a given piece of information is stored only once.) Some of the demand generation systems do indeed have a separate company table: it is one of the marks of a sophisticated design.

But the wrinkle here is that most CRM systems in general, and Salesforce.com in particular, also have separate company and individual levels. In fact, Salesforce.com actually has two types of individuals: “leads” which are unattached individuals, and “contacts”, which are individuals associated with an “account” (typically a company, although it might a smaller entity such as a division or department). Most demand generation systems make little distinction between CRM “leads” and “contacts”, converting them both to the same record type when data is loaded or synchronized.

The common assumption among demand generation vendors is that the CRM system is the primary source of information for which individuals are associated with which companies and for the company information itself. This makes sense, given that the salespeople who manage the CRM data are much closer to the companies and individuals than the marketers who run the demand generation system. Demand generation systems therefore generally import the company / individual relationships as part of their synchronization process. Systems with a separate company table store the imported company data in it; those without a separate company table copy the (same) company data onto each individual record. So far so good.

However, this raises the question of whether the demand generation system should be permitted to override company / individual relationships defined in the CRM system or to edit the company (or, for that matter, individual) data itself. I have to get back to the vendors and ask the question, but I believe that most vendors do NOT let the demand generation system assign individuals to companies or change the imported relationships. (In at least some cases, users can choose whether or not to allow such changes.) Interestingly enough, these limits apply even to systems that infer a visitor’s company from their IP address and show it in reports. Whether demand generation can change company-level data and have those changes flow back into the CRM system is less clear: again, it may be matter of configuration in some products. The vendors who don’t provide this capability will argue, probably correctly, that few marketers really want to do this and or in fact should do it.

So what information DOES originate in the demand generation system? Basically, it is new individuals, which correspond to “lead” records in Salesforce.com, and attributes for existing individuals, which may relate to either CRM “leads” or “contacts”. The demand generation system may also capture company information, but this is stored on the individual record and kept distinct from the company information in the CRM system. When a new individual is sent from demand generation to the CRM system, it is set up in CRM as a “lead” (that is, unattached to a company). The CRM user can later convert it to a contact within an account. But the demand generation system cannot generally set up accounts and contacts itself. (Again, let me stress that there may be some exceptions—I’ll let you know when I find out.)

Bottom line: leads, lead data and contact data may originate in either demand generation or CRM, and the synchronization is truly bi-directional in that changes made in either system will be copied to the other. But accounts and account / contact relationships are only maintained in the CRM system: most demand generation systems simply copy that data and don’t allow changes. Thus, it is essentially a unidirectional synchronization.

This leads us to the second issue, which is company-level reporting. It’s touted by most demand generation vendors, but a closer look reveals that some actually rely on the account-level reporting in Salesforce.com to deliver it. This isn’t necessarily a problem, since the Salesforce.com report can incorporate activities captured by the demand generation system. Per the earlier discussion, these activities will be linked to individuals (leads or contacts in Salesforce.com terms). Of course, if the individuals have not been linked to a company in the CRM system, they cannot be included in company-level reports.

One problem with relying on CRM for company-level reporting is that the demand generation system may have some nice reporting capabilities that you’d want to use. So there is some advantage to capturing the company / individual links within the demand generation system, even if the links themselves are created in CRM. (Not to get too technical here, but those “links” could simply be a company ID on the individual record, even if there is no separate company-level table in the data model. So lacking a company table does not preclude company-level reporting.)

A second issue is that some marketers want to use company-level information in their lead scoring calculations. This is another question we ask explicitly in the Guide, and only some companies say they can do it. Whether they make it simple is another question—some products who claim the facility in fact require considerable effort to make it happen. Again, the vendors who don’t offer this would presumably say that it isn’t very important to their clients.

I hope this clarifies both the mechanics of handling company-level data and some of underlying business issues. It’s one of those aspects of demand generation systems where vendor differences are real but subtle, and where the true importance of those differences is clear only to experienced users. All I can do in the Guide and this blog is try to describe things as clearly and accurately as possible, and thereby help you to make sound judgments about your own business needs.