eTrigue Puts a New Interface on Mature Marketing Automation Features

Summary: eTrigue's new product is aimed at small-to-mid size businesses who want an easier alternative to leading marketing automation systems. With mature features and a $1,000 per month starting price, the system is worth a look.

eTrigue officially announced its new DemandCenter marketing automation system on Tuesday, replacing an earlier product dating back more than five years.

The system is positioned as “marketing automation for the rest of us”, meaning that eTrigue considers it much easier to use than leading marketing automation products. If that sounds familiar, it’s because I recently mentioned similar claims from Net-Results , Act-On Software, and tMarketbright. All believe that the complexity of standard marketing systems is the major reason they have not been more widely adopted and that they can offer a simpler alternative.

Bear in mind that’s a two-part proposition. Even if these vendors are right that complexity is the key barrier to adoption, there’s no business opportunity unless their systems are simpler. Otherwise, they’ve simply explained why marketing automation can never succeed, or at least won’t succeed until a critical mass of marketers have been trained to handle a new level of complexity.

So let’s cut to the critical question: is DemandCenter easier to use than systems like Pardot, Marketo, and Genius? The answer is a definite…maybe. DemandCenter has a campaign flow interface that does seem easier to use than standard products. But the rest of it, while nicely done, doesn’t strike me as materially different.

What makes the campaign builder different? Well, most systems use some variation of two basic approaches. One is to create a classic branching flow diagram, like a Visio chart. Here’s a state-of-the-art version from Eloqua:


This has the advantage of displaying the exact flow of leads, including branches that split apart and come together. It allows complex flows and is pretty much the way that most people diagram a campaign when they're planning it. But flow diagrams get confusing once you move beyond a handful of branches.

The other option is to build a list of steps without any branching. Rules within each step can still deliver different treatments to different segments, but everyone moves to the same next step at the same time. This is easier to follow but it lacks flexibility and you must look inside each step to see the details. Here is Marketo’s version:


DemandCenter lies somewhere in between. It lays out the steps within a single sequence on a row – similar to the list of steps but sideways. But it also allows distinct branches, showing each branch as its own row. This isn't perfect – you can’t draw lines to connect different boxes across branches, as in a flow diagram – but it’s probably more intuitive than the other approaches for moderately complex flows. Users can also collapse an entire, multi-branch campaign onto a single row and show multiple campaigns on the screen.


(Of course, nothing is truly unique. DemandCenter’s approach is conceptually similar to the interface introduced by Silverpop last year, which also showed branches as horizontal tracks. I liked that one too.)


So let's grant that eTrigue has built a somewhat better mousetrap. How much does it really matter? The campaign interface is just one of many components within a marketing automation system. A better campaign interface by itself is not enough to radically change the complexity of marketing automation as a whole.

Now, if all DemandCenter features were easier than the competition, that might change things. But while the rest of DemandCenter is well designed, nothing struck me as different enough to make a substantial difference in usability. So if superior ease of use is the only way for eTrigue to distinguish itself, it will have a very hard time.

But marketing automation systems actually compete on more than ease of use. eTrigue’s original product was originally developed in 2004/2005 by Silicon Valley marketing agency 3marketeers, which couldn’t find a system that met its own needs. The system has since been sold to about 150 clients. This long experience has led eTrigue to include capabilities that are missing in most low-to-mid-tier marketing automation products. These include:

- anonymous visitor look-up, based on IP address, with automatic exclusion of ISP addresses
- reporting on anonymous visitors as individuals (not companies) and indefinite retention of anonymous visitor histories (most systems erase the related cookies after a few months)
- real-time sales alerts triggered by lead behaviors
- ability to send leads directly from one campaign to another
- statistics for each campaign step visible in the campaign flow diagram
- a cube-based data mart for time-series analysis and other advanced reporting
- automated execution of reports on user-defined schedules
- precise user- and group-level security, including options to limit specific campaigns to specific users
- ability for Salesforce.com users to send emails through eTrigue
- tailored dashboards for each user

These are in addition to the usual marketing automation functions: email campaigns, landing pages and forms, lead scoring, and bi-directional integration with both Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics.

That's a richer feature set than most marketing automation systems targeted towards the small and mid-size business. But pricing of DemandCenter is actually lower than most vendors in that segment, starting at $1,000 per month for a 10,000 name database. This includes implementation and training. The combination of mature features, a new interface, and low pricing makes eTrigue an attractive alternative even if it doesn’t break any major barriers for ease of use.

eTrigue also has a product aimed at salespeople, called SalesPro. This works directly from a Salesforce.com database, using the Salesforce.com email engine but applying eTrigue email authoring, campaign structures, Web tracking, and lead scores. The system doesn't include landing pages. It's priced at $500 per month for 10 users.

Act-On Software Stresses Ease of Use

Summary: Act-On Software’s revised system offers a reasonable mix of features in an easy-to-use interface. At $500 per month with no annual contract, it’s priced to make it easy to get started with marketing automation.
I started last week to write a review of Act-On Software’s latest release but got distracted by the larger and sexier question of Act-On’s business strategy. So let me try again.

The new release is designed for marketers who want to start using the system with little or no training. The home page all but screams as much, with a huge central panel of “quick start” links to different types of projects. These include:

- outbound marketing programs (e-mail campaigns, events & webinars, and automated programs)
- program components (Web forms, landing pages, list management, media library)
- traffic monitoring (Twitter dashboard, Website visitors)


This mix of programs, components, and monitoring may be logically inconsistent, but it serves the practical purpose of giving marketers one-click access to common tasks. The section for each task continues this approach by combining all task-related functions including set-up, execution and reporting. By contrast, other systems often put reporting in a separate area.

The actual functions provided by Act-On are generally competitive with low-to-mid tier marketing automation products. Of course, every system has its own mix of strengths and weaknesses. In Act-On's case, unusual advantages include:

- “smart” content blocks that can be embedded like widgets in emails and Web pages. These include calendars, Webex invitations, surveys, payments via Paypal, and SMS alerts when a link is clicked.

- unusually close Webex integration, including direct posting of Act-On invitation forms to Webex registration lists and automatic import of attendee lists from Webex into Act-On.

- a “Twitter prospector” that executes automated searches, weeds out spam posts (identified by third-party links within the post), sends the remaining results to an in-box for review, and lets users apply standard templates to create replies.

- Web analytics based on user-assigned page names, so tracking can work without building codes into the URL structure

The system has some other strengths that are less unusual, but still hard to find:

- anonymous visitor tracking based on IP address lookup, with automated integration into Jigsaw to look up contact names and automated alerts for visits from named accounts. While some other system provide this, many marketing automation vendors rely on third-party products instead.

- tracking within Act-On emails sent through Microsoft Outlook. Such emails would otherwise be invisible to the marketing automation system.
- sequential campaign flows with conditional actions in each step and “early exit” conditions that can remove leads from the flow at any step. Most marketing automation systems offer conditional actions, which let the system send different messages to different lead segments. But an early exit rule is harder to find.

- a preinstalled library of stock images, such as form buttons. This simplifies content creation.

Act-On has also retained its list-oriented approach to the marketing database. This lets users manage the database as if it were a set of separate lists. (In reality, Act-On actually does store the leads in a traditional database. The same lead can belong to multiple lists.) Act-On can also push or pull data to Salesforce.com on a list-by-list basis, which gives users more control than moving all records at once. I've never seen the benefits of the list-based approach, but Act-On says its clients find it easier to grasp than traditional segments.
Act-On does have some weaknesses compared with most other products. These include limits on lead scoring and lack of progressive profiling.

As for that user interface: it's certainly attractive and does look easy, although I can't say whether it's substantially simpler than the competition. My general feeling remains that any initial advantage in ease of use quickly becomes irrelevant as marketers gain experience. After that, what really matters is having a system with the capabilities that match your needs. So any selection decision should consider long-term requirements in addition to the interface.
Pricing of Act-On starts at $500 per month, which is low for a mid-tier marketing automation product although it's limited to three users and 10,000 active contacts (plus an unlimited number of inactive contacts). No long-term contract is required and a 14 day free trial is available. Act-On has over 200 clients.

The Pond Just Got More Crowded: Google, Salesforce.com and Sequoia Invest in HubSpot

Summary: HubSpot announced a $32 million investment yesterday by Sequoia Partners, Google and Salesforce.com. This could be a real game-changer in the small business marketing automation landscape.

If you heard a loud thud late Tuesday afternoon, it was the sound of two shoes dropping. Salesforce.com and Google announced their long-anticipated entry into the marketing automation industry, in the baby-step form of investments in HubSpot. The $32 million fourth round of funding was led by Sequoia Capital, which apparently provided most of the money (numbers were not announced). It followed $33 million in earlier funding since the company was founded in 2006.

In many ways, this investment strikes me as more significant than last year’s acquisitions of Unica by IBM and of Aprimo by Teradata, which were widely touted as “validating” the concept marketing automation and involved vastly more money ($1 billion combined). Both Unica and Aprimo were long-established vendors with fundamentally stable products sold primarily to large enterprises: although their new owners may market them more broadly, they’ll be selling pretty much what IBM and Teradata always sold (big systems) to pretty much the same customers (big companies). Even the most ambitious vision articulated by the vendors – radically more integrated, analytically-driven marketing management – won’t really change their sector of the marketing automation industry.

But HubSpot plays in a different pond, where the frogs are more numerous and much livelier. It’s selling to small and mid-size companies and business-to-business marketers, who are just dipping their toes into marketing automation. It’s not yet clear which vendors will dominate the industry or what form the successful systems will take. And the current frogs are all small enough that a powerful newcomer could displace them, especially if it had a natural entry point such as, oh, Google AdWords or Salesforce.com’s CRM system.

During the analyst call that followed the announcement, HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah made quite clear that they hoped to leverage the Google and Salesforece.com relationships in just this way. This will involve tighter technical integration with both Google and Saleforce.com, and apparently some marketing to the Salesforce.com customer base.

Of course, the entry of Salesforce.com as a direct competitor has long been the worst nightmare of B2B marketing automation vendors, who exist largely because Salesforce.com doesn’t give marketers what they need. A viable marketing solution within Salesforce.com would preempt many purchases of a separate marketing automation system in companies where Salesforce.com is already in place.

Yesterday’s announcement doesn’t mean the nightmare has come true – this is a small investment by Salesforce.com, not an acquisition, and it’s quite clear that HubSpot intends to go public on its own. But if Salesforce.com likes what it sees, who knows where that will lead? The same goes for Google, although Google Venture Partner Rich Miner went out of his way during the analyst call to say that the Google investment was financial (i.e., intended to make money on its own) rather than strategic (i.e., intended to extend Google’s own business).

All this is good and kudos to HubSpot for getting this far and landing such powerful partners. The company also deserves praise for articulating a sound vision of future growth through expanded product features. This is as close as you can reasonably expect them to come to acknowledging that the existing HubSpot is far from a complete marketing automation solution. (See my December 2009 post for a more detailed discussion of HubSpot's capabilities; basically, they are still pretty weak in outbound email, lead scoring, and nurturing, which are all core components of standard B2B marketing automation. They also lack integrated CRM features – a hallmark of small business marketing automation – although the Salesforce.com connection probably makes that moot.)

Yet something really bothered me about yesterday’s announcement. HubSpot has always been quite clear that it is focused on small-to-mid-size businesses and that it offers “inbound marketing” rather than traditional marketing automation. In fact, it has always been highly dismissive of traditional outbound marketing as essentially obsolete – a claim it repeated again yesterday.

Despite this background, yesterday’s announcement positioned the firm’s competitors as the mid-to-large company B2B marketing automation vendors, listing Eloqua, Marketo, Genius, Manticore Technology, and Neolane by name. This wasn’t a casual comment – the press release twice called the HubSpot a marketing industry “leader” and included a pie chart showing “over 50% Market Share”, a claim that is only true if you (a) count clients, not revenue (an absurd mixing of apples and oranges in this case) and (b) ignore HubSpot’s most direct competitors, the other small business marketing automation vendors including Infusionsoft (6,000+ customers vs. HubSpot’s 4,000+) and OfficeAutoPilot (2,000+ customers). [Note: comments from Infusionsoft and HubSpot, posted below, suggest those vendors may compete less than I thought when I wrote this. But I still think excluding them from the analysis is wrong.]

Here’s what I consider a more realistic view of the market:

- Based on revenue, HubSpot had less than 7% of the B2B marketing automation market in 2010 ($15 million HubSpot revenue vs. $225 million total) (see my post of January 11, 2011) and an even smaller fraction if you include B2C marketing automation.

- Based on client counts, adding Infusionsoft and OfficeAutoPilot reduces HubSpot’s share to about 25% (data from our B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool).

- The small business vendors, including Infusionsoft, OfficeAutoPilot,It's those firms, and other small-business-focused competitors including Act-On Software, Net-Results, and Marketbright, who have the most to fear from HubSpot.

Now, I wasn’t born yesterday and am rarely upset to see a company spin the facts in its favor. In fact, as a marketer myself, I have a grudging admiration for people who do it deftly. But a distortion this large really bothers me. I could say that’s because it harms the market by confusing people, but I think the real reason is more visceral: it insults my own intelligence and that of everyone else who is apparently expected to believe it. What’s even sadder is these particular claims are totally unnecessary: HubSpot is a strong company with a solid product and excellent story. It doesn't need exaggeration.

I’ve also found HubSpot to be quite open and honest in the past, which makes this all the more puzzling. I hope it’s just an aberration.

One other point from today: in a related blog post, Brian Halligan gives some insight into HubSpot’s business strategy and the reasons for this round of funding. I’ve no complaints about any of it. But there’s an intriguing graphic that shows HubSpot’s lead sources – intended to illustrate how HubSpot “eats our own dog-food” through inbound marketing. Am I reading this wrong, or does it show that (bad, obsolete, interruptive) email is their largest source of business, while organic search and social media barely register? Now THAT's what I call openness.

Webinar this Friday - 5 Things You Must Consider Before Purchasing Marketing Automation

This Friday I'll be presenting a 45 minute free Webinar, sponsored by Focus.com and hosted by the ever-popular Adam Needles, on preparing for a successful marketing automation deployment.

You can register here. Details below:

Friday, March 11, 2011
10:00AM PST / 1:00PM EST

There’s plenty of information on why you need to buy marketing automation and, as statistics show, many marketing organizations (big and small) are jumping on board. But this webinar isn’t about why you should buy marketing automation – that’s been discussed at length by everyone in the business. Instead, Focus Expert David Raab will dive deeper to tell you the “how,” the “who,” the “when” and whether you are ready to automate your marketing in the first place. David will cover a number of factors to consider to know before you buy, including:

• The non-technology factors you must have in place to be successful
• Why your lead management program should drive your implementation
• How to organize the marketing department for success

f you’re interested but can’t attend the live event, register today and we will send you a link to the on-demand archive when available.

Are We Making Marketing Automation Harder Than Necessary?

Summary: Is stressing the need for process change making marketing automation too complicated, or a recognition of what it really takes for success? Vendors take both sides of the argument. So did Aesop: see The Tortoise and the Hare.

Act-On Software officially relaunched its system earlier this week, offering a new interface and a new positioning. The interface is perfectly nice but the positioning is ultimately more important. The company’s press release puts the key claim succinctly: “The Act-On Integrated Marketing Platform disrupts the conventional wisdom that companies need marketing automation solutions that are expensive, complex, and require significant services engagements to get them up and running.”

I’m not sure that whoever speaks for “conventional wisdom” would agree that marketing automation solutions must be expensive and complex. My own position (loosely paraphrasing Einstein) is it should be as complicated and costly as necessary, but not more.

However, the real meat of that statement is the third item: “significant services engagements”. This refers to the idea that marketing automation must accompanied by comprehensive planning and process engineering, which often require external assistance. The oracles of conventional wisdom would probably agree. I know I do.

Act-On begs to differ. Their belief, outlined to me in January by Sales VP Shawn Naggiar and CMO David Applebaum, is that most marketers just want to get things done immediately with existing resources. Of course, no one could argue with that – we all want something for nothing. The real question is whether marketing automation can actually deliver value without marketers making a more substantial investment. Act-On is betting that they can, especially if aided by software that’s designed to make easy things simple. The company just received $4 million in funding from others willing to share the bet, on top of an initial $2.5 million.

It would be easy to dismiss Act-On’s proposition as something between wishful thinking and pandering, right up there with diet-free weight loss. But I’ve heard almost exactly the same argument recently from other vendors including Net-Results, Marketbright, and, to lesser extent, Genius.com. All cite the need for an intermediate step between the simplicity of email-only systems and the complexity of full-blown marketing automation. They see closing this gap as the critical requirement in spreading marketing automation to the masses, and as a great business opportunity for themselves. When so many smart people reach the same conclusion, it's worth serious consideration.

On the other hand, the vendors with the greatest success to date have stressed the importance of process. This is true not just at the high end of the market, but also at the low end, where Infusionsoft, OfficeAutoPilot and HubSpot all make huge efforts to educate and cajole their clients into using their systems fully.

Infusionsoft and OfficeAutoPilot are selling to much smaller businesses than Act-On, Net-Results, and the new Marketbright. Still, it's interesting that vendors at both ends of the spectrum have found that process focus is essential. Maybe success requirements are really different in the middle – but I’d say the burden of proof is on those making that claim.

If I want to start a good argument, I should probably end this post here. Drawing clear battle lines between vendors who believe in process and those who don't should certainly prompt some response.

But that wouldn’t be fair to either side. The process-oriented vendors do strive to make it easy to get started, and the start-up-oriented vendors do expect their clients’ processes to mature over time. And, while Act-On, Net-Results, Marketbright, and Genius all argue that their systems are substantially easier to use than products like Pardot, Marketo and LoopFuse, those vendors surely disagree. My own (fair but wimpy) opinion is that there are significant differences among individual systems but neither group is generally easier or more powerful than the other. Users have to do the hard work of matching the system to their particular needs and style. Eat your spinach.

That said, the role of process is an important and worthwhile subject for debate. The greatest danger I see facing the B2B marketing automation industry is that it will develop a reputation for failure. This is exactly what happened to CRM systems when people started to think that simply purchasing one was a guarantee of success. It took a long time and much hard work for the industry to overcome the stigma of the resulting failures. They have now established that careful planning and disciplined deployment are essential for clients to receive real benefits.

Perhaps we're doomed to repeat this history. It's the "trough of despair" in the hype cycle. But we can at least try to avoid it. My position is this: marketers can start small with their automation systems, but they should still go into the project recognizing that real value requires substantial change. Ignoring this reality is bad for everyone.

MarketingPilot Offers Integrated Marketing Management for Mid-Size Companies

Yesterday's acquisition of AssetLink by SAS has prompted me to finally write about MarketingPilot, a vendor I've been following since its launch nearly ten years ago.

MarketingPilot started as an operations management tool for mid-size direct marketers, with features for project management, list and media buying, source code tracking, expense capture, and vendor management. Since then it has expanded steadily to encompass the full range of marketing resource management and then gone ahead to add marketing database management and campaign execution. The technology has evolved from Windows-based client server systems – using the Borland Interbase engine, if you want a real whiff from the memory jar – to a mix of on-premise and hosted options.

Average price and client size have also increased steadily, although the focus has remained on mid-size rather than enterprise clients. The company also created special editions for ad agencies, which now provide about 40% of its business. MarketingPilot has about 40 employees and 400 installations with over 15,000 end-users.

With AssetLink (60 employees) now owned by SAS, MarketingPilot also may be the largest remaining independent MRM vendor. I can’t say for sure because there are several companies in the field that I’ve never researched. But it doesn’t really matter, because MarketingPilot is now positioned as an integrated marketing management product. That puts it into roughly the same class as much larger firms including Neolane (200 employees) and Alterian (370 employees).

I say “roughly” because Neolane and Alterian are rooted in the campaign management side of marketing automation, while MarketingPilot is based on marketing resource management. Although the overlap between these products is growing, they are still quite different.

To give you an idea of the scope of MarketingPilot, here is a set of headings from its Web site:

Alerts - Analytics/Performance Measurement - Approvals - Budgets - Calendars - Campaign Management - Collateral Management - Contract Management - CRM - Digital Asset/Document Management - Direct Marketing - Direct Response - Editions - Email Marketing - Enterprise Edition - Enterprise Marketing Management - Estimates - Event Management - Expense Management - Financial Management - Internet/Online Marketing - Inventory Management - Lead Management - List Management - Marketing Automation - Marketing Database - Marketing Plans - Marketing Resource Management - Media Buying and Planning - Multi-currency - Purchasing - Print Production - Reports - Scheduling - Social Media - Solutions - Strategic Planning - Supply Chain/Vendor Management - Time Slips - Trade Shows - Web Portal

This is broader list than you'll see from most marketing automation vendors – a group not known for modest product claims. But even MarketingPilot isn’t all things to all people (yet). Here's a quick inventory of strengths and weaknesses:

- just about any MRM feature you can imagine: planning, budgeting, project management, vendor management, media buying, content management, creative mark-up, approval workflows, etc.
- email, landing page and Web form creation
- high volume email delivery
- social media execution and tracking
- lead distribution and lead scoring based on attributes, but not behaviors
- integrated CRM, with an future option to synchronize with external CRM systems
- marketing database management with separate company and contact levels
- a highly tailorable interface that shows each user only the features they can access (critical in a system with so many options)
- multiple languages, currencies and time zones
- segmentation on contact and company data, with plans for a visual query builder that allows more complex queries against additional tables
- single-step campaign execution, with multi-step campaign flows due later this year
- response reporting, with plans to add ROI calculations
- Google Analytics integration, with expanded Web visitor tracking and analytics using MarketingPilot’s own tags due later this year.

That’s an impressive list, even after recognizing that key marketing automation features are not yet available, including multi-step campaigns, advanced segmentation, Web behavior tracking, behavior-based lead scoring, and ROI calculations. But they’re all promised fairly soon. Once they’re delivered, MarketingPilot will be a viable mid-market option for integrated marketing management.

If somebody doesn’t buy them first.

SAS Acquires AssetLink: Great for Enterprises, But What About the Rest of Us?

Summary: SAS's purchase of AssetLink ensures it's a viable alternative to IBM/Unica and Teradata/Aprimo for integrated marketing management. The real question is whether mid-size firms will be able to afford those systems.

SAS today announced its acquisition of marketing resource management vendor AssetLink. The move makes perfect sense: the other big MRM vendor was Aprimo, and once they were acquired by Teradata, SAS and AssetLink had no alternative partners in the enterprise marketing space.

Let me make clear that when I say “enterprise”, I mean “enterprise”, as in big business. Our friends at Gartner have recently proposed replacing “enterprise marketing management” with “integrated marketing management” as the general term for, um, integrated marketing management. Makes sense. But AssetLink told me their 50+ clients are all big companies. SAS’s marketing systems are also sold mostly to big firms. So we’re really talking about the “enterprise” market here. Once you starting considering mid-size businesses, there are other players, most notably MarketingPilot for MRM and Alterian and Neolane for business-to-consumer marketing automation.

Naturally, SAS and AssetLink don’t intend to limit themselves to enterprise buyers. Like IBM/Unica and Teradata/Aprimo, they hope to sell integrated marketing systems to mid-size firms too. This may be easier for the other two vendors: IBM and Unica certainly have more mid-size marketing clients than SAS and AssetLink, and although Teradata is mostly a big-company vendor, Aprimo has a broader client mix and a relatively new “Marketing Studio On Demand” product that was designed for smaller buyers. Still, we can expect SAS to try.

I'll admit to being skeptical that enterprise-oriented firms like IBM, Teradata, and SAS can successfully sell their products for the mid-market. The transition faces some technical roadblocks, mostly about hiding complexity and reducing the need for customization. But those can be solved. The larger challenges are rooted in corporate culture and require changes in areas like pricing and sales compensation. To put it more bluntly, enterprise firms like to sell big deals.

In fact, I think big deals are exactly what have attracted IBM, Teradata, and SAS to focus on marketing systems. They all seem to have adopted the grand vision of integrated marketing automation as a centrally-managed, analytically-driven process to coordinate customer contacts across all touchpoints. This requires integrating the marketing system with sales, customer service and Web systems. While I also love that vision, I suspect that only a few large firms will have the resources to implement it. This could mean that, in practice, integrated marketing management is limited to enterprise buyers.

This leads to another question: What are Oracle and SAP up to? They’re the other big enterprise software vendors and they’re surely interested in offering integrated marketing automation to their own clients, both to increase revenue and to block account penetration by competitors. Both vendors do have some marketing automation products but these don’t have much of a public presence. If integrated marketing automation really takes off at enterprise accounts, I suspect we’ll see Oracle and SAP pay more attention to this market, either through acquisition or enhancement of existing products.

You’ll notice I haven’t said much here about the SAS/AssetLink deal itself. That’s not due to any lack of enthusiasm: it’s just that the pairing was so obvious that it doesn’t require much explanation. It ensures that SAS’s marketing automation suite remains a viable alternative to IBM and Teradata, by giving it the scope that those other vendors possess. Of course, there are still substantial differences among the products, so buyers who are free to choose any of them will need to dig into the details and match them against their requirements. But I suspect that many companies will have a strong predisposition towards one vendor or another, depending on what other systems they have in place. In that case, there may be fewer truly competitive deals than we saw in the past, when marketing could choose its system without the rest of the company really caring all that much.

My bottom line, then, is that this deal doesn’t reshape the market, but it does clarify its structure and ensure that SAS continues to compete. My real concern is whether mid-size companies will be able to participate or integrated marketing automation will remain the preserve of enterprise marketers.

Constant Contact Adds Social CRM: Should Marketing Automation Vendors Be Worried?

Small-business email provider Constant Contact yesterday announced the acquisition of "social CRM"* vendor Bantam Live. This is a major expansion for Constant Contact, placing it more squarely into competition with CRM and marketing automation vendors. As I've noted previously, small businesses are particularly likely to adopt a single platform for all of their marketing and customer management needs because the inefficiencies of multiple platforms are so obvious and painful in a small organization.

Email vendors like Constant Contact are especially well positioned to grab this business because they are one of first technologies that businesses adopt. (Other entry points: accounting software like Intuit Quickbooks, email clients like Microsoft Outlook, personal productivity suites like Microsoft Office, Web hosting companies like GoDaddy, and of course CRM like Salesforce.com.) As a point of reference, Constant Contact says it is used by more than 400,000 organizations, compared with maybe 10,000 for all marketing automation systems combined. The company expects more than $200 million in revenue in 2011, which about equals my estimate for 2010 revenues for all B2B marketing automation. And Constant Contact is just one of many small business email providers.

I've been meaning for some time to write a post about the small business sector of the marketing automation industry, because I really see it as very distinct from marketing automation for mid-size and large businesses. But this Constant Contact announcement underscores one the major points I had in mind: that the low number of current marketing automation installations in this field doesn't mean it's a wide open market. Rather, it means that there are plenty of other partial solutions in place at most firms. Expanding the solutions to offer reasonably complete marketing automation just isn't that hard, technically. And any vendor who does this has a major advantage because they can sell marketing automation as a product extension to their existing clients.

Finding a way to displace these existing vendors is the real challenge for small business marketing automation systems, since small businesses are not likely to add a new system without getting rid of an old one. The other big issue is that the existing solutions often cost only a few dollars per month (for example, Constant Contact averages under $50 per month per client). This means the $300 per month of even the cheapest marketing automation systems is a big increase that many small businesses will not be willing to pay.

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* I put "social CRM" in quotation marks because I personally am not quite sure what it really means. According to their Web site, Bantam Live offers the usual sales automation functions (contact management, profile management, pipeline management, sales analytics, calendar sharing, file sharing, workgroups) plus a bucket of social media capabilities including social search, network feeds, messaging, discussions and collaborative workflow.

ClickDimensions Offers Marketing Automation as a Microsoft CRM Add-on

Now that I’m more or less finished launching the B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST), I can start catching up on the other topics.

Let’s start with ClickDimensions, a system I explored last September but never wrote about. ClickDimensions does pretty much the standard marketing automation activities: email, landing pages, Web visitor tracking, drip marketing campaigns, and lead scoring.

What’s missing from the list is CRM integration. That's no accident: ClickDimensions doesn’t integrate with CRM in the regular sense of synchronizing data. Rather, it works directly from Microsoft Dynamics CRM files. In other words, ClickDimensions is a Microsoft CRM add-on.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, I (and many others) have long argued that marketing automation makes more sense as an integrated component of a CRM system than a stand-alone product. After all, separate systems must synchronize databases, campaigns, users, content libraries, activity histories, and other things, adding cost and complexity. Small business systems like Infusionsoft and OfficeAutoPilot solve this problem by bundling their own CRM features. This isn't an option at bigger companies, where one or more CRM systems are often deeply embedded. So it makes more sense to extend CRM to include marketing automation than the other way around.

This potential expansion has always been the biggest cloud hovering over B2B marketing automation, which has arguably been allowed to develop only because the business remained too small for the major CRM vendors to care about. Of course, another way to look at this is that the CRM vendors already do marketing automation – certainly Oracle/Siebel does, and plenty of folks would argue that Salesforce.com has adequate marketing automation capabilities for most purposes, although most experts (and I) would disagree. Still, a slow incremental expansion of CRM vendors’ marketing automation features is all it would take to squeeze the dedicated marketing automation vendors into an ever-smaller corner of the market, leaving them to serve only companies with specialized needs.

But I digress. ClickDimensions illustrates the advantages of a combined CRM/marketing automation platform. It works off the Dynamics CRM database, so sales and marketing have access to the same, complete data without synchronization. Perhaps more important, ClickDimensions use the Dynamics CRM platform to handle data management, campaign workflows, and user rights. This has freed ClickDimensions to concentrate on the building features that are absent (at least for now) in Dynamics and other CRM systems: advanced email campaigns and Web activity tracking.

ClickDimensions has its own email engine, replacing the product’s original reliance on ExactTarget. The engine supports dynamic content, which is unusual for lower-to-mid-tier marketing automation products. I did find the implementation rather basic: users must write rules in a scripting language and the content is embedded in the email templates rather than read from a shared library.

On the other hand, ClickDimensions has an advanced Outlook email integration that I’ve never seen anywhere else. An administrator can assign an email address to a mailing list; then, end-users send a personalized email to that address and the system delivers it to everyone on the list. ClickDimensions calls this “Outlookcasting.” The advantage is that salespeople can use their familiar Outlook email to send mass emails which are tracked through the marketing automation system.

The system's other major extension beyond standard CRM capabilities is Web activity tracking. This is pretty straightforward: users tag their Web pages with ClickDimensions tracking codes and the system stores activities in custom data objects within the Dynamics data structure. Like many marketing automation systems, ClickDimensions can use the IP address of anonymous visitors to identify their company (if they are using a corporate IP address). It also lets users manually label IP addresses that might belong to a generic ISP but the user knows are linked to a specific company. The system tracks the usual Web information: visits, page views, posted forms, posted fields, and so on.

Email and Web activity data, as well as any activities captured by Dynamics itself, are available for lead scoring and event triggers. Multi-step campaign flows are built using the Dynamics workflow engine. I haven't examined the Dynamics workflow in detail but it seems comparable to most marketing automation campaign engines.

ClickDimensions pricing ranges from $4,000 to $12,000 per year based on email volume. That’s considerably cheaper than standard mid-tier marketing automation products, although some small business systems are cheaper. The initial version of ClickDimensions was released in September 2010, although the company’s own email engine wasn’t added until December. The vendor reports more than 50 current clients, including a few big companies. It sells the product directly in the U.S. and through resellers in Europe. ClickDimensions is also part of Microsoft’s BizSpark program, an initiative to form close relationships with high-potential start-ups.

Which B2B Marketing Automation Systems Have Hard-to-Find Features? The Answers May Surprise You

Summary: A close look at which vendors have the least common features finds some are widely distributed, while others are concentrated among products for big companies. As always, you need to look at the details to see which products have what you need.

Last week’s post used data from our B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) to identify leading vendors in categories such as lead generation, campaign management, and technology. The main point, at least as I saw it, was that no single vendor dominates everything. Different firms are best at serving small, mid-size and large marketing organizations, and for each of these buyer types, different vendors lead different categories.

It’s like the awards ceremony at a progressive elementary school: everybody is best at something.

That may sound all warm and fuzzy, but this conclusion also has great practical significance: it means that you can’t assume a sector leader has the best product for your particular needs. You must look at the details to find the best match.

I cautioned in that post that you can’t stop at the category level. Even the vendor with the highest category score won’t necessarily have a feature you need. The chart below takes the analysis to the next level, looking at which vendors meet specific requirements. It lists the 33 least common items of the 190 we captured in our research. The green cells identify vendors who fully match an item (score=2); the orange column at the right shows how many of the 18 vendors had this score. (Yellow cells indicate a score of 1, meaning an item was partly fulfilled. I’ve ignored those cells in the following discussion but show them to make the point that many vendors do have some capabilities in these areas.)

There is an obvious over-all pattern: the green cells cluster heavily towards the right. Since the chart is organized with small business systems to the left and big business systems to the right, this means the rarer features are most often found in products for big marketing departments. That makes intuitive sense – you’d expect bigger organizations to need more special features. (You'd also expect to need more features in general, which the data also confirms although I haven't illustrated it here.) One caveat is that the item list itself was leaned heavily towards the needs of mid-size and large businesses; a list of features tailored to small businesses might have a different pattern.

But while most green cells are on the right, there are plenty of exceptions. This is important: it means that buyers who need an unusual feature might find it any type of system. Indeed, nearly half of these items (14 of the 33) can be found in the small business columns (the first five on the left). Nor is it simply that these items are small business specialties. Twelve of the 14 are also found in five big-business products on the right.

The other pattern clearly visible is the two heavily-populated columns in the center, representing mid-market leaders Eloqua and Marketo. The high number of green cells (seven for Marketo and nine for Eloqua) shows that both products are feature-rich. But they're far from twins: their combined green cells cover 13 different items, and there are just three items which both vendors satisfy fully. Once more, the moral of the story is that even direct competitors are quite different when you start looking at details. The good news is this means that buyers who know exactly what they want should be able to distinguish strong from weak candidates quite easily.

Although the items I've listed are shared across all kinds of systems, the distribution isn't simply random. The chart below illustrates which kinds of features are found where. It summarizes the results for the three groups I’ve been discussing: small-business vendors (the five left-hand columns), big-business vendors (the five right-hand columns), and the Marketo/Eloqua combination. Green cells indicate at least one vendor in the group supports an item. Numbers indicate how many vendors support the item.


I’ve given yellow labels to items that are supported big-business systems only. You'll see that most relate advanced marketing planning and administration, which is something only big companies really need. These include detailed cost calculations, expiration dates on marketing content, project schedules, project task detail, results forecasts, approval workflows, marketing calendars, and plan vs. actual reporting. Several of the remaining items relate to advanced offer selection, another requirement for big programs because they have too many potential offers to manage manually or through simple rules. The rest, including multi-language user interface and on-premise deployment, also deal with needs unique to large enterprises. The only real odd-ball here is online chat. What can I say?

The blue labels are items found in a small-business system. All of these are also available in at least one other category, which basically confirms that all kinds of marketers need them. Half relate to specific output channels: fax, RSS, social media, direct mail, email, external Web sites, and Webinars. My interpretation is that vendors of all sizes see the need to simplify multi-channel integration for their clients. The balance are advanced capabilities used by sophisticated marketers in all sizes of organizations.

The five remaining items, with white labels, are shared by mid-tier and big-business systems. Two relate to channel integration (social media and events) and three are generally big-business concerns (fractional revenue attribution, offer coordination, and user-defined matching rules). It’s interesting that the second group are the items shared by Marketo and Eloqua. Without reading too much into this, it suggests that both vendors are looking to the needs of larger rather than smaller companies.

As you’re surely gathered by now, I find this data inherently intriguing. It's a way to understand the contours of the marketing automation industry. But most buyers just want to pick the right system. For them, this data simply reinforces that same central lesson: you must look at the details to find your best match. Still, that’s a lesson too few people have learned, so I’m perfectly happy to keep repeating it.

B2B Marfketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool: What’s Inside and Why

Summary: Our new B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) has been carefully crafted to help marketers at every step of the selection process. I think it’s worth walking through the main components to explain why they’re there.

Here's a screen-by-screen look at the components of the VEST. For more information or to order, please click here.

Explanations

What It Is: This is basic information for people who are just starting to explore marketing automation. It includes a general introduction suggesting how to use the VEST and then provides explanations of what marketing automation means and why it’s important, an overview of the state of the industry, advice on running a selection project, and details on the vendor scoring.

Why It’s There: Many buyers are new to marketing automation. They need a coherent explanation of what it is, why it matters, how it fits into the larger scheme of marketing technology, and how to go about selecting a tool. I think the industry veterans will also find these materials interesting, but they’re really aimed at bringing the newbies up to speed.

Sector Charts


What It Is: This is the vendor landscape chart that users love and analysts are apparently obligated to produce. It uses our vendor scores to plot the relative positions of products in terms of how well they fit buyer needs. This lets us place “leaders” in the upper right quadrant. There are four versions: one each based on weights for small, mid-size and large businesses, plus a custom chart with the user’s own weights. Sliders make it easy adjust the weights assigned to broad categories within product and vendor fit.


Why It’s There: The chart makes it easy for each user to identify the most likely candidates, quickly reducing the consideration set to something manageable. More important, having alternative sets of weights, allowing custom weights, and making easy to adjust category weights all encourage buyers to recognize that there’s no "one true leader" and therefore to think about what weights are really relevant to their own needs.

Vendor Profiles


What It Is: This gives concise descriptions of the strengths, weaknesses, market position, and most suitable clients for each vendor. These are accompanied by charts displaying key factoids, such as the number of clients, number of employees and year founded; the position of the vendor in each of the three sector charts; and the relative strength of specific categories within the product and vendor fit scores.

Why It’s There: Now that buyers have tentatively identified their best candidates, they can look here to get a better sense of the products. The descriptions are based on Raab Associates’ detailed product research, and thus highlight information not captured in the numeric scores. For the first time in the VEST, this section introduces the category details within the score totals. This provides the next level of detail and lets buyers to see how vendor strengths actually line up with their priorities.

Item Detail


What It Is: This shows the nearly 200 specific items used in scoring the vendors. It provides the detailed definitions used in rating each item for each vendor (typically on a scale of 0 to 2) and shows the weights assigned to each item in the small, mid-size and large scoring schemes. It also gives users another opportunity to view and adjust the category weights.

Why It’s There: This introduces the actual items used in the scoring, encouraging them to look even deeper below the surface. The definitions include explanations of when and why each item matters, helping to further the users’ understanding of important-but-subtle product differences. Showing the variation of weights for the same item in the different scoring schemes implicitly encourages users to consider what weight makes the most sense for them.

Compare Vendors


What It Is: This lets users select any three vendors and compare them side-by-side. Screens start with a summary view that shows the product and vendor fit totals and the sum of both raw and weighted values for the categories. Users can then drill into each category to see the item-level ratings and weighted scores for all three vendors.

Why It’s There: This lets users drill into the vendor details at the finest possible level, seeing exactly what is driving the category scores and exactly how the vendors differ. Showing the sum of the raw values along with the weighted values graphically illustrates the impact of the category weights on the summary scores, encouraging users to ensure that the category weights reflect their own priorities. By this point in the process, users should understand which items they care about most.

Custom Weights


What It Is: This lets users set the item and category weights they’ll use in their custom scoring. They can apply the standard small, mid-size or large weights as a starting point. They can also save their weights as a scenario to use in another session. They can save any number of those scenarios.

Why It’s There: This lets users create their own custom scores, based by now on a deep understanding of their own needs and the information embedded within the VEST. Custom scoring won’t make the selection decision for anyone, but it will facilitate comparisons between vendors and highlight key items to research in detail.

Picking Your Best Marketing Automation Vendor: One Size Won't Fit All

Summary: Vendor scores from our new B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool offer new proof of an old truth: there's no one best system for everyone.

The one point I make every time I discuss software selection is that you have to find a vendor that matches your own business needs. No one ever denies this, of course, but the typical next question is still, Who are industry leaders? – with the unstated but obvious intention of limiting consideration to whomever gets named.

It’s not that these people didn’t listen: they certainly want a system to meet their needs. But I think they’re assuming that most systems are pretty much the same, and therefore the industry leaders are the most likely meet their requirements. The assumption is wrong but it’s hard to shake. My reluctance to contribute to this error is the main reason I’ve carefully avoided any formal ranking of vendors over the years.

But of course you know that I’ve now abandoned that position with the new B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) – which I’ll remind you is both totally awesome and available for sale on this very nice Web page. I’ll admit my change is partly about giving the market what it wants. But I also believe the new VEST can help to educate people about product differences, leading them to look more deeply than they would otherwise. Certainly the VEST gives them fingertip access to vastly more information about more products than they are likely to gather on their own. So, in that sense at least, it will surely help them to consider more options.

Back to the education part. Even someone as wise as you, a Regular Reader Of This Blog, may wonder whether those Important Differences really exist. After all, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that the industry leaders are in fact the strongest products across the board?

Nope.

In fact, the best thing about the new VEST may be that I finally have hard data to prove this point. The graphic below may not be very legible, but it’s really intended to illustrate patterns rather than show a lot of detailed information.

Before you squint too hard, here’s what you’re looking at:

- left to right, I’ve listed the 18 VEST vendors (nice alliteration) in order of their percentage of small business clients. So vendors with mostly small clients are at the left, and vendors with mostly large clients are at the right.

- reading down, there are three big blocks relating to vendor scores for small, mid-size and large businesses. (In case you missed a class, the VEST has different scoring schemes for those three client groups because their needs are different.)

- within the three big blocks, there are blocks for product categories (lead generation, campaign management, scoring and distribution, reporting, technology, usability and pricing) and for vendorcategories (company strength and sector presence [sectors are another term for the small, mid-size and large businesses]). Each category has its own row.

- the bright green cells represent the highest-ranked vendors for each category. Specifically, I took the vendor scores (based on the weighted sum of vendor scores on the individual items—as many as 60 items in some categories) and normalized on a scale of 0 to 1. In the product categories, green cells represent a normalized score of .9 or higher (that is, the vendor’s score was within 10% of the highest score). In the vendor categories, where the top vendor sometimes scores much higher than the rest, green cells represent a normalized score of .75 or better.

- the dark green cells show the highest combined scores across all product and vendor categories. The combined scores reflect the weights applied to the individual categories, as I explained in my earlier posts. Again, the scores are normalized and the green indicates scores higher than .9 for product fit and .75 for vendor fit.

Ok then. Now that you know what you’re looking at, here are a few observations:

- colored cells are concentrated at the left in the upper blocks, spread pretty widely in the middle, and to the right in the lower blocks. In concrete terms, this means that vendors with the most small business clients are rated most highly on small business features, vendors with a mix of clients dominate the middle, and vendors with large clients have the strongest big-client features. Not at all surprising but good validation that the scores are realistic.

- there are no solid columns of cells. That is, no single vendor is best at everything, even within a single buyer type. The nearest exception is at the bottom right, where Neolane has five green product cells out of seven for large clients. Good for them, of course, but note there are five dark green cells on the large-company product fit row: that is, several other vendors have combined product scores within 10% of Neolane’s.

- light green cells are spread widely across the rows. This means that most vendors are among the best at something. In fact, only Genius lacks at least one green cell somewhere on the diagram. (And this isn’t fair to Genius, which has some unique features that are very important to certain users.)

- dark green cells aren’t necessarily below the most light green cells. The most glaring example is in the center row, where True Influence has a dark green cell (among the best over-all) without any light green cells (not the best in any category). This reflects the range in scores within each vendor: that is, vendors are often very good at some things and not so good at others.

All these observations lead back to the same central point: different vendors are good at different things and no one vendor is best at everything. This is exactly what buyers need to recognize to understand why it isn’t safe to look only at the market leaders. Nor can they simply decide based on the category rankings: there’s plenty of variation among individual items within those rankings too. In other words, there’s truly no substitute for understanding your requirements and researching the vendors in detail. The new VEST will help, but whether you buy it or not, you still have to do the work to make a good choice.

B2B Marketing Automation Report Is Now Available Online. Thanks, OfficeAutoPilot

Thanks to the heroic efforts of my friends at OfficeAutoPilot, the new B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) is finally available for online sales. You can click here to access the new landing page and order forms.

There's a long story behind this, with many lessons that reinforce and illuminate the basic premise behind marketing automation: that is, marketers need a system that makes it easy to do their jobs. I don't have the energy to write that at the moment, however. But I will point you to the animated video on the OfficeAutoPilot home page, which is laugh-out-loud funny (to me, at least) and makes the fundamental case quite clearly.

I'll qualify this a bit by pointing out that OfficeAutoPilot is one of the systems aimed at small businesses, which means it includes the CRM and e-commerce components you don't find in products aimed at larger organizations. This is what made it perfect for Raab Associates' own needs, since the specific roadblock to selling the VEST on the existing Raab Guide Web site was that the e-commerce bit wasn't working.

Even more important, OfficeAutoPilot (again like other small business specialists) has recognized that its clients need a great deal of help in setting up their systems and has organized accordingly. The OfficeAutoPilot staff spent nearly two full days working to get me running, drawing on best practices to create a much more sophisticated process than I would have started with by myself. More to the point, they did this without charging a penny -- which I'm pretty sure is what they do for all their clients, not just industry analysts like me. In fact, although OfficeAutoPilot owner Landon Ray did give me a free subscription to the system (full disclosure), the staff who worked on my project didn't seem to have any particular sense of what I do.

This gets to the heart of the marketing automation deployment challenge, which is helping marketers get real value from their systems from the start. Industry gurus, myself included, rant about this endlessly. So I wasn't particularly surprised to find myself living it, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that OfficeAutoPilot really works to solve it in the most direct way possible: by just doing the stuff for clients who need help. I fully recognize that life isn't so simple at bigger organizations, but it's still an important example to hold up as one type of ideal.

Ok, I guess I wrote a little more about this than I had planned--it's my way of winding down after an intense several weeks of first getting the VEST created and then finally putting it into the market. The job isn't really done: I need to toss the old Joomla-based Raab Guide site and create a new one in WordPress that I can maintain personally. And at some point I still need to do a more detailed review of OfficeAutoPilot itself, which I'll say in general I'm finding quite satisfactory. But for now the real story is just to say thanks to the folks at OfficeAutoPilot who took such good care of me, and I am quite certain will continue to do so in the future.

B2B Marketing Automation Report Is Ready...My Web Site, Not So Much

The good news is, my new B2B Marketing Automation report (more formally: the Vendor Selection Tool, or VEST) is now available. The bad news is I can't actually sell it online, despite the best efforts of Web masters on two continents. But the good news is I'm more than happy to take credit card orders directly if you send me an email or give me a call. Email is info@raabguide.com.

To recap a bit, the new report is based on a survey of 18 vendors, who answered nearly 200 questions about their products and companies. Most answers were scored from 0, 1 or 2, indicating whether a particular feature was available fully, partly, or not at all. I translated other answers such as starting price or number of employees into similar 0-2 ranges so I could combine everything in a scoring formula. See my posts over the past few weeks for details on that.

The final result was three sets of scores for each vendor. The sets represent fitness for small, mid-size and large businesses, and each set contains a product fit score and vendor fit score. The idea was to simulate the type of scoring that a typical business in each category might do in its own vendor evaluation. Of course, no one's business is truly typical, so the interactive version of the tool also lets you create your own custom scoring weights.

The core of the new report, therefore, contains two sections: scatter diagrams plotting all the vendors in a typical "industry matrix" style and individual vendor profiles.

The industry matrix puts leads at the top right, where God and Gartner evidently intended them to be, and cleverly named other groups everywhere else. The clever part is giving names that are descriptive without being insulting. I settled on:

- "alternatives" (strong product fit but weak vendor fit)
- "anomalies" (weak product but strong vendor fit)
- "long shots" (weak product fit and weak vendor fit)

The vendor profiles give more detail about each vendor, including showing the scores for components within the product fit (7 components) and vendor fit (2 components). This gives some good insight into where the rankings came from.

So far so good. As I hinted before, there's both an interactive version and non-interactive version of the report. This is partly because I don't think everyone will want to pay for the full price for the interactive version and partly because some people have had problems running the interactive version, which uses Adobe Flash within a PDF. The non-interactive version, which I'm tactfully referring to as "basic", has an introductory section with industry explanations, recommendations on a selection process, etc., plus the three industry matrix charts (for small, mid-size and large) and individual profiles on each vendor. The profiles offer some narrative and scores for the components within the larger scores: 7 components within the profit fit (lead generation, campaign management, scoring, etc.) and two within the vendor fit (company strength and sector expertise). These give some insight into where the sales came from. This is priced at $295.

The interactive version has all those elements, which are made interactive by the fact that users can change the weights assigned to the different components within the profit and vendor fit scores. You've seen some of this is the same PDFs I posted over the past few weeks. It's great fun: there are little sliders for the weights and the vendors zoom around on the chart as you move them. A wonderful feeling of power.

The interactive edition also contains three more sections:

- Item Detail, which lets you see the 200-ish individual items used in the scoring, including their definitions and the weights assigned in each of the three scoring schemes.

- Custom Weights, which lets you set your own scoring weights for the individual items. You can start with the existing small, mid-size, or large weights as a base.

- Compare (my personal favorite), which lets you pick any three vendors and see how their scores compare in any of the weighting sets (small, mid-size, large, or custom). You can see bar charts with overviews and then drill into the item-by-item details for each category. This is where you see the specific differences between vendors.

Price for the interactive edition is $795.

I'll be presenting some additional analysis based on what's in the reports over the next few weeks, and of course will make a formal announcement once the e-commerce bugs are worked out. Again, though, you're welcome to send me a note to get your copy at once.

B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Comparisons: New Report Next Week and The Coolest Sample Yet

I suspect you may be getting tired of reading about the features in my new report comparing B2B marketing automation vendors, and want some actual information. Soon, I promise: the final data is all ready and only some light editing stands between you and a completed report. Well, that and the fact that the e-commerce features of the www.raabguide.com Website need some work. Either way, the report will come out next week -- even if I have to take credit card orders by phone.

But I finished the final interactive component of the report yesterday and I think it's exciting enough to be worth sharing. It lets you do what I think most buyers really want, which is to compare selected vendors side by side on their specific features. You can also compare their scores, which, since you can change the weights applied to different inputs, means you can get your very own, custom comparative ranking. If that's not fun, what is?

But there's more: you get to see the results in colorful graphs. Here's a screenshot:


You can also download an interactive sample. (This is scrambled data and vendor names are replaced by sports teams. Beware that the document uses Adobe Flash; Mac users in particular may need to use Adobe Reader rather than their usual viewer. And, alas, it won't work on your iPad.)

As you can see, the screen lets you pick up three vendors, a weight set (small, mid-size or large), and the type of data to view: a summary or the individual items within each category. For each item, you see the actual input values (2, 1 or 0 depending on whether the vendor complies fully, partly, or not at all) and the scores calculated once the weights are applied. You can change the category weights (by adjusting the figures in the little gray boxes at the right) and watch the scores themselves change as the individual weights are adjusted proportionately. The graphs also adjust immediately as you make changes.

My purpose in all this is to help buyers look beneath the scores themselves to understand where the scores came from. This lets them judge whether they really care about the factors that are driving the relative rankings. Similarly, making it easy to change the weights raises the question of which weights really are appropriate. Thinking about this should lead buyers to a better decision.

The screenshot above illustrates the importance of the weights. Look at Technology: there are pretty big differences between the different "vendors", but the category as a whole has such a low weight that these make little difference in the final rankings. This reflects a judgment on my part that small business buyers don't really care much about technology and that their technology needs are pretty simple.

If you squint hard enough, you'll also notice that the middle vendor has the highest total input value for Technology, but the lowest weighted score. That's pretty common because the weights do vary substantially from one item to the next. In this instance, the main reason is that small business scores apply negative weights to many advanced features, on the theory that they detract from value by adding complexity. You'll recall that I wrote about that in an earlier post.

The downloadable sample only has descriptions under all the other tabs, but everything else is actually ready. I'll make a formal announcement next week about price and availability of the new report.

B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Comparison -- Here's a Sample

I’ve been having way too much fun working on my new industry report. I decided to make it an interactive document that lets users (viewers? readers? The Chosen?) set their own weights for the different scoring categories and do detailed, side-by-side comparisons of vendors they select. This gives the document vastly more play value than a simple report. Much more important, it reinforces the point that I keep stressing, which is that every evaluation must be based on the buyer’s unique needs. Having three different sets of scores was a step in that direction, and making things interactive goes still further.

Click here to download a sample of the format. (Beware that it's a big file and can take several minutes to load.) Vendor names have been replaced with football teams and the specific details are excluded. But you can see the results of the different scoring schemes and also get a list of the specific items with their weights and definitions. The sample also contains draft versions of the introductory materials, which need some reformatting. (Note to Mac users: this is an Adobe Flash document; you'll have to use Adobe Reader to view it.)

In case it’s not obvious, you can move the little sliders on the “Sector Chart” tab to see how the different vendors move around depending on how you weight different categories of attributes. The final report will show directly how much each category contributes to each vendor’s score. You can also adjust the category weights on the grid within the “Scoring Weights” tab, which shows the detailed items. You have to mouse over the numbers in the grids – not the most convenient method, but the one allowed by the software I’m using (SAP Business Objects’ Xcelsius).

I actually did work up a version of the report that lets users set their own weights for the individual items. Unfortunately, that seems to overtax the software, so I’ll have to leave that out of the final product. I might put it out as a separate product or upgrade to the base report.

Please take a look and let me know what you think. The report itself should be ready for distribution within a few days, and of course I'll announce it here first.

Another Estimate of B2B Marketing Automation Revenue

Summary: Here's a closer look at revenue per employee and marketing automation revenue in general. I get the same answers as before but now have more detail to back it up.

Some of the comments on last week’s post on the size of the B2B marketing automation industry led me to dig a bit more deeply into the question of revenue per employee. Looking through my files and asking a few questions, here are vendors for whom I have reasonably reliable information:


This gives an average of $171,000 per employee. Given that these are fast-growing companies and the employee counts were based on figures for September or later, the average headcount through the course of the year was lower, meaning the revenue per full-time-equivalent employee would be higher – probably not so far from my $200,000 figure. Indeed, the figure for the three slowest-growing companies (Unica, Aprimo and Alterian) comes to $194,000. That’s pretty darn close to my $200,000 standard. Cool.

These figures also shine more light on the original question of industry size. I don’t know the B2B fraction of Unica, Alterian or Neolane’s revenues, but it’s probably quite low: let's guess 15%. Aprimo has stated they are 40% B2B, and the rest of those vendors are 100% B2B. Doing that math, you get $160 million total:


But what about everyone else? The other big players in enterprise marketing automation are SAS, Teradata and SmartFocus, but they are almost entirely B2C so far I know. So maybe let’s credit them with $10 million.

This leaves all the other B2B marketing automation vendors. The survey for my up-coming report has employee counts, client counts and minimum prices for quite a few: OfficeAutoPilot, True Influence, Pardot, LoopFuse, Net Results, Manticore, Silverpop, Genius, LeadFormix,TreeHouse Interactive, SalesFUSION, and Marketbright. I can use that to prepare two estimates: one based on number of employees x revenue per employee, and another based on number of clients x minimum revenue per client.

- total employees comes to about 470 (I have to make guesses for a couple of small vendors and reduce the Silverpop total to account for its large B2C business). Since these are also fast-growing firms, let’s use a figure of $120,000 per employee, which happens to be the average for Neolane, HubSpot, Marketo and Infusionsoft. That yields $56 million.

- clients x minimum price is calculated separately for each vendor, of course. You’ll have to trust me that the total comes to $37 million. But that’s a very crude figure: it’s certainly low in the sense that many average revenue per client is higher than the minimum price. On the other hand, we have the growth effect again – those client counts were towards the end of the year, so companies weren’t getting a full revenue year from everyone. For sake of argument, let’s assume the two factors cancel each other out.

So we have one estimate of $56 million and another of $37 million. The good news is that they’re in the same ballpark. Let’s split the difference and figure $45 million in revenue for this group.

Finally, there are a number of other B2B marketing automation vendors who weren’t covered in my survey. These include ActiveConversion, Act-On Software, Genoo, LeadLife, eTrigue, Marqui, and others. I do have client counts and pricing for most of them; some rough calculations yield a figure of $10 million.

Add these up, and you get a total B2B marketing automation revenues for 2010 of $225 million:


Maybe I’ll adjust my original $200 million estimate and maybe I won’t bother. Either way, I do feel more confident that it’s close to right.

How Big Is the B2B Marketing Automation Industry?

Summary: Here are my estimates for the size of the B2B marketing automation industry, broken down by customer segments. Enjoy.

I've been working madly on my new report on B2B marketing automation vendors. One of the things this has forced me to do is come up with an estimate of industry size that I'm willing to defend in print. I based my figures on several approaches: revenues for the few vendors who release their figures; the number of vendor-reported clients multiplied by an estimated revenue per client; and the number of vendor-reported employees multiplied by industry-average revenue per employee.

These methods all yield similar figures -- around a $200 million in revenue for 2010. Bear in mind that the industry nearly doubled last year, so the current run rate is much higher. Also remember that I've excluded:

- the big enterprise marketing automation vendors (Unica, SAS, Teradata), who sell primarily to B2C marketers;

- B2C portions of Aprimo and Neolane; and,

- vendors who work mostly through marketing service providers (Alterian and SmartFocus).

Including those vendors would at least double the total figure. Services are also excluded.

That said, here's an excerpt from the report:

Revenues for B2B marketing automation systems (excluding related services) were $200 million in 2010, according to Raab Associates estimates. The industry can be divided into three segments serving different types of clients:

• Small business (under $20 million revenue). These are unsophisticated marketing departments whose primary interests are outbound email, landing pages, and simple lead nurturing through email autoresponders. Many are very small companies with just one or two marketing automation users. They often do not integrate with a separate sales automation system, either not using one at all or relying on a CRM option offered by the marketing automation vendor itself. The fastest growing industry segment, this group tripled to 12,000 clients and $60 million revenue in 2010. Many small business marketing departments use only email systems (which also provide landing pages and simple nurture campaigns) instead of marketing automation.

• Mid-size business ($20 million to $500 million revenue). This segment covers a broad range of marketing users with widely varied needs. Most require the full range of marketing automation functions, but apply them in relatively simple ways. They have three to fifteen marketing automation users. This segment is the heart of the marketing automation industry, supporting the largest number of competitors and accounting for approximately $100 million in 2010 revenue across 3,000 clients.

• Big business ($500 million revenue and higher). These are large marketing departments that may manage hundreds of campaigns for multiple products in different locations. They need special features for automated content selection, project management, complex lead scores, and tight limits on the rights granted to individual users. This group had about 500 clients generating $40 million revenue in 2010. Although it has been growing less quickly than other segments, adoption will accelerate as the value of B2B marketing automation is more widely recognized, existing B2B systems add more large-company features, and big software vendors enter the field.