DemandGen’s David Lewis: What’s Ahead For Marketing Automation In 2013
Editor’s Note: As part of our forthcoming Marketing Automation Technology Forecast project, we recently caught up with David Lewis, Founder and CEO of DemandGen International, Inc. David offered a number of insights during that conversation, and we’re excited to share some of these today. Enjoy!
DGR: What major trends do you see in terms of new and emerging technologies, or new applications for existing marketing automation (MA) technologies?
I see changes coming in three primary areas: ease of use, out-of-the-box functionality, and service offerings.
Greater ease of use. In this area, we’ll likely see MA systems providing more intuitive, and more insightful, reporting capabilities, which are also more standardized so that marketers have a defined set of commonly used metrics and reports like accountants do. New reporting developments will offer not only numerical information but will also provide better visuals to marketers to make understanding and presenting the information easier.
Maturing MA tools will also provide more automation capability in the areas of nurturing and lead scoring. An example is the automatic serving of better performing nurture emails, similar to the approach used in Google AdWords. And we’ll see simplification around designing and integrating lead scoring, nurturing and the demand funnel into the lead management methodology.
Through more intuitive interfaces and more use of predictive models, the solutions will adjust programs for you based on what’s working best, and will use historical sales and marketing data to help you develop predictive lead scoring and nurturing models.
More out-of-the-box functionality. I anticipate that the leading vendors will develop more out-of-the-box functionality to begin to address the very large untapped market of businesses that demand instant effectiveness of new technologies. Salesforce.com is a good example: When small to medium businesses buy Salesforce, they can use it effectively from that moment, even before it is completely tailored to the business.
Similarly, MA solutions will come with a library of templates that can be quickly adapted to your look and feel, so that you can create custom emails and landing pages as easily as a PowerPoint slide. Lead scoring and nurture programs will include template libraries that can be easily tailored to your business, rather than developed from scratch.
Expanded service offerings. Finally, I expect marketing automation vendors to broaden the services and capabilities that they provide to marketers. This will include offerings such as content management and campaign planning along with tools for project management.
All this functionality will help marketers plan and track all the tasks and deliverables necessary to assemble and execute campaigns. We can also expect MA solutions to offer better assistance with lead generation, through integration with your social networks and list brokerage services.
DGR: What major challenges related to marketing automation technology will define the market in 2013, and how will vendors respond?
The defining challenge for 2013 is all about CRM. As I mentioned above, when you buy a CRM solution you can move in immediately and become productive, but today’s MA systems are not packaged in a way that allows a marketing team to take immediate advantage of the solution. Most of that facilitation is still happening at the vendor level. But we’ll see more advances in this area, with pre-installed modules that are purpose-built for the specific needs of Marketing.
Ultimately, we’ll see the focus of Marketing shifting to developing content for the system and away from designing the programs.
DGR: Do you foresee any surprises in terms of market trends during the coming year?
B2B marketers are going to reevaluate the importance and significance of social media, and probably redirect their investment into other channels that will yield better results.
In addition, we’ll see some marketing teams moving to a variable compensation model tied closely to revenue, thanks to the new availability of reporting. In the past it was virtually impossible for Marketing to get credit for revenue derived from its programs. Now that we can demonstrate our contribution to revenue, why wouldn’t marketers want their compensation to be based on their performance — just like the sales organization?
Finally, to date, MA has been really targeted at the marketing department, but fundamentally it’s a communication platform. And because communication takes place throughout the whole organization — marketing, sales, training, customer service, human resources, even the partner channel — we may begin to see MA systems being applied to all different areas of the business and become a company infrastructure purchase rather than just a system for marketing.
Oracle And Eloqua: Making Sense Of The Marriage
By now, you’ve seen the news that Oracle shelled out $871 million to buy Eloqua. We have already shared a few thoughts about what the deal means for the marketing automation and CRM industries, but here’s some additional color commentary.
Oracle Got A Great Deal
First, this is a big deal, but why isn’t it even bigger? As Brian Hansford pointed out in an insightful Twitter post, it’s a screwed-up world when a “cheesy photo app” with a quicksand business model (and a legal staff that needs to quit drinking on the job) sells for $1 billion.
Yet a highly successful marketing automation vendor with a proven business and vast growth potential goes for considerably less than $1 billion. Go figure.
Market2Nowhere
The acquisition also evokes memories of Oracle’s 2010 purchase of Market2Lead, which promptly joined Spinal Tap in the “where are they now?” file. That was a peculiar deal to begin with; Oracle purchased the company’s intellectual property but basically dumped its customer base into the nearest ditch. (Eloqua CEO Joe Payne actually published a blog post at the time inviting Market2Lead customers to jump to his company’s platform. Check it out while you still can.)
Obviously, that’s not happening this time around. Like it or not, Eloqua’s client list is being invited to this party.
Four Questions To Ponder
Keeping that in mind, here are some issues worth considering as Oracle closes this deal:
- Oracle typically assimilates its acquisitions by swallowing them whole. Will Eloqua keep a separate brand identity for the time being? Does it make sense to do so, given some of the issues discussed below?
- We don’t know how many Eloqua customers are also Salesforce customers, but “a lot” seems like a safe answer. As a result, Eloqua is bound to have some interesting conversations with clients who depend on close integration of their Eloqua and Salesforce CRM systems.
- That sound you hear is Marc Benioff shredding Eloqua’s invitation to next year’s Dreamforce event. The Dreamforce Cloud Expo has always been fertile ground for marketing automation vendors, and Eloqua will – at the very least – find it a considerably less welcoming environment in the future.
- Salesforce doesn’t just integrate with Eloqua; it’s also a client. Sorting this out will have the entertainment potential of a Hatfield-McCoy wedding party.
Thanks for reading, Happy Mayan Apocalypse, and have a great holiday!
-Matthew McKenzie
IDC: Marketing Automation Continues Double-Digit Growth
The latest market research from IDC continues to show a strong market for both marketing automation and sales automation solutions.
IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker for the first half of 2012 showed overall software market growth of 4.7% year over year. This marks the beginning of what IDC says will be a period of slower single-digit growth for the market.
Drilling into the numbers, however IDC found that CRM software in general experienced above-average growth of 8.1%. Within the CRM category, three out of four sub-categories – marketing, sales and customer service – showed a combined growth rate of more than 12%. (The fourth sub-category, call center software, showed much lower growth.)
This is all good news for the marketing automation industry, and it matches predictions from other research firms that predicted double-digit growth for marketing automation through at least 2014.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Gets Yammer Integration
Microsoft has been busy lately beefing up the technology supporting its Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. That was the motive behind the company’s recent purchase of MarketingPilot, and it’s the reason why it’s now announcing native integration with its Yammer enterprise social networking solution.
Yammer, which is part of Microsoft’s Office division, was itself acquired earlier this year. According to Microsoft, it will integrate Yammer and Microsoft Dynamics CRM by embedding the former’s social feeds, along with Follow and Like buttons, into individual CRM records. In addition, when a user takes action on a CRM record, a page will be automatically created in Yammer where employees can discuss, follow and collaborate on the record.
Yammer has also updated its App Directory, which provides connectors for third-party business applications. This includes new integrations from business data provider GoodData, gamification platform Kudos and Salesforce.com.
Stupid CRM Tricks And What Marketers Can Learn From Them
What’s better than learning from your mistakes? Learning from some other poor slob’s mistakes. In that spirit, I highly recommend a recent CIO.com article: Top 10 CRM Tricks Guaranteed To Lose Customers.
As the article points out, when it comes to rolling out technology that impacts customer service and support, the devil is in the details. Cutting corners, limiting options or making half-baked assumptions about how to “serve” your customers guarantee a quick trip to CRM hell for everyone involved.
There are lots of lessons here for marketing and sales organizations. One of my favorites: Why locking bread-and-butter content behind a mind-numbing registration process – what the article refers to as “hiding the can opener inside the can” – is a horrible idea.
Another favorite: failing to perform usability testing with outsiders. This applies to any customer-facing technology, not just CRM. It’s not enough to sample your own cat food; you need to round up a few complete strangers and ask them to have a taste, too.
-Matthew McKenzie
Gleanster Announces New Insight Exchanges For Marketing Automation, CRM
Gleanster today announced the rollout of two Insight Exchanges on Marketing Automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), with resources such as vendor landscapes, white papers, benchmark research, videos, presentations and analyst commentary.
Launched on December 28, 2011, the Insight Exchange Open Resource Library is a “great way for solution providers to demonstrate thought leadership, raise brand visibility and gain broad exposure for the valuable content assets they’ve already created,” according to Jeff Zabin, CEO and Research Director at Gleanster, in a company press release.
“At a glance, you can view all the relevant solutions and their showcases, which are chock full of actionable insights, best practices and strategic guidance,” Zabin said. “For their part, solution providers have a powerful new vehicle at their disposal for raising brand visibility, demonstrating thought leadership and generating new revenue opportunities.”
Next week, Gleanster will publish a benchmark report on CRM that features showcases for more than 40 technology solution providers, including Infor, Infusionsoft, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sage Software, SalesFUSION and Salesforce.com.
The Marketing Automation benchmark report is set to publish in October 2012, and will showcase more than 40 solution providers, including Act-On Software, Aprimo, eTrigue, ExactTarget, HubSpot, Unica and Pardot.
Are Marketing Automation Vendors Making Promises They Can’t Keep?
Last month, The Annuitas Group ran a pair of blog posts about 9 Things Marketers Need from Marketing Automation Vendors and Consultants. There’s some great stuff here, and they’re saying some things that really need to be said about a fast-growing, and still maturing, industry.
But one point on their list is especially important: Automation vendors need to think about whether terms like “quick,” “easy” and “30 days” really belong in their marketing vocabularies.
This Has All Happened Before
I have seen other groups of technology vendors make similar promises, and it rarely ended well.
In the 1990s, vendors pushed their content management and document management products as drop-dead easy, turnkey solutions. They weren’t.
A decade ago, the same thing happened in the CRM market. Failure rates on CRM projects climbed as high as 70%, and many companies canceled or scaled back their CRM projects.
In both cases, customers had a bad habit of letting the technology drive their purchasing decisions, rather than thinking first about their business processes and change management issues. The vendors did nothing to stop them. A backlash was inevitable.
Is the marketing automation market headed down the same path? It’s too early to tell, although an often-cited statistic from SiriusDecisions – that 85% of marketing automation users don’t think they’re taking full advantage of their systems — is cause for concern.
Addressing The Frustration Factor
Customers need guidance to push down that frustration factor, and vendors need to provide that guidance.
Before a company can take full advantage of a marketing automation solution, it has to make sure its sales and marketing teams are speaking the same language. It needs a lead scoring methodology, closed-loop reporting processes, user training and enablement, and all of the other things that contribute to a successful solution.
Vendors can help with all of these things. The best vendors, in fact, excel at helping customers with change management and business-process issues. Yet it’s impossible to reconcile change management best practices – all of which take time and care to implement – with the fast-faster-fastest marketing mantra being used to sell the technology.
This will all work itself out in the end. It always does. The big question is whether all of the vendors making promises today will be around to keep them tomorrow.
Salesforce Ties The Knot With Buddy Media. What Now?
It’s official: Salesforce has agreed to acquire Buddy Media in a deal worth about $689 million, including $467 million in cash. Buddy Media is an A-list player in the social marketing space, with clients such as Ford, HP, L’Oreal and Mattel, and the company also boasts an especially close relationship with Facebook.
The announcement isn’t a surprise, but now we can move on to the really interesting question: What Salesforce will do with its latest social-marketing acquisition.
Yes, the purchase comes just after Oracle’s $300 million purchase of Virtue – probably Buddy Media’s biggest competitor in the social media marketing space. But Salesforce has been on a social trajectory for quite some time now; its other key offerings here include Chatter, a real-time collaboration tool, and the Radian6 social listening platform purchased last year.
The general idea, as Buddy Media founder Michael Lazerow put it in a blog post announcing the deal, is to roll up all of these pieces into a “comprehensive Marketing Cloud that will allow customers to listen, engage, gain insight, publish, advertise and measure social marketing programs.”
(Marketo might have a thing or two to say about using the term “marketing cloud,” but that’s neither here nor there.)
It makes sense to me, and it’s clear that Salesforce needed to move quickly given the consolidation taking place in the social-marketing space. If Salesforce really wants to build a platform that gives CMOs one-stop shopping for their technology needs – and that sure looks like the plan – then social marketing is a huge part of making that happen.
Yet there’s a challenge here, too: Salesforce has to pull off this transition without sacrificing its core business competencies. Not everyone is convinced Salesforce can pull this off.
On the other hand, I don’t think Salesforce could afford to sit still in spite of the risks. When you look at big CRM vendors like Oracle or marketing automation companies like Eloqua and Marketo, it’s clear that they’re moving into this turf as fast as they can – and Oracle in particular would love to marginalize Salesforce.
