to comment on where Marketbright is focused. David Raab has summed it up nicely in his recent blog. Marketbright is focused on the needs of customers who require complex nurture flows. The more products, the more vertical markets, the more price points, basically the larger the customer base and the more the requirement to segment offerings, the better Marketbright does. If you just want an email plus tool, then we can meet requirements but there are some simplistic tools out there that do exactly that. Our value rises the more people want to target their offering, which is typically larger companies.

Hope this helps identify our focus.

We also focus on Demand Discovery. We believe that B2B Marketing is much more than about pounding out emails, it is about finding out where your prospects are congregating and dropping breadcrumbs of information that lead them to your company. That can be Direct Mail, SEO/SEM, TradeShows, Webinars, Social Networking, Blogs, Analysts. Marketbright has solutions for all these and more.

The B2B buying process/cycle has lots of moving parts with lots of legacy pain around manual processes, sales & marketing misalignment, slow time to execution due to reliance on IT, etc. There are vendors who build a solution to meet needs in certain areas of the cycle. They then grow their solutions to cover more of the overall process as customers tell them, for example, “I love your solution for list management, but I sure which you could automate follow-up with my list based on their interactions with me.” There have been large numbers of these types of conversations going on between customers and vendors and the result is that Demand Generation solutions (aka Marketing Automation, aka Lead Nurturing, aka Lead Management, etc) contains an ever-growing set of vendors.

It’s an exciting time to be in this market. It’s also great for customers who have a variety of solutions to consider. A crucial part of the decision-making process that sometimes gets overlooked in feature check-box bake-offs is the robustness, scalability, reliability, and data capabilities of solutions. This is complex stuff with a need for reliable up time, fast execution, excellence in email deliverability, and end users who demand their results quickly if not in real-time. It’s even more difficult to deliver all this as a true SaaS with instant-on rather than a complex implementation cycle like in traditional enterprise software. It’ll be interesting to see how some of these vendors scale as they start to get a critical mass of users and activity on the system.

On the other hand, vendors can grow quickly and still lose money. Lots of price-cutting out there, I’m told.

Thanks for mentioning the Guide!

David