Tag Archives: CRM

7 Reasons Why Oracle’s Market2Lead Acquisition Makes a Lot of Sense

Oracle has just acquired Market2Lead, one of the early Marketing Automation vendors. There has been a lot of talk in the industry about possible consolidation, such as vendors going out of business, becoming irrelevant or being acquired. This is the first transaction involving a major software vendor, so it deserves some notice. Everybody expected Salesforce.com to make a first move, but Oracle surprised us here :- )

People asked my opinion on this acquisition. Overall, I think this is great news, for 7 reasons:

1. Market2Lead Probably Got A Good Deal

Market2Lead was one of the early Marketing Automation vendors. Actually in 2006, when I was a marketing manager at a software company in San Francisco, I selected Market2Lead as our Marketing Automation system. But since then too little progress was made: the product was good, but their marketing was lagging behind. The result: not enough new customers. Selling the company to a well-known software company may be a very good outcome for Market2Lead (speculation, I have no inside information on this).

2. Marketing & Sales Belong Together

More and more I’ve come to believe that great marketing initiatives go bad if marketing and sales don’t have a productive relationship. A Marketing Automation system either needs to have great connection to the CRM system, or it should all be integrated. Oracle clearly takes the integrated approach (as they always do), and I believe this is a good move.

3. The Market Needs Consolidation

I publish a list of all Marketing Automation vendors. There are over 30 vendors on this list, which is way too much. There isn’t enough business in this market to support so many vendors. So one fewer vendor – although always sad for the individuals involved – is not a bad thing for the market as a whole.

4. It Puts Marketing Automation On The Map

Most Marketing Automation companies are relatively small. Even industry leaders like Eloqua and Unica are relatively small compared with vendors in more established software categories. This is the first serious Marketing Automation initiative by a major software player. Other CRM vendors claim to do Marketing Automation, but I believe those claims are unsubstantiated. So the Oracle move shows that Marketing Automation is becoming a mainstream solution.

5. Small Installed Base / Few Customers Affected

It seems that Market2Lead is migrating their customers to other solutions, at least, Eloqua’s announcement gives that impression. According to the Oracle’s announcement, only the IP has been acquired, not the company. The fact that the Market2Lead’s installed base is relatively small is a good thing: major disruptions can give a market a bad name, and that’s the last thing Marketing Automation needs.

6. Enterprise-Ready Product

More on a product-level, Oracle is getting their hands on a very feature-rich product. Having done a lot of work with Market2Lead myself, I know first-hand that it’s a very powerful system. This is a good fit with Oracle’s main customer base: mid-size to large companies.

7. Great Technology Fit

There is also a good fit from a technology perspective. The Market2Lead product has been developed using the Java programming language. That is not one of the most hip languages such as PHP or Ruby, but it’s the primary technology at Oracle. Oracle has been a Java-company for a long time, and after the Sun acquisition they also own the Java technology itself. It should be reasonably easy to integrate Market2Lead code in Oracle applications.

My Take On This Deal

I think this deal signals the beginning of a 3-5 year long consolidation process in the Marketing Automation industry. The winners will have tied their applications into other vital marketing and sales processes, either through integration or through acquisition. So my advice for marketing practitioners is to hedge your bets: your Marketing Automation vendor may not be around anymore in a couple of years.

How Are CRM and Marketing Automation Different?

Last week I presented a session at Silverpop’s B2B Marketing University in Atlanta. In addition to Marketing Automation, there were two big topics: Social Media and CRM. I will write about Social Media some other time, and focus on CRM in this post.

Many attendees were confused by CRM vendors claiming to offer full marketing functionality. If that’s true, why would you still need Marketing Automation? So let’s dig in and find how Marketing Automation and CRM are different.

Strong Features of CRM

In my presentation I tried to shed some light on the strong points of either system. For CRM, I focused on Salesforce.com. This was the list with strong points for a CRM system (compared to Marketing Automation):

SFDC

MA

Opportunity creation

Yes

No

Forecasting

Yes

No

Call logging

Yes

Sometimes

Individual emails

Yes

Sometimes

Products & Pricing

Yes

No

Document library

Yes

Sometimes

Case Management

Yes

No

Contracts

Yes

No

So in short, those are the features that individual sales people will benefit from. Marketing Automation also has some features for sales people, but those tend to be focused on lead prioritization, email, and prospect activity notifications.

Strong Features of Marketing Automation

I made a similar list for Marketing Automation:

SFDC

MA

Native Email Marketing

No

Yes

Drip Email Marketing

No

Yes

Automated Campaigns Flows

No

Yes

Dynamic List Segmentation

No

Yes

Web Analytics

No

Yes

Deduplication

No

Yes

Profile-based Lead Scoring

Limited

Yes

Behavioral Lead Scoring

No

Yes

One Type of Contact (vs Lead & Contact)

No

Yes

Form Builder

No

Yes

Landing Page Builder

No

Yes

Today’s CRM Systems Do Not Help Marketing

My conclusion is that the typical CRM system does not have strong marketing functionality. At the same time, a CRM system is a necessity to support an efficient sales force. So your company will need both. Luckily, all Marketing Automation systems can be connected to Salesforce.com and often also to other CRM systems.

In a earlier post I wrote about an project to use Salesforce.com instead of a Marketing Automation system: the conclusion was that you need a whole range of add-ons to make it work, sort-of. In the long run, CRM systems may offer more marketing features, but today you still need a separate Marketing Automation system.

What is your take? What is the key difference between Marketing Automation and CRM?