Tag Archives: genius.com

Will Marketing Automation Be Free?

Today Genius.com announced a free version of their Marketing Automation system. Only about a month ago, Loopfuse also started offering a free version of their Marketing Automation system. What does this mean for companies interested in adopting Marketing Automation?

How Much Is Free?

Let’s first look at the features of the free versions:

Loopfuse Genius.com
Users unlimited 5
Emails / month 5,000 2,500
Contacts 2,500 3,000
Pageviews / month 100,000 unlimited
Support community-driven community-driven

So these offerings are closely matched. Both are meant as ‘freemium’ offerings. They are great for small companies and small initial projects, but they’re too limited for normal projects. Companies will have to upgrade to the paid version as their initiatives grow. And of course, that’s what Loopfuse and Genius.com hope for.

Why Free?

Why are they doing this? Loopfuse gives as the main reason that adoption rate of Marketing Automation is still very low (5-10%), and that a disruptive offering is needed to get the remaining 90-95% on board. This is supported by the main trends in the Marketing Automation market:

  • The product scope of all marketing automation vendors is quite similar
  • There is severe competition (30+ vendors)
  • Land grab is common, where vendors lower prices to get customers on board
  • Industry consolidation is starting (Market2lead acquired, LeadGenesys refocused)

My take: even though your project may be too large for these free versions, you may get a better deal for paid versions from whichever vendor. Just realize that this may not be a sustainable situation. Some vendors will sell below cost to gain market share, so higher prices or acquisitions may follow.

Will Other Vendors Follow?

Because the cost of offering a free version is low, other vendors may also want to create a free offering. But it’s not without its challenges. The key to success of a freemium model is to make the free version functional enough, while making premium version attractive enough so that a significant percentage of users will upgrade. Some of the other challenges:

  • The gap between the free and paid versions may be too big
  • ‘Free’ customers may lack the expertise to be successful
  • There may be too much cost in the vendor’s business model (e.g. expensive sales teams)

Loopfuse has published pricing for their paid products, and they have a low-overhead sales model. Also, their founders came from Red Hat, which has a very similar strategy of offering both free and premium products. Few other vendors are in a similar position, so my prediction is that free versions are not going to be a trend.

So What Does It Mean For You?

If your company is looking to adopt Marketing Automation, count on paying for your Marketing Automation system. Either you will go over the limits of the free version, or you will require support. Instead of focusing on free or cheap, choose a vendor that you trust, that best meets your requirements, and that provides excellent support.

Does that mean that these free versions are irrelevant? No. It’s great to try out marketing automation without the limits of a trial period or for small projects. Also, it may be a good solution for small and savvy organizations. But the overall impact on the market will be limited. So I don’t think it’s going to be a general trend. What is your take? Please leave a comment with your prediction…

MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit Boston

Monday and Tuesday I’m attending the Boston MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit. About two weeks ago I attended the San Francisco event, which had a similar program and exhibitors. In this post some thoughts about the program…
First of all, the best thing about this event is that the speakers are marketing practitioners, not vendors. This ensures that you get lots of real-life advice. However, there are also many different perspectives, and it’s not always easy to link them together. But, that can easily be addressed:
Classify the Topics
Having seen many of the presentations in San Francisco, I found it useful to classify them in three main categories:
Lead Generation
Lead Management
Content creation
The first is obviously focused on getting more leads into your database, while the second topic focuses on nurturing those leads. Many marketing organizations now realize that both these activities are more successful if they use attractive content, so that is also addressed in a couple of sessions. I tried to classify every session, and that made it easier for me to distill best practices.
The Review Sessions Are Recommended
I can also recommend the introduction and review sessions led by Flint McGlaughlin, Stefan Tornquist, Sean Donahue and Brian Carroll and of MarketingExperiments, MarketingSherpa and InTouch (all part of the MECLABS group). They do a great job synthesizing all ideas.
Favorite Session
My favorite sessions was presented by Maureen Thorman of National Instruments about customer segmentation based on web traffic: unfortunately this sessions will not be presented in Boston, that’s a bummer.
The Marketing Automation Vendors
My specialty is Marketing Automation Consulting, and many of the vendors were attending with a booth. In Boston the following Marketing Automation vendors are worth a visit (in order of booth number):
Pardot (booth 1)
Manticore Technology (booth 2)
Silverpop Engage B2B (booth 4)
Marketo (booth 6)
Genius.com (booth 7)
Marketbright (booth 14)
Hubspot (booth 16)
Neolane (booth 19)
Twitter & Questions
I will try to tweet as many sessions as possible at the LeadSloth Twitter page. Let me know if you have any questions via Twitter or email (jep leadsloth com).  And if you’re attending, let’s connect (see my picture on the right).

marketingsherpa b2b marketing summitMonday and Tuesday I’m attending the Boston MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit. About two weeks ago I attended the San Francisco event, which had a similar program and exhibitors. In this post some recommendations for the program…

First of all, the best thing about this event is that the speakers are marketing practitioners, not vendors. This ensures that you get lots of real-life advice. However, there are also many different perspectives, and it’s not always easy to link them together. But, that can easily be addressed:

Classify the Topics

Having seen many of the presentations in San Francisco, I found it useful to classify them in three main categories:

  • Lead Generation
  • Lead Management
  • Content creation

The first is obviously focused on getting more leads into your database, while the second topic focuses on nurturing those leads. Many marketing organizations now realize that both these activities are more successful if they use attractive content, so that is also addressed in a couple of sessions. I tried to classify every session, and that made it easier for me to distill best practices.

The Review Sessions Are Recommended

I can also recommend the introduction and review sessions led by Flint McGlaughlin, Stefan Tornquist, Sean Donahue and Brian Carroll and of MarketingExperiments, MarketingSherpa and InTouch (all part of the MECLABS group). They do a great job synthesizing all ideas.

My Favorite Session

My favorite session in San Francisco was presented by Maureen Thorman of National Instruments about customer segmentation based on web traffic: unfortunately this sessions will not be presented in Boston, that’s a bummer, because they used very advanced web analytics to improve the conversation with prospects and customers.

The Marketing Automation Vendors

My specialty is Marketing Automation Consulting, and many of the Marketing Automation vendors have a booth. In Boston you should definitely stop by at the booths of the following Marketing Automation vendors (in order of booth number):

Twitter & Questions

I will try to tweet as many sessions as possible at the LeadSloth Twitter page. Let me know if you have any questions via Twitter or email (jep leadsloth com).  And if you’re attending, let’s connect (see my picture on the right)!

Measure Your ROI on Social Media Leads

On Tuesday Genius.com announced the Genius URL Shortener (GURL), which makes it easier to measure the results of social media campaigns. At first I thought: “what’s new about that?”, and Marketo wrote a post on an alternative way to create tracking links. But when I read Ardath Albee’s post about the Genius URL Shortener I really got it: GURLs are cool!

Lead Source Measurement Needs Improvement

Tracking where a visitor comes from is not a new technique. I first used it inside AdWords, in which they offered cross-media conversion tracking. You could create a tracking URL, which you would include in non-AdWords advertisements, email blasts, and so on. This allowed you to see how many people registered (= converted) for each source.

After that, Google Analytics provided similar tracking features by appending variables to the existing URL (see the Google URL Builder tool). There are two big limitations for using this in B2B marketing:

  • You can only see conversions, not opportunities or revenue (because that information is in the CRM system)
  • You can’t see data on individual users

Marketing Automation to Measure End-to-End ROI

The Google tracking is from before Twitter, so the URLs were long and ugly. Twitter made the URL shorteners popular, like tinyURL and bit.ly. So in my opinion Genius now provides similar conversion tracking, with four improvements:

  • It has short and clean URLs
  • The URLs are easy to create, and anyone in the company can create them
  • It provides end-to-end tracking to see associated opportunities and revenue (pulled from Salesforce.com)
  • It ties into existing identified visitor tracking functionality (so clicks on GURLs and the entire web session are added to the lead record as metadata)

Of course, Social Media is all the rage, but I would also use the Genius URL Shortener for online advertisements, list rentals, and so on. The only place where you wouldn’t need it is in your own email blasts, because those are already tracked automatically.

The one feature I would like to add is the ability to associate links to specific campaigns, so you can see which lead sources were most effective for a particular campaign (Marketo’s approach covers this, but is not so easy to use).

So in my opinion this is a very interesting new  tool that is makes it easier to track campaign ROI for Social Media and beyond.

How would you use this lead source tracking tool? Let me know your suggestions.

Disclosure: I am a guest blogger on the MarketingGenius blog

Marketing Automation Introduction

Many posts on this blog are fairly in-depth, so it was fun to write an introduction to Marketing Automation on the Genius.com blog. For easy digestion, I split up the marketing automation process in four steps:

  1. Getting more visitors to your website
  2. Get more visitors to register
  3. Lead nurturing and scoring
  4. Marketing & Sales Collaboration

In addition to the overview article that I linked to above, I’ve written one post for each step. Those will be published this week and next week. The first article about getting more website visitors is already live.

I’ve heard other definitions of the steps that are more catchy, like “pre-click, post-click and post-conversion”. These are the same steps as my steps 1 to 3. I’ve chosen to write out a description of the steps, because I think that’s easier to understand for people who are new to Marketing Automation. And I’ve added step 4 because collaboration with sales is one of the key success factors of marketing automation.

Anyhow, I hope you find the articles on the Genius.com blog interesting, even though you may already be a Marketing Automation expert :- )

Top-10 Demand Generation Vendor Blogs

UPDATE 7/14/09: I’ve now put all marketing automation blogs on a single page.

In my previous post I listed the Top-10 Demand Generation blog by marketers and consultants. Today I’ve put together a list of vendor blogs. Most of these vendors blogs really get ‘online marketing’, so they talk about best practices rather then just touting their products, and they post regularly.

In alphabetical order:

Sorry, can’t help it: every time I try to make a top-10, I end up with 11 and find it impossible to choose which one should go. So 11 it is :- )

Again, let me know your suggestions for other blogs. I’m pretty sure I still have to discover lots of cool blogs.

Lead Management Automation Systems Compared

Stagnant email service providers becoming irrelevant? (see conclusion)

In a previous post there was a lively discussion about the terms Demand Generation and Lead Management Automation (LMA) systems. The consensus was that Lead Management System is part of the demand generation process, and focuses on managing leads you already have in your database (and capturing/importing new leads). Some example features:

  • building landing pages and registration forms
  • tracking the source of leads
  • collecting as much information as possible (web & data analytics)
  • nurturing via email and other channels
  • calculating a lead score until the prospect is sales-ready

But how does that compare to email marketing, web analytics and landing page optimization tools? In talking to several marketing managers, they often asked: “How do LMA systems compare to {fill in any other marketing software}”. In the next paragraphs I compare LMA systems with other popular marketing systems, and I hope to go more in-depth in future posts.

Email Marketing

Lead Management Systems can send out batch emails to a list, similar to Email Services Providers (ESPs) like VerticalResponse, ExactTarget and Constant Contact. Interesting enough, I’ve heard of several companies that still use ESPs in addition to their Lead Management System, not sure why. Let me know if you have ideas.

Lead Management Systems also provide lots of advanced email features, such as drip-marketing, event-based emails, heavily segmented and personalized emails (e.g. sent from the account of the responsible sales person), and event reminder emails. However, ESPs are also moving forward, and for example ExactTarget now also offers drip-marketing support.

Data Management

Some demandgen vendors provide data management features for deduplication and normalization. My personal opinion is that these features are usually somewhat limited, and that they’re not mature enough to replace specialized data cleaning solutions (Ringlead, DemandTools). But that may change soon, as LMA vendors keep expanding their offerings.

Web Analytics

All Lead Management Systems offer some kind of web analytics, mostly focused on marketing metrics. Only LMA systems aimed at smaller companies tend to offer generic web analytics (page views, referrers, etc.). In all other cases, you would still need a general-purpose Web Analytics systems, such Google Analytics, Coremetrics, Omniture or WebTrends.

There are also some specialized Web Analytics vendors that identify the company name of anonymous leads (Leadlander) or website activity for known leads (Genius.com). However, more and more LMA systems include this functionality. It ranges from fairly basic (Market2lead) to more comprehensive (Marketo, Genius Enterprise, ActiveConversion, LeadGenesys, Pardot).

Web Content Management

Lead Management Systems also do not replace Web Content Management systems, although it may be more common to have WCM features in Demand Generation in the future (earlier post). The only web pages they currently manage are landing pages or microsites. Those are usually hosted on a subdomain such as http://marketing.company.com. There are some exceptions: both Marketbright and Marqui include a full WCM system.

Landing page optimization & Website Personalization

An area where many Lead Management Systems can still improve is landing page optimization. In my opinion they should offer more features to optimize landing page conversion, which critical for Search Marketing efforts. There are dedicated vendors with a superior feature set, such as ion interactive, magnify360 and Sitebrand.

I’ve heard some vendors thinking about personalizing offers based on behavior of anonymous visitors to make it more likely that they register for an offer. Currently I’m not aware of any LMA vendors that offer this functionality: let me know if you know more about this…

Search Marketing

Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click management are usually not included in Lead Management Systems. At most, LMA systems provide reporting on the lead source (which keywords, and organic search or PPC). It looks like SEO and PPC management will stay separate from Lead Management for the short to medium term. Personally I expect this will be integrated in the long term, as lead acquisition and lead management naturally complement each other, and cover the entire demand generation cycle.

Conclusion

Lead Management Automation vendors are rapidly expanding their functionality, but will not replace all specialized tools any time soon. I think we’ll see a consolidation of the industry of the next couple of years. Specialized vendors need to keep innovating, otherwise they will falter. Some categories are there to stay, such as Web Content Management and Web Analytics, but each will also expand their marketing automation features.

I’m not sure about Email Service Providers: In my opinion they either need to move towards lead management or become irrelevant. ExactTarget, Lyris and Silverpop are on the move, but VerticalResponse is at risk: even for small companies there are more effective lead management solutions (such as InfusionSoft).

What do you think: is there a future for pure-play ESPs?

Genius Enterprise Review

Today Genius.com launched their new Genius Enterprise product. It adds automated lead nurturing, real-time lead conversions, and lead scoring to its existing email marketing solutions.

Genius.com Product Suite

Genius.com is well-known for its sales notification product, SalesGenius. It allows sales people to send personalized emails to their prospects and monitor their response in real-time. The Genius Tracker – sort of an instant messaging client – gives immediate alerts if prospects visit the company’s website. Sales people can sign up individually, without having to involve the IT department.

Last year Genius.com introduced MarketingGenius, which allows marketing departments to send emails on behalf of the sales people. Again, the responsible sales person is notified of click-throughs via the Tracker.

The Enterprise product that is launched today extends this offering with lead nurturing and lead scoring. Now Genius.com is one step closer to becoming a viable competitor to more established marketing automation solutions, so I’ve added them to my list of Demand Generation systems.

Genius Enterprise

With the existing products emails are sent by a sales person or by the marketing department. With Genius Enterprise there can be lots of different events that trigger the sending of an email. Let’s take a quick peak at the new product:

genius-workflow-designer

The Genius Enterprise Workflow Designer

The screenshot shows that many events can start a workflow: a change in Salesforce.com, a website visit, an email open or the passage of a certain amount of time. Based on that, additional emails can be sent, the lead score can be updated or the responsible sales person can be alerted. For a more detailed review, see David Raab’s write-up.

Genius.com expects that this product will especially appeal to mid-side to large organizations. Most will use this together with the SalesGenius product. Pricing starts at $18,000 per year, including 5 SalesGenius seats.

How does Genius Enterprise Compare?

Many new customers will upgrade from Email Service Providers that don’t provide the real-time tracking and lead nurturing features. The closest competitor in this area may be ExactTarget, which offers email nurturing functionality.

Also, many companies will compare Genius.com with established Demand Generation products such as Eloqua. Genius does not provide some typical demand generation features, such as landing pages or microsites. However, not every company may need that. And Genius clearly has an edge in several areas:

  • quick implementation with no IT involvement
  • ease of use
  • marketing & sales collaboration
  • instant response
  • real-time salesforce.com integration

Conclusion

If your first priority in Demand Generation is to make better use of email campaigns to nurture prospects, and to foster sales & marketing collaboration, Genius Enterprise is an excellent choice. If you need other demand generation features like landing pages, you should compare it with full-featured demand generation products.

PS. Genius.com will be at the Sales 2.0 conference, this Wednesday and Thursday in San Francisco (4 & 5 March 2009). Stop by for a demo.

Demand Generation – Week in Review

Unfortunately the flu got the better of me last week, so my blogging and Twittering came to a halt. But let’s make the best of it, and collect a list of news from the past week. Lots of interesting things happened, and insightful articles were published. I probably missed several things, but these are the highlights:

Top-5 B2B Marketing tips

Jon Miller at Marketo summarizes the key findings of several B2B marketing thought leadership interviews.
1.Start with a solid base
2.Use Push AND Pull Tactics
3.Integrate Your Efforts
4.Innovate
5.Test, Test and Retest

Market2Lead 4.0 released

Market2Lead has launched version 4.0 with a completely revamped user interface. I was planning to write a short review, but haven’t found time for this yet. To be continued…

B2B marketing is Obsolete

Laura Ramos has published the final piece in the “Obsolescence of B2B marketing” series.
1.Build a marketing-only database to capture buyer insight
2.Shift from simply generating demand to managing it
3.Combine digital and traditional tactics to build dialogue around needs and motivations
4.Embrace the groundswell and community marketing principles

Social Media and B2B Marketing

Steve Woods wrote this blog post that gives some great ideas on how to use social media for B2B marketing.
1.Set your information free
2.Focus on being credible
3.Understand their buying process
4.Match your marketing to their buying process
5.Keep interest high through nurturing
6.Only sell when they are ready to buy

10 Tips For Tweeting A Live Conference

Mike Damphousse wrote an interesting article for those who want to use Twitter for PR, in this case for the coverage of an industry conference (the Sales 2.0 conference next week in San Francisco). I will also attend this conference, so let me know if you want to meet up!

Vtrenz changes name to Silverpop Engage B2B

After being acquired by Silverpop, Vtrenz continued under its own name for a while, but now the name has changed to Silverpop Engage B2B. Which makes me wonder: do they rule out using Engage for high-value B2C sales processes? In any case, it’s good they make a clear choice and are developing a new brand for this established marketing automation product.

Marketo 3.0 First Look

David Raab got a sneak preview of  the new release of Marketo and writes about usability aspects of Demand Generation systems in general.

Genius.com announces Genius Enterprise

Apparently it’s the week for new releases: also Genius.com is preparing a new product: Genius Enterprise. Key new features are automated lead nurturing and lead scoring. David Raab again has the scoop.

DemandGen Report Sales & Marketing Alignment Awards

Last week I wrote about the Stevie Awards and complained that few vendors had submitted their customer case studies. This week the DemandGen Report announced the winners of their Sales & Marketing alignment awards. The winners are:

  • Enterprise Category: eTrique implementation at Cisco
  • SMB category: Eloqua implementation at Sourcefire
  • Fast Track category: Genius implementation at ADX

I hope this overview is useful. Please add a comment to give your feedback, or to report important events that I’ve missed. Thanks!

Sales 2.0 Conference: for Marketing 2.0 too

I was recently invited to attend the Sales 2.0 Conference, which takes place on March 4 & 5, 2009 in San Francisco. I always like to attend conferences, so I gladly accepted. But I did wonder:

How does Sales 2.0 relate to Marketing Automation?

In the traditional way of thinking, if something is labeled “sales” it is clearly not marketing. Luckily, things are changing. The best definition of Sales 2.0 captures this, by mentioning the importance of having a customer-focused process that is supported by both sales and marketing:

sales 2.0 conference logo“Sales 2.0 brings together customer-focused methodologies and productivity-enhancing technologies that transform selling from an art to a science. Sales 2.0 relies on a repeatable, collaborative and customer-enabled process that runs through the sales and marketing organization, resulting in improved productivity, predictable ROI and superior performance.” – Pelin Wood Thorogood and Gerhard Gschwandtner

Having applied Sales 2.0 techniques in my own job, I’ve seen that the collaboration between marketing and sales has improved significantly: the sales team now knows what they can expect from marketing. The processes are better defined, and the outcomes are more measurable.

Sales 2.0 Tools

On this blog I often cover solutions that support the marketing & sales process. If you look at the sponsors of the Sales 2.0 Conference you get a good overview of the type of products offered in the Sales 2.0 space. This is just a subset:

  • Genius.com
    Email and analytics tools for demand generation; Genius.com offers products for both individual sales people as well as marketing teams
  • Marketo
    Lead Management software, to streamline the lead generation process from inquiry to sales-ready lead
  • Xactly
    Compensation management software; seems most interesting for larger sales organizations
  • LucidEra, Angoss, Birst
    Sales & Marketing Analytics; they will probably be upset that I bundled them together,but based on their websites it looks like they do a similar thing: providing better insight into sales & marketing performance
  • GroupSwim Sales Collaboration
    Collaboration software for Sales & Marketing teams; includes a strong knowledge sharing component.

And then there are a whole range of sales productivity tools (e.g. ConnectAndSell and Xobni) and data vendors (like JigSaw). Also, services vendors are present, from lead generation services to sales training.

The Conference Schedule

In addition to interesting Sales 2.0 vendors, the conference has an nice line-up of speakers. This includes Brian Carroll (author of Lead Management for the Complex Sale), Jim Dickie and Barry Trailer of CSO Insights, Judy Fick of Unisys and many more. The event is hosted by Gerhard Gschwandtner of SellingPower and David Thompson of Genius.com. If you want to meet up, please send me an email (leadsloth) or Tweet.

Are you planning to attend the conference? It looks like there will be some interesting topics for demand generation marketers, what is your take?

Demand Generation Market is Hot: LoopFuse, Genius.com

While the stock market tanks, the Demand Generation and Marketing Automation markets are gearing up. This week both LoopFuse and Genius.com published very positive news.

Genius.com: 200% revenue growth

genius.com logoGenius.com reports 200% revenue growth and a 50% increase in new customer acquistions (that’s a typo from their press release). I assume that means they’ve also increased revenue per customer, most likely because they are now selling MarketingGenius, which is an email marketing tool, which sells at a higher price point than the existing SalesGenius product (for individual sales people).

Genius.com now has over 50,000 Genius users, in over 100 countries worldwide. That is impressive. However, their core functionality (tracking of prospects’ website activity) is now also offered by Marketing Automation systems as part of a bigger offering. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Genius.com will continue to expand their offerings.

Loopfuse: Series A funding

loopfuse logoLoopfuse, a provider of open source marketing automation and email marketing solutions, has raised around $1.4 million in Series A funding led by True Ventures.

The only thing I know about them is that many of their customers are themselves open source software companies, such as Acquia, the company behind the Drupal Content Management System. As a matter of fact, Drupal is now integrated with LoopFuse. With the integration Loopfuse tags are automatically added to Drupal pages, and Drupal web forms are submitted into LoopFuse (at least, that’s what I understand based on the press release). I’d love to learn more about this system. Let me know your feedback or testimonials.

In any case, the LoopFuse people must be in euphoria after this news, at least based on the (somewhat cocky) comment on their blog:

“To Marketo and their overpriced Toy for Marketing Tots™, and Eloqua, with their Techological Torture Device™, I say, Get some coffee and try to stay awake. If it was bad for you when it was two guys (and a dog), it’s going to be an utter nightmare now.”

Tough times ahead?

You’d say that the good times must be ending some time? Or will marketing automation be the positive exception? Will Genius.com and Eloqua go IPO in 2010? That would really put the demand generation space on the map.