Marketing Automation
Inbound Marketing
Demand Generation

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 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):

• 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)!

Last year Laura Ramos, the B2B Marketing guru at Forrester, stated that the lead management automation market was confusing. There are many players, and many sub-categories. Demand Generation is probably the most confusing, it can mean two things:

• Software or services that get you in touch with new prospects so you can fill your database; this could be Search Engine Optimization (Hubspot), telesales (Phone Works) or contact databases (Demandbase, Jigsaw)
• But it can also mean: software that automates the lead management process once leads have arrived on your website, or are already in your database (Eloqua, Marketo, Market2Lead, etc.)

If I understand it correctly, Laura uses the first definition, while Eloqua – the leading lead management automation firm – often uses the second definition. Also, David Raab publishes the Guide to Demand Generation Systems, covering Eloqua, Vtrenz, Marketo, Manticore Technology and Market2Lead, which clearly fall within the second definition.

I must side with Laura: Eloqua and similar systems do not generate demand, they primarily manage leads (in a very elaborate way though :- )

So my suggestion: replace all instances of Demand Generation System with Lead Management System!

Does that makes sense or not?