Lead Management & Marketing Automation

2009 was the year in which Marketing Automation really took off. Several new vendors appeared on the market, many existing vendors experienced rapid growth, and Marketing Automation as a term gained popularity among B2B marketers. In this post I want to focus on the trends in Marketing Automation for 2010. I have asked many of the vendors, consultants and thought leaders to give their opinion. The response was overwhelming: see below for all 20 (!) predictions.

There are lots of interesting opinions, from practical to visionary, with consensus on some topics, and differences on others. These are the trends that are mentioned most often:

1. Improved ROI & Reporting
2. Integration of Social Media, Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation
3. Creation of buyer-centric content
4. The need for new analytical skills
5. Renewed focus on data quality
6. Sales & marketing alignment

I could not agree more with these predictions. (1) We’re at a point where we have lot of data about marketing performance, but it’s a big challenge to turn it into actionable information (2) we’re actively tweeting, blogging and using LinkedIn, but how can that be effectively managed, and how can it be measured? (3) It’s all about the buyer now, so why are you still writing about “my company this, my company that”? (4) Marketing is getting more of a science: creative marketers need to acquire new skills and more people with an analytical background need to enter the profession (5) Data quality is somewhat boring, but it is a prerequisite for effective marketing automation and (6) sales and marketing need act as one team to give buyers the best possible buying experience.

The Contributors

In alphabetical order (click on name to scroll down):

• Adam Blitzer, COO & Co-founder, Pardot
• Erik Bower, Co-founder, Marketbright
• Christoper Doran, CMO, Manticore Technology
• Matt Filios, COO, Net-Results
• Chris Frank, Director of Marketing, TreeHouse Interactive
• Malcolm Friedberg, Principal, Left Brain Marketing
• Kristin Hambelton, Sr Director of Marketing, Neolane
• Megan Heuer, Research Director, SiriusDecisions
• Carlos Hidalgo, President, Annuitas Group
• Kevin Joyce, CMO, Market2Lead
• Scott Mersy, VP Marketing and Products, Genius.com
• Adam Needles, Director, Field Marketing and B2B Marketing Evangelist, Silverpop
• Jeff Ogden, Director of Marketing, Aplicor & President, Find New Customers
• Jeff Pedowitz, President and CEO, The Pedowitz Group
• Maria Pergolino, Sr. Manager, Inbound Marketing, Marketo
• Matthew Quinlan, VP Field Operations, Loopfuse
• David Raab, Raab Associates & author, Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems
• Mike Volpe, VP of Inbound Marketing, Hubspot
• Steve Woods, CTO, Eloqua
• Fred Yee, CEO, ActiveConversion

Adam Blitzer, COO & Co-founder, Pardot (@AdamBlitzer)

The vast majority of leads generated on a website never have a meaningful conversation with a sales rep. The rep may try to contact the prospect several times but will give up after a certain point. If there is no mechanism to pass the lead back to the marketing team (in an automated or semi-automated fashion), the lead is gone forever.

Marketing automation solutions can facilitate remarketing to inactive leads, or so-called lead recycling, which helps drive value from a marketer’s most valuable asset, his or her lead database. An attached CRM system can kick the records back into a marketing automation system’s lead nurturing program and alert the assigned sales rep if the leads become active.

If you aren’t recycling leads (and most marketers aren’t), you are wasting a significant percentage of your marketing dollars.

Erik Bower, Co-founder, Marketbright (No Twitter)

Methods to the madness: Everybody has methodologies, Sales has SPIN, Customer Centric, etc. Marketing has none. In 2010 you’ll start to hear about marketing methods. At Marketbright, we believe Agile Marketing will emerge as a popular methodology so marketing professionals can adapt and survive in 2010.

Social Media Marketing FAIL: In 2010, we’ll see a lot of companies spend a lot of money trying to make a big splash into social networks and many will crash and burn. Social networks like Facebook and Linkedin will start to face customer defections as their networks get bogged down with marketing spam. Marketers will continue to struggle with the new Social Media reality and coming up with smart ways to influence the market’s conversation about their brand.

Twitter splinter: People who “get” twitter will continue to laugh at those who don’t and those who don’t will continue to not care, and to not twitter. A new movement will start called Refusetwits (like Refuseniks).

Spammers Beware: As email clients and service providers adopt features similar to those in Other Inbox, making it nearly impossible to email people you don’t have explicit opt in preferences from. This will place a higher premium on membership management and real, editorialized, well written monthly newsletters.

Resurgence of the Agency: Marketing departments have been trying to go it alone and do their own thing. In 2010, many will start to reengage with creative agencies and marketing consultancies as they realize that they can’t do everything and that finding a good marketing operations person is hard and getting harder.

Christoper Doran, CMO, Manticore Technology (@cdoran)

With shiny new marketing automation platforms now in place, 2010 promises to be the year that marketers begin to create business processes to measure and manage the marketing funnel. Best in class marketing teams successfully implement social media programs as part of their marketing mix, while others struggle to understand how social media fits in the puzzle: Is it sales enablement? Thought leadership? Demand Generation? SEO? Answer: All of the Above! Manticore Technology wishes you a full-funnel in 2010.

Matt Filios, COO, Net-Results (@KeeperMJF)

1. 2010 will be a year in which companies of all sizes begin to understand and embrace the power and value of marketing automation as a way of engaging with their entire funnel in an automated fashion. As Laura Ramos at Forrester stated in her report several months back, today only 2-5% of B2B companies are utilizing marketing automation/lead management automation. As companies recognize the significance of tying web analytics with email and direct mail campaigns, they can truly get a better understanding of where each of their prospects and leads are in the buying process. Having ‘conversations’ with these prospects as they become more sales-ready keeps the company top of mind when they are ready to buy.

2. The increased number of marketing automation vendors now allows companies to utilize a system without blowing their budget. There are now a number of vendors for every size of company to choose from, and I expect this to continue as this industry continues to heat up.

3. Marketing automation platforms and CRM systems will become more tightly integrated, further bridging the gap between marketing and sales. The virtual ‘wall’ in which marketers throw their leads over to salespeople now comes down, allowing for a collaborative effort of defining and refining qualified leads.

Chris Frank, Director of Marketing, TreeHouse Interactive (@treehousi)

The Rise of Inbound Marketing – The concept of using social media, search engine optimization and blogs together in driving early awareness stage traffic is still a fairly new one. Marketers over 2010 will get much savvier about doing this, however. Beyond the basic tactics for using each tool, there are going to be innovations in marketing automation that will help marketers better manage their efforts, measure results and target prospects.

Cohesive Communication – Many marketers are still struggling to escape from being reactionary to being more proactive. It is a huge shift for marketing teams to make, but a very important one to use marketing automation technology correctly. I see teams that make the shift being better able to compete on a campaign-by-campaign level, better satisfy sales team needs and ultimately being able to drive more pipeline opportunities. A funny thing happens when you start planning out communication—it actually happens, it addresses buying cycle gaps and it becomes more effective because it’s cohesive.

Getting Along – One of the biggest benefits of using a marketing automation solution is that it has the potential to put sales and marketing teams on the same page. The ability to define what a lead really is and then use your marketing automation system to qualify, nurture and pass along those leads is a basic benefit. In 2010 there will be many integrations between marketing automation and CRM systems that will change how teams work together to close business.

Read Chris’s full 2010 predictions on the Treehouse blog.

Malcolm Friedberg, Principal, Left Brain Marketing (@LeftBrainMktg)

I think that the business climate is slightly improving and 2010 will provide marketers with a little more flexibility. With that said, I believe the overall trend towards accountability, measurement and marketing ROI will continue to pick up steam. Consequently, marketing automation will play an increasingly important role in helping marketers meet CEO and board expectations as well as get insight into how best to allocate their budgets. The single biggest challenge that automation can address is reporting. At the programmatic level, closed-loop reporting will provide insight into the which tactics are generating the strongest results. Access to this data is the foundation for making budgetary and, when necessary, process changes. At the executive level, ROI reporting by business segment or marketing activity as well as overall marketing investment will enable the marketer to show revenue contribution and make meaningful contributions in discussion about the direction of the company and its products and services.

Kristin Hambelton, Sr. Director of Marketing, Neolane (@neolane)

Most VPs of marketing have come to terms with the fact that budgets won’t be increasing any time soon, so one of the clear themes for 2010 seems to be how marketing automation tools and processes can help organizations navigate the “new normal” and get greater returns on marketing investments.

Lead nurturing must match the complexity of the sales cycle: Despite the typical complexity of B2B sales cycles, B2B marketers have traditionally run very basic campaigns to match basic sales processes. Therefore, their lead generation and nurturing programs often focus only on email and web channels. In the coming year they will increasingly turn to centralized marketing automation systems to manage customer data consistently in order to nurture the right kind of leads in a consistent and coordinated way across communications channels.

Data-centric marketing must pave the way to greater customer intelligence, because the value of data can decline very quickly. By tightly integrating marketing automation solutions with existing data warehouse/master data management platforms, marketers will gain more confidence about the relevancy and quality of their data for improved campaign effectiveness, customer value and ROI.

Streamlining distributed marketing activities is critical to productivity and brand consistency: With many companies’ complex business models spanning multiple industries, geographies and languages, it will be increasingly important to gain more visibility and control over total marketing operations. With distributed marketing teams, marketing automation is key to supporting closed-loop marketing processes and for allowing remote teams to be more collaborative and productive by simplifying and automating key processes.

Megan Heuer, Research Director, SiriusDecisions (@megheuer)

1. Deal with Bad Data Once and For All: The effective use of marketing automation puts big demands on marketing data, and in most companies that data is in a sorry state. In 2010, Marketing Leaders will have to look at data as a strategic asset and take specific, measureable action to treat it as such. How much can be accomplished with marketing automation depends on the quality of data and the marketing function’s ability to make insightful use of it.

2. Address Legacy Organizational Structure Issues: Marketing cannot embrace the changing buying process if it is organized to support an internal construct of the selling process. Siloed, single-tactic teams must be broken down and rebuilt into an integrated function that can plan and execute multi-touch, buyer-behavior oriented campaigns that fully leverage marketing automation’s power.

3. Use Reporting as a Strategic Tool: Marketing Automation allows vastly better visibility into both buyer behavior and program results. Today, however, most reporting pulled from those tools is focused on telling what happened, and not on illuminating the best path forward. While it is essential for marketing to know what it got in return for a given investment, it’s equally important to take advantage of the power of analytics to define what works, what doesn’t and what actions need to be taken as a result. Testing, predicting and adjusting are words marketing leaders need to get comfortable with in 2010.

See also her recent blog post Five B2B Marketing Surprises From 2009

Carlos Hidalgo, President, Annuitas Group (@cahidalgo)

1. I think developing and implementing a holistic lead management process will be one of the greatest challenges companies face in 2010. This goes beyond just lead scoring and lead nurturing and when done correctly actually can solve many of the other issues that are faced today by organizations but in reality are just symptoms i.e. Marketing and sales alignment. It is an organization wide effort and takes hard work to think through all of the areas including: data, lead planning, lead routing, lead qualification (including scoring), lead nurturing, metrics and technology. While this is a large challenge, it is one that will pay one of the highest returns.

2. I think measurement will continue to be a challenge for organizations as it has been for years. However with the introduction of social and inbound it takes on a whole new face and some interesting layers. Organizations will need to first determine what they are looking to measure and therein lies one of the key challenges. Organizations often don’t know what or why they want to measure, so they try to measure everything. Going into this year, organizations will need to determine what key metrics they need and it is recommended that they focus these measurements around the buying cycle and buying behavior.

3. The last major challenge marketing departments will face is the adoption of technology. With marketing automation being on the rise, the adoption of this technology is a must for most organizations, but it will also require that organizations determine the ramifications of such a purchase. How will it impact their global execution? What will it do to their resource allocation and how will they provide the value? These questions should be answered by companies before making the purchase.

Kevin Joyce, CMO, Market2Lead (@nivenor1)

In 2010 CEOs will start to loosen the purse strings and invest again in marketing and sales. The budget won’t flood back to previous levels but rather trickle back, and the Marketing VP will have to account more vigorously than ever for each marketing investment. Therein lies the first business challenge of Marketing VPs: how to turn your organization into a measurable, accountable, productive machine, with KPIs and believable results data.

The second challenge will be in adapting their organization to take advantage of new ways of marketing, new media, new technologies. The choices of tools available to marketing are increasing rapidly, and the mix of marketing folks will need to shift a little more to the left brain marketers. The second challenge will therefore be to define and staff marketing operations roles in the organization.

The recession reminded companies of the value of marketing to their installed base, and to their in house lists. But if your data hygiene is on par with a New York subway restroom, marketing to the in house database will fail to meet expectations. The challenge is to have complete, accurate, current, and deep data on your prospects and customers so you can market to them effectively, and have the processes in place to slow the decay of the database.

Scott Mersy, VP Marketing and Products, Genius.com (@smersy)

Marketers need to connect Inboud Marketing to Marketing Automation. There’s a lot of discussion about trading traditional outbound marketing methods for inbound ones. However, Inbound Marketing by itself isn’t enough in a complex selling environment. VPs of Marketing need to maximize the revenue opportunity from inbound leads and optimize the burgeoning customer relationship after an expression of inbound interest is expressed. Marketing Automation enables delivery of appropriate messages, emails, website personalization – all designed to drive a “right-time” interaction with sales.

Marketers are challenged to measure further down the funnel. When measuring number of leads and cost per lead, marketing’s goals aren’t aligned with sales. Marketing talks about generating “enough” leads, but Sales inevitably (and rightfully) complains about the quality of the leads because, more often than not, the quality is sub-par. With proper lead nurturing enabled by marketing automation, marketing is held to much higher standards. Conversion metrics all the way through to revenue will quickly become the standard way to measure marketing.

Marketers must be publishers. Publish or perish is no longer just the mantra of academia, it’s a key aspect of a company’s marketing strategy. We need to keep publishing, but, more importantly, we need to engage in conversations. Without listening, “conversations” are simply monologues. Genius.com’s Barbra Gago (@barbragago) recently published a great slideshare to help marketers learn how to create great content.

Adam Needles, Director, Field Marketing and B2B Marketing Evangelist, Silverpop (@abneedles)

I think the greatest issue B2B marketing executives will face in 2010 is two-fold: 1.) responding to the continuing shift in power from vendor to buyer that Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are enabling and 2.) consequently improving their ability to re-cast marketing strategies and tactics in a buyer-centric context.

This power shift is not new; in fact, it is the Groundswell that Charlene Li wrote about and is a key focus of Paul Greenberg’s new Fourth Edition of CRM at the Speed of Light. But marketers awareness of the dynamics of this power shift and their ability to respond to it are just maturing.

Marketing automation is playing a key role as a central platform for responding to and delivering buyer-centric marketing programs; moreover, the agenda of marketing automation is rapidly expanding to address the continuity of buyer dialogue from inbound/upstream engagement – through mid-stream nurturing — to hand-off to a sales team member.

So in my mind 2010 will be the year of our shift from thinking about marketing automation as a way to gain operational efficiency to a way to reposition marketing — becoming more buyer-centric and ensuring continuity of dialogue with the buyer throughout his/her buying process and at all touch points. In fact, I believe marketing automation will be the catalyst for a new mass one-to-one style of engagement, that was not possible before and that is critical to winning in the ‘brave new world’ of B2B marketing we’re faced with.

Jeff Ogden, Director of Marketing, Aplicor & President, Find New Customers (@FearlessComp)

1. Learning the personas and issues for target customers so we can create Problem to Solution marketing stories.

2. Better align sales and marketing to empower sales to close faster.

3. Document the value of marketing for the executive leadership team.

Jeff Pedowitz, President and CEO, The Pedowitz Group (@jpedowitz)

I believe this year will be one of explosive growth for the category. I predict that over 1000 new companies will implement marketing automation tools and processes this year. There will be a strong emphasis on monetizing social media, achieving closed loop reporting, and improving campaign effectiveness. Lead Scoring will become a common standard and more marketers will start to use multi-touch campaigns for both existing customers and new prospects. This will be the year of Revenue.

Maria Pergolino, Sr. Manager, Inbound Marketing, Marketo (@InboundMarketer)

Marketing Automation will continue to be one of the biggest initiatives for B2B Marketing Executives in 2010, primarily because of the speed at which the return on the investment can be achieved.  While the implementation, process, and tools marketers select will be the tactical challenges faced by the marketing team, this will improve the marketing department by making:

1. Marketing success transparent to the entire organization, particularly the executive staff and sales team, because of the ability to analyze marketing campaign effectiveness and influence and share this success via dashboards and reports.

2. More out of one of the organizations most valuable assets, the contact database, by reinvigorating leads that are already known.  This will be done with lead recycling, remessaging, and highly personalized and segmented offers.  This also includes nurturing programs to grow and enhance relationships with current customers, helping make them more profitable.

3. Marketers able to score and nurture leads on activities outside of emails and the company website.  This includes social media networks, partner sites, blogs, and more.   This social marketing automation will not replace the current efforts of those already using marketing automation, but will enhance programs, improving results and creating a better understanding of the return that can be achieved through social media marketing.

Matthew Quinlan, VP Field Operations, Loopfuse (@mattquinlan)

Determining leadsource efficiency and reallocating the limited leadgen budget dollars to the most efficient sources. (Google adwords, banner ads on sites A/B/C, purchasing prequalified leads from companies like Tippit, purchasing email lists from vendor A/B/C, event sponsorships A/B/C, etc.)

Designing more sophisticated (non-linear) marketing programs that are more adaptive to the user’s behaviors along the way. (Regardless of what you may have seen, every program DOES NOT have to begin with an outbound email).

Focus within social media. New social media channels are appearing weekly and while they may not have hard costs, targeting a channel like Twitter effectively takes time and effort. Measuring the impact of each channel will allow you to pick/choose the key channels to focus upon.

David Raab, Raab Associates & Author, Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems (@draab)

As to the coming year, we’ll certainly see continued deployment of tools to market through social media and to give salespeople access to marketing automation data. I also think we’ll see more sophisticated reporting on marketing results, in particular a better job of connecting actual sales (via opportunities) to campaigns. I’d like to think we’ll see greater recognition of the importance of testing, but that could be wishful thinking on my part. One particular area I think is ripe for greater attention is really dealing with the need for more precisely targeted content. Many marketers find the volume of content they need to create is a stumbling block for better marketing automation; at the same time, they also lack ways to determine which content should be sent to particular people in particular circumstances. I think there is a common automated solution to both these problems that involves breaking content into snippets and delivering the right snippet at the right moment. I haven’t seen anyone actually address this in quite those terms, but it seems like a solution to a very pressing problem.

Mike Volpe, VP of Inbound Marketing, Hubspot (@mvolpe)

2010 will be the year of inbound marketing for two reasons.

First, the euphoria of social media marketing will turn into a hangover, followed by the epiphany that social media is just one tool, and the path to success is paved with a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy, not using one tool.

Second, marketers will realize that only automating the bottom of their funnel through lead nurturing does nothing to grow the top of the funnel, and to maintain a healthy long term pipeline, they need a complete inbound marketing strategy to attract more leads to their company at a low cost.

Steve Woods, CTO, Eloqua (@stevewoods)

2010 will bring interesting challenges to marketers. First, there will be a continuation of the expansion in the number of “touches” that a prospect has prior to closing – with many of those touches via social media channels. With this, there will be a deepening of the realization that assigning the revenue to the last touch only is not just incorrect, but very misleading. With that, 2010 will bring an increased focus on understanding influence, and attributing revenue, across all touches in the marketing process.

Secondly, the content we create will begin to change significantly. As social media approaches push marketers to be more engaged and less broadcasters, we will be pushed to re-tool to create more content, less “polished” than previously, but more interesting and shareable. With this, subject matter experts will have to be more involved in the content creation process as the high level messaging will no longer be sufficient.

The third challenge we will face in 2010 as marketers will be skills based. As marketing engages deeper in the buying funnel, contributing significantly to the overall lifecycle of a lead, marketers will be required to structure their thinking in terms of business process flows. The data, timing, exceptions, and dispositions of scoring a lead, handing the lead to sales, and having sales act on that lead will require a deeper understanding of data, process, and automation than we in marketing have historically been called on to have.

2010 will be a true turning point year as the change in our buyers’ buying processes has become so profound that we can no longer engage with them in an old way. The challenges and opportunities are there for us, and those who tackle them will see 2010 as a year of significant successes.

Fred Yee, CEO, ActiveConversion (@ActiveConv)

As one of the earlier vendors in this space, we’ve seen many changes (new vendors come in, some go dormant or never get traction), and predictions (eg when SFDC provides MA, what will happen to you?) and thus our thoughts for the new year are somewhat pragmatic. Here are the ones we think will stand out:

1. Sales will be more engaged in MA leading to more buy-in by the rest of the company
2. Social media will be seen as important but not the be all in marketing – and needs to be incorporated
3. These products will extend to complex sales cycles in B2C – and to other markets around the world
4. What matters in the end is pipeline and revenue – senior management doesn’t care how you do it.

The industry is far from being mature, with many potential customers still learning about MA. And the feature list is endless due to the new integration possibilities provided by SaaS every day. 2010 promises to be very exciting, yet volatile due to ongoing changes. We hope it’s the year that the hype diminishes, as it hurts the industry and the customers.

This is a list of Marketing Automation Systems, also called Demand Generation or Lead Management Automation systems.

I focus on Marketing Automation systems for companies that sell big-ticket items and have a long sales cycle, often in the B2B domain. My focus is on online marketing, although some systems that are mentioned below have good support for multi-channel marketing.

Explanation of the columns:

• Target customer: the size of companies for which the product is an ideal fit; there is overlap: for example, I’ve seen small companies being successful with Eloqua, and large companies benefiting from Hubspot
• Forrester Rating: rating as in Laura Ramos’s report “B2B Lead Management Automation Market Overview“
• Jep’s Rating: my personal take on the Marketing Automation market

Even though some vendors have been around for almost 10 years, Marketing Automation is still relatively new. According to Forrester, only 2-5% of B2B firms have invested in full-featured Marketing Automation. But that percentage is rapidly growing. Increasingly, B2B companies realize that Marketing Automation software requires skilled operators. But – if you decide to hire a Marketing Automation manager – what should you look for, and where do you find them?

Note: if you’re looking for a Marketing Automation job, check out the positions below…

Inspiration: Web Analytics 5 Years Ago

New technology requires people with a new set of skills, nothing new about that. The situation with Marketing Automation reminds me most of Web Analytics. In the early days, Web Analytics was touted as the tool that has all the answers. But as Web Analytics guru Avinash Kaushik described, the 10/90 rule applied: for every dollar you spend on a tool, you need to spend 9 dollars on analysts to get the most out of the tool.

If you believe in the 10/90 perspective, it’s suddenly much more important to hire the right people. Avinash has great advice for that in his Signs You Are a Great Analyst blog post. But that’s for web analysts. Let’s try to get a similar list for Marketing Automation managers.

Marketing Automation Jobs

Marketing Automation is really just starting. There are relatively few specialists today. But I see more an more job descriptions for Marketing Automation Managers appear. These are some recent jobs:

• Blackboard, Senior Manager, Marketing Operations and Technology (PDF), Washington DC
• Bronto, Marketing Campaign Manager (PDF), Durham NC
• Genius.com, Product Marketing Genius (PDF), San Mateo CA
• Neolane, Online/Digital Marketing Specialist (PDF), Newton MA
• Sophos, Marketing Automation Manager (PDF), Burlington MA
• Tableau, Marketing Campaign Manager (PDF), Seattle WA
• TrialPay, Marketing Automation Manager (PDF), Mountain View CA

When I talk to the hiring managers, they often tell me it’s hard to find suitable candidates, because very few people have all required skills. So let’s first take a look at which skills are typically required, inspired by the job profiles above.

Marketing Automation Job Requirements

First of all, in most cases the person is responsible for lead generation, lead nurturing and lead scoring. These are common job requirements:

Experience with:

• Marketing Automation software
• Sales Force Automation software (primarily Salesforce.com)
• Database management (segmentation, reporting and maintenance)
• Email Marketing
• List acquisition and import
• Website management and basic HTML
• Organic and paid search campaigns
• Data analysis, reporting and business intelligence
• Optimization & A/B testing, Continuous improvement

Required skills:

• Analytical and metrics-focused, Excel skills
• Technically savvy, comfortable with software applications
• Understanding of business needs (incl. sales & marketing processes)
• Good communicator, and ability to communicate with a non-technical audience

That sounds pretty challenging to me!

Challenge 1: Analytical Skills Required

Of your high school or college friends, how many were into mathematics and statistics? It my class it was a minority. And that’s just the minority that we need as Marketing Automation managers: people who are good with numbers and heroes with pivot tables. And ideally they’re also good with software applications and can do a little bit of HTML coding.

Challenge 2: Marketing & Sales Skills Required

These analytical skills need to be applied to solve business problems. A thorough understanding of sales & marketing processes is required. This is especially important because sales & marketing collaboration is often a bottleneck when implementing Marketing Automation. The marketing automation manager should just as easily talk to a sales person as to a web developer.

Challenge 3: Experience With 10+ Systems Required

And last but not least: it would be great if the marketing automation manager has experience with the systems that are used in marketing. In addition to a marketing automation systems, these are usually CRM systems, content management systems, pay-per-click systems and reporting applications. And this is not just familiarity with the tools, but also experience with the most common tasks like data acquisition, import, cleanup, testing and reporting.

My Conclusion: Learn From Management Consulting

Today, there are simply not enough people with the right skills and experience. My suggestions is to look at how strategy consultants like McKinsey have solved this problem. Hire associates just out of college, pay them well, coach them, let them work really hard and they grow into experienced Marketing Automation managers within a couple of years. Problem solved?

What is your take? How do we find enough people to support the Marketing Automation revolution?

This is a list of  interesting Marketing Automation and Demand Generation blogs. It is in progress, so feel free to suggest additional blogs: please also give a short summary of the focus of the blog, and why you like it. See below for the runners up section.

• Adam Needles‘ Propelling Brands blog (@abneedles)
  Adam – the former VP Marketing of the 451 Group – is finishing up a graduate project on marketing technology and publishes deep insights about marketing automation
• Ardath Albee’s Marketing Interactions blog (@ardath421)
  Ardath is a talented independent marketing consultant who writes about using content to engage with prospective customers; she really gets Marketing & Sales collaboration
• B2B Marketing Zone
  This is more of a meta-blog, aggregating a large number of B2B blogs, including this blog. I’ve discovered several new and interesting blogs on the B2B Marketing Zone, so highly recommended.
• Brenda Gelston’ Marketing Momentum blog (@brendagelston)
  This blog provides a strategic perspective on the demand generation process.
• Brian Carroll’s B2B Lead Generation blog (@brianjcarroll)
  Brian is the author of the authoritative book “Lead generation for the complex sale” and has a wealth of interesting articles on his blog
• Craig Rosenberg’s Funnelholic blog (@funnelholic)
  Craig has lots of experience with sales operations and demand generation, and shares his and other people’s knowledge via his blog. Lately he has published 15+ thought leadership interviews that are extremely insightful
• David Meerman Scott’s Web Ink Now blog (@dmscott)
  David’s posts are about content-based marketing, which is an important ingredient of successful lead generation. He’s also a talented writer, so it’s always fun to read.
• David Raab’s Marketing Automation technology blog (@draab)
  He covers lots of Marketing Automation vendors, he offers insights into usability of demand generation systems and covers various other topics.
• DemandGen Report (@dg_report)
  This is an leading online magazine for Marketing Automaton, which features vendor information, news articles a job board and more.
• Gary Katz, Marketing Operations at Work (@MOPartnersCEO)
  Gary is one of the forces behind promoting marketing operations as a important specialty, and on his blog he writes about this.
• Jame Ervin’s @Work blog (@jameane)
  Jame is an experienced demand gen practitioner, who really understands metrics-based lead generation.
• Jeff Ogden’s Fearless Competitor blog (@Jeff_Ogden)
  Jeff specializes in helping companies find new customers, he wrote a great e-book about that, and blogs about Demand Generation, primarily from a Sales perspective
• Ken Molay, Webinar Blog (@klmonline)
  Demand generation is not complete without covering Webinars, one of the key lead generation programs. Ken’s blog full of useful webinar ideas.
• Laura Ramos‘ B2B Marketing posts (@lauraramos)
  Laura is the star analyst at Forrester covering B2B Marketing, and frequently has some very interesting perspectives, such as a discussion around obsolescence of B2B marketing
• Mac McIntosh’s Sales Lead Insights blog (@B2B_Sales_Leads)
  Mac is a leading sales and marketing consultant and award-winning columnist for BtoB magazine. Like no other he understands B2B lead generation
• Maria Pergolino’s Inbound Marketer blog (@InboundMarketer)
  Maria is a demand generation practitioner who covers a variety of topics, from selection criteria to weekly summaries of interesting demand generation tweets. Maria now primarily writes on the Marketo blog
• Mike Damphousse’s Smashmouth Marketing blog (@damphoux)
  Mike’s blog focuses on a broad range of b2b marketing issues.  Although he covers other topics, demand generation from an outbound perspective is his forte.  Always a clear message and non-commercial.
• Rebekah Donaldson’s “Red on Marketing” (@b2bcommunicate)
  Rebekah and her team write about demand generation, with lots of good articles on content marketing and social media.
• Scott Brinker’s Chief Marketing Technologist blog (@chiefmartec)
  Scott writes about the technical aspects of marketing, and about post-click marketing in particular.
• Upshot Institute
  This is a resource website with information on marketing automation vendors, podcasts, webinars and blogs.

Vendor blogs

• ActiveConversion B2B Marketing Blog
  This is my new discovery. Recently, they are writing more posts, and some good ones too! For example, I like Six Steps to Punching Above Your Weight.
• Eloqua Marketing Insights and Digital Body Language
  For Eloqua I’m following two blogs. I really like their CTO Steve Woods’ blog: Digital Body Language. The corporate blog is a little more corporate, but some good articles.
• Genius.com B2B Marketing for Faster Sales Blog
  Genius publishes some good best practices posts, combined with some company-related news.
• Hubspot Internet Marketing Blog
  Hubspot is probably both the most active and most popular blog of this list. It is about Internet marketing: very interesting posts about SEO, PPC and Social Media.
• Market2Lead Marketing Automation and Lead Management blog
  The Market2Lead blog got a boost when Kevin Joyce joined the company. He writes in-depth posts on Marketing Automation best practices.
• Marketbright blog
  On average every week Mike Pilcher publishes an interesting post. Lately he has published a couple of interesting though leadership posts, most recently with Ardath Albee (her blog was in last week’s Top-10 ).
• Marketo Modern B2B Marketing Blog
  Marketo publishes a steady stream of interesting articles, now including articles written by Maria Pergolino from the Inbound Marketer blog (also on the earlier Top-10 ).
• Net-Results blog
  This is one of the newer vendors in the Demand Generation market, focused on the SMB market.
• Pardot Corporate Blog and Adam Blitzer’s B2B Marketing ROI blog
  Pardot’s corporate blog has practical tips for email marketing, landing pages, search engine optimization and marketing automation. Marketing VP Adam Blitzer posts less frequently but goes more in-depth.
• Reachforce: The B2B Lead
  Reachforce publishes almost daily Lead Generation tips. They’re numbering them, and they are at #230 now!
• ReadyContacts Lead Data Management blog
  This blog focuses on B2B list building, not surprisingly, because that’s what ReadyContacts focuses on.
• Silverpop Engage B2B Blog
  Will Schnabel has published some really good pieces, such as “5 Tips to Improve Efficiencies Using Lead Management Solutions“. Recently Adam Needles joined the Silverpop team, so they now blogging even more actively.

Runners up

• Robert Lesser’s Acquiring Minds blog (@RobertLesser)
  Offers perspectives and research on how B2B marketers are best using old and new media to generate demand.
• Ask Justin Hitt blog (@hittjw)
  Justin writes about challenges faced by sales and marketing professionals in B2B technology services organizations
• Melissa Paulik’s “The Marketing Survivalist” blog (@MelissaPaulik)
  Melissa is a marketing coach and trainer who writes about business blogging, lead nurturing, and many more B2B marketing topics.
• Jason Kort’s Marketing Automation Now
  Jason blogs about CRM and Marketing Automation, including an occasional podcast.

In the spirit of Twitter’s Follow Friday I’d like to finally publish the remaining Demand Generation blogs that I enjoy reading. Earlier I published the Top 10 Demand Generation vendor blogs and the Top 10 Marketing Automation Blogs.

Of course, there were many great blogs that I forgot to include, so here are the remaining ones!

• B2B Marketing Zone
  This is more of a meta-blog, aggregating a large number of B2B blogs, including this blog. I’ve discovered several new and interesting blogs on the B2B Marketing Zone, so highly recommended.
• DemandGen Report
  This is an leading online magazine for Marketing Automaton, which features vendor information, news articles a job board and more.
• Rebekah Donaldson’s “Red on Marketing”
  Rebekah and her team write about demand generation, with lots of good articles on content marketing and social media.
• Brenda Gelston’ Marketing Momentum blog
  This blog provides a strategic perspective on the demand generation process.
• Gary Katz, Marketing Operations at Work
  Gary is one of the forces behind promoting marketing operations as a important specialty, and on his blog he writes about this.
• Ken Molay, Webinar Blog
  Demand generation is not complete without covering Webinars, one of the key lead generation programs. Ken’s blog full of useful webinar ideas.
• Net-Results blog
  This is one of the newer vendors in the Demand Generation market, focused on the SMB market.
• Jeff Ogden’s Fearless Competitor blog
  Jeff specializes in helping companies find new customers, he wrote a great e-book about that, and blogs about Demand Generation, primarily from a Sales perspective
• Upshot Institute
  This is a resource website with information on marketing automation vendors, podcasts, webinars and blogs.

I hope you found some interesting new blogs in this list. And again, if you have any blog recommendations, please let me know: I’m looking forward to discover new thought leaders.

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

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:

• ActiveConversion B2B Marketing Blog
  This is my new discovery. Recently, they are writing more posts, and some good ones too! For example, I like Six Steps to Punching Above Your Weight.
• Eloqua Marketing Insights and Digital Body Language
  For Eloqua I’m following two blogs. I really like their CTO Steve Woods’ blog: Digital Body Language. The corporate blog is a little more corporate, but some good articles.
• Genius.com B2B Marketing for Faster Sales Blog
  Genius publishes some good best practices posts, combined with some company-related news.
• Hubspot Internet Marketing Blog
  Hubspot is probably both the most active and most popular blog of this list. It is about Internet marketing: very interesting posts about SEO, PPC and Social Media.
• Market2Lead Marketing Automation and Lead Management blog
  The Market2Lead blog got a boost when Kevin Joyce joined the company. He writes in-depth posts on Marketing Automation best practices.
• Marketbright blog
  On average every week Mike Pilcher publishes an interesting post. Lately he has published a couple of interesting though leadership posts, most recently with Ardath Albee (her blog was in last week’s Top-10 ).
• Marketo Modern B2B Marketing Blog
  Marketo publishes a steady stream of interesting articles, now including articles written by Maria Pergolino from the Inbound Marketer blog (also on the earlier Top-10 ).
• Pardot Corporate Blog and Adam Blitzer’s B2B Marketing ROI blog
  Pardot’s corporate blog has practical tips for email marketing, landing pages, search engine optimization and marketing automation. Marketing VP Adam Blitzer posts less frequently but goes more in-depth.
• Reachforce: The B2B Lead
  Reachforce publishes almost daily Lead Generation tips. They’re numbering them, and they are at #230 now!
• ReadyContacts Lead Data Management blog
  This blog focuses on B2B list building, not surprisingly, because that’s what ReadyContacts focuses on.
• Silverpop Engage B2B Blog
  Will Schnabel has published some really good pieces, such as “5 Tips to Improve Efficiencies Using Lead Management Solutions“. Lately they have been publishing some customer case studies and guest articles, so I hope they will again publish some in-depth articles.

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.

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

A couple of people recently asked me which blogs I’m frequently reading. So here’s the list. Please send me your favorite blogs, because there must be lots of great Marketing Automation blogs that I haven’t found yet!

BTW 1: Some of these blogs are more about lead generation, demand generation or inbound marketing, so maybe the title of this blog post is not ideal. But regardless of the terminology, these are the blogs that I enjoy most :- )

BTW 2: I have not included vendor weblogs: I will put those in a separate post.

In alphabetical order, these are the blogs that I read most frequently, and that I can heartily recommend.

• Adam Needles‘ Propelling Brands blog (@abneedles)
  Adam – the former VP Marketing of the 451 Group – is finishing up a graduate project on marketing technology and publishes deep insights about marketing automation
• Ardath Albee’s Marketing Interactions blog (@ardath421)
  Ardath is a talented independent marketing consultant who writes about using content to engage with prospective customers; she really gets Marketing & Sales collaboration
• Brian Carroll’s B2B Lead Generation blog (@brianjcarroll)
  Brian is the author of the authoritative book “Lead generation for the complex sale” and has a wealth of interesting articles on his blog
• Craig Rosenberg’s Funnelholic blog (@funnelholic)
  Craig has lots of experience with sales operations and demand generation, and shares his and other people’s knowledge via his blog. Lately he has published 15+ thought leadership interviews that are extremely insightful
• David Meerman Scott’s Web Ink Now blog (@dmscott)
  David’s posts are about content-based marketing, which is an important ingredient of successful lead generation. He’s also a talented writer, so it’s always fun to read.
• David Raab’s Marketing Automation technology blog (@draab)
  He covers lots of Marketing Automation vendors, he offers insights into usability of demand generation systems and covers various other topics.
• Jame Ervin’s @Work blog (@jameane)
  Jame is an experienced demand gen practitioner, who really understands metrics-based lead generation.
• Laura Ramos‘ B2B Marketing posts (@lauraramos)
  Laura is the star analyst at Forrester covering B2B Marketing, and frequently has some very interesting perspectives, such as a discussion around obsolescence of B2B marketing
• Mac McIntosh’s Sales Lead Insights blog (@B2B_Sales_Leads)
  Mac is a leading sales and marketing consultant and award-winning columnist for BtoB magazine. Like no other he understands B2B lead generation
• Maria Pergolino’s Inbound Marketer blog (@InboundMarketer)
  Maria is a demand generation practitioner who covers a variety of topics, from selection criteria to weekly summaries of interesting demand generation tweets
• Scott Brinker’s Chief Marketing Technologist blog (@chiefmartec)
  Scott writes about the technical aspects of marketing, and about post-click marketing in particular.

(oops, that’s 11 blogs)

Let me know your favorite blogs, so I can put them in a follow-up post. Thanks!

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!

This is a list of Demand Generation systems, also called Marketing Automation or Lead Management systems. I need your input here: do you have experience with any of these systems? If yes, please send me an email ().

This page gives a quick overview of the market. For a detailed evaluation, buy the Raab Guide.

• Eloqua
  Eloqua has a high-end offering, supplemented by solid professional services. Their sweet spot are customers with over $10 million in revenues, but they also have some happy smaller customers (Lite package for $1500/m, Feb-09). If you want the go with the most established player in the market, go with Eloqua, but make sure you have adequate budget and skills available.
• Marketo
  Marketo is one of the fastest-growing players in this market: implementation is fast, their Sales & Marketing collaboration features are top notch, and non-technical users find it easy to use. They’re still adding new features almost every month, and a fast-growing customer base is a sign of success. Their sweet spot are mid-size companies.
• Market2Lead
  Market2Lead offers one of the most complete feature sets. Usability has been improved with a redesigned user interface, early 2009. Many of their customers are mid- to large-size software companies.
• LeadGenesys
  LeadGenesys is one of the most marketing process oriented of the bunch. They have good analytics, and solid features for sales people, such as notifications when people from certain companies are on your website (for both anonymous and registered users).
• Pardot
  Pardot pricing starts a little lower than most other vendors, and their contracts are month-to-month. Their system is seemingly simple, but very powerful at the same time: everything just works with minimal configuration. However, their Salesforce integration could be easier to use, and would benefit from some additional features.
• Act-On
  Act-On is somewhat similar to Pardot in market positioning (focused on small to medium-size companies), but they differentiate themselves with a unique integration with Webex that really simplifies the logistics around organizing webinars. See my review here » and also David Raab’s post
• Manticore Technology
  Manticore is one of the early Demand Gen vendors (since 2001). They have a comprehensive offering, including a professional version that is more affordable. Their lead scoring system and campaign builder are very feature-rich.
• Silverpop Engage B2B
  Silverpop Engage B2B (formerly Vtrenz)  has been around for a while too.  They also have all required functionality, including an integration with Microsoft Dynamics.
• Marketbright
  Marketbright seems focused on the larger marketing organizations. Many years ago they started as a marketing content management vendor, but have added extensive demand generation features. Implementation is very flexible, but can also take some time. David Raab has a short overview of Marketbright on his blog.
• Genius.com
  Genius.com started as an email marketing tool for sales people with real-time notifications, but has expanded to include comprehensive email marketing, lead nurturing and lead scoring functionality. See my review here »
• eTrigue
  eTrigue officially launched in November ‘08, but the software is already in version 3 because it was developed in-house within a marketing agency. It seems a mid to high-end solution, starting at $2,500 per month.
• ActiveConversion
  ActiveConversion offers a fairly complete marketing automation suite for SMB companies. They are very good at identifying valuable leads in your database and on your website (both anonymous and identified leads). In addition to integrated email marketing , you can also integrate your existing VerticalResponse, Constant Contact or ExactTarget accounts. See my review here »
• Marqui
  Marqui integrates web content management and campaign management. Marqui was acquired by private investors in the fall of 2008. Their pricing is per user, and is on the low end, so at this time it’s not entirely clear to me how they compare to other vendors: any input is welcome.
• LoopFuse
  LoopFuse is founded by former jBoss people. It is good at wading through large lists of leads and filtering out the valuable prospects. Therefore it’s used by many open source companies that must identify the relatively small ratio of qualified prospects within a very large database of people who registered to download.
• Hubspot
  HubSpot is an inbound marketing software system for small and medium-sized businesses that combines social media, SEO, blogging, landing pages, lead intelligence and alerts, Salesforce.com integration and marketing analytics. At this time, it does not include email marketing, email nurturing or lead scoring. See my review here »
• FirstReef SalesFusion360
  FirstReef combines 3 previously unconnected technologies, Web Analytics, Email Marketing, and CRM; and then it adds lead scoring.
• Infusionsoft
  Infusionsoft provides an automated follow-up marketing solution for small businesses. They even include billing and accounting features!
• TreeHouse Interactive
  A marketing automation system for SMBs with strong ROI reporting; now includes a Salesforce.com integration. See David Raab’s review for details
• OfficeAutopilot by Moonray
  This marketing automation system also includes CRM functionality, but can also integrate with Salesforce.com. For details, see the review by David Raab.
• Zoomio
  Zoomio is a European player in the marketing automation market. I had never heard of them until they approached our Amsterdam office. They have a great process view on marketing campaigns. They lack a Salesforce.com integration, but provide a web services API for custom integrations. See my review here »
• LeadLife
  To be covered. See also David Raab’s first take.
• True Influence
  To be covered. See also David Raab’s first take.
• TFC
  Kind of a hybrid services + software solution. To be covered
• Net-Results
  Marketing automation software designed and priced specifically for the SMB market.

So there are lots of different vendors. My general advice is to do a trial with any product that you are considering. Only when you are actually setting up sample campaigns yourself (rather than viewing a demo) you get a better feel for which solution is best for you.

Maria Pergolino at the Inbound Marketer blog has a good list of selection criteria for demand generation systems.