David Raab

I released the 2012 edition of our B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) report today, an event that deserves more hoopla that I’ve given it. The VEST provides by far the most detailed, objective information available on industry vendors. It includes nearly 200 data points on 21 products, thumbnail sketches of each vendor’s strengths and weaknesses, and three industry quadrants showing leaders in different market segments. It’s also interactive: you can change the weights assigned to different items and watch the vendors zoom around the quadrant as a result. For those of us who don’t get out much, that’s downright exciting.

Although the VEST is primarily intended to help people who are buying a marketing automation system, its database also provides a statistical portrait of the industry. After rooting around in the numbers like pig hunting truffles, here’s what I dug up:

Core marketing automation is...

I had an earful last week from Genoo president Kim Albee, who told me that I’ve misclassified her target customers as “micro businesses” (under $5 million revenue) for the past two years. She tells me nearly all of her clients are larger than that. I’ve revised my big list of demand generation vendors to reflect this.

The main cause of my misunderstanding was Genoo’s starting price of $199 per month, which is below any small or mid-size business system. But the lowest price for Genoo with CRM integration is $599 per month, and I consider CRM integration a required feature in a B2B marketing automation product. This is still low for small-to-mid systems but not wholly out of line. On the other hand, I should have been warned by the fact that Genoo doesn’t provide a built-in CRM system, which is pretty much the key defining...

The list of independent marketing automation systems shrank by one yesterday when Leadformix  was purchased by sales enablement vendor CallidusCloud for $9 million.

The price is surprisingly low for an established marketing automation vendor. In my VEST report from last July, LeadFormix reported 210 clients, concentrated among mid-size firms, and 82 employees. This would translate to around $7 million revenue, for a price of just over 1x revenue, compared with 4 to 5x revenue in other recent acquisitions.  I suspect the actual LeadFormix revenue was considerably lower than $7 million, but, even so, the price may give pause to investors in other marketing automation firms who are hoping for a great payout.  But bear in mind that LeadFormix was largely self-financed, so they may have sold at...

Marketers recognize the potential reach of social media, but are rightly frightened that they can’t control the message. Most social marketing applications sidestep the issue by focusing on creating communities (Jive, Lithium), monitoring conversations (Radian6, Trackur) and running promotions (CrowdFactory, Nextbee). Marketing automation vendors have mostly worked on making it easy to post and share messages and to capture social data. (See my December 8 post for details.)

Influitive tackles the control issue head on.  It applies game-based motivational methods to company advocates. Marketers define “...