Back when I was writing a great deal about QlikView, I proposed that its fundamental value came from empowering business analysts to do work for themselves that would otherwise require IT support. (See, for example, this post, which has the virtue of pretty graphics.) This same notion of considering which users do which work has permiated my ideas of usability measurement for demand generation systems and usability in general. But to get back specifically to business intelligence systems, I think there is a particularly large gap between the capabilities...
Wednesday, 24 December 2008
Thursday, 18 December 2008
My feelings are hurt, people. No one has commented on last week’s post about usability measurement. I know it’s not the world’s most fascinating topic but I really wanted some feedback. And I do, after all, know how many people visit the site each day. Based on those numbers, there are a lot of you who have chosen not to help me.Oh well, no grudges here -- ‘tis the season and all that. I’m guessing the reason for the lack of comment is that the proposed methodology was too complex for people to take the time to assess and critique. In fact,...
Saturday, 13 December 2008
As Tuesday’s post suggested, my thoughts on usability measurement have now crystallized. To provide a meaningful and consistent comparison of usability across demand generation vendors, you could:1. Define a set of business scenarios that must be supported by the system. Each scenario would describe a type of marketing campaign and the system tasks required to run it. These tasks would cover system set-up, materials creation, campaign design, execution and evaluation. Some tasks would be common to several scenarios, while others would be unique....
Tuesday, 9 December 2008
I think we all know that the simplest practical measure of intelligence is how often someone agrees with you. On that scale, University of Ottawa Professor Timothy Lethbridge must be some kind of genius, because his course notes on Software Usability express my opinions on the topic even better and in more detail than I’ve yet to do for myself. Specifically, he lists the following basic process for measuring usability:- understand your users, and recognize that they fall into different classes- understand the tasks that users will perform with...
I noticed a visitor to the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems site from a new source the other day, which turned out to be a mention on blog by Jason Stewart of Demandbase. The context was a discussion of system selection and the Raab Guide was paired with a reference to a very excellent series of posts on system selection on Maria Pergolino’s Inbound Marketer blog. Actually, only two of promised three parts are posted, but the first two are well worth a look. In particular, part 2 has a long list of evaluation criteria. I haven’t compared...
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
My little tour of demand generation vendors landed at Pardot just before Thanksgiving. As you’ll recall from my post on Web activity statistics, Pardot is one of the higher-ranked vendors not already in the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems. So I was quite curious to see what they had to offer.What I found was intriguing. While last week’s post found that Marketbright aims at more sophisticated clients, Pardot explicitly targets small and midsize businesses (or SMBs as we fondly acronymize them [yes, that’s a word, at least according to http://www.urbandictionary.com/])....
Tuesday, 25 November 2008
I had a preliminary conversation last week with Mike Pilcher of Marketbright, one of the vendors I’ll probably end up adding to the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems. We didn’t look at the software itself, so I can’t comment on it in any detail. The slides did list a few unusual features, including “prospect portals” that help buyers and sellers to share information related to a project; a sales proposal builder; and features to work with sales partners. These seem pretty minor, although they do insert Marketbright more deeply into the...
Wednesday, 19 November 2008
As you might imagine, I’ve been trying to decide how to expand the set of products covered in the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems. My original plan had been to add several marketing automation vendors with significant presence in this market. The tentative list is Unica, Aprimo, Alterian, and Neolane.But I’ve also been approached by some of the other demand generation specialists. My original set of products was based on a general knowledge of which companies are most established, plus some consultation with vendors to learn who they felt...
Thursday, 13 November 2008
A funny thing happened as I was writing one of my usual rants on incorporating usability into the selection process. (The resulting paper is on the http://www.raabguide.com/ site, creatively titled "Building Usability into Your System Selection".)After a few bon mots that probably no one else will find clever ("Usability is hard to measure; features are easy to count" "Small hard facts beat big blurry realities") I got to describing the steps in a usability-aware selection process:define business needs define processes to meet those needs define...
Friday, 31 October 2008
The fourth and final item I had planned to add to the Demand Generation Guide Web site was posted yesterday. This is a spreadsheet on calculating the business value of a demand generation system. Basically it defines a formula for calculating profit based on factors that are affected by a demand generation system: number of leads, lead-to-customer conversion rate, net margin per customer, acquisition cost, lead handling cost and sales cost. It then identifies which factors are affected by different demand generation applications (lead generation...
Monday, 27 October 2008
Over the weekend I completed "Demand Generation vs. Customer Relationship Management", the third in my trio of papers explaining where demand generation systems fit into the larger world of customer management software. Like the other two, they are available at the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems Web site http://www.raabguide.com/. This one was much easier to write because I was able to draw on the six-task framework established in the first...
Thursday, 23 October 2008
As I promised (threatened?) in my last post, I've been furiously writing articles to explain demand generation for the new Guide Web site. I just finished #2, the not-very-creatively titled "Introduction to Demand Generation Systems" and posted it there.I won't recap the piece in detail, but am pleased that it does contain pictures. One illustrates my conception of how demand generation systems fit into the world of marketing systems, as follows:Is...
Monday, 20 October 2008
One of the first people I told about the new Guide to Demand Generation Systems -- an experienced database marketing consultant, no less -- was receptive to the Guide but asked whether there was any real difference between "demand generation" and "marketing automation" in general. This set off all kinds of alarms, since this was someone who clearly should have been familiar with the distinction.As with most things, my immediate reaction was to write up an answer. In fact, I've decided I need at least three pieces on the topic: one explaining demand...
Wednesday, 15 October 2008
I've emerged from the cave where Osama bin Laden and I were working on the new Guide to Demand Generation Systems (oops -- the Osama part was supposed to be secret) and am now catching up with the rest of the world. One news item that caught my attention described a recent National Research Council report that concluded data mining to find terrorists "is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts." See "Government report: data mining doesn't work well" from CNET.The article pretty much speaks for...
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
The new Guide Web site is now fully functional at www.raabguide.com. Please visit and comment. If you want to make a purchase, even better.Per yesterday's post regarding the comparison matrix and vendor tables, extracts of both are available on the site (under 'Look Inside' on the 'Guide' page). These will give a concrete view of the difference between the two formats.I'm sure I'll be adding more to the site over time. For the moment, we have to turn our attention to marketing: press release should have gone out today but I haven't heard from...
Monday, 13 October 2008
I won’t claim a direct cause-and-effect relationship, but is it really just a coincidence that the stock market finally had a good day exactly when my new Guide to Demand Generation Systems is about to be released? Think about it.That said, the new Guide Web site is in the final testing and should be launched tomorrow. It might even be working by the time you read this: try http://www.raabguide.com/. The Guide itself has been circulating in draft among the vendors for about two weeks. The extra time was helpful since it allowed a final round of...
Wednesday, 1 October 2008
I've been distracted this week by an unrelated client deadline, but the new Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems is indeed complete. A proper e-commerce site will be available shortly, but if anyone really can't wait, the salient details are:- 150+ point comparison matrix and detailed tables on: Eloqua, Manticore, Marketo, Market2Lead and Vtrenz, based on extensive vendor interviews and demonstrations- price: $595 for single copy, $995 for one-year subscription (provides access to updates as these are made--I expect to add more vendors and...
Friday, 5 September 2008
I have mostly been focused this week on formats for the new Demand Generation Guide. Since this is of interest to at least some regular readers of this blog, I suppose it’s okay to give you all an update.The issue I’m wresting with is still how to present vendor summaries. As of last week’s post, I had decided to build a list of applications plus some common issues such as vendor background, technology and pricing. Ease of use was still a nagging issue because ease of use for simple tasks can conflict with ease of use for complex ones.The only...
Thursday, 28 August 2008
Now that I have that long post about analytical databases out of the way, I can get back to thinking about demand generation systems. Research on the new Guide is proceeding nicely (thanks for asking), and should be wrapped up by the end of next week. This means I have to nail down how I’ll present the results. In my last post on the topic, I was thinking in terms of defining user types. But, as I think I wrote in a comment since then, I now believe the best approach is to define several applications and score the vendors in terms of their...
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
“You gotta get a gimmick if you wanna get ahead” sing the strippers in the classic musical Gypsy. The same rule seems to apply to analytical databases: each vendor has its own little twist that makes it unique, if not necessarily better than the competition. This applies even, or maybe especially, to the non-columnar systems that use a massively parallel (“shared-nothing”) architecture to handle very large volumes.You’ll note I didn’t refer to these systems as “appliances”. Most indeed follow the appliance path pioneered by industry leader Netezza,...
Wednesday, 6 August 2008
Tuesday, 5 August 2008
I finally had a conversation with columnar database developer Vertica last week. They have done such an excellent job explaining their system in white papers and other published materials that most of my questions had already been answered. But it’s always good to hear things straight from the source.The briefing pretty much confirmed what I already knew and have written here and elsewhere. Specifically, the two big differentiators of Vertica are its use of sorted data and of shared-nothing (MPP) hardware. Loading the data in a sorted order...
Monday, 4 August 2008
I had a very productive conversation on Friday with Fred Yee, president of ActiveConversion, a demand generation system aimed primarily at small business. As you might have guessed from my recent posts, I was especially interested in his perceptions of the purchase process. In fact, this was so interesting that I didn’t look very closely at the ActiveConversion system. This is no reflection on the product, which seems to be well designed, is very reasonably priced, and has a particularly interesting integration with the Jigsaw online business directory...
Thursday, 31 July 2008
Yesterday’s post on classifying demand generation systems prompted some strong reactions. The basic issue is how to treat ease of use when describing vendors.It’s hard to even define the issue without prejudicing the discussion. Are we talking about vendor rankings, vendor comparisons, or vendor analyses?- Ranking implies a single score for each product. The approach is popular but it leads people to avoid evaluating systems against their own requirements. So I reject it.- Vendor comparisons give each several scores to each vendor, for multiple...
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