If you suspected that my last two blog posts were a way to avoid writing a post that ranks vendors on usability, you’re probably right. You’re also spending way too much time worrying about my blog, although I appreciate the attention. But it turns out that those posts served a purpose beyond procrastination. In particular, they helped me to clarify the distinction between small campaigns focused on a specific treatment (e.g. offering a white paper or promoting a Webinar) and the larger process of managing the flow of treatments. I’d already...
Thursday, 26 February 2009
Wednesday, 25 February 2009
Yesterday’s chance to write the first review (I think) of Marketo’s 3.0 release seems to have awakened a long-dormant journalism gene. I spoke today with Genius.com, whose new nurture marketing system, Genius Enterprise, will officially launch next week. Knowing I’ll have another scoop if I write about it at once, I find I can’t resist.Genius.com itself has been around since 2006, when it launched SalesGenius. This gave salespeople a desktop “Tracker” that instantly alerted them when prospects responded to their emails, and showed which pages the...
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
I’m going to diverge just slightly from my current obsession with usability to talk about a conversation I had today with Marketo President and CEO Phil Fernandez, who previewed the 3.0 release of his flagship product, scheduled for March 3.The changes that Fernandez described seemed good but subtle. Major themes were greater access to detailed information, more precise targeting, and tighter integration with Salesforce.com. The company also reworked the user interface--of more than 200 total changes in this upgrade, about 75 were tied to usability--although...
Monday, 23 February 2009
I’ve continued to refine my checklist of items for scoring demand generation vendors on "ease of use for basic functions". Results are promising in that my draft rankings agree with my intuitive sense of where different vendors fall on the continuum. Of course, actually publishing the rankings will throw some vendor noses out of joint, so I need to think a bit more how to do it so that everything is as transparent and reasonable as possible. I’m hoping to release something towards the end of this week, but won’t make any promises.In preparation,...
Monday, 16 February 2009
I’ve more or less decided to offer a free summary of the demand generation vendor information in the Raab Guide. This might cost me a few sales, but it will enable many more people to benefit from the Guide’s contents and will make the Guide more valuable to the sponsoring vendors.This raises the issue of exactly what should be in the summary listings. It seems that what people really want is an easy way to identify the best candidates for their particular situation. (Duh.) This suggests the summary should contain two components: a self-evaluation...
Friday, 13 February 2009
Back in early January I posted a discussion on treatment of Company-Level Data in Demand Generation Systems . At that time, I posed a set of specific questions to the demand generation vendors in the Raab Guide. Yesterday the final answer trickled in. Results are summarized in the table at the end of this post.More than anything else, this exercise reinforced my understanding of how hard it is to answer a seemly simple question about a software product’s capabilities. My original approach in the Guide had simply been to ask vendors whether they...
Thursday, 12 February 2009
Two economists are walking on the street. One looks down and sees a $100 bill. He points it out to the other, who says, “It must be counterfeit. If that were a real $100 bill, someone would have already picked it up.”The point of the story, other than showing why economists are poor comedians, is that the market is not always perfectly efficient. I suppose no one needs reminding of that in today’s economic situation. But most of us still assume there is a reasonable relationship between price and value. This is why it’s hard to imagine that...
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Tuesday, 10 February 2009
Jorge Luis Borges wrote surreal stories that dealt largely with the nature of literature and authorship. His most popular work is Ficciones, a collection that includes a series of reviews of books that were never written. This was a brilliantly efficient conceit, allowing Borges to analyze the themes and issues of these stories without going to the trouble of actually creating them.In that same spirit, here are summaries of three blog posts I doubt I’ll ever have time to actually write.1. The Future of Technology Analysts. This is a reaction to...
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
My new obsession with Twitter (follow me as @draab) has led to several messages from people who seemed to have trouble choosing between Eloqua and Marketo . This is a bit perplexing, since those products are at the opposite ends of the spectrum: Marketo being relatively low cost / limited functionality / easier to learn, and Eloqua being higher cost / richer functionality / takes more training. It shouldn't be hard to figure out which one suits you better.But what really concerns me is that these people are apparently limiting their consideration...
Monday, 2 February 2009
I occasionally do some development work in QlikView and have made no secret that I think it's a great product. So part of me was pleased to learn that it had been listed as a—indeed, the only—“champion” in an Aberdeen Group AXIS report on BI/Performance Management software. Although QlikView has received plenty of recognition recently, it deserves every bit of it. (If you’ve been living in a cave, or, much worse, not reading this blog: QlikView is...
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