Marketing Lessons from Chernobyl

I’ll be speaking about optimization this Wednesday at the Online Marketing Summit conference in Santa Clara, CA. Since I’m very comfortable with the actual topic, most of my prep time has been spent looking for pictures for my slides.One discovery was the image above, which shows is how I think most people imagine optimization: a team of dead-serious revenue engineers carefully tweaking dials and watching gauges until they find the perfect balance...

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Infor Epiphany Marketing and Interaction Advisor: Good Examples of B2C Marketing Automation

Epiphany was one of the high-fliers of an earlier marketing automation boom: launched in 1997 with an initial public offering in 1999, it traded stock for a full suite of marketing and CRM systems before its price collapsed. The remains were scooped up in 2005 by SSA Global, which was itself purchased in 2006 by enterprise software vendor Infor. Through all this, the company’s products continued to sell with little change. The crown jewel turned...

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Microsoft Buys Marketing Automation Vendor MarketingPilot: Start of Something Big?

Microsoft today announced the acquisition of marketing management system vendor MarketingPilot, which will become part of its Dynamics CRM group. Financial terms were not disclosed.MarketingPilot is best described as integrated marketing management for mid-tier companies. It has a pretty low profile in the B2B marketing automation world, partly because it serves a mix of B2C and B2B clients but mostly because it started as a marketing operations...

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ExactTarget Acquires Pardot: Great Exit for Pardot, Questionable Future for ExactTarget

ExactTarget announced its acquisition today of mid-tier marketing automation vendor Pardot, for just under $100 million ($95.5 million, to be exact). In one way, this was surprising: Pardot had seemed less interested in being purchased than others in the industry. But Pardot was also the only major marketing automation competitor without serious outside funding.  From that perspective it seems predictable that they would need access to more resources. Looking over the published materials and listening to the investor relations conference...

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SetLogik Offers B2B Marketers a Real Marketing Database

I’ve now done more detailed research into the SetLogik B2B data management system I mentioned in my Dreamforce post.  If anything, I’m even more impressed.I originally saw SetLogik as a tool to associate marketing leads with sales opportunities, even when they are not connected directly within Salesforce.com. That’s important in itself, since those missing links are the greatest obstacle to showing the value of B2B marketing efforts through...

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KXEN Packages Automated Predictive Models within Salesforce Apps

As I mentioned in my Marketing Automation Beer Goggles post, KXEN introduced a free lead scoring app  for Salesforce.com users at Dreamforce. KXEN has since given me a closer look at the lead scoring product, underlying technology, and future plans.First for details on Predictive Lead Scoring itself. As originally reported, it’s free and requires no configuration to set up. The trade-off for this simplicity is users have no control over which...

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