When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I’ve been illustrating the point recently by asking whether every system I see is really a Customer Data Platform (CDP). The question comes up because nearly every customer management system builds its own customer database, which is one core function of a CDP. What distinguishes CDPs is that they make their database accessible to other execution systems and add some type of customer management intelligence. This intelligence ranges from behavior flags, segment codes,...
Wednesday, 27 November 2013
Friday, 22 November 2013
I spent the early part of this week at Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference. Here are my observations.The big news was for geeks. The main theme of the conference was Salesforce1, a new set of technologies that make it vastly easier to deliver and integrate mobile versions of Salesforce-based applications. It is apparently a major technical accomplishment and at least one of my technical friends was hugely impressed. But I can’t say I personally found it all that exciting. Perhaps we’ve reached the point where we expect technology...
Friday, 15 November 2013
There are about 3 million companies with revenue between $1 million and $5 million in the U.S., according to Manta. This is an enticingly huge market for marketing automation vendors, and one that seems largely untapped. The largest marketing automation vendor in the segment, Infusionsoft, has under 20,000 clients. This is barely scratching the surface. But this perspective is misleading. Many small businesses do their marketing through CRM,...
Friday, 8 November 2013
I had a conversation last week with a vendor whose pitch was all about providing execution systems with a shared database that contains a unified view of customer information from all sources. Sadly, they were unfamiliar with the concept of a Customer Data Platform as I’ve been developing it over the past few months and didn’t realize that they fit the definition.This post is not about that company.Instead, it will be about another company I also...
Friday, 1 November 2013
There was a really interesting discussion this week over on Scott Brinker’s ChiefMartec blog about the evolution of marketing automation systems into “platforms” that each support a swarm of satellite applications connected through open APIs. This is something I’ve already thought and written about quite a bit, but the discussion did advance my understanding of whether any marketing automation vendor gains a business advantage if third party applications...
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