NitroMojo and Marketing Advocate Specialize in Marketing Automation for Channel Partners

As I noted in a post last year, there is a universe of specialized marketing automation systems for companies that sell through channel partners. These products address several interrelated challenges: distributing leads to partners without losing track of performance; distributing partner-customized versions of company-created content; and helping partners run their own marketing campaigns. Here are two more vendors with related offerings:

NitroMojo focuses primarily on lead distribution and tracking. Its particular strength comes from sending follow-up email surveys directly to leads to find out what happened: were they contacted by the channel partner? did they eventually buy? is there someone else at their company to talk to? is there something else they might purchase? This addresses one of the central dilemmas of selling through partners, which is losing contact with the leads and, as a result, not being able to measure effectiveness of corporate lead generation programs. NitroMojo says about 60% of leads reply to the surveys, giving enough information for meaningful analysis of program, partner, and salesperson performance.

The system also provides sales reps and sales managers with basic sales automation, including abilities to enter and rate new leads, review and prioritize existing leads, track call results, send materials from a central library, and schedule future calls. Corporate marketers can build campaigns with multiple events, create landing pages, capture revenues and costs, distribute leads with complex routing rules, score leads on behaviors and salesperson ratings, and measure performance.  Pricing starts around $3,000 per year plus $100 per user per month, which is usually less than the cost of marketing automation and sales automation systems that NitroMojo would replace. The current version of NitroMojo system was introduced about a year ago and had three global clients with more than 150 users when I spoke with the company in April.

Marketing Advocate is designed to help technology resellers who lack in-house marketing skills. It provides a resellers with a vendor-sponsored microsite that gives them access to marketing content, prospect lists, acquisition email campaigns, and automated nurture emails.  Resellers define their target prospects when they set up the system and then purchase suitable lists from suppliers including NetProspex, Jigsaw, and Harte-Hanks. These prospects, and other names uploaded by the reseller, receive standard campaign emails at three week intervals until they respond by visiting a landing page. The system then sends them personalized emails offering contents related to their behaviors. The leads are also scored and, when ready, can be passed to a telephone lead qualification service or directly to the vendor’s sales automation system. The sponsoring vendor doesn’t see the lead names until the reseller enters them into the system.

The point of all this is to minimize the effort that the resellers themselves must put into marketing. Marketing Advocate typically builds 25 to 30 prospecting campaigns tailored to different customer segments, and lets the resellers select the campaign and segments they want to pursue. The company also assembles and selects content to offer in the emails, has negotiated arrangements with the list providers, gives reports that analyze program response quantity and quality, and offers a concierge service to review results with resellers and discuss improvements. The system can also integrate with event management software and Google AdWords. Partner agencies are available for telephone lead qualification, search engine optimization, and paid search.

Marketing Advocate typically costs $500 to $700 per month per reseller, with some portion of the expense usually subsidized by the sponsoring vendor. Marketers pay $1 per name for prospects. The system is used by divisions at several major technology vendors including IBM, Microsoft, and HP.

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Treehouse Interactive Refines Its Features and Targets Larger Firms

Summary: Treehouse Interactive has been slowly enhancing its marketing automation system with features that appeal to experienced users. Its new clients are larger firms and half are switching from another marketing automation product that they found inadequate. This might foreshadow attrition problems at other vendors.

It’s been nearly two years since my last review of Treehouse Interactive. Here's an update.

The big news is, well, that there’s no big news. Treehouse has been quietly but steadily growing its business (up 30% this year), improving its product, and attracting more demanding clients. One telling statistic is that about half its new customers are replacing an existing marketing automation system – a sure sign that Treehouse offers features that only an experienced marketer will realize are missing from other products.

A bit of background: Treehouse started in 1997 with the Sales View sales automation product. It added Marketing View marketing automation in 1999 and Reseller View partner management after that. Its marketing automation system offers the usual range of functions: email, Web analytics, landing pages, multi-step campaigns, lead scoring, CRM integration, ROI reporting. The greatest divergence from industry norms is Treehouse contacts always enter campaigns by completing a form. Other systems select campaign members with rules that can access a broader set of data.

In addition, Treehouse originally required all subsequent campaign steps to execute the same actions on the same schedule. This is considerably more rigid than the branching capabilities built into most marketing automation products. Treehouse has since enabled imported data to trigger campaign actions, and promises behavior-based triggers in the near future. See my original post for more details.

Treehouse’s developments since that post have largely played to its strengths. I’ll group these into themes, with the caveat that I’m combining enhancements introduced at different times in the past year and a half.

- form integration. Treehouse has continued to expand how clients can use its forms, which were already more powerful than most. The system can now generate HTML code to embed forms within external Web pages, allowing users to create standard Javascript or Facebook-compatible non-Javascript versions, or both. It can also post form responses using HTTP Send commands, which can send data to GoToWebinar (replacing GoToWebinar’s own registration forms) or to other systems such as product registration, CRM and customer support. The HTTP Send avoids API calls or Web Services, although Treehouse offers data exchange through Web Services as well. The system also has an “instant polling” feature to embed surveys within any Web page.

- CRM synchronization. When I last wrote about Treehouse, it had just added Salesforce.com integration. It has since added a connector for Oracle CRM On Demand. It has also improved its CRM integration to synchronize data in real time, show Treehouse events within the CRM interface, and allow salespeople to add leads to campaigns and remove them. CRM integration is handled through forms that map fields from one system to another. These forms also contain update rules (controlling when data from one system replaces data in the other) and action rules (specifying when to take actions such as sending an email or updating a list subscription). The action rules are particularly significant in the context of Treehouse’s forms-based campaign design, since they provide a way to modify lead treatments that isn’t based on the original form entries.

- Web analytics. The system now builds separate Web activity profiles for individuals (whether identified or anonymous, so long as they have a cookie), for all individuals associated with a company, and for companies identified via IP address but lacking an associated individual. An individual’s lead score can be based on both individual and company Web behaviors. The system has expanded its referral reporting to track results by the exact referring URL. The CRM integration can now capture the search phrase and other referral details for leads imported from Salesforce.com Web to Lead forms: this required special processing since Salesforce.com embeds the information within a text string.

- download and document management. Treehouse can now tie multiple downloads to a single request form. It can list the leads that downloaded a specific document (a feature Treehouse says is unique, although I can only confirm that it's rare), as well as counting total downloads and downloads by unique leads. Downloads are now part of contact history along with emails, campaigns, purchases, click-throughs and form actions. The system also maintains a library of available documents. These can be stored outside of Treehouse so long as there’s a tag for Treehouse to call them.

- social media integration. Marketing messages can include a button that lets recipients create social media messages with an embedded URL. The messages will be sent under the recipient’s own identity in systems including Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and Digg. Although many demand generation vendors now offer some type of social sharing, Treehouse introduced this feature back in May 2009. Emails and forms can also include a forward-to-a-friend button that allows recipients to enter several email addresses at once.

- other advanced features. These include fine-grained access permissions, split and multivariate testing, easy addition of new tables linked to contact records, and support for non-Roman languages such as Chinese. All are features particularly relevant to larger or more sophisticated clients.

Treehouse pricing has changed a bit since my original post, now starting at $749 per month for up to 7,500 contacts in the database. This is still firmly in small business territory, although Treehouse’s advanced features really make it a better fit for more sophisticated marketers, who are usually at larger companies. The company is a particularly good fit for channel marketers who can benefit from its Reseller View system.

Treehouse now has nearly 200 total clients, of which more than half use Marketing View. This makes it one of the smaller players competing for mid-to-upper size clients, a particularly crowded niche. But the firm is self-funded and profitable, and it's selling on features, not cost. So I'd expect it to be a reliable vendor, even if someone else eventually dominates its segment.

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Treehouse Interactive MarketingView Combines Demand Generation with Campaign ROI Tracking

I originally spoke with Treehouse Interactive in late January, but didn’t write about them because weren’t quite ready to talk about their Salesforce.com integration. Since that’s critical to many demand generation users, I didn’t want to give a false impression by leaving it out. They officially announced the Salesforce integration and other changes (more about that later) on March 3. So now the story can be told.

It’s actually quite a long story, dating back to the company’s initial sales automation system in 1997, followed by its MarketingView demand generation product in 1999. Finding a demand generation system that old is always a surprise, since most products were launched much more recently. But Treehouse Interactive has been growing quietly all that time, now reaching a perfectly respectable 100 or so clients, of which more than half use MarketingView. The balance use the company's sales automation product, SalesView, (which is what let them get away without Salesforce.com integration for so long), and a partner portal called ResellerView.

Given the number of perfectly acceptable demand generation products available today, it’s tempting to focus on SalesView and ResellerView as items that really distinguish Treehouse Interactive. But any evaluation still has to start with the core functions, since each product does these slightly differently. MarketingView is no exception. It provides a pretty typical email builder, with a graphical editor that lets users modify HTML templates and insert personalization variables. The system is a little above-average in that emails can contain if/then rules to display different images based on differences in lead data. These rules require a little script writing, which is always a negative in my book, but nothing fancy.

MarketingView is also unusual, though not unique, in assigning a separate IP address to each client. This ensures that spam problems of one client don’t spill over to affect the others. I was just discussing this recently with another vendor who also gives everybody their own IP address, and it seems the cost is quite minimal. So far as I’m concerned, it should be provided by every vendor as part of their base price.

Emails can be attached to lists, which are either maintained within the system based on user-specified criteria or imported from external files. The list definition interface is a bit old-school: users fill in the blanks on a form that shows lead attributes and a few behavioral attributes: numbers of email clicks, email opens, spending and purchases. This is a very limited set of behavioral attributes compared with what’s available in other demand generation systems. Users do get to specify threshold values, greater or less than operators, and date ranges to measure.

Although most of the old fill-in-the-blanks query interfaces could only select records that contained all of the user-specified field values, MarketingView is a bit more flexible: it lets users specify ‘or and ‘not’ relationships among the values. The interface to do this still seems old-fashioned: users get a numbered list of the specified attributes and can then write script statements such as “1 and 2 or 3 and not 4’. This is a bit awkward, since you have to look somewhere else on the screen to find what each number refers to. It could also be misread when users leave out parentheses. But it’s basically serviceable and I suspect few MarketingView clients have trouble with it.

The system’s Web form builder is considerably more advanced. Users can create questions on the fly, list allowable answers, specify required items, and either map results to database fields or store them separately. New questions are automatically added to a library so they can be reused across surveys. Users can also set up form-level rules that let visitors save and return to a partly completed form, set an expiration date on a survey, authenticate the visitor based on their name or other value, prepopulate the form with data for known visitors, and control what happens when someone fills out the same form more than once. (The system can prevent this, overwrite previous entries, or keep each the entry as a separate record.) Forms can be hosted by Treehouse Interactive or run on an external server. MarketingView can also accept data posted from forms built outside of the system.

This is all good stuff, and some is above the industry average. But what really makes a MarketingView form special is what happens after it’s completed. Users can attach any number of actions to a form and can assign both selection conditions and time intervals to each action.

In fact, campaigns in MarketingView are nothing more (or less) than a list of actions attached to a form. This is certainly an unusual approach, and I can’t quite decide whether I like it. Since the available actions include all the basic campaign tasks – sending an email, adding a name to a list, sending a lead to the CRM system, notifying a salesperson, and sending another form – it does give users pretty much the same functionality as a conventional approach. In fact, it’s arguably just a slightly different version of the small linear campaigns I consider the basic building blocks of an easy-to-use campaign interface. (See my earlier posts on the topic.) But without a way to visualize the flow of leads from one campaign to another, it would be difficult to use MarketingView for complex programs.

There are also some significant limits to how MarketingView implements its campaign approach. The most important is that filter conditions for subsequent actions can only look at the data on the original form. This means you can’t define different paths based on other information in a lead record or on subsequent behaviors. Even something as simple as removing a lead from a campaign when the lead is sent to sales requires terminating the campaign for everyone.

Another issue is that all campaign actions are scheduled relative to the original form submission date. This means a campaign can’t wait for an event and then resume once it happens. I think there are ways to achieve similar outcomes by having separate campaigns trigger each other in sequence: that is, one campaign would end in an email that links to a form, which would then start another campaign. But this seems considerably harder to manage than doing everything within one campaign.

Ok, people looking for the world’s fanciest campaign manager are probably not going to buy MarketingView. But there are other reasons to consider it.

- ROI reporting. This was the other key point in the March 3 release. MarketingView can pull revenues from the CRM opportunity records, pretty much the same as other demand generation systems. But it can also insert a script into an ecommerce system transaction page to pull revenues from online purchases. The system links this to campaigns through a campaign cookie on the buyer’s computer. I believe this is unique to MarketingView, at least as a standard feature.

MarketingView can capture revenue from sales through channel partners. It does this through its ResellerView portal, which attaches campaigns to leads it distributes to partners and reports back the revenues that partners associated with those leads. The actual process is somewhat complex: the leads are actually sent to a sales automation system (SalesView or Salesforce.com) which in turn sends them to ResellerView, and the revenues are read from opportunity records that also flow from ResellerView to sales automation to MarketingView. This makes it easier to coordinate direct sales and channel sales efforts, and it done without requiring partners to license the sales automation system. Again, this particular approach is apparently unique.

Taken together, these features mean that MarketingView can link campaigns to revenue for direct sales (from CRM), online sales (from ecommerce) and channel sales (from ResellerView). For clients who use those channels, the result is a more complete view of campaign revenue than traditional demand generation products can provide. The system also captures campaign costs, so it can produce a proper ROI report. In fact, it produces a bevy of statistics based on the different combinations of cost, revenue and response statistics, such as cost per opportunity and revenue per click.

- lead scoring based on actual purchases. This draws on the revenue capture features just discussed. In particular, the system has a “Who’s Climbing Up” report that tracks scores based on recent email opens, link clicks, form submissions, purchase dollars and purchase events. This report can be turned into a list of hot prospects. Of course, every demand generation system does lead scoring. But access to online and channel revenue lets MarketingView produce more useful scores, at least for companies where those sales are important.

- Partner management. I didn’t examine ResellerView in depth, but it promises a broad set of partner relationship management features. In addition to distributing leads and capturing revenues, the system can register partners, give them accounts, manage contracts, track their certifications, manage coop advertising, send newsletters and other notices, register opportunities, and even run a dealer locator. The only other demand generation vendor I’ve seen with serious partner management is Marketbright.

- bidirectional real time data synchronization with sales automation. This applies both to SalesView and Salesforce.com. Several, but not all, demand generation vendors support real time synchronization. It’s increasingly important as marketing and sales groups both stay involved with leads throughout their life cycle, instead of abruptly ending marketing involvement once sales takes over. Real time alerts from demand generation to sales automation are relatively easy to find, but real time updates from sales automation to demand generation are not. MarketingView does both. The value of real time updates from sales automation is that they can trigger immediate automated responses from demand generation, allowing more attentive service than sales people can do on their own.

Treehouse Interactive products are offered as subscription services. Pricing on MarketingView is based on the number of contacts in the database, without regard to volume of emails or Web transactions. A 5,000 contact system costs $599 per month, which puts the pricing firmly in small business territory. Rates for higher volumes are confidential but still priced with small and mid-sized business in mind. The company has some larger firms among its existing clients, although it isn’t actively targeting the enterprise market. Treehouse Interactive also offers custom development, Web design, and marketing consulting.

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