Predictions for B2B Marketing in 2011

I don't usually bother with the traditional "predictions for next year" piece at this time of year. But I happened to write one in response to a question at the Focus online community last week. So I figured I'd share it here as well.

Summary: 2011 will see continued adjustment as B2B lead generators experiment with the opportunities provided by new media.

1. Marketing automation hits an inflection point, or maybe two. Mainstream B2B marketers will purchase marketing automation systems in large numbers, having finally heard about it often enough to believe it's worthwhile. But many buyers will be following the herd without understanding why, and as a result will not invest in the training, program development and process change necessary for success. This will eventually lead to a backlash against marketing automation, although that might not happen until after 2011.

2. Training and support will be critical success factors. Whether or not they use marketing automation systems, marketers will increasingly rely on external training, consultants and agencies to help them take advantage of the new possibilities opened by changes in media and buying patterns. Companies that aggressively seek help in improving their skills will succeed; those who try to learn everything for themselves by trial-and-error will increasingly fall behind the industry. Marketing automation vendors will move beyond current efforts at generic industry education to provide one-on-one assistance to their clients via their own staff, partners, and built-in system features that automatically review client work, recommend changes and sometimes implement them automatically. (Current examples: Hubspot's Web site grader for SEO, Omniture Test & Target for landing page optimization, Google AdWords for keyword and copy testing.)

3. Integration will be the new mantra. Marketers will struggle to incorporate an ever-expanding array of online marketing options: not just Web sites and email, but social, mobile, location-based, game-based, app-based, video-based, and perhaps even base-based. Growing complexity will lead them to seek integrated solutions that provide a unified dashboard to view and manage all these media. Vendors will scramble to fill this need. Competitors will include existing marketing automation and CRM systems seeking to use their existing functions as a base, and entirely new systems that provide a consistent interface to access many different products transparently via their APIs.

4. SMB systems will lead the way. Systems built for small businesses will set the standard for ease of use, integration, automation and feedback. Lessons learned from these systems will be applied by their developers and observant competitors to help marketers at larger companies as well. But enterprise marketers have additional needs related to scalability, content sharing and user rights management, which SMB systems are not designed to address. Selling to enterprises is also very different from selling to SMBs. So the SMB vendors themselves won't necessarily succeed at moving upwards to larger clients.

5. Social marketing inches forward. Did you really think I'd talk about trends without mentioning social media? Marketers in 2011 will still be confused about how to make best use of the many opportunities presented by social media. Better tools will emerge to simplify and integrate social monitoring, response and value measurement. Like most new channels, social will at first be treated as a separate specialty. But advanced firms will increasingly see it as one of many channels to be managed, measured and eventually integrated with the rest of their marketing programs. Social extensions to traditional marketing automation systems will make this easier.

6. The content explosion implodes: marketers will rein in runaway content generation by adopting a more systematic approach to understanding the types of content needed for different customer personas at different stages in the buying cycle. Content management and delivery systems will be mapped against these persona/stage models to simplify delivery of the right content in the right situation. Marketers will develop small, reusable content "bites" that can be assembled into custom messages, thereby both reducing the need for new content and enabling more appropriate customer treatments. Marketers will also be increasingly insistent on measuring the impact of their messages, so they can use the results to improve the quality of their messages and targeting. Since this measurement will draw on data from multiple systems, including sales and Web behaviors, it will occur in measurement systems that are outside the delivery systems themselves.

7. Last call for last click attribution: marketers will seriously address the need to show the relationship between their efforts and revenue. This will force them to abandon last-click attribution in favor of methods that address the impact of all treatments delivered to each lead. Different vendors and analysts will propose different techniques to do this, but no single standard will emerge before the end of 2011.

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Case Study: Using a Scenario to Select Business Intelligence Software

Summary: Testing products against a scenario is critical to making a sound selection. But the scenario has to reflect your own requirements. While this post shows results from one test, rankings could be very different for someone else.

I’m forever telling people that the only reliable way to select software is to devise scenarios and test the candidate products against them. I recently went through that process for a client and thought I’d share the results.

1. Define Requirements. In this particular case, the requirements were quite clear: the client had a number of workers who needed a data visualization tool to improve their presentations. These were smart but not particularly technical people and they only did a couple of presentations each month. This mean the tool had to be extremely easy to use, because the workers wouldn’t find time for extensive training and, being just occasional users, would quickly forget most of they had learned. They also wanted to do some light ad hoc analysis within the tool, but just on small, summary data sets since the serious analytics are done by other users earlier in the process. And, oh, by the way, if the same tool could provide live, updatable dashboards for clients to access directly, that would be nice too. (In a classic case of scope creep, the client later added mapping capabilities to the list, merging this with a project that had been running separately.)

During our initial discussions, I also mentioned that Crystal Xcelsius (now SAP Crystal Dashboard Design) has the very neat ability to embed live charts within Powerpoint documents. This became a requirement too. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to embed one of those images directly within this post, but you can click here to see a sample embedded in a pdf. Click on the radio buttons to see the different variables. How fun is that?)

2. Identify Options. Based on my own knowledge and a little background research, I built a list of candidate systems. Again, the main criteria were visualization, ease of use and – it nearly goes without saying – low cost. A few were eliminated immediately due to complexity or other reasons. This left:

• Xcelsius


• Advizor Solutions


• TIBCO Spotfire


• QlikView


• Lyzasoft


• Tableau Software

3. Define the Scenario. I defined a typical analysis for the client: a bar chart comparing index values for four variables across seven customer segments. The simplest bar chart showed all segment values for one variable. Another shows all variables for all segments, sorted first by variable and then by segment, with the segments ranked according to response rate (one of the five variables). This would show how the different variables related to response rate. It looked like this:


The tasks to execute the scenario were:

• connect to a simple Excel spreadsheet (seven segments x four variables.)*


• create a bar chart showing data for all segments for a single variable.


• create a bar chart showing data for all segments for all variables, clustered by variable and sorted by the value of one variable (response index).


• provide users with an option to select or highlight individual variables and segments.

Because my requirements assumed users would have little or no training, I specified that the scenarios be performed without taking time to learn each system. This made the testing easy, but I should stress it's an unusual situation: in most cases, systems are run by people who use them often enough to become experts. For situations like that, you should have an experienced user (often a vendor sales rep or engineer) execute the scenario for you. In fact, one of the most common errors we see is people judging a system by how easily they can run it without training – something that favors systems which are easy to use for simple tasks, but lack the functional depth clients will eventually need to do their real jobs.

4. Results. I was able to download free or trial versions of each system. I installed these and then timed how long it took to complete the scenario, or at least to get as far as I could before reaching the frustration level where a typical end-user would stop.

I did my best to approach each system as if I’d never seen it before, although in fact, I’ve done at least some testing on every product except SpotFire, and have worked extensively with Xcelsius and QlikView. As a bit of a double-check, I dragooned one of my kids into testing one system when he was innocently visiting home over Thanksgiving: his time was actually quicker than mine. I took that as a proof I'd tested fairly.

Notes from the tests are below.

• Xcelsius (SAP Crystal Dashboard Design): 3 hours to set up bar chart with one variable and allowing selection of individual variables. Did not attempt to create chart showing multiple variables. (Note: most of the time was spent figuring out how Xcelsius did the variable selection, which is highly unintuitive. I finally had to cheat and use the help functions, and even then it took at least another half hour. Remember that Xcelsius is a system I’d used extensively in the past, so I already had some idea of what I was looking for. On the other hand, I reproduced that chart in just a few minutes when I was creating the pdf for this post. Xcelsius would work very well for a frequent user, but it’s not for people who use it only occasionally.)
  

• Advizor: 3/4 hour to set up bar chart. Able to show multiple variables on same chart but not to group or sort by variable. Not obvious how to make changes (must click on a pull down menu to expose row of icons).

• Spotfire: 1/2 hour to set up bar chart. Needed to read Help to put multiple lines or bars on same chart. Could not find way to sort or group by variable.
  

• QlikView: 1/4 hour to set up bar chart (using default wizard). Able to add multiple variables and sort segments by response index, but could not cluster by variable or expose menu to add/remove variables. Not obvious how to make changes (must right-click to open properties box – I wouldn’t have known this without my prior QlikView experience).

• Lyzasoft: 1/4 hour to set up bar chart with multiple variables. Able to select individual variables, cluster by variable and sort by response index, but couldn’t easily assign different colors to different variables (required for legibility). Annoying lag each time chart is redrawn.

• Tableau: 1/4 hour to set up bar chart with multiple variables. Able to select individual variables, cluster by variable, and sort by variable. Only system to complete the full scenario.

Let me stress again that these results apply only to this particular scenario. Specifically, the ability to cluster the bars by segments within variables turned out to be critical in this test but doesn't come up very often in the real world. Other requirements, such as advanced collaboration, sophisticated dashboards or specialized types of graphics, would have yielded very different ranks.

5. Final Assessment. Although the scenario nicely addressed ease of use, there were other considerations that played into the final decision. These required a bit more research and some trade-offs, particularly regarding the Xcelsius-style ability to embed interactive charts within a Powerpoint slide. No one else on the list could do this without either loading additional software (often a problem when end-user PCs are locked down by corporate IT) or accessing an external server (a problem for mobile users and with license costs).

The following table shows my results:


6. Next Steps. The result of this project wasn’t a final selection, but a recommendation of a couple of products to explore in depth. There were still plenty of details to research and confirm. However, starting with a scenario greatly sped up the work, narrowed the field, and ensured that the final choice would meet operational requirements. That was well worth the effort. I strongly suggest you do the same.


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* The actual data looked like this. Here's a link if you want to download it:

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Tableau Software Adds In-Memory Database Engine

Summary: Tableau has added a large-scale in-memory database engine to its data analysis and visualization software. This makes it a lot more powerful.

Hard to believe, but it's more than three years since my review of Tableau Software’s data analysis system. Tableau has managed quite well without my attention: sales have doubled every year and should exceed $40 million in 2010; they have 5,500 clients, 60,000 users and 185 employees; and they plan to add 100 more employees next year. Ah, I knew them when.

What really matters from a user perspective is that the product itself has matured. Back in 2007, my main complaint was that Tableau lacked a data engine. The system either issued SQL queries against an external database or imported a small data set into memory. This meant response time depended on the speed of the external system and that users were constrained by the external files' data structure.

Tableau’s most recent release (6.0, launched on November 10) finally changes this by adding a built-in data engine. Note that I said “changes” rather than “fixes”, since Tableau has obviously been successful without this feature. Instead, the vendor has built connectors for high-speed analytical databases and appliances including Hyperion Essbase, Greenplum, Netezza, PostgreSQL, Microsoft PowerPivot, ParAccel, Sybase IQ, Teradata, and Vertica. These provide good performance on any size database, but they still leave the Tableau user tethered to an external system. An internal database allows much more independence and offers high performance when no external analytical engine is present. This is a big advantage since such engines are still relatively rare and, even if a company has one, it might not contain all the right data or be accessible to Tableau users.

Of course, this assumes that Tableau's internal database is itself a high-speed analytical engine. That’s apparently the case: the engine is home-grown but it passes the buzzword test (in-memory, columnar, compressed) and – at least in an online demo – offered near-immediate response to queries against a 7 million row file. It also supports multi-table data structures and in-memory “blending” of disparate data sources, further freeing users from the constraints of their corporate environment. The system is also designed to work with data sets that are too large to fit into memory: it will use as much memory as possible and then access the remaining data from disk storage.

Tableau has added some nice end-user enhancements too. These include:

- new types of combination charts;
- ability to display the same data at different aggregation levels on the same chart (e.g., average as a line and individual observations as points);
- more powerful calculations including multi-pass formulas that can calculate against a calculated value
- user-entered parameters to allow what-if calculations

The Tableau interface hasn’t changed much since 2007. But that's okay since I liked it then and still like it now. In fact, it won a little test we conducted recently to see how far totally untrained users could get with a moderately complex task. (I'll give more details in a future post.)

Tableau can run either as traditional software installed on the user's PC or on a server accessed over the Internet. Pricing for a single user desktop system is still $999 for a version that can connect to Excel, Access or text files, and has risen slightly to $1,999 for one that can connect to other databases. These are perpetual license fees; annual maintenance is 20%.

There’s also a free reader that lets unlimited users download and read workbooks created in the desktop system. The server version allows multiple users to access workbooks on a central server. Pricing for this starts at $10,000 for ten users and you still need at least one desktop license to create the workbooks. Large server installations can avoid per-user fees by purchasing CPU-based licenses, which are priced north of $100,000.

Although the server configuration makes Tableau a candidate for some enterprise reporting tasks, it can't easily limit different users to different data, which is a typical reporting requirement. So Tableau is still primarily a self-service tool for business and data analysts. The new database, calculation and data blending features add considerably to their power.

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QlikView's New Release Focuses on Enterprise Deployment

I haven’t written much about QlikView recently, partly because my own work hasn’t required using it and partly because it’s now well enough known that other people cover it in depth. But it remains my personal go-to tool for data analysis and I do keep an eye on it. The company released QlikView 10 in October and Senior Director of Product Marketing Erica Driver briefed me on it in a couple of weeks ago. Here’s what’s up.

- Business is good. If you follow the industry at all, you already know that QlikView had a successful initial public stock offering in July. Driver said the purpose was less to raise money than to gain the credibility that comes from being a public company. (The share price has nearly doubled since launch, incidentally.) The company has continued its rapid growth, exceeding 15,000 clients and showing 40% higher revenue vs. the prior year in its most recent quarter. Total revenues will easily exceed $200 million for 2010. Most clients are still mid-sized businesses, which is QlikView’s traditional stronghold. But more big enterprises are signing on as well.

- Features are stable. Driver walked me through the major changes in QlikView 10. From an end-user perspective, none were especially exciting -- which simply confirms that QlikView already had pretty much all the features it needed.

Even the most intriguing user-facing improvements are pretty subtle. For example, there’s now an “associative search” feature that means I can enter client names in a sales rep selection box and the system will find the reps who serve those clients. Very clever and quite useful if you think about it, but I’m guessing you didn’t fall off you chair when you heard the news.

The other big enhancement was a “mekko” chart, which is bar chart where the width of the bar reflects a data dimension. So, you could have a bar chart where the height represents revenue and the width represents profitability. Again, kinda neat but not earth-shattering.

Let me stress again that I’m not complaining: QlikView didn’t need a lot of new end-user features because the existing set was already terrific.

- Development is focused on integration and enterprise support. With features under control, developers have been spending their time on improving performance, integration and scalability. This involves geeky things aimed at like a documented data format for faster loads, simpler embedding of QlikView as an app within external Web sites, faster repainting of pages in the AJAX client, more multithreading, centralized user management and section access controls, better audit logging, and prebuilt connectors for products including SAP and Salesforce.com.

There’s also a new API that lets external objects to display data from QlikView charts. That means a developer can, say, put QlikView data in a Gantt chart even though QlikView itself doesn’t support Gantt charts. The company has also made it easier to merge QlikView with other systems like Google Maps and SharePoint.

These open up some great opportunities for QlikView deployments, but they depend on sophisticated developers to take advantage of them. In other words, they are not capabilities that a business analyst -- even a power user who's mastered QlikView scripts -- will be able to handle. They mark the extension of QlikView from stand-alone dashboards to a system that is managed by an IT department and integrated with the rest of the corporate infrastructure.

This is exactly the "pervasive business intelligence" that industry gurus currently tout as the future of BI. QlikView has correctly figured out that it must move in this direction to continue growing, and in particular to compete against traditional BI vendors at large enterprises. That said, I think QlikView still has plenty of room to grow within the traditional business intelligence market as well.

- Mobile interface. This actually came out in April and it’s just not that important in the grand scheme of things. But if you’re as superficial as I am, you’ll think it’s the most exciting news of all. Yes, you can access QlikView reports on iPad, Android and Blackberry smartphones, including those touchscreen features you’ve wanted since seeing Minority Report. The iPad version will even use the embedded GPS to automatically select localized information. How cool is that?

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HubSpot Expands Its Services But Stays Focused on Small Business

Summary: HubSpot has continued to grow its customer base and expand its product. It's looking more like a conventional small-business marketing automation system every day.

You have to admire a company that defines a clear strategy and methodically executes it. HubSpot has always aimed to provide small businesses with one easy-to-use system for all their marketing needs. The company began with search engine optimization to attract traffic, and added landing pages, blogging, Web hosting, lead scoring, and Salesforce.com integration. Since my July 2009 review, HubSpot has further extended the system to include social media monitoring and sharing, limited list segmentation and simple drip marketing campaigns. It is now working on more robust outbound email, support for mobile Web pages, and APIs for outside developers to create add-on applications.

The extension into email is a particularly significant step for HubSpot, placing it in more direct competition with other small business marketing systems like Infusionsoft, OfficeAutoPilot and Genoo. Of course, this competition was always implicit – few small businesses would have purchased HubSpot plus one of those products. But HubSpot’s “inbound marketing” message was different enough that most buyers would have decided based on their marketing priorities (Web site or email?). As both sets of systems expand their scope, their features will overlap more and marketers will compare them directly.

Choices will be based on individual features and supporting services. In terms of features, HubSpot still offers unmatched search engine optimization and only Genoo shares its ability to host a complete Web site (as opposed to just landing pages and microsites). On the other hand, HubSpot’s lead scoring, email and nurture campaigns are quite limited compared with its competitors. Web analytics, social media and CRM integration seem roughly equivalent.

One distinct disadvantage is that most small business marketing automation systems offer their own low-cost alternative to Salesforce.com, while HubSpot does not. HubSpot’s Kirsten Knipp told me the company has no plans to add this, relying instead on easy integration with systems like SugarCRM and Zoho. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they changed their minds.

In general, though, HubSpot’s growth strategy seems to rely more on expanding services than features. This makes sense: like everyone else, they've recognized that most small businesses (and many not-so-small businesses) don’t know how to make good use of a marketing automation program. This makes support essential for both selling and retaining them as customers.

One aspect of service is consulting support. HubSpot offers three pricing tiers that add service as well as features at the levels increase. The highest tier, still a relatively modest $18,000 per year, includes a weekly telephone consultation.

The company has also set up new programs to help recruit and train marketing experts who can resell the product and/or use it to support their own clients. These programs include sales training, product training, and certification. They should both expand HubSpot’s sales and provide experts to help buyers that HubSpot sells directly.

So far, HubSpot’s strategy has been working quite nicely. The company has been growing at a steady pace, reaching 3,500 customers in October with 98% monthly retention. A couple hundred of these are at the highest pricing tier, with the others split about evenly between the $3,000 and $9,000 levels. This is still fewer clients than Infusionsoft, which had more than 6,000 clients as of late September. But it's probably more than any other marketing automation vendor and impressive by any standard.

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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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Alterian Alchemy Knits Together Marketing Components

Summary: Alterian just announced Alchemy, which provides a new interface and tight integration across existing components.

Alterian last week announced a new generation of products called Alchemy. It’s positioning these as “customer engagement solutions” rather than “campaign management” solutions. The general idea seems to be that customer engagement involves digital dialogs while traditional campaign management is mostly about outbound messages.

Happily, there’s more here than new labels. The main changes, set for release next March, are:

- an integrated framework to share customer information and marketing data (campaign plans, contents, etc.) across channels. This is supported by a new capability to read data in Microsoft SQL Server databases without first loading it into Alterian’s own database engine.

- a new user interface built using the Microsoft Silverlight platform. This is highly configurable and includes specific new tools for building queries, campaigns, and dashboards. The campaign builder in particular has been updated to support trigger-driven, multi-step processes in a branching flow chart.

The company also plans to expand integration with KXEN for predictive analytics, although it hasn’t set a release date.

Alchemy will also include revised and expanded versions of Alterian's social media, Web content management, Web analytics, and email solutions. These will be released throughout the first half of next year. A detailed roadmap is available in the Alchemy FAQ.

Pricing for Alchemy hasn’t been announced, but it will be somewhat higher than current Alterian products. The old products will remain available to serve what Alterian now refers to as “traditional” marketers.

Alchemy is a bit tough to assess. It doesn't add many new functions, but Alterian already had an extremely broad set of capabilities. I think what’s really happening is it knits together products that Alterian had previously acquired but not truly integrated. This is delivering on an old promise, not creating a revolution. Still, it should let marketers do a substantially better job at managing customer relationships across all channels. Revolutionary or not, that's an improvement well worth having.

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