The release of FreeView and a new low-cost, zero-risk pricing model , marks an almost year’s-worth of work in  planning and infrastructure investment geared to accelerate the adoption of Marketing Automation. So allow me to rain on the price-gouging parade. In a market with single-digit penetration, and many competitors continuing to follow Eloqua in to the realm of pricing-out the masses, it is evident that many marketers are simply priced-out of the market. The model works for them, at the cost of the consumer ( your arm, and your leg ). Forever. Why Now? MORE >>

This is also called SaaS (software as a service), which is a term originally made popular by vendors such as SalesForce.com. Also, scaling up as more customer accounts are added is not limited by what a single server can handle across all customer accounts which would require expensive hardware upgrades, but instead can simply add more reasonably priced servers to the server farm. In a nutshell, this means it is software hosted by a vendor on the internet that can be run using a web browser without having to install any software, so is ready for use immediately. to be exact). MORE >>

You can then finalize the process by delivering this information into your sales team’s most trusted sidekick – Salesforce.com. Use our LoopFuse OneView salesforce.com plug-in (available on appexchange ) and all the lead scoring and grading will be populated into the lead view. This type of pre-qualifying activity will give your sales team greater confidence in the marketing team and the leads that come into Salesforce.com. The topic on hand – enhancing your CRM with Loopfuse.  One of his first comments was “what makes a lead qualified?” First step, talk to your sales team. MORE >>

Because PointClear provides outsourced prospect development services —lead generation, lead qualification and lead nurturing—to clients in the technology and SaaS sectors, I was particularly interested in Lauren’s findings on sales and marketing expenses as a percentage of revenue for three publicly-held cloud application companies: Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors and NetSuite. Extensive pricing pressure from competing services/products at lower prices. Sales and marketing activity. Selling subscriptions via a direct sales force. Target market challenges. MORE >>

The Future of Marketing Automation June 16th, 2010 by Marcus Tewksbury Over the last couple of years, particularly in the marketing space, nothing has been hotter than the marketing automation space.  The promise of doing more with less, speeding response times, and focusing sales efforts on the most likely prospects have held wide appeal during these lean times. Looking to the future of the space, however, I think the near term promise is going to have less to do with the automation and more with the data capture.  Largely this really is no longer the case.  Pinging is currently not allowed. MORE >>