As I mentioned yesterday, our new B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) asks vendors to estimate the number of clients in each of four size categories. There’s a strong case to be made that micro-businesses in particular have such different needs that their vendors are not really part of the same industry as the rest of B2B marketing automation. But if you do want to consider all these vendors as one industry, the minimum adjustment to make is to account for differences in price. But not all of these are B2B marketers. The $257.5 The 26.7% MORE >>

I’m working on an interesting project right now: moving away from a marketing automation system. The company in question has used a comprehensive marketing automation system for about 2 years. In addition to cost savings, the thinking is that a full-blown marketing automation system just makes less sense with the new strategy. How to Replace a Marketing Automation System? Email marketing that integrates with Salesforce.com is provided by many vendors, like VerticalResponse , Boomerang , ExactTarget , Genius , Lyris and more. MORE >>

The main cause of my misunderstanding was Genoo’s starting price of $199 per month, which is below any small or mid-size business system. But the lowest price for Genoo with CRM integration is $599 per month, and I consider CRM integration a required feature in a B2B marketing automation product. On the other hand, I should have been warned by the fact that Genoo doesn’t provide a built-in CRM system, which is pretty much the key defining characteristic of a micro business system. She tells me nearly all of her clients are larger than that. MORE >>

Dell announced today that it has added Pardot marketing automation to its list of Dell Cloud Business Software applications. Other products in the suite include Salesforce.com for sales automation and customer service, Adobe EchoSign for e-signatures, AppExtremes Conga Composer for proposal creation, Dell’s own Boomi for application integration, and a Dell-built analytics platform. The Pardot system costs from $1,000 to $3,000 per month depending on the email volume, file size, and numbers of forms, landing pages, programs, and automation rules. MORE >>

Now that I’m more or less finished launching the B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) , I can start catching up on the other topics. ClickDimensions does pretty much the standard marketing automation activities: email, landing pages, Web visitor tracking, drip marketing campaigns, and lead scoring. What’s missing from the list is CRM integration. That's no accident: ClickDimensions doesn’t integrate with CRM in the regular sense of synchronizing data. Rather, it works directly from Microsoft Dynamics CRM files. MORE >>