During Dreamforce, Marketo the revenue performance management company hosted a “Marketo TV&# session where they met with dozens of people to discuss marketing automation, social media and Salesforce. This is the video featuring InsideView discussing the growing need for social media adoption in sales groups as well as high level thoughts on where the industry [.]. Sales Data Sales Intelligence Social Selling Technology B2B b2b sales CRM crm 2.0 Sales 2.0 customer 2.0 Enterprise 2.0 MORE >>

This is a guest post from Tom Callway, Marketing Manager at IT monitoring platform company Opsview. The company had only recently adopted an open core business model for its flagship IT monitoring product – distributing a free version under an open source license and selling subscriptions for a premium version to enterprise customers. Needless to say whatever new processes I introduced had to scale with the company’s growth ambitions. There are a number of marketing automation vendors out there including Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot. Marketing Automation and your CRM. MORE >>

AUSTIN, Texas – April 3, 2013 – ReachForce, a leader in B2B data solutions for marketers, announced it has acquired SetLogik, an innovator of cloud-based data and analytics solutions, to form the industry’s first Connected Marketing Data Hub. Designed to integrate with leading marketing and sales automation platforms, like Marketo, Eloqua and salesforce.com, it supports marketing professionals to more effectively collect, qualify, target, and convert leads throughout the buyer’s lifecycle. It was clear what we needed to do to help, and the results are huge. About ReachForce. MORE >>

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, it’s advantageous to manage your customers and prospects in one of the many customer relationship management (CRM) systems. If you’re like many companies, you employ a marketing individual or team to collect your contacts information and execute campaigns in somewhat of a batch and blast situation. You may even be sophisticated enough to break down your list by sales group, product, region, or industry. That process is generally called “lead nurturing,” which is a popular buzzword in the industry. MORE >>

Summary: Marketing automation and CRM systems may eventually converge, but for now marketers need help explaining why they need a system of their own. People still don’t understand the difference between marketing automation vs. CRM. Someone (I think it was end-of-day panelist Meg Heuer of Sirius Decisions ) also pointed out that CRM data is often very dirty, which isn't a problem for salespeople working with one record at a time, but making it hard to use for marketing. Will Marketing automation and CRM remain separate? Vendors take note. MORE >>