To make a free product viable, LoopFuse needed to engineer as much cost as possible out of the entire client life cycle. This means it had to be possible for clients to purchase and configure the system, learn how to use it and resolve support issues with next to no involvement by LoopFuse staff. Other vendors have similar price points for the small business market (see my list of demand generation vendors ) although I suspect their internal costs are higher. Summary: LoopFuse has launched a free entry-level version of its marketing automation system. MORE >>

As I wrote in my June 30 post on consolidation among marketing automation vendors , I expect the number of competitors to shrink fairly quickly as new buyers concentrate their purchases among a handful of leading vendors. Or will they simply be crushed as giants from related industries introduce their own products? The rest of the competitors, including the original market leaders, were nearly all purchased as line extensions by much larger firms. Of course, Oracle has already made its move by purchasing Market2Lead's intellectual assets. MORE >>

Home Forrester Research « I was recently briefed by | Main | Going Corporate » August 26, 2008 Demandbase: A New Twist In The Lead Management Automation Market [Posted by Laura Ramos ] In a recent survey of over 2100 IT professionals who buy or recommend telecom and networking solutions, we found buyers turn to peers and colleagues first, followed by vendor, industry trade, or professional Web sites, to inform their purchase decisions. However, many tech buyers visit vendor Web sites many times to learn about and compare products, yet few register or leave evidence of their activity. MORE >>

Home Forrester Research « Getting Up Close and Personal | Main | Social Technographics Data Now Available » March 20, 2008 B2B Lead Management Market Heats Up [Posted by Laura Ramos ] Since the start of this year, I’ve been receiving a boatload of briefing requests from companies wanting to show me their lead generation and management solutions. While honored, I also find reviewing these solutions confusing because there is a lot of variation in the product presentations and overlap between categories. My point: B2B marketers are looking elsewhere for help generating demand. MORE >>

When I was researching last week’s piece on Market2Lead , one of the points that vendor stressed was their ability to create a full-scale marketing database with information from external sources to analyze campaign results. My understanding of competitive products was that they had similar capabilities, at least hypothetically, so I choose not to list that as a Market2Lead specialty. But I recently spoke with on-demand business intelligence vendor LucidEra , who also said they had found that demand generation systems could not integrate such information. MORE >>