On days when I have nothing else to be cranky about, I sometimes fuss at how business-to-business software vendors hijacked the term “marketing automation” despite its long and relatively honorable history describing systems for consumer marketing. That formula fell out of favor when the most prominent CRM system became B2B-oriented Salesforce.com , whose very name reflects its origins in B2B sales automation. Those buyers often find that systems from big enterprise software vendors become too expensive or require too many ancillary components from their corporate parents.