Let’s face it, nobody likes to buy software. Even with marketing automation software, whose inherent intention is to make your marketing efforts both more streamlined (lower cost) and more effective (higher sales pipeline output), it can be difficult to carve out the dollars necessary to get rolling. If others in your group or organization need convincing to give marketing automation software a go, here are nine proven ways to get the thumbs-up. Don’t talk about software. As I said at the beginning, nobody likes to buy software. Do the math. MORE >>

More than 40K attend this software technology conference, and many expect to hear each year from Marc Benioff, CEO and chairman of salesforce.com. In less than 24 hours, salesforce.com used social media and search to turn a bad situation into success that will likely generate revenue in the months to come. But the PR team exponentially multiplied the incident’s value to salesforce.com. The salesforce.com team was ready with handouts and matching Salesforce garb. Marc celebrated salesforce.com as a leader in cloud, CRM, technology, and innovation. MORE >>

He helped build Salesforce.com with an outbound marketing perspective into the mid-market. He cites the example of a marketing automation company to illustrate how important outbound initiatives are: “Jon Miller from Marketo is one of my favorite writers on lead development. The people we always talk about are the HubSpots and the Marketos and the Eloquas of the world who are driving leads. Concluding Thoughts: Consumerized B2B Software & the Resurgence of Field Sales. My guest today is Craig Rosenberg, Vice President, Sales and Marketing and Co-Founder at Focus. MORE >>

First, the company invested in Marketo , a leading marketing automation platform that integrated well with the company’s CRM system, Salesforce.com. After interviewing a number of firms, they hired Spear Marketing Group , a Marketo solutions partner and a full-service agency known for its work in both demand generation and lead management. Many companies implementing marketing automation software let the technology drive strategy,” says Howard Sewell, Spear President. All this presents real challenges for both demand generation and lead management. MORE >>

Marketing Automation Software Guide published a  B2B Marketing Automation market map that shows a few other players I ignored for the timeline above, like SAP and Oracle because although they do have marketing automation capabilities it is not their core business (and I don’t agree with tagging Salesforce.com as a marketing automation solution). agree, more companies are adding marketing automation and marketing software in general to their budgets. Interesting to note that the majority of the players only came to existence not even 5 years ago. What do you think ? MORE >>