This is frustrating for consumer marketers, who see the huge variety, slick features, and attractive pricing of the B2B systems. Some B2C systems offer similar features and pricing with the same Software-as-a-Service business model. As you might have guessed from my recent list of B2C marketing automation systems , I’ve recently been spending some time helping consumer marketers to select vendors. This is more a return than a departure: although I’ve written mostly about B2B systems for the past few years, my earlier work was largely in consumer marketing. B2B systems are cheaper. MORE >>

Sector revenues: We aggregate the vendor-provided client counts by industry segment (micro business, small business, mid-size business, and large business), which we multiply by the estimated average selling price in each segment. I’ve just finished the latest update of our B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST), available on the raabguide.com Web site. The VEST is our evaluation of industry vendors, aimed primarily at companies choosing a marketing automation system. ll get to the 2013 estimate in a bit. First, I thought I’d explain where the figures come from. MORE >>

Pricing is free up to 20 active advocates, and then starts at $500 per month, growing at roughly $20 per advocate per month. Marketers recognize the potential reach of social media, but are rightly frightened that they can’t control the message. Most social marketing applications sidestep the issue by focusing on creating communities ( Jive , Lithium ), monitoring conversations (Radian6 , Trackur ) and running promotions ( CrowdFactory , Nextbee ). Marketing automation vendors have mostly worked on making it easy to post and share messages and to capture social data. MORE >>

But it still marks a major step towards letting QlikView run time-critical applications such as stock trade analysis, pricing and inventory management. QlikTech released version 9 of its QlikView business intelligence software today. The product has been in public beta for several months, so the general features are well known to people who care about such things. Probably the item that attracted the most advance attention is an iPhone version that supports interactive analysis; this also works for other Java Mobile clients like Blackberry. API for real-time updates of in-memory data. 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. Albee also pointed to Genoo’s pricing as a reaction to customer requirements. The two lower price levels also require additional charges for the SEO tools, which are licensed from an external developer. She tells me nearly all of her clients are larger than that. MORE >>