Marketers can do a better job of picking their marketing automation vendors if they roll up their sleeves and work at it. But you also need a vendor who will support your long-term success. Here are some ways to identify a “future-safe” vendor. Past innovations: a history of advanced thinking shows the vendor understands marketers’ needs and suggests they'll adapt well to the future. You also need to be sure the vendor is a fast follower, so its clients will quickly benefit from new ideas invented by everyone. MORE >>

Summary: The first of three posts describing my new scoring system for B2B marketing automation vendors. ve finally had time to work up the vendor scores based on the 150+ RFP questions I distributed back in September. have never liked those charts because so many buyers consider only the handful of anointed “leaders”, even though one of the less popular vendors might actually be a better fit. vendor strength , which assesses a vendor’s current and future business position. Vendor strength will be scored on a separate dimension. MORE >>

Since we do have revenue figures for the top four vendors, we can also look at their revenue per employee. The news is better for HubSpot, whose apparent productivity decrease (measured in clients-per-employee) vanishes when you measure revenue per employee instead. But other marketers should also find them helpful as they try to understand each vendor's business situation and determine how well it matches the marketer's own needs. demand generation systems marketing software selection marketing automation vendor financials marketing automation industry trends MORE >>

set their own weights for the different scoring categories and do detailed, side-by-side comparisons of vendors they select. Vendor names have been replaced with football teams and the specific details are excluded. In case it’s not obvious, you can move the little sliders on the “Sector Chart” tab to see how the different vendors move around depending on how you weight different categories of attributes. The final report will show directly how much each category contributes to each vendor’s score. might put it out as a separate product or upgrade to the base report. MORE >>

Today I’ll describe the other one: evaluating vendor services. The problem with services is simple: you won’t use them until you’ve already bought the product. In terms of what you need, vendors offer three types of services: deployment: help with setting up your system support: help in operating your system after it’s deployed account service: help in growing your business. Buyers must understand those needs to know what they want a vendor to provide. marketing automation vendor selection marketing software evaluation MORE >>