I had a very productive conversation on Friday with Fred Yee, president of ActiveConversion , a demand generation system aimed primarily at small business. In fact, this was so interesting that I didn’t look very closely at the ActiveConversion system. I don't know when or whether I'll have time to do a proper analysis of ActiveConversion, but if you're in the market, be sure to take a look. MORE

Vendors take note. Is Salesforce.com a threat to vendors of marketing automation solutions? The movement is coming mostly from the marketing automation side, presumably because there is more money to gain by moving into sales from marketing systems than vice versa: - marketing automation systems for small businesses ( Infusionsoft , Office Autopilot , Net-Results , ActiveConversion , etc.) MORE

Our just-released update to the B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Toolkit (VEST) shows that client counts grew just over 50% over the year ending in June, compared with nearly 100% growth for the year ending last December. That’s a marked decline, and the pattern is consistent across individual vendors: although some grew faster than others, each grew slower than during the previous period.* It's fine for vendors to expand their product scope, as several are. MORE

Summary: Based on Web traffic rankings, new demand generation vendors with low prices are gaining market presence. Last November, after much consideration of alternatives , I settled on Alexa three-month Web traffic rankings as a reasonable way to measure the relative market presence of demand generation vendors. I revisited that data today, adding a few new vendors and dropping some of the very minor ones. ActiveConversion is not new but also has a low price point. MORE

One of the audience members at the B2B Marketing University in Boston asked about demand generation systems for small businesses, and how to distinguish among the vendors in general. My brief answer was that the biggest difference was less functionality than the target markets the different vendors pursue. B2b marketing automation) vendors, with links to my reviews where I've written one. MORE

There are at least 4 amorphous groups of solution providers also setting their sights on this space: 1) Lead generation services or tools – Because this category contains both service providers (that look more like agencies or telesales outsourcers) and software as a service vendors, there are probably more than I could possibly name. The lead management vendors are developing one-to-one email capabilities that help sales people be more consistent and productive. MORE

Today I’ve put together a list of vendor blogs. Most of these vendors blogs really get ‘online marketing’, so they talk about best practices rather then just touting their products, and they post regularly. In alphabetical order: ActiveConversion B2B Marketing Blog. Tags: Demand Generation activeconversion eloqua genius.com hubspot market2lead marketbright marketo pardot reachforce readycontacts silverpop MORE

ActiveConversion first became known for its sales-focused Web Analytics, such as identifying companies that visit your website (similar to Leadlander ). Therefore I initially called them a ‘niche vendor’ However, the product has evolved into a fairly complete marketing automation suite for SMB companies. So the people behind ActiveConversion gave me a demo to show they are more than a niche player. Have you worked with ActiveConversion? MORE

My little tour of demand generation vendors landed at Pardot just before Thanksgiving. As you’ll recall from my post on Web activity statistics , Pardot is one of the higher-ranked vendors not already in the Raab Guide to Demand Generation Systems. What really distinguishes the Enterprise vendors is the ability to limit different users to different tasks. 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. MORE

My original plan had been to add several marketing automation vendors with significant presence in this market. My original set of products was based on a general knowledge of which companies are most established, plus some consultation with vendors to learn who they felt were their main competitors. Yet there are so many more vendors I could add. The general rule is pretty obvious: pick the vendors that people are most interested in. MORE

Naturally, the vendors showing them to me have all thought very carefully about their designs and made the best choices they could, typically based on feedback from their customers. So I thought I'd take a little scan of the demand generation systems I've looked at to see how the vendors themselves had voted. I don't expect this news to change the minds of vendors who made the opposite decision. Here, then, is a list of vendors (alphabetically) and their interfaces. MORE

Looking through my files and asking a few questions, here are vendors for whom I have reasonably reliable information: This gives an average of $171,000 per employee. Aprimo has stated they are 40% B2B, and the rest of those vendors are 100% B2B. This leaves all the other B2B marketing automation vendors. total employees comes to about 470 (I have to make guesses for a couple of small vendors and reduce the Silverpop total to account for its large B2C business). MORE