Demand Generation Software is a hot market at the moment. Demand Gen systems can add a lot of value, especially for high-value sales processes. This can be for enterprise software companies, corporate and private banking, but also for ticket sales for sports: I never realized NBA season’s tickets were that expensive!
To help you find the right Demand Generation tools, I’ve just updated my list of Demand Generation Systems. It gives an overview of all Demand Generation vendors that I know of. If I’ve missed some, please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.
The list is not meant as a thorough review: for that, you may want to buy the Raab Guide on Demand Generation Systems by David Raab. He recently published a list of low-cost demand generation systems, which may also be interesting.
If you’re looking for selection criteria, please take a look at Maria Pergolino’s blog: vendor comparisons part 1 and part 2 (part 3 is not published yet).
Last week Laura Ramos of Forrester also gave her view on the Lead Management Automation market, which is also a good read. She does not only mention Demand Generation vendors, but also other marketing automation solution providers.
The future of the Demand Generation market
If I look at the long list of players in this market, I’d almost wonder when the first one goes belly up. However, it seems as if the market is booming, and several vendors are reporting record results (for example Market2Lead, Pardot, Marketo, Marketbright).
Is it still possible for new Demand Generation vendors to enter the market in 2009?
Hi Jep,
New entrants still crop up. It may actually be easier to establish mind share now that people understand the concept a little better. Of course, money for start-ups will be tight unless we can convince Obama to make it part of the latest rescue package. Hmm, demand generation / economic stimulus: it’s not really that much of a stretch.
On the other hand, vendors can grow quickly and still lose money. Lots of price-cutting out there, I’m told.
Thanks for mentioning the Guide!
David
Demand Generation is indeed a hot market and, as you mentioned in this post, includes even more vendors than mentioned on your list, including my company, Genius.com, which won in the Demand Generation category for best Salesforce.com App of 2008 (http://is.gd/hlvp).
The B2B buying process/cycle has lots of moving parts with lots of legacy pain around manual processes, sales & marketing misalignment, slow time to execution due to reliance on IT, etc. There are vendors who build a solution to meet needs in certain areas of the cycle. They then grow their solutions to cover more of the overall process as customers tell them, for example, “I love your solution for list management, but I sure which you could automate follow-up with my list based on their interactions with me.” There have been large numbers of these types of conversations going on between customers and vendors and the result is that Demand Generation solutions (aka Marketing Automation, aka Lead Nurturing, aka Lead Management, etc) contains an ever-growing set of vendors.
It’s an exciting time to be in this market. It’s also great for customers who have a variety of solutions to consider. A crucial part of the decision-making process that sometimes gets overlooked in feature check-box bake-offs is the robustness, scalability, reliability, and data capabilities of solutions. This is complex stuff with a need for reliable up time, fast execution, excellence in email deliverability, and end users who demand their results quickly if not in real-time. It’s even more difficult to deliver all this as a true SaaS with instant-on rather than a complex implementation cycle like in traditional enterprise software. It’ll be interesting to see how some of these vendors scale as they start to get a critical mass of users and activity on the system.
Jeb
to comment on where Marketbright is focused. David Raab has summed it up nicely in his recent blog. Marketbright is focused on the needs of customers who require complex nurture flows. The more products, the more vertical markets, the more price points, basically the larger the customer base and the more the requirement to segment offerings, the better Marketbright does. If you just want an email plus tool, then we can meet requirements but there are some simplistic tools out there that do exactly that. Our value rises the more people want to target their offering, which is typically larger companies.
Hope this helps identify our focus.
We also focus on Demand Discovery. We believe that B2B Marketing is much more than about pounding out emails, it is about finding out where your prospects are congregating and dropping breadcrumbs of information that lead them to your company. That can be Direct Mail, SEO/SEM, TradeShows, Webinars, Social Networking, Blogs, Analysts. Marketbright has solutions for all these and more.
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