Tag Archives: pardot

Pardot User Conference Proves They’re a Top Marketing Automation Vendor

The past two days I attended the Pardot User Conference, and also presented a session on Lead Nurturing. Over 100 Pardot customers from all over North America attended this event. And that’s impressive.

Learnings From The Conference

The conference had a nice balance of sessions. The sessions were about lead management, lead nurturing, content marketing, social media and Pardot product sessions. The Pardot team also showed how they are using Pardot within their own organization.

One of the most interesting things Pardot does for their own lead management is to give a 60 second look to each and every lead that is sent to sales. They realize the marketing automation can only go so far, and that a human interpretation of the lead’s profile and email & web activity will uncover additional insights. They add these insights to a notes field, which is typically the first thing a sales rep looks at when they receive a new lead.

Also, the Pardot software integrates with the site search on your website, so if prospects perform a search on your website, the search phrase is added to the activity history. This gives a good indication of a prospect’s intent.

Marketing Automation User Conferences

To organize a user conference, a vendor needs critical mass. You need hundreds of customers, otherwise you won’t get a reasonable number of people to attend the conference. Of the vendors on my list of Marketing Automation vendors, only a handful have enough customers to make this happen.

In May I attended Silverpop’s user conference, and the Marketo and Eloqua user conferences are coming up in October. Just like Pardot, these companies have hundreds of customers, so they are the top of the crop when looking at user adoption of marketing automation systems.

Pardot’s Secret

However, if I ask people which vendors they think are most popular, few are mentioning Pardot. They’re not spending as much on marketing as the other vendors. So what’s their secret? In my opinion, there are three reasons:

  • a good product that is easy to use
  • simple and reasonable pricing
  • friendly and extremely helpful employees

And additionally, I think they focus on an attractive niche in the Marketing Automation market: most of their customers have a marketing team of one to five people, while many of the other top vendors focus on larger clients.

I’m interested to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment. And if you were one of the attendees, let me know how you liked it!

MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit Boston

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Monday and Tuesday I’m attending the Boston MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit. About two weeks ago I attended the San Francisco event, which had a similar program and exhibitors. In this post some thoughts about the program…
First of all, the best thing about this event is that the speakers are marketing practitioners, not vendors. This ensures that you get lots of real-life advice. However, there are also many different perspectives, and it’s not always easy to link them together. But, that can easily be addressed:
Classify the Topics
Having seen many of the presentations in San Francisco, I found it useful to classify them in three main categories:
Lead Generation
Lead Management
Content creation
The first is obviously focused on getting more leads into your database, while the second topic focuses on nurturing those leads. Many marketing organizations now realize that both these activities are more successful if they use attractive content, so that is also addressed in a couple of sessions. I tried to classify every session, and that made it easier for me to distill best practices.
The Review Sessions Are Recommended
I can also recommend the introduction and review sessions led by Flint McGlaughlin, Stefan Tornquist, Sean Donahue and Brian Carroll and of MarketingExperiments, MarketingSherpa and InTouch (all part of the MECLABS group). They do a great job synthesizing all ideas.
Favorite Session
My favorite sessions was presented by Maureen Thorman of National Instruments about customer segmentation based on web traffic: unfortunately this sessions will not be presented in Boston, that’s a bummer.
The Marketing Automation Vendors
My specialty is Marketing Automation Consulting, and many of the vendors were attending with a booth. In Boston the following Marketing Automation vendors are worth a visit (in order of booth number):
Pardot (booth 1)
Manticore Technology (booth 2)
Silverpop Engage B2B (booth 4)
Marketo (booth 6)
Genius.com (booth 7)
Marketbright (booth 14)
Hubspot (booth 16)
Neolane (booth 19)
Twitter & Questions
I will try to tweet as many sessions as possible at the LeadSloth Twitter page. Let me know if you have any questions via Twitter or email (jep leadsloth com).  And if you’re attending, let’s connect (see my picture on the right).

marketingsherpa b2b marketing summitMonday and Tuesday I’m attending the Boston MarketingSherpa B2B Marketing Summit. About two weeks ago I attended the San Francisco event, which had a similar program and exhibitors. In this post some recommendations for the program…

First of all, the best thing about this event is that the speakers are marketing practitioners, not vendors. This ensures that you get lots of real-life advice. However, there are also many different perspectives, and it’s not always easy to link them together. But, that can easily be addressed:

Classify the Topics

Having seen many of the presentations in San Francisco, I found it useful to classify them in three main categories:

  • Lead Generation
  • Lead Management
  • Content creation

The first is obviously focused on getting more leads into your database, while the second topic focuses on nurturing those leads. Many marketing organizations now realize that both these activities are more successful if they use attractive content, so that is also addressed in a couple of sessions. I tried to classify every session, and that made it easier for me to distill best practices.

The Review Sessions Are Recommended

I can also recommend the introduction and review sessions led by Flint McGlaughlin, Stefan Tornquist, Sean Donahue and Brian Carroll and of MarketingExperiments, MarketingSherpa and InTouch (all part of the MECLABS group). They do a great job synthesizing all ideas.

My Favorite Session

My favorite session in San Francisco was presented by Maureen Thorman of National Instruments about customer segmentation based on web traffic: unfortunately this sessions will not be presented in Boston, that’s a bummer, because they used very advanced web analytics to improve the conversation with prospects and customers.

The Marketing Automation Vendors

My specialty is Marketing Automation Consulting, and many of the Marketing Automation vendors have a booth. In Boston you should definitely stop by at the booths of the following Marketing Automation vendors (in order of booth number):

Twitter & Questions

I will try to tweet as many sessions as possible at the LeadSloth Twitter page. Let me know if you have any questions via Twitter or email (jep leadsloth com).  And if you’re attending, let’s connect (see my picture on the right)!

Freelance Marketing Automation Consultant

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This week I’m finishing up my day job as Sr Marketing Manager at Backbase, and will be available full-time for Marketing Automation Consulting. If you have Marketing Automation challenges, I’d love to hear from you (leadsloth email address or toll-free 1-888-4A-SLOTH).

I have hands-on experience with Marketo, Market2Lead, Pardot, Hubspot, Salesforce.com, DemandTools, various Email Service Providers, multiple CMSs (WordPress, Drupal), and a range of other tools. Because I understand Marketing Automation in-depth, I can usually get up to speed quickly with any other tools that you may have.

In the next three weeks I’m getting married and I will move from San Francisco to Durham, North Carolina. June 8th I will officially start as a full-time consultant. Around that time I will also pick up blogging and Twittering again. See you then!

Top-10 Demand Generation Vendor Blogs

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UPDATE 7/14/09: I’ve now put all marketing automation blogs on a single page.

In my previous post I listed the Top-10 Demand Generation blog by marketers and consultants. 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:

Sorry, can’t help it: every time I try to make a top-10, I end up with 11 and find it impossible to choose which one should go. So 11 it is :- )

Again, let me know your suggestions for other blogs. I’m pretty sure I still have to discover lots of cool blogs.

Lead Management Automation Systems Compared

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Stagnant email service providers becoming irrelevant? (see conclusion)

In a previous post there was a lively discussion about the terms Demand Generation and Lead Management Automation (LMA) systems. The consensus was that Lead Management System is part of the demand generation process, and focuses on managing leads you already have in your database (and capturing/importing new leads). Some example features:

  • building landing pages and registration forms
  • tracking the source of leads
  • collecting as much information as possible (web & data analytics)
  • nurturing via email and other channels
  • calculating a lead score until the prospect is sales-ready

But how does that compare to email marketing, web analytics and landing page optimization tools? In talking to several marketing managers, they often asked: “How do LMA systems compare to {fill in any other marketing software}”. In the next paragraphs I compare LMA systems with other popular marketing systems, and I hope to go more in-depth in future posts.

Email Marketing

Lead Management Systems can send out batch emails to a list, similar to Email Services Providers (ESPs) like VerticalResponse, ExactTarget and Constant Contact. Interesting enough, I’ve heard of several companies that still use ESPs in addition to their Lead Management System, not sure why. Let me know if you have ideas.

Lead Management Systems also provide lots of advanced email features, such as drip-marketing, event-based emails, heavily segmented and personalized emails (e.g. sent from the account of the responsible sales person), and event reminder emails. However, ESPs are also moving forward, and for example ExactTarget now also offers drip-marketing support.

Data Management

Some demandgen vendors provide data management features for deduplication and normalization. My personal opinion is that these features are usually somewhat limited, and that they’re not mature enough to replace specialized data cleaning solutions (Ringlead, DemandTools). But that may change soon, as LMA vendors keep expanding their offerings.

Web Analytics

All Lead Management Systems offer some kind of web analytics, mostly focused on marketing metrics. Only LMA systems aimed at smaller companies tend to offer generic web analytics (page views, referrers, etc.). In all other cases, you would still need a general-purpose Web Analytics systems, such Google Analytics, Coremetrics, Omniture or WebTrends.

There are also some specialized Web Analytics vendors that identify the company name of anonymous leads (Leadlander) or website activity for known leads (Genius.com). However, more and more LMA systems include this functionality. It ranges from fairly basic (Market2lead) to more comprehensive (Marketo, Genius Enterprise, ActiveConversion, LeadGenesys, Pardot).

Web Content Management

Lead Management Systems also do not replace Web Content Management systems, although it may be more common to have WCM features in Demand Generation in the future (earlier post). The only web pages they currently manage are landing pages or microsites. Those are usually hosted on a subdomain such as http://marketing.company.com. There are some exceptions: both Marketbright and Marqui include a full WCM system.

Landing page optimization & Website Personalization

An area where many Lead Management Systems can still improve is landing page optimization. In my opinion they should offer more features to optimize landing page conversion, which critical for Search Marketing efforts. There are dedicated vendors with a superior feature set, such as ion interactive, magnify360 and Sitebrand.

I’ve heard some vendors thinking about personalizing offers based on behavior of anonymous visitors to make it more likely that they register for an offer. Currently I’m not aware of any LMA vendors that offer this functionality: let me know if you know more about this…

Search Marketing

Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-Click management are usually not included in Lead Management Systems. At most, LMA systems provide reporting on the lead source (which keywords, and organic search or PPC). It looks like SEO and PPC management will stay separate from Lead Management for the short to medium term. Personally I expect this will be integrated in the long term, as lead acquisition and lead management naturally complement each other, and cover the entire demand generation cycle.

Conclusion

Lead Management Automation vendors are rapidly expanding their functionality, but will not replace all specialized tools any time soon. I think we’ll see a consolidation of the industry of the next couple of years. Specialized vendors need to keep innovating, otherwise they will falter. Some categories are there to stay, such as Web Content Management and Web Analytics, but each will also expand their marketing automation features.

I’m not sure about Email Service Providers: In my opinion they either need to move towards lead management or become irrelevant. ExactTarget, Lyris and Silverpop are on the move, but VerticalResponse is at risk: even for small companies there are more effective lead management solutions (such as InfusionSoft).

What do you think: is there a future for pure-play ESPs?

Choosing a Demand Generation System

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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?