This post expands on my post at RingLead.com: Six Marketing Automation Principles to Keep Your Data Clean.

Many marketers who are new to marketing automation suddenly discover their success on the job is directly affected by databases that seem out of their control. CRMs have data that is imported by salespeople, interns, hand typed, etc. That one hot shot sales director you poached from your competitor? He brought his “personal” list over and uploaded 5,000 records with no Lead Source, few Emails, no unsubscribe, no lead assignments, and uploaded it all without permission.

Sound familiar?

Almost always this data is not imported correctly or with consistency. It is just there!

But you can take control. If you want your job to be successful with marketing automation, you must take control – and take responsibility – for the data from Sales. (and sometimes your CRM managers). You need not worry, you can do this and do it well with the principles of data cleanliness.

Principle One: Design the System to Avoid Human Error

Marketers I have worked with have a familiar refrain: “Sales, Leads, and Other People are always importing bad data into the CRM.” When I look at their CRM and Forms, the most common root cause of these errors is the design of the system. Simply design your workflows and access levels to encourage certain behaviors while blocking bad behaviors. This is the first principle because the others rely on system design.

How do you design the system to make behavior work for you? Let’s try a few common CRM tools at your finger tips.

Picklists

Picklists ensure that your field values are completely static and controlled by you. The user or lead gets a choice, but the spellings are always precise. Common fields to use these on are: Country, State, Lead Source, and Lead Status. For countries and States, I use the ISO Country List.

Read Only Fields

Some fields are meant for information to Sales or to Marketing. Thus, only a few people should ever be able to access the field. For example:

• Comments History
• Interesting Moments
• SFDC Campaign Member
• SFDC Campaign
• Lead Source
• Subscription management fields

Import access must be limited to certain people

Even within Marketo, you may want to restrict junior or inexperienced staff from importing lists. The most well intentioned user can create havoc by not following procedures. With a marketing automation platform (MAP), always import into the MAP, never into the CRM. Of course there could be exceptions, but only an administrator would really know when those should occur.

Role vs. Title

Another design principle is to use picklist fields and free text fields at different times. For example, Role is a picklist that you might put on a form early in the buying process. Later, or in a progressive form, the Title field would appear. The reason I like this two-part data collector is that Role is easy to just choose. Titles vary widely and are for most people’s vanity. Lead scoring and other routing based on free text fields has to take into account a lot of options. Why not avoid issues early on?

Principle Two: One Field for One Purpose

The field that comes to mind is Description (in SFDC) or “Notes”. This field was intended to be for either the Lead to fill out some detail or to provide a scratch space for Sales. Instead, it is often used to put in call notes and the history of the Lead.

Do NOT permit this to happen. Sales absolutely must use Tasks or Meetings to log calls, even voicemails or emails. These records are stamped with time and date and have appropriate fields to help track Sales’ interaction with the Lead. Tasks are also a great way to tell Sales what Marketing is up to.

Thus, a field like “Description” is best used as a temporary field for handling data that will be passed to a Task or a “Comments History Field” [see instructions].

Principle Three: Use Automation to Correct Data Values

The use of automation rules to correct common misspellings or missing data goes back to the 1960s and early principles of data quality when direct mail errors could result in thousands of dollars wasted. Today, data quality mistakes ruin reputations far faster than a misdirected mail piece. Email reputation, choice of language, and customer experience matter and they matter more because mistakes can go publicly viral in minutes. Save your firm’s reputation with automated data cleansing.

These data management flows are one of the first things I setup in Marketo. Most firms setup these flows to start.

• Country Corrector (although you should have followed Principle 1 to not need this)
• State Corrector or Mapper – often helpful if you have Country and Inferred State.
• Count of Employees to Employee Range – again, Principle 1 and 2 say you shouldn’t need to do this, because you chose one option, but it’s possible you ignored me 🙂
• Bad Lead Source to Good Lead Source
• Email Invalid to Email is Good if the Email changed.

For example, this flow adjusts Employee Range based on Employee Number.

Principle Four: Prevent Duplicates at the Source

Your system can include tools from the Appexchange such as Dupeblocker or RingLead to stop a user from entering a duplicate at that very moment. If you get the settings right, this should discourage salespeople from just entering data without thinking.

Then you should run a deduping process over your entire CRM before you connect your marketing automation platform (MAP). You will thank me later. Most marketing automation firms offer a cleansing service (including Marketo), but you can ask other firms for help. If you have an SFDC Admin, they will know the tools and services to help you dedupe effectively. Usually this involves DemandTools, if your company can afford it.

Principle Five: Establish a Regular Cleaning Process

This cleaning process includes a monthly or quarterly review of the MAP+CRM. You will want to bring your team into a room, with laptops, and with pizza. Spend an entire Friday afternoon doing this and life will be better the rest of the time. Assign one person to each area at the start, and then go from there.

• Duplicate count review: find out who is doing this and clean it up.
• Asset Cleanup: turn off or archive old emails, landing pages, workflows, programs. Marketo does a great job of allowing archiving to retain data. Also, team members should delete tests and other items they no longer need.
• Workflow Review: are the right ones working properly?
• Empty Value Counts: review records that are still missing key data: Country, Employees, Annual Revenue, Industry, etc… whatever is crucial to determining customer fit, scoring, and MQL status.

Principle Six: Automate Data Appending

You will always have leads without key demographic data points. These leads could be interested, but if you do not know they are in your target audience, you will never pass them to Sales. Nor should you!

Instead, find an appropriate data appending service. There are two types:

• Form Based Autofill with ReachForce, for example. These tools ask the Lead to confirm if they are at a specific firm. The Lead confirms and the system autofills geographic and firmographic data automatically in the background.
• Backend Autofill: these services are similar to Hoover’s, DiscoverOrg, RingLead, and ZoomInfo. Their integration or service backfills missing firmographic data based on your rules. This happens in the background, but the Lead never sees this.

Often, firms use both front end and back end appending tools to cover as much of the data gap as possible. Whichever one you prefer will help you improve segmentation capabilities and reduce the number of unaddressable Leads.

Remember these principles as you clean your database:

1. Design the System to Avoid Human Error
2. One field is for One Purpose
3. Automate Data Correction
4. Prevent Duplicates at the Source
5. Establish a Regular Cleaning Process
6. Automate Data Appending

Here are a few resources you can use for preparing your database to be clean in and out:

• Salesforce Appexchange
• Marketo Easy Merge (ask your rep)

(Disclosure: I sometimes write for RingLead). [Updated: Feb 15, 2018 – removed back url]

Image Credits: Whatleydude, Barbourians

I am fortunate to meet very interesting people who are often top marketers. Sharing those conversations with you is one of my goals here at Marketing Rockstar Guides. I find these discussions are a great way to better understand marketing and what’s possible now and in the future. Last fall, I interviewed several of the top marketing automation consultants in the Marketing Automation Consultants’ roundup. This year, we will focus more on the vendors in the specialist areas of Marketing Automation.

Recently I sat down with top marketer Eric Holmen, President of Invoca. Invoca provides inbound call automation and intelligence directly to marketing.

Josh: Let’s talk about high intent mobile search and click to call – how do you support this? 

Eric:

The challenge in achieving closed loop marketing reports is that the phone is the big remaining gap between what happens online and the final action the prospect takes to reach a salesperson. If 60% or more of the first part of the buying cycle happens online, and many of us have structured our funnels around online engagement, what happens at that 60% mark when the prospect calls us on the phone?

Does all of that prospect data get connected to that phone call? Will the salesperson be able to make that connection? If it is a manual connection, will someone make the right one?

[Josh: I’ve been there, trying to connect 1-800 inbound calls by hand and it never worked.]

At Invoca, we support high intent search and click to call by connecting the same prospect across all devices.

As that buyer clicks on mobile, they build a device profile that can be used for future marketing. Marketers can then send more mobile friendly emails. And by “mobile friendly,” I mean sized right, but also a call-to-action (CTA) that is targeted by device. If they are on a phone, the CTA could be “Call Us”. That CTA could include a dynamic, trackable phone number just for that lead. Desktop offers would include video or papers with form fill outs. Tablets could have more multimedia offers. And Apple recently announced their plans to make it easy to integrate click to call from an Apple Laptop or iPad with your iPhone.

To close the gap between the rich clickstream history collected and the prospect’s phone call, Invoca’s JavaScript generates dynamic and unique phone numbers posted on emails, sites, and ads so when that call is made, the system automatically knows who the lead is and precisely which ad or keyword caused the call. Because of this capability, Sales and Marketing know a lead’s history all the way through the first phone call.

Josh: What is your take on Remarketing and Retargeting, especially with mobile?

Eric: When B2B marketers use remarketing or retargeting on mobile, it is not about acquisition. The lead already knows who you are. Remarketing for B2B is about staying in front of the lead at all times, which influences search and phone calls. If you, as the marketer, can use remarketing messages and CTAs effectively, you will receive a phone call from that prospect.

Josh: And when that call comes in, Invoca will ensure a completely closed loop report with no manual intervention.

Eric: Precisely!

Josh: How could I use Invoca for a B2B firm, rather than a B2C firm?

Eric: Business-to-business sales have long buy cycles and most buyers start the process at their office desktop. Most marketers have developed online sales funnels centered on the desktop. And I am not talking about “responsive” templates; I mean that content and call-to-actions are designed for a desktop, even when the email is formatted to be mobile friendly.

But the emails marketers are sending to buyers are increasingly viewed on mobile device – when someone is traveling, commuting, at nights – all away from that desktop. How many people want to download a paper on their phone? Will they really read it.

Remember that we can track all the way through the phone call and it’s possible to target messaging by device. Do not cut and paste desktop marketing into mobile marketing. Responsive is hard and marketers always start there for some reason. But you should focus on the phone number at the top of the page on mobile and desktop.

Mobile is not about forms; mobile is about getting quick answers. Thus, content in mobile should be un-gated, it should be easy to read, and it should have a mobile friendly CTA.

It is important to remember that mobile is simpler, spontaneous, and may not be the first point of contact. Mobile is not the best place for certain content. Marketers spend more time worrying about responsive to make the desktop flexible when they should focus on creating mobile conversations.

I believe mobile spend is about staying “front-of-mind” and similar to what was done in the older days of interruption advertising, where repeated messages were key to success.

So my question for your readers is, “Have you made the B2B buying cycle mobile?”

Josh: How do sales people react to the additional insight from Invoca – and the recording of their calls?

Eric: They love it. Usually our first conversation is with the senior sales team at a company. Sales people want inbound calls instead of trying someone ten times who just filled out a form.

[Josh – it’s true, every salesperson wants the inbound call that happens to need something right now.]

As for recording, yes they are hesitant. Salespeople don’t want to be evaluated initially because everyone is a bit hesitant to be monitored and possibly receive feedback. Here’s what companies do with us:

A firm can setup Invoca Signal – it listens but does not give marketing a full recording. Instead, it checks the call for key phrases and then scores the conversation. This approach makes Sales feel better about the machine recording. Somewhat akin to Gmail ads – the machine is producing ads, and humans don’t see your email.

Another option with Invoca for Salesforce.com is to turn on complete call recording. Invoca records calls and attaches them to the opportunity in Salesforce. This is a great tool for ISRs, who are monitored for qualification and call quality. With 50 to 100 calls per day, they may write in Call Notes that miss important subtleties or key messages the Prospect had. The notes could be incomplete in some way.

When the Opportunity is passed to Field Sales for the meetings, the Account Executive can look at the Notes and listen to previous calls with the attached .WAV file. There is no need to go back to the ISR and ask them to remember one of thousands of calls.

Sales teams also warm up to recording of calls because it is a great tool for training and mentorship. The ISR team is often a first step on the way to Field Sales. More experienced Field Salespeople can offer friendly advice on phrasing and listening because they can hear what is really being said by ISRs. Thus, your teams will benefit more from recording and once salespeople realize this, they are on board.

Josh: What kind of firm is an ideal fit for taking advantage of Invoca’s capabilities? Do I have to have a large SDR team?

Eric:

Our ideal fits are firms involved in B2B, local, and mobile services.

Take B2B, this is a considered purchase. These are expensive services that are similar to annuity payments and require some amount of configuration. B2B firms do business by phone and in person, not e-commerce.

Then you have Local and Mobile Firms. These firms are typically restaurants or dry cleaners. For the consumer, the activity is spontaneous and involves searching for the firm and possibly calling that company. We find that big or small firms or chains can take advantage of mobile click to call. Of course, only a very large dry cleaning chain could take advantage of Invoca. Thus, our local-mobile customers are large firms with local offices, such as insurance agencies. Invoca will setup dynamic numbers and couple that with local search and ads to drive phone calls dire

And finally are firms that do not take phone calls. While few firms are entirely without a phone presence, they do exist. This group is not ideal for Invoca at all. For instance, e-commerce firms or companies selling commodities or easy to buy products rarely use the phone. Amazon has been a prime example with email only support, but even they are experimenting now with the phone.

Josh: I am a big believer in the phone and in having a phone number available. Think about the times you need help from a firm. You don’t say “I’ll contact them via email,” you say, “I’ll call them to resolve this.” Only you find out they have no listed phone number. And you get frustrated because it would be easier and faster to just speak to someone. Treat your prospects and clients the way you want to be treated in the same situation – keep your phone number. Allow people to reach your firm in anyway they want or can: email, phone, webform, website, case creation.

Eric:

Absolutely. Conversion rates go up on web pages with phone numbers because it engenders trust that there is a real human standing behind the product. Some marketers have taken numbers off their sites entirely in an effort to reduce the cost of calls, but also to force leads onto the trackable web.

Phone calls break the clickstream history – it’s hard to connect a call back to a clickstream, unless you have Invoca using unique phone numbers to connect the lead back to his clickstream.. 

Josh: Your career is rich in database marketing, marketing automation, and mobile. Could you tell us about that?

Eric:

I started in 2003 with a mobile firm called Smart Reply. At the time, only Eloqua and Vtrenz were around, so I chose Vtrenz, which was acquired by Silverpop in 2007. Because of that relationship, I became friendly with the CEO of Silverpop, Bill Nussey. After SmartReply was sold, I joined The Marketing Arm as CMO.

In 2011, Silverpop completed their new platform, combining Vtrenz and Silverpop’s email system. With that, Silverpop could now work for both B2B and B2C firms. Marketing automation for B2C became much more sophisticated, allowing for a personalized experience.

I liked Silverpop because it could send millions of personalized emails per day, which is critical for B2C firms as they achieve one-to-one marketing.

I was very proud of what we accomplished in my time at Silverpop.

As for Invoca, I had been looking at mobile and spoke with the CEO of Invoca, Jason Spievak, and was surprised because I realized I had ignored the power of tracking the inbound call channel. The possibilities with dynamic phone numbers based on individuals and their online activity is enormous. This “last mile” of mobile closes the loop on the final step in marketing – an area that had no visibility in the lead lifecycle.

Many B2B firms, and quite a few B2C firms, have made the mistake of trying to control the conversation with their audience. Sites no longer have phone numbers. But the phone is still ringing! People do find a way to call. Why? At some point you need to have a fluid, real time conversation. The only way to do that is with the phone.

I had a client who removed their phone numbers from public view. They still received 1500 calls per week – people went out of their way to find a number to call. They realized that people want to speak with them and those people are engaged and want to buy. So they put the phone back on the site.

Yes, the majority of your leads will still be on the web and will start there. But when they call you, how will you know what they have already done?

Josh: What do you do for fun?

Eric: I go sailing on my yacht, The Tequila.

Josh: Sounds very pleasant!

Many thanks to Eric Holmen for taking the time to share his thoughts on closing the loop with phone call tracking and his insights on B2B mobile ads.

Do you have a firm you would like me to interview? Let me know in the comments below.

Whether you are just starting your marketing automation journey or you’re ramping up to crush next quarter’s goals, there are some solid tips and tricks to achieve marketing automation success. I’ve worked in marketing automation for a number of years, and while success requires a lot of moving parts, these tips will help you get there.

Ensure Alignment with Sales and Other Departments

The best project outcomes I have seen are when the project lead is embedded within Marketing and works at the intersection of Marketing, Sales, and Technology. This ensures alignment across disciplines.

Sales and Marketing will be on board quickly, so start there. Billing teams are system critical to the business and will need reassurance and careful work to bring them into marketing automation.

A Phased Approach with a Vision Works Best

Marketing automation is powerful and can touch many functions. Take a phased approach.

1. Know all the systems.
2. Which systems and teams need this now?
3. Which can use it later?
4. What is the impact?

When I first implemented Marketo, I often found myself a bit out of step with the rest of the firm. And by out of step, I mean I was way ahead because I had fully embraced revenue marketing and the rest of the firm was not quite ready. So I stepped back and courted each group with what was in it for them whenever possible.

• Sales – better leads, better information on what they need, and they are closer to buying…at least that was the vision.
• Marketing – I will automate all of the drudgery and liberate you to run real programs and nurturing. You will look awesome.
• IT – please just setup the CNAME 🙂
• Web Technology – we’d like to track lead behavior and setup our own forms so we don’t bug you anymore. We won’t interfere with things like Omniture and Google Analytics – we promise!
• SFDC Admins – we need your help with integration and we’ll help you increase usage.

Get Buy In From Sales, then Technology

Obtaining buy-in from each group and each team leader is key to your early success. Buy-in is crucial from the heads of Sales, Marketing, and Technology.

As you can see above, you do need to consider where each team is coming from, what they need, and what their goals might be. I’d like to think the CEO would help align us all, but the reality is each team has specific goals that aren’t obviously linked to your marketing automation project. Help other team leaders make the leap to understand why this is important and why this might even help them reach their goals:

• Sales – make more calls and calls that lead to Opportunities and Won Sales each month.
• Marketing – save time and focus on content, testing, and nurturing.
• Web/Tech – marketing will be able to handle more requests without you. More lead tracking will enhance existing analytics tools. Be careful that you don’t steal their thunder.
• Product Management – easier to send out surveys, use tracking data on site and in product. Even trigger in product emails to increase usage.
• Operations and Finance – (usually last on my list) – automate invoices and notices.

Include the Client Facing Teams and the Customer

A successful roll out needs to include the customer lifecycle and which teams own each stage of that lifecycle. For example:

• Stage 1: Web, Marketing Communications
• Stage 2: Demand Generation, Content, and Sales
• Stage 3: Customer Onboarding
• Stage 4: Account Management and Billing

Remember that your goal is to help the customer do something they believe is critical enough to pay you for. If you just automate emails, you become a spammer. Whenever you design a workflow, form, or page design it with the customer in mind. You are there to help them and any way you can remove barriers for a lead, you both win.

This is why MAP features like progressive profiling and data appending are crucial to the customer experience. If you can make it easier for the lead to fill out less information, or already know who they are, then you saved someone a few seconds. A few seconds over tens of thousands of leads saves a lot of hours of work. Those seconds also take the hesitation out of providing contact information in exchange for content.

Include your CRM Admin

Remember to work with your CRM Admin (if you have one) to map out existing fields, field values, and any new fields required. A few key questions should help the conversation.

• What do you need to track?
• Who is responsible for what?
• Which reports do you want the system to spit out?

Then work backward to determine what else you need in the system.

Let Leads be Themselves

Consider having a free text ‘Job Title’ field where leads provide their real title – the one that makes them feel good. Then ask for a ‘Role’ or ‘Seniority’ field which is your main segmentation bucket. If you really want to take the burden off the lead, run data management flows to map this data automatically. You can use tools like RingLead, Demandbase, and ReachForce.

Clean Your Data Automatically

Dedupe and clean up your CRM before you connect your marketing automation system. Be sure to have the CRM enforce data quality through dupeblockers, ISO Country Picklists, and required fields.

Then make a list of key data that can be managed automatically or standardized to avoid re-work. Common candidates for this treatment are:

• Country and State: best to define CRM picklists and Form picklists, but you can automate fixes too.
• Lead Source: revise your picklist and make sure your Forms are stamping leads properly. If you have to, data flows can monitor and update bad values.
• Subscription Management: design a compliant system and automatically update lists to have accurate counts for easy sending.
• Competitors – screen and block competitors.

Aim Toward the Vision, Get Big Wins Done First

If you are starting from scratch, focus on the big automation wins such as lead routing, data appending and management, and lead scoring. These are still the mainstays of marketing automation platforms like Marketo. Don’t let your system become a glorified email service provider – use your MAP to save huge time and then use that time for heavy duty lead nurturing.

Once you’ve mastered these key marketing automation skills, check out the ebook I wrote with RingLead, The Newcomer’s Guide to Marketing Automation, for even more insight.

If you want to hear more, join me for a special webinar to become a Marketing Automation Rockstar.

 

Today, I spoke with Jay Famico, SiriusDecisions’ Technology Practice Director and author of SiriusView: Marketing Automation Platforms 2014, an important analysis of the state of the marketing automation platforms (MAP) market. Jay was kind enough to share part of the report with me, which led to an interesting conversation on the world of marketing automation.

Josh: Why did you decide to review the MAPs? With automation tools enabling marketers to refine persuasion triggers further, do you believe this report will become the marketers’ and the technologists’ go-to report instead of reports from Gartner or Forrester?

Jay – Our marketing automation SiriusView addresses feature mix, ecosystem, and use cases and requirements to help marketers decide which platform is best for them. SiriusDecisions is not going after Gartner or Forrester. Rather, we are a focused provider outside of technology. We are exclusively focused on business-to-business marketing and sales sector. We are more about the complex sale, buying center, and nuances of demand creation by industry sector.

Josh – You mention the growing divide between marketers who can effectively use marketing automation and those who can’t. I see this divide, too, and am curious if you have additional data on salaries and success of certified experts.

Jay – About 40% of MAP power users have less than two years of experience with the system.

It is one thing to buy a MAP, and another to have someone who can work the system. This skills gap is driving more rapid advancement for skilled MAP power users. Marketers with the necessary technical skills are receiving higher titles faster or more rapid promotions. You can see this on Glassdoor and a 2011 Marketo analysis of marketing automation salaries.

Over the next 10 years, someone who has a resume that lists marketing automation is going to get far more call-backs and command a higher salary. Marketers with MAP skills are more likely to be hired – and be hired faster. Marketers with skills in flow chart creation, process management, and engagement concepts will also do well. Without these skills, you’ll be left behind in b-to-b marketing by 2020.

Every week, I get calls from clients who say, “Hey, I need someone to run my MAP who has 6 to 10 years of experience with MAPs and is director-level or above.”

Josh – [laughter]

Jay – But this person does not exist now. That expertise is rare at that level. My advice to hiring mangers is to roll back expectations of what a good MAP marketer is. Why not pair a junior person with a consultant, agency or senior marketer who can mentor them? Find a smart, driven marketer and give them an opportunity. SiriusDecisions can help with this.

Josh – I also see similar postings and frequently find the company changes their mind about those requirements very quickly. There are not enough people with this skill set to be picky right now.

You mention you believe several MAP vendors will enter b-to-b, but what about established b-to-b providers heading to B2C? Do you see challenges for them when it comes to scaling systems or in having the right B2C skill set?

Jay – I can’t talk about any particular vendor, but in general, there is a scaling issue when moving from b-to-b to b-t-c. Your typical b-to-b database contains 10,000 to 2.5 million contacts, max. A b-to-c database can easily 2.5 million-plus. Firms will have to abandon SQL, which many already have done. Some big questions and issues for MAP vendors and their b-to-c customers are

• Testing and quality assurance – what happens when you mis-send? There is a much larger impact with millions of consumers instead of 100,000 professionals.
• Does the MAP have workflow and approval steps to reduce missteps?
• Use cases – what must b-to-c marketers do differently? Activities and metrics tend to be different: shopping cart abandons, more automation, direct sales and no lead transfers. Vendors will need to educate b-to-c marketers what can be done.
• Staffing and users – b-to-c firms use more agencies and external teams, and thus a turnkey approach. Reseller tools will need to be developed further by MAPs. Several are adding an agency login system.
• New features like “exchange centers” and pre-packaged playbooks to transfer recipes across instances are appearing more and more often.

Josh – When you discuss pre-packaged playbooks are you talking about recipe books or preset Marketo programs?

Jay – Yes, this is to transfer recipes across instances. I am a huge proponent of playbooks. It always helps to abstract away the ingredients (features) from what the marketer wants to do. Can they standardize requests? Speed up deployment of a program? Adding recipes and transferring them reduces the need for more skilled teams. Newer users can be effective, while the power user does more interesting things.

Josh – Marketo and HubSpot are both increasing use of “Recipes,” so I’m sure we’ll see more of this as it goes beyond consultancies.

On page 6 of the SiriusView, you display the rated vendors’ customer mixes (SMB v. enterprise) against their overall scores. What’s the best way to read this chart?

Jay – Yes, you can narrow down your selection of MAP based on the chart. But don’t make your decision based on the chart alone. It doesn’t factor in organization-specific needs that must be considered, such as use cases, internal skill level, database size, regulatory issues and the CRM.

After looking at the chart, understand the vendors in the landscape. Narrow down your research by looking at similar firms – those whose customer mix matches who you are as a company. Most likely, you’ll find someone who can meet your needs. Consider each vendor’s strength in your area of greatest need.

Then, go into the report to learn more about each vendor that you aren’t familiar with. The report is intended to help you understand the important things that each vendor does differently and what each is really missing.

Josh – What was the most surprising finding you included in the report?

Jay – First, I thought 2014’s report would involve only slight updates to the 2013 report, but huge changes have occurred  in just one year; the level of innovation was dramatic. Acquisitions like Neolane and IBM changed the landscape. Consolidation has been a key theme in the past year and will continue to play a role.

The MAP market has also expanded significantly. In 2013, 11 vendors met our requirements; in our 2014 MAP report, we covered 17. There are a number of firms, like Sitecore, expanding from Web to MAP. Vocus is a good example of evolution, too, although we did not include them in the report this year. Vocus moved from PR software to be more MAP-like.

Also, Eloqua is now adding segmentation tools with data that isn’t in the MAP natively. Other vendors are going beyond AB testing to multivariate and automated AB testing.

Josh – As CRM firms like Salesforce acquire MAPs, is there a risk to customers?

Jay – No, there are no risks to the customer. As an example, if you get Marketo and have SFDC, you will be in a better position for negotiation.

Pardot now has access to SFDC’s deep resources and larger client base. Getting that first meeting is easier for them. Getting shortlisted is easier. SFDC AppExchange apps will, by definition, integrate with Pardot.

What does that mean for competitors? SFDC won’t shut down their open APIs because it will damage their ecosystem and trust. MAP integration is not at risk. SFDC is the main integration point for MAPs and is not likely to change in near future. SFDC and MAPs share many major clients and because of this, neither side will risk client relationships.

Vendors are starting to look outside of SFDC now. Several are adding other CRMs to their roadmap and have already started to add that capability to their marketing messaging.

Josh – I see this, too, in the marketplace in terms of negotiation on renewals. I have not seen many outright switches.

Lastly, what advice would you give someone looking to choose a MAP?

Jay – Understand what your needs, wants, and requirements are. Ask the following questions:

• What are you trying to do in terms of marketing?
• What is realistic and feasible for you in the next year?
• What’s your one-year, three-year and five-year road map, given other constraints? If you are just thinking about automation and ignoring things like data quality and content availability, then you may have trouble.
• Do you have enough content to power nurturing?
• Do you have high-enough data quality to segment well? Enough people with “First Name?”Are your reps putting personal details in fields that might go outside the firm?

Your biggest risk is in not delivering the value expected. With a MAP, you want to immediately show the value.

When you speak with MAP vendors, have standard use cases for them to show during the demo. Be specific about your needs. If you care about nurturing, ask them show you a nurturing plan. The reason is to get them to show you want you want. Don’t let them show you only their best side. Get that comparison point between vendors.

Be sure to speak to other MAP experts. Ask them what they would do again and what they would do differently.

Seek out vendor references from LinkedIn and your peer base, not just the vendor. You want the full story on the system, not just the story from their best clients.

Josh – Jay, great advice, and great to have you discuss this report in detail. Where’s the best place for my readers to see the report?

Jay – If your readers are looking for a synopsis of the report they can read about it and how we categorized each of the vendors in my recent blog post.

If readers would like to access the entire report, Marketo just purchased reprint rights.

Reach Jay @jayfamico

Jay Famico is the Practice Director, Technology at Sirius Decisions. Jay helps clients select and optimize marketing and sales technology, and understand the challenges and opportunities that technology and process standardization present and how individual applications should link to form a unified ecosystem.

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Thanks Jay!

Stay tuned for some very interesting Marketo posts that I’ve been working on the past few weeks. Also, if you’re in the Los Angeles area, I am in town and happy to meet up. Send a note to hello {at } marketingrockstarguides.com.