Salesforce.com Hungry for Marketing Automation?

Kevin Joyce is the chief marketing officer at Market2Lead and makes some interesting observations in his article on DestinationCRM entitled Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf? Is Salesforce.com a threat to vendors of marketing automation solutions?

According to Joyce, the most likely technologies to become commoditized and be fully absorbed by midmarket CRMs are:

• all sales person-related functions, such as notifications, alerts, outlook integration, etc.
• lead scoring from the sales perspective
• data quality tools and data enrichment
• technologies related to social media tracking (knowledge management extension)
• telesales and tele-qualification functionality
• pay-per-click tracking
• email marketing
  
• channel management functionality

Least likely to be absorbed within the next two years include technologies such as:

• Web analytics
• asset and content management
• marketing calendars and project management
• marketing planning, budgeting, and financials
• production management
• campaign automation
• response management (dynamic profiling with forms, landing pages, microsites, etc.)
• PR-related technologies
  
• marketing data warehouse

Joyce believes Salesforce.com will likely absorb functionality that has wide appeal to its installed base. That means low end marketing automation vendors and email marketing firms will need to be worried and marketing automation vendors catering to the high-end and midmarket will be in friendly cooperation with the CRM vendors.

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