Salesforce.com Pieces Together Jigsaw

April 28, 2010

Back on February 13, 2010, we reported that Salesforce had raised $575M in order to fund a more aggressive acquisition policy over the next few quarters that would involve a string of small-to-mid-sized deals, with potential for larger acquisitions. The first of these new acquisitions occurred earlier this month with that $142M purchase of Jigsaw.  This [...]

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RightNow Changes SaaS Pricing

April 26, 2010

In an article by Chris Kanaracus in the Computerworld magazine,  CRM vendor RightNow announced a new SaaS (software as a service) pricing and licensing model on Thursday that it says provides customers with fairer, clearer deals. The company also issued a “Cloud Challenge” to competitors, urging them to adopt similar principles. RightNow contends that while [...]

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Netsuite Adds New Marketing Automation Vendor

April 26, 2010

LeadForce1 has joined Pardot and Silverpop Engage B2B on Netsuite’s SuiteApp.com.  SuiteApp is Netsuite’s answer to Salesforce.com’s successful AppExchange. ”The integration of LeadForce1 and NetSuite brings a new dimension to customer lifecycle management,” says Sushil Jha, Chief Revenue Officer at LeadForce1.  “It helps marketing and sales teams collaborate more effectively in targeting prospects, and it [...]

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A Strategic Look at Selecting a Marketing Automation Vendor

April 16, 2010

Astadia provides deeper guidance on how to select a marketing automation vendor on their company blog.  In this post they are advocating to look beyond functionality and think about how marketing automation fits from an overall strategic standpoint.  Full disclosure: Astadia consults on a variety of SaaS solutions like Salesforce.com, Eloqua, and Xactly but this is still good [...]

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Salesforce.com Chatter Preview

April 13, 2010

Salesforce.com is still in the process of beta testing Chatter with customers and here is a nice review of it’s functionality by David Tiber at CIO.  The artice is entitled Why Salesforce.com Chatter Matters. Enter Chatter, Salesforce.com’s offering that applies social networking metaphors to the problem of collaboration. It has the immediacy and feel of [...]

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Marketing Automation Meets Sales 2.0

March 21, 2010

Jep Castelein at The Connected Marketer discusses how marketing automation dovetails with concepts discussed in Sales 2.0… Buyer Education The automated email campaigns in Marketing Automation systems are a great tool for buyer education. Based on a lead’s profile, interests and responses you can engage in a dialog focused on knowledge transfer. Once the lead [...]

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Eloqua Addresses Implementation Issues with SmartStart

March 8, 2010

In the past Eloqua has been criticized for lengthy deployment times and high implementation costs.  The company has tried to improve their services with the SmartStart implementation program. Clients who participate in Eloqua’s SmartStart are refunded the balance of their investment if they are not fully satisfied with the performance of their marketing automation deployment. Eloqua [...]

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10 Marketing Automation Must Haves

March 6, 2010

Richard Sharp at Marqui’s Web Marketing Blog posted Top 10 Marketing Automation Must Haves, Part 1. Here is a summary of the key big ideas. Fast landing page creation you can measure and a/b split test. Simple form creation that integrates with your website call-to-actions. All leads into 1 funnel. Bi-directional integration with your chosen [...]

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Marketing Automation: Rise of the Machines

February 21, 2010

Here is a fun article posted by Joel Harrison called Marketing Automation: The Rise of Machines? ‘Automation’ is a word that could strike fear into the minds of the average cinema-goer, back in the golden age of science fiction last century. It conjured up images of soulless robots, marching relentlessly to subjugate us under their [...]

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Salesforce Beefs Up For Mergers and Aquisitions

February 13, 2010

As follow up from my November 2009 post entitled Salesforce Hungry for Marketing Automation, Salesforce.com recently raised $575M through a convertible debt offering on top of the $1B in net cash and investments on its balance sheet.  Many analysts believe they are likely to use the cash to fund a more aggressive acquisition policy over [...]

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