Marketing Automation for the Inbound Challenged – Part 3: Vendors 1

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Once you’ve grasped the whole marketing automation concept, you’re going to need a vendor to help you follow through. Over my next two blogs, I’ll highlight different marketing automation vendors, and what they do that sets them apart. Information is interpreted differently by everyone, so if you see something that looks out of whack, be sure to comment. This is your chance to set the record straight!

B2B Marketing Automation VendorsEloqua
Eloqua provides you with contact management, campaign management, lead management and marketing measurement, all in one platform. It’s the only vendor that can guarantee customer success, and its customers range from small organizations to large corporations. Eloqua can work with a company that’s just getting started, or improve the sophistication of existing marketing efforts.

Genius
Genius is the only marketing automation system that facilitates both lead-nurturing work flows and real-time prospect qualification alerts. It is broken up into two products: Genius Pro and Genius Enterprise. Pro supports all aspects of demand generation and one-to-one communication between sales and their prospects. Enterprise includes everything from Genius Pro, but adds automated lead nurturing, real-time lead conversions and lead scoring. They emphasize their ability to provide real-time alerts, and were rated #1 in Marketing Automation by Appexchange in 2009.

Marketo
Marketo is made up of two sections: Marketo Lead Management and Marketo Sales Insight. They provide solutions for both sales and marketing, and pride themselves on their ability to provide the functionality marketers need to generate more high-quality sales leads. Marketo offers a free trial, as well as no charges for set-up, integration or training. They can have you up and running with their products in just one day. Marketo is a 100% native force.com application, meaning it works inside Salesforce CRM, and it just received a 2010 Codie Award for Best Marketing Solution.

Sage
Sage North America’s sole focus is providing business management software and services to small and mid-sized companies. They offer a variety of product support plans to facilitate both customer and partner training, and have the capabilities to fulfill customers’ needs in customer management, financial management, inventory management, people management and more. You can specify what types of products are best fit for you by filtering through business need, industry or company size.

SAS
SAS is the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market, as well as the leader in business analytics software and services. They provide the technology and analytics applications to help you thrive both today and tomorrow. They work with large corporations and small companies alike, and their client list includes 92 of the top 100 companies on the 2009 FORTUNE Global 500 List. They were also named by FORTUNE as the #1 company to work for in America.

Stay tuned next week for information on more marketing automation vendors. In the meantime, share your thoughts!