B2B Connection

At Dreamforce we talked with Paul Rudwall, Director of Product Marketing at Invoca, about marketers’ blind spot in the customer journey. According to Rudwall, the rise of mobile has created a surge in phone calls, which are not properly linked to the mobile internet research preceding the calls. Tracking this journey is crucial, if marketers want to understand which touch points are driving conversion.  Rudwall describes how customers are using Invoca to tie online activity to phone calls—intelligence they use to drive high-converting leads for sales.   Give us a little introduction—who are you as a company, and how did you personally come to work with Invoca? Before Invoca, I worked with Responsys, so digital marketing is my forte. But finding Invoca was a light bulb moment. At Responsys, I had worked with huge companies who invest millions of dollars every day to drive demand for their product, and you might be surprised by how many conversions still happens over the phone. Before buyers make a big purchase of a complex product, like a cable or satellite subscription, life insurance or software, they want to talk to a real person. Tools like Responsys, ExactTarget, Kenshoo, and Marin are not focused on how phone calls fit into the […]

According to Ian Walsh, CMO, TrackMaven’s approach to marketing analytics is helping content marketers drastically increase engagement. Walsh explained how TrackMaven’s metrics aim to help content marketers focus in on what’s working–both in terms of their own content and their competitors’ content. TrackMaven is a competitive marketing analysis platform, aggregating and presenting competitor marketing activity and content marketing via a feed and offering it for comparison to one’s own campaign.  Tell me about TrackMaven—what do you do and what is your vision? Basically, TrackMaven is a marketing analytics software platform. We call ourselves competitive intelligence for digital marketers. At the highest level, we help companies create better content for their content marketing. We do that by analyzing the impact that our customer’s content is having in the marketplace. Not social listening or the voice of customer but actually looking at the content and messages that our customers are putting in the market across various different digital channels, and looking at what’s working, what’s not? What’s driving the most engagement with channel metrics? We do that for their competitors as well as for the customers themselves. This really helps them benchmark their performance relative to their competition. This means understanding how well they’re performing on different channels and different topics […]

Michael Walton of Simply Measured explains how marketers can use social data to understand the why and the what next for their social marketing campaigns. Rather than passively “listening” to social, Simply Measured believes marketers need goal-driven insights around social impact, marketing impact, and business impact.  What is Simply Measured’s value proposition, and how was it developed? The history of Simply Measured set the tone for how we think about things and how we deliver solutions to the market. In 2010, the three founders had a vision about making marketers’ lives easier. But they honestly had no product idea at all. At the time they named the company UntitledStartup.com. Their premise was to get talented people together, deeply understand customer needs, then build a remarkable product and turn it into a remarkable business model. It wasn’t long before they understood that giving marketers access to social data in tools they can use was really key to marketers’ goals. That was the seed. Since then Simply Measured has turned from a tool focused just on Twitter measurement, into what we believe is the market leader in in-depth social analytics across a range of social networks. We deliver value up and down the marketing stack. It’s a cool […]

Demandbase is an Account-based Marketing (ABM) solution with capabilities for targeted web advertising, website personalization and ties to CRM.  Per Wikipedia, account-based marketing (ABM), also known as key account marketing, is a strategic approach to business marketing in which an organization considers and communicates with individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one. They recently acquired a company called WhoToo, which will help Demandbase add “types of people” persona profile data to the mix, making campaigns more targeted.   What’s new at Demandbase? We’ve built out our B2B marketing cloud solution with a platform for advertising, personalization, and now CRM. Our comprehensive approach connects results from advertising, website and selling programs at the account level, fueling ABM (Account-Based Marketing), which B2B companies are rapidly adopting. We started to experience a lot of traction a few years ago in high tech, but now we are seeing adoption by financial institutions, healthcare companies, and manufacturers. Our underlying data assets are driving the success of our ABM solutions and we continue to invest in growing these. Last week we announced the acquisition of WhoToo, a Seattle-based company focused on building persona profiles of people (hundreds of millions) and interests in functional areas. Our core data asset has always been a […]

Social media management vendor Spredfast acquired another SMMS product, Shoutlet, last month. Both products offer a similar set of capabilities, and serve a mix of SMBs and enterprise customers in industries such as retail, CPG, and financial services. Shoutlet has 100 employees and is based in Madison, WI. Spredfast is based in Austin, TX, and prior to the acquisition, had about 400 employees. Acquisitions are prevalent in the SMMS space: Spredfast merged with Mass Relevance in 2014, and Sprinklr has made 7 acquisitions in 18 months, including NewBrand, Get Satisfaction and Pluck this year. According to Spredfast, though they are both social media management platforms, Spredfast and Shoutlet have complementary feature sets. TrustRadius summarized the strengths and areas for improvement of each product in our Buyer’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Management Software, published January 2015. End-users who have written reviews of Shoutlet on TrustRadius like the product’s publishing features, its contests and landing pages features, and customer support. Users would like to see better channel coverage, better workflow and collaboration features, and better social CRM features.  Spredfast users like the product’s workflows, analytics, innovation and customer support, but also mentioned performance issues, usability issues and a learning curve. Spredfast is most compared to Sprinklr by those […]

InsightSquared is a sales performance analytics solution that includes sales forecasts, KPI tracking, and multi-data source reports. The solution helps businesses immediately identify weaknesses in their sales process, diagnose the root cause of the issue, and take action to correct course. It’s a top rated BI solution in the small business segment on TrustRadius. What’s new at InsightSquared? We’ve grown a lot this year and had a great year last year. We feel like we’ve really found product market fit, so we’re leaning into growth. We moved to a new 45k square foot office in Boston – that’s triple our old space. Our team has doubled in the last year to over 150 people. Our sales team, in particular, has grown pretty aggressively. There’s been a lot of change. What’s new on the product front? We’ve doubled down on sales performance analytics. If you look at our reviews on TrustRadius, we are the top rated sales performance analytics product on the market. We offer over 400 reports – we think it’s the deepest library out there. Our product is very configurable, but customers can still be up and running within a week with limited to no professional services. That’s really unique in the industry. To date, […]

  The brand-new TrustMaps for Survey Tools are here, which means buyers can now use dynamic filters to find the best products for their company size. Dynamic TrustMaps rank products based on real-time user satisfaction ratings and evaluation frequency among SMBs and enterprises. Users of survey tools have shared 107 ratings and 187 in-depth reviews, spanning a broad range of products, use cases, and opinions. Buyers can now quickly locate the survey tools most highly rated and widely adopted by companies of similar size, and therefore most closely aligned to their needs. To understand what users are saying about specific product features and other use case parameters, check out our review base here. “Companies are increasingly looking to both customer and employee satisfaction as a key part of remaining competitive. Online survey platforms enable their research, but different feature sets are important depending on the use case,” said Vinay Bhagat, CEO of TrustRadius. “Users running customer satisfaction surveys might need CRM integration and in-depth customer profiling, whereas those gathering ‘360-degree’ employee feedback might need advanced branching logic with anonymity. Our Survey Tools TrustMaps™ and store of in-depth reviews help prospective buyers identify the best-fit solutions based on their specific needs.” Each TrustMap™ depicts […]

NewsCred is a content marketing platform and content marketplace. TrustRadius talked to Alicianne Rand, VP of Marketing at NewsCred, to learn about their approach to content marketing and their innovations around measuring the “content journey” across the full customer experience. NewsCred has gone through some interesting changes over the past few years. Can you give us some background on NewsCred and your current value proposition? NewsCred has about 220 people in three offices globally. We’ve been around for about seven years, but for the first three years, we had a different business model. As a B2B marketing company we’ve been around for four and a half years. There are two core pieces to our product. The first is our software: we provide a platform that enables global brands to source content and manage the entire content marketing process. It can help them simplify and scale the process from start to finish: from building a content strategy, to sourcing quality content, to editorial calendars, workflows, and planning, to publishing and distribution, to measuring and analyzing the success of their content. That entire process happens within a single platform. The second part of our product value is our content marketplace. NewsCred is the […]

Uberflip is a content marketing platform that allows its users to aggregate marketing content into a well-designed, easy-to-update content hub. We interviewed Uberflip’s VP of Marketing to talk about the company’s positioning, differentiation, and perspective on content marketing trends. What are the core capabilities of content marketing software? When we take a look at the space in general, there’s the broader content marketing cycle. First, there’s content creation, ideation, authoring. Then there’s the creation of the content experience – how is it presented to audiences? Is it responsive and optimized for lead generation, or whatever your goals might be? There’s also content distribution, and then there’s the ROI metrics component, which runs through the entire cycle. With bigger organizations, there’s also the issue of content marketing operations, especially if they are creating a lot of content. They need to coordinate content with many different stakeholders. Most content marketing software falls into one or more of those buckets. Are there all-in-one products, or do most products focus in on a part of the content marketing cycle? That’s a very loaded question. A lot of content marketing software overlaps. While you do have solutions that claim to be all-in-one, I have yet to […]

TrustRadius talked with Campaign Monitor’s vice president of demand generation and marketing ops about the importance of balancing beauty and basics for do-it-yourself email marketers.   Campaign Monitor has undergone a lot of growth recently. What does your customer base look like? We now have more than 1.2 million customers at 120,000 companies globally. Our customers break down into three main categories: 1) We have a great set of SMB customers who are really trying to grow their businesses with Campaign Monitor. We work with businesses like Rip Curl, who uses Campaign Monitor’s email marketing to launch their products, and the San Diego Chargers, who use us to manage ticket sales and promotions. 2) We also have a lot of digital agency customers. Businesses work with agencies to make their email marketing decisions, and those agencies then utilize Campaign Monitor to send emails for their clients, like the Foo Fighters and Disney on Ice for example. 3) Lastly, divisions or departments in big companies use Campaign Monitor to get on-brand email out. These are people who are trying to get something done and can’t afford to wait in the queue of a corporate marketing dept. Coca-Cola and British Airways are two […]

Gainsight is a Customer Success Management solution. We interviewed Gainsight’s CEO to discuss trends in the space and areas of focus for Gainsight.       How have you seen the CSM industry change in the last couple of years? The way we think about this industry of customer success is really to think first about the profession of customer success, and then think about the technology. Over the last 10 years, more and more business models have shifted to where the lifetime value of the customer comes not from the initial sale, but from ongoing value. You don’t get paid up front as much anymore, and the customer’s not stuck with you. You’re making a lot of your money over time, and because of that, companies at the forefront created customer success teams. Some people still call them account management teams, but the new way to think about this role is all about driving success for the customer, driving lifetime value in terms of renewal and upsells. Salesforce came up with this terminology and idea; they created “customer success” a while ago. Almost every SaaS company has a customer success team of some kind. But it’s not just SaaS companies anymore; […]

Acquia provides a cloud platform for building, delivering, and optimizing digital experiences. It was founded by the maker of Drupal. We interviewed Acquia’s CMO to talk about the company’s positioning, differentiation and CMS trends. Where does Acquia fit in the landscape of CMS vendors? We describe ourselves as the digital experience company. We help our customers unify content, community and commerce, meaning their traditional .com website, their commerce site, and their social community site, on our Acquia platform. And we harness the open-source product Drupal as the underlying technology behind our platform. What is digital experience management and how universal a term is it? The generally accepted category that we all compete in is Web Content Management. It’s not sexy, but when I see RFPs, or when Sitecore and Adobe see RFPs, the majority of them are still using the phrase web content management. I think vendors and some analysts like Forrester have jumped on the term digital experience because the word “web” implies one channel, when in reality it is a website, a mobile device, a screen, all these digital touchpoints. The term is trying to capture that it’s multi-channel. And it’s really a recognition that “web content management” is […]

We sat down with Atri Chatterjee, CMO at Act-On to discuss customer focus, product development strategy, and the future of marketing automation. What’s new at Act-On? Lot’s of things are new. Act-On is now 7 years old, and we’ve grown really fast. We’re 5 years in the market, building out the product and now we’re building up our team. We’ve got a new CFO, who joined us last quarter. We have a new VP of Demand Generation and a new VP of Ops—some of the leadership that will help scale this company, which is what we’re already starting to do. Where is Act-On’s focus in terms of the customer base? We have over 3,000 customers, and we’re getting bigger and bigger customers. You probably are familiar with Act-On being strong in the SMB sector. What’s really happening is that Act-On is becoming strong in the mid-market, and that is our focus. So, we still go after small companies, but typically small companies who are growing fast, not microbusinesses. Can you talk about how the mid-market is different, in terms of needs, from the small businesses that have previously been your focus? There are no small companies that we sell to […]

What led you to start Engagio? I’ve been fortunate enough to only work at two companies in the last 17 years. During my tenure, both companies went from small to big, and I realized that I love the small stage. I knew at some point that I was going to leave Marketo to start a new company. I wanted to stay in the marketing tech space but did not want to compete with Marketo, and spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best opportunity. A friend of mine, Maria Pergolino, the VP of Marketing at Apttus, suggested Account Based Marketing [a strategic approach to business marketing in which an organization considers and communicates with individual prospect or customer accounts as markets of one], since she found that there was a lot of things she needed to do manually to support ABM. The more time I spent on the idea, the more I realized how good it was. There is a real need around ABM, and it was not something I saw existing Marketing Automation players directly addressing, especially as some are moving more towards B2C [business to consumer]. Account-based marketing is hardcore B2B [business to business]. I left […]

TrustRadius checked in with CMO Mike Volpe for an update on developments at HubSpot, and to get his take on the Marketing Automation landscape. What’s new at HubSpot? We went public back in October. That’s been awesome. We’ve been growing more than 50% a year, year over year. In the fall we launched our CRM as well as our Sidekick for Sales product. [Sidekick is a set of integrated email tools, which allows users to view contact profiles from their inboxes and track email opens and clicks, with email scheduling capabilities coming soon}. In May, we announced eleven integrations with all sorts of cool software solutions including Slideshare, HelloSign (contract e-signature), Infer (lead scoring), data hero (business intelligence/analytics) and a whole bunch more. The other thing we launched was our Sidekick for Business product, which is a higher-end product for individual sales reps. It has tools to help reps with email templates, communication tracking, presentations, tracking of usage of those presentations, call logging, call reporting, etc. So we’ve done a lot more on the sales line of things, too. The last time we talked, you had just launched your CRM product—could you give us an update on that? Our CRM strategy […]

Social media is one of the newest, fastest changing and perhaps least understood marketing channels for businesses. As we noted in our Buyer’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Management Software, companies are finding new and interesting ways to leverage social media, from customer service to product development to recruiting to market research. One major retail company, for example, uses social media listening tools to understand shoplifting frequency at particular locations and take action as needed – people share anything on social media. Simply Measured, a social media analytics vendor, recently asked the research team at TrustRadius to survey and analyze the state of social media marketing in 2015. Nearly 600 social media practitioners – from consultants to executives to social media managers – took our survey, responding to questions about the goals, challenges and measurement tactics for their social media programs. The main takeaway is that companies of all sizes and social media maturity level are struggling to communicate the value of their social media programs. This is not a new finding; studies in previous years have come to a similar conclusion; perhaps the surprising piece is that this is STILL the case, despite increasingly sophisticated measurement tactics and data technologies. Measuring ROI […]

I recently met with Sangram Vajre, Co-Founder and CMO at Terminus at the recent Martech conference in San Francisco.  I thought Terminus would be of interest to our readers. Sangram was previously VP of Marketing at marketing automation software vendor Pardot, now owned by Salesforce. The lead investor in Terminus is David Cummings, a co-founder of Pardot. Terminus positions itself as a platform for B2B advertising automation. Their mission is to address two key B2B marketing challenges: 1) The B2B buying cycle is getting longer and more complex. Multiple people have influence so to maximize effectiveness, you need to market at an account versus an individual level. 2) You need to engage buyers on their channels of preference, e.g. mobile, Facebook, different websites. Advertising is relatively new for B2B. How does it compare to B2C? “The typical spend levels in B2C advertising are huge. In B2B, you’re not spending nearly that much. For every account you’re targeting you can control the number of impressions delivered, and the devices on which you render above fold, and to some degree clicks.” How do you target? “We’re advocating an approach call ‘Flip My Funnel’, where you start with your best fit prospective customers. Then you figure out the titles you […]

On April 8, 2015 enterprise social media management software vendor Sprinklr announced the acquisition of Get Satisfaction, a customer community software platform. Terms for the deal were not disclosed. This is Sprinklr’s fifth acquisition since January 2014. I caught up with Jeremy Epstein, VP of Marketing at Sprinklr, and Rahul Sachdev, formerly CEO of Get Satisfaction, who now serves as Sprinklr’s VP of First Party Experience, to talk about their motivations for the deal and integration plans. Get Satisfaction’s origins were as a freemium online community solution. It was rapidly adopted mostly by SMBs. The company started to focus on the enterprise market in 2012 and completed the build out of an enterprise solution by late 2013. Today Get Satisfaction hosts about 1,000 communities, 300 of which are for enterprise companies. Enterprise communities include the Pampers Diaper product line for Procter & Gamble, and the TV group of Korean electronics company LG. Get Satisfaction’s primary use case is customer care, but it also supports product research and marketing. Get Satisfaction’s enterprise edition was typically sold for $30-50k per year per community, and as high as $100k depending on add-on modules and services. Get Satisfaction is rated positively on TrustRadius with an average “likelihood […]

In the spring of 2015, Spear Marketing Group, a leading full-service B2B demand generation agency, conducted a market research survey designed to document the level of maturity (or lack thereof) present in the typical marketing automation deployment. It was the firm’s hypothesis, based on anecdotal evidence and its own work with marketing automation clients, that underutilization of marketing automation software was rampant in the B2B community. To test that hypothesis, the agency designed a survey that targeted B2B marketing executives, marketing operations titles, and other marketing automation users. More than 100 respondents completed a series of 33 questions that asked how much their organizations were either: 1) Using specific features, in a way that would illustrate full utilization of the functionality available to them, or 2) Enjoying business value in areas consistent with generally accepted best practices. Respondents were then assigned a “grade” based on how many of their responses aligned with those best practices.  Taken as a whole, the average respondent answered 56% of the questions “correctly” and scored a grade of C. Whereas that single grade would suggest a general lack of maturity in most marketing automation deployments, responses to individual questions tell a more complex story. In some notable […]

  Every business wants an answer to certain questions: What do people say about our product? Who is talking about – and who likes or dislikes – our product? However, businesses have a few options for how to develop insight into their customers. They could run focus groups, but those are logistically difficult, expensive, and the data is inaccurate because the study subjects are psychologically “primed”. They could dig into owned data they have on their current customers, which is a great idea. But this can only go so far: what about customers who chose not to purchase? Or who switched products? The Social Web and Its Vast Data There is a world of customer data out there, ready to be used to drive real business results. This is the social web (or web 2.0, or more commonly: “The Internet”). Ever since the dawn of social networks, forums, blogs, comments, and all such 2-way conversation channels, people have been talking about what they do, like, eat, wear, hate, love, think, and feel. This massive set of unstructured data can actually be mined and analyzed. More often than that, the results produced can be used to define new assumptions, or modify […]