Salesforce Makes a Great Catch with Pardot

Salesforce Makes a Great Catch with Pardot

In October of 2012, email service provider ExactTarget announced the acquisition of Marketing Automation vendor Pardot for $95 Million.  Now, less than a year later, Salesforce annnounced the acquisition of ExactTarget for $2.5 Billion, outdoing Oracle‘s $871 Million acquisition of Marketing Automation vendor Eloqua, which had just IPO’d that August.  And let’s not forget Marketo, which recently IPO’d and as  of today has a market capitalization of $780+ Million.  What does this mean/what might […]

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DemandGen for DemandGen Professionals

DemandGen for DemandGen Professionals

Almost a year ago we blogged about the lack of Marketing Automation skills, which fit into a broader category of Marketing Operations.  Since then we’ve been helping companies go through the painful but necessary transformation to become network-centric organizations that capture “data-driven revenue™.”  The main challenge is that we have not come far enough in getting people with the right skills in positions where they can […]

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Eating Our Words About Hubspot

Eating Our Words About Hubspot

Earlier this month, we made a a brief comment regarding Hubspot‘s standing in the world of Marketing Automation.  Undoubtedly they are the thought leader in “Inbound Marketing,” but we said that they were not playing at the same level as some of the leading Marketing Automation platforms such as Pardot or Marketo.   Well, the fantastic listeners at Hubspot caught wind of our blog, and none other than the effervescent Laura Fitton (@pistachio) […]

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Marketing Automation – Not as Simple as It Looks

Marketing Automation – Not as Simple as It Looks

Salesforce put a video on Marketing Automation on YouTube last week and it’s become a little hit in the circles we run in. But while it gives a good 50,000 foot over view, it does not give justice to the hard work that goes into preparing to implement and Marketing Automation platform, which Allinio can facilitate.  And here’s another one from Act-On Software… Now forgive us for weaving an […]

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“Will Big IT Swallow Up Marketing Automation?”

“Will Big IT Swallow Up Marketing Automation?”

That’s the title of Johnny Mone‘s (@johnnymone) brief but thoughtful article in Business 2 Community late last week.  He brings up some valid observations given the major shifts in the IT world, including leadership moves by Oracle, IBM, Salesforce, Intuit, Dell (which we covered in our last blog) regarding Marketing Automation.While we said that Dell’s venture with Pardot was a pivotal event, Johnny counters that overall the jury may still be out because the target audience of SMBs […]

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GovLoop’s “5 Things” Nails Dreamforce Just Right

GovLoop’s “5 Things” Nails Dreamforce Just Right

We’ve scoured many reviews about the other week’s great Dreamforce event put on by Salesforce.  Gary Honig (@GaryHonig) brought to our attention a great blogpost from an unlikely (from a private sector perspective) source:  GovLoop, a social network for the government community to connect and share information.  In this blogpost, “The Top 5 Things I Learned from the Biggest Tech Conference in the U.S.,” Mike Bernard (@Bernster) gives his […]

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Marketing Automation & Dreamforce 2011 – Day 2

Marketing Automation & Dreamforce 2011 – Day 2

Joe Zuccaro (@joezuc), Allinio’s President & CEO, continues to blog from the Dreamforce trenches in San Francisco: Day two of Dreamforce started off with a bang; mainly in terms of product announcements by Salesforce.  There was a mind-boggling number of new products that Salesforce is launching, and their vision is quite ambitious (as if they have never been ambitious before!), with a lot focusing on the “social enterprise.”  They […]

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Marketing Automation & Dreamforce 2011 – Day 1

Marketing Automation & Dreamforce 2011 – Day 1

Joe Zuccaro (@joezuc), Allinio’s President & CEO, blogs from the trenches in San Francisco: I arrived at Salesforce.com‘s popular user conference, Dreamforce, on an early flight, but it seems that most people arrived well before me.  Most if not all the Marketing Automation sessions were full, but I got into most of the ones I wanted. This is the biggest Dreamforce to date, with 45,000 attendees. and the […]

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MMI Can Give You a Marketing Automation “Edge”

MMI Can Give You a Marketing Automation “Edge”

We visited MMI Solutions, a small but promising Marketing Automation company in outside New York City.  They already have some top-notch customers like Kodak, Canon, and Expedia that have used their tool, MMI Edge. MMI Edge is designed with features allowing for cross media marketing at the highest levels, including the creation, tracking and reporting of PURLs (Personalized URLs), QR codes, web activity, e-newsletters, e-mails, and web to print.  The […]

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Simple Marketing Automation with Lead Follow-Up

Simple Marketing Automation with Lead Follow-Up

Lead Follow-Up, a niche solution available on the Salesforce AppExchange for the past four years, has hundreds of small business customers.   We took a look at the app and think it’s a decent entrée into Marketing Automation for a number of reasons:  First, it offers a 30-day trial followed by month-to-month credit card billing; second, the billing is at very attractive price points for small businesses, especially sole […]

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