B2B Marketing POSTs by Laura Ramos

I have long wondered about the contradictions I see in the marketing automation space. Look at lead management in particular. On the one hand, demand management technology produces measurable benefit for the thousands of marketers who use it. Lead management enthusiasts run more programs, with greater efficiency, and better track results.  On the other, market penetration – while growing – is early stage and many, many more marketers could benefit from adopting automation. Despite this, I have watched technology providers in this space battle heatedly over price and customer replacement.

Part of the problem is the limited collective experience  B2B marketers have with these tools. The idea of marketing automation is very attractive, but the work needed to make execution happen successfully can be daunting. It takes time to input contact information, build email templates, design landing pages, incorporate those pages into the company Web site (while attending to the brand, search marketing, and usability issues that can arise), and build the reports that help to demonstrate the value of this investment.  It seems as if marketers need some sort of open source, or freeware technology – like many developers enjoy – to let them learn and experiment before making a software investment.

Last month, Sean Dwyer, CEO of Loopfuse, contacted me about his plans to offer marketing automation for free. (Full disclosure: Loopfuse is an an up-and-coming lead management automation provider and I have worked with Sean in the past as a Forrester analyst. You can see evidence of this in my prior posts.)  Sean wanted my opinion as an ex-analyst and someone who knows the market.

At first I thought Sean was crazy, but then the idea began to appeal to me. Rather than cover all the details here, I’ll point you to Ardath Albee’s blog post about FreeView. If you are interested in learning more, read her post, because I think she does a fabulous job of covering the news.  What appears to appeal to both Ardath and me is that Loopfuse has made a limited-use (in volume, not features) software tool available to marketers who want to experiment with marketing automation without incurring an upfront financial or contractual commitments. Freeview will not only attract marketers in small businesses and startups, but – much like open source software – it may also create a following of professionals at many levels who use Freeview to become familiar with the technology and demonstrate its value without raising the eyebrows of the CFO or controller.

Will this announcement make lead management automation more pervasive? Or will it simply intensify price competition and customer poaching? As an ex-analyst, I no longer feel compelled to make a call here. So I’ll just watch from the sidelines and see what success this announcement holds for Loopfuse specifically and the rest of the market in general.  Care to make a prediction?  Feel free to post a comment and we can chat about it further.