Q. Can lead generation applications really find my business new customers?
Yes, the applications that are now available integrate with your existing sales and marketing systems to provide an additional layer of functionality your sales and marketing teams can use with ease. All of the applications available today use Salesforce.com as their foundation. If your enterprise already uses this platform, adding a lead generation system to this delivers a fully integrated service.
Q. Are all business sectors covered by the solution suppliers?
Identifying a qualified sales lead is completely sector agnostic. All of the lead generation applications can be used to locate, nurture, track and monitor sales behaviour within your market sector. The power of lead generation software is that it can be tailored to your enterprises precise needs, delivering qualified sales leads over any period of time, geographical area, spending power, and company size or any other qualifier you want to set.
Q. Do I need to integrate these services into my business’ IT systems?
Generally you can use lead generation applications with nothing more complex than your favourite Internet browser. However, your business will find that the lead generation systems that are leading the market today all use Salesforce.com as their foundation. If your enterprise already uses this application, you will find implementing all of the lead generation applications fast and easy to rollout across your business.
Q. How customisable are the solutions on offer?
One of the key components of all these systems is their ability to offer the user a complete and unique set of data based on their individual sales lead parameters. Data mining techniques have recently taken a quantum leap forward enabling your business to query a business information database with very specific sales queries that generate potential sales leads based on what can be highly focused filtering techniques.
Q. What kind of system is right for my business?
As with other business services, one size doesn’t fit all. The driving factor that should support your buying decision is what results your business is expecting from the sales data that these systems provide. Even before you look for a vendor, you must clearly understand your own goals, but also evaluate your existing database set up and how this can be integrated with the sales lead generation applications.
DEVELOPER: Marketo
SOLUTION: Marketo Lead Management
CONTACT URL: http://www.marketo.com/
PHONE: +1-650-655-4830
PRICE: Starts at £1,500 per month
Founded in 2006, Marketo has seen massive growth over a very short period of time and now have over 100 mid-sized and enterprise level businesses as customers. From the moment you log onto the Marketo application is clear that the designers have thought long and hard about usability. When compared to the other platforms in this group, Marketo’s user interface is clean and uncluttered.
Using a folder and branch approach that will be familiar to any Windows Explorer user, the application can be easily and quickly navigated. The simple interface, however, doesn’t mean that this application is lightweight – far from it. Marketo’s approach is to wrap the depth that the application offers in a simple user interface. The sales lead scoring is particularly powerful in this respect.
Marketo can build sales campaigns complete with collateral, score potential sales leads and manage all of your customer data, but it’s the drag-and-drop interface that stood out for us. Other platforms use a visio-like diagrammatical approach to campaign or sales lead processing. Although these can be highly effective, they can often become overly complex. Marketo’s approach is simple and intuitive.
The close links to your Salesforce.com account that populates Marketo with the fields you have set-up, coupled with its on-demand usability, make this application hard to beat for all B2B marketing activity. In addition, with no charges for training, set-up or integration with your CRM platform, Marketo is very attractive for small and medium-sized companies.
Overall, Marketo impressed us with its ease of use and its ability for a sales lead to not only be identified, but also nurtured over time with clear lead scoring that can be built into the sales flow as a new action is built. We also liked the ability to perform deep tracking of a campaign and how granular the sales lead detail can be if you need it. Not the cheapest system on the market, but with great features and a superb user interface we have no hesitation in recommending this platform to all B2B marketers.
VERDICT (RATED OUT OF FIVE STARS)
FEATURES ***
IMPLEMENTATION ****
VERSATILITY *****
USABILITY *****
VALUE FOR MONEY *****
B2B MARKETING RATING *****
DEVELOPER: Eloqua
SOLUTION: Lead Demand Generation
CONTACT URL: www.eloqua.com
PHONE: 080-8234-2143
PRICE: Starts at £1500 per month
For all marketers the addition of lead generation applications should enable them a level of automation with how they handle potential sales leads. Eloqua offers a number of tools that have this function including matching communications to sales leads that improves overall conversion rates.
Eloqua uses the visio charting approach for campaign and sales tracking. If you like this way of visualising your company’s data, and would like to build complex sales lead actions, Eloqua’s system is one of the most comprehensive on the market. However, we felt that in the hands of businesses that may not have experience of building actions or campaigns using these charting methods, the learning curve is quite steep and detracts somewhat from the overall usability of the application as a whole. The approach felt too much like setting up a complex Access database.
We do feel that the reporting features of Eloqua are excellent. Based on the leads, campaigns and scoring you have set-up, the reports available give a snapshot of the activity you are interested in. Also, the integration with a CRM dashboard (Salesforce.com being the obvious platform) or other sales systems is handled well within the browser window that tracks lead scoring as well as a plethora of other criteria linked to a potential sales lead.
Also, Eloqua has developed its systems since the company founded in 1999 to offer an array of features including full integration using the industry standard BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline) parameters that can be integrated with lead nurturing with the sales graphical workflow engine. All these features are powerful, but we are concerned that smaller enterprises may find this level of functionality too complex for their needs and that the system may be less of an ideal platform for B2B marketers. However, if you are looking for a lead generation system your business can grow into, Eloqua is a great solution.
VERDICT (RATED OUT OF FIVE STARS)
FEATURES ****
IMPLEMENTATION ***
VERSATILITY ****
USABILITY ***
VALUE FOR MONEY ****
B2B MARKETING RATING ****
DEVELOPER: Silverpop
SOLUTION: Engage B2B
CONTACT URL: www.silverpop.com/b2b
PHONE: +1 877-484-7704
PRICE: Pricing is based on number of database records per month
Formerly known as Vtrenz, Engage B2B is a lead generation platform built for the B2B marketer. Embracing a tabbed interface, all of the applications main features are available at all times. You can quickly navigate to the area of the program you want to use and start to build sales action lists via the list manager. This uses a simple interface to generate the marketing steps from a single database of customer profiles.
We liked the simple way in which marketing collateral could be built simply and quickly by anyone without any HTML coding knowledge at all – although you can switch to HTML view if you need to. The WYSIWYG editor is fast and intuitive to use negating the need for IT or web design services as you can include assets to drop into your marketing emails. Coupled with the close integration with lead and campaign data from your CRM such as the ubiquitous Salesforce.com, Engage B2B offers a powerful and intuitive set of tools.
The campaign-building feature within Engage B2B is the outstanding area of the application in our view. Also, the ability to score a lead based on BANT criteria is very easy to set-up and manipulate within the system. Scoring via recent behaviour is also a superb method of focusing your marketing on potential sales leads over time. The technology the platform uses has a powerful querying engine built in.
You can also depreciate a sales lead as their activity drops off saving you wasted time to devote to more current leads. We liked the ability to score potential leads that eventually pass a score level and then automatically get sent to your sales team for follow up, and the ability to see cold leads that reactivate in the future.
We can see why Engage B2B was crowned the best lead generation solution by Jupiter Research last year. The entire application integrates with your Salesforce.com data and delivers real-world qualified sales leads via an intuitive interface that is supported by all the leading Internet browsers.
VERDICT (RATED OUT OF FIVE STARS)
FEATURES ****
IMPLEMENTATION ***
VERSATILITY ***1/2
USABILITY ****
VALUE FOR MONEY ***1/2
B2B MARKETING RATING ****
DEVELOPER: Manticore
SOLUTION: Professional Edition
CONTACT URL: http://www.manticoretechnology.com/
PHONE: +1 512-241-3780
PRICE: £700 (per month starting price for Professional Edition)
Available in a Professional and Enterprise editions, Manticore positions itself against Eloqua in the lead generation sector. It’s features and general functionality is similar, but we found that Manticore was more accessible and easier to learn quickly. Clearly one great selling point for smaller businesses is its low entry price when compared to the other platforms in this market.
Both versions of the application place lead nurturing at the centre of everything that your business does with the platform. Identifying potential leads from your Salesforce.com databases is the first step. We liked the way in which Demand Booster is integrated into the entire package. This is a drag-and-drop visio-like decision process system that includes email, lead scoring, landing pages and additional CRM fields. Demand Booster looks similar to Eloqua’s system but is much more intuitive to use.
Manticore go out of their way to highlight how fast and easy it is to set-up their systems. The have what they call a multi-tenant architecture’ that simply means that the raw sales data your business contains can be packaging an manipulated with ease across all of the features that Manticore offer including a handy de-duping feature to save on wasted sales calls.
What impressed us the most was the multi-model lead scoring (only available on the Enterprise version) features that Manticore’s platforms contain. These are fast and easy to set up, and have enough depth of detail to ensure your sales and marketing staff can accurate track a sales lead from initial contact, through to conversion.
The marketing mix optimizer is also very useful as you can see closed deals and how these relate to the campaigns you ran. Manticore is a mature application that offers superb lead tracking features. With an upgrade path available when you need it and a well thought out interface, excellent support and attractive price point, Manticore is highly recommended.
VERDICT (RATED OUT OF FIVE STARS)
FEATURES ****
IMPLEMENTATION ***1/2
VERSATILITY ****
USABILITY ****
VALUE FOR MONEY *****
B2B MARKETING RATING ****1/2
Features
The features of each of the package in the group test were compared and contrasted together. This enabled us to gauge how the features of each lead generation system could be related to a B2B user.
Implementation
How each system is installed and rolled out onto B2B enterprise’s existing IT platform was also evaluated. With a number of options available each packages implementation systems was compared.
Versatility
As no two businesses are the same, a sales lead generation system must be able to handle a wide-range of business queries. How much control each system gives you was closely evaluated.
Usability
With web-based sales lead systems now forming the vast majority of the market, we looked closely at how intuitive the user interfaces of these systems are, and how they can be customised.
Value for money
The bottom line for any sales lead generation service is can it deliver tangible sales leads to your business. We looked closely at the cost of installation and the level of return that each platform offers to your business.
