I spent most of my day today reviewing software tools for marketing. Over the past two months I’ve seen many examples of why it’s so difficult to choose the right product in this space. Unfortunately it’s the wild west out here right now. I went to Dreamforce last month and came back with a list of 8 vendors that claim to have a business intelligence application.From looking at my checklist, yes they do all do some kind of BI, but as you dig in you find out how the checklist is completely inadequate when selecting a tool.
Four of them did a lot of pipeline analysis, which would be great if I was a VP of Sales, but I’m not. I’m more interested in spending marketing program dollars wisely.The tool that looks to be the best fit for what I am trying to do is InetSoft’s Style Intelligence for Salesforce. They’ve been doing reporting for over 10 years and are now plugging into Salesforce. Ultimately I’m trying to automate the reports I’m running manually right now. I had a demo and tour today, and will continue to give it a test drive.
One reply on “Reviewing Marketing Automation Software”
Hey John – google reader just fed me posts today – starting at “Finding Relevance” and ending w/ this one. I may not have my reader set properly, but since you asked.