Attending the Sirius Decisions 2012 European Summit yesterday, where Steve Muddiman, Basware CEO presented a keynote presentation on our company transformation, it struck me how far the understanding of demand generation has come in the last 2 – 3 years.
When I was last blogging regularly in 2010, all the focus was on SFA/ CRM, with Salesforce.com centre stage and Marketing automation systems representing a relatively new and fragmented market. Now, Sirius can fill a room to overflowing with B2B marketing professionals all wanting to hear about updates to Sirius’ famous ‘waterfall‘.
Meanwhile, Eloqua, one of the leading Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) – which we use at Basware – has gone public and has seen its share price rise on the back of the considerable rise in technology adoption in Marketing. According to Demand Gen’s recent report Eloqua’s next moves shadow those of many in marketing for B2B technology companies (their most highly penetrated market) by providing support for mobile, industry-specific automation support and an increased focus on SMB – where arch-rivals Marketo and Hubspot compete.
The recognition that digital marketing generally – particularly inbound – and marketing automation specifically, focused on automated lead scoring and nurturing, can increase pipeline velocity and improve conversion at every stage of the sales cycle seems to have come of age.
A colleague and I will shortly be presenting Basware’s sales and marketing alignment program ‘No Lead Left Behind’ at Eloqua’s road to revenue tour so hope to see you there.