Driving Sales and Marketing Alignment

Jonathan - I totally agree that there is more consolidation on the horizon. I question whether the pure revenue stream will be the motivator or whether it will be the opportunity to be the most integrated Sales + Marketing solution for the enterprise. 
 
Are there any enterprise vendors who built an end to end solution from the ground up so that companies don't have to cobble together a best of breed solution? 
 
There are some for SMB (disclosure, I work at one) - who I believe really need a marketing platform architected from the start for integration. 
 
All that being said, regardless of who is next in line – the next few years will be fascinating to watch as marketing applications mature.

Jonathan; 
 
No doubt changes are coming in the marketing automation space - soon. The market is maturing and buyers are, well, buying. I think in the next year or so, we'll see a true separation in the market. The major players will continue to grow, while smaller players will be acquired or fade. Having been in the marketing automation space for 7 years now, it's an exciting time! 

Jonathan - What struck me as interesting in this announcement is that Oracle only acquired the assets of Market2Lead making this a pure technology play. The on-demand CRM wars between Oracle and SFDC are clearly heating up. SFDC has long lacked any real marketing automation functionality, yet their recent acquisition of Jigsaw suggests they are moving in this direction. With the acquisition of Market2Lead, Oracle gets a head start on incorporating MAP functionality into their CRM suite. Will there be more acquisitions as these two powerhouses square off for the next iteration of on-demand CRM - absolutely. The good news in all this in my mind is that the real winner will be the end user community who will be able to look at their SaaS CRM vendor as something more than a core SFA provider.

Kudos to Oracle for smartly selecting an enterprise class marketing automation platform. Market2Lead was not venture funded and you are right they had arguably the best marketing automation platform but lacked the marketing $$$. Now with Oracle I am bullish on the winning combination.

While evaluating marketing automation systems for our client, I looked around and purchased a paid report from Raab Associates, which evaluated the top marketing automation vendors across 200+ dimensions to support both simple and complex campaigns. Market2Lead came out on top as the most comprehensive and the easiest to use for both simple and complex campaigns. This was the most indept report I was able to lay my hands on. The folks at Oracle made an excellent choice selecting the best technology in the market place. Oracle sales machine should have a field day selling the joint sales and marketing solution.

Thanks Jonathon for the commentary on this acquisition. The comments are far too bullish IMHO. This was an inevitable move for Oracle in their never ending moves to fill out their footprint so that they have more to sell to the install base to compete against SAP, MS and the CRM platform players. 
 
The fact that this move happened in 2010 vs 2008 or 09 is indicative of the slow adoption rate of MA that Sirius mentioned at your recent conference.  
 
I still say that when you get into integrated sales & marketing processes, espcially for the enterprise (over $100mm firms), that technology is far from the issue for these larger companies. Its much more of a people/process challenge that most CRM platforms have addresses for some time. 
 
The enterprises that Oracle/SAp and the like sell to are still stuck in a marketing model that is very much Product Marketing / Channel marketing model that is an extension of ERP, SCM and Demand PLanning/Mgmt. They are focused on fulfilling demand for customers and not very focused on direct client acquisition. The channel partners are the ones that are dealing more with the direct client acquisition (lead gen and lead mgmt). 
 
I don't see the problem (need) being integrated solutions of SFA and MA under the CRM umbrella. If it were we would have seen these SW acquisition plays in spades, especially when it comes to SFDC.

Thanks everyone for the comments, but just to be clear I would not have classified Market2Lead as the best MAP out there. As I said they had strong technology, particularly on the data management side. 
 
Henry, we have hundreds of clients over $100 million that rely heavily on there direct sales force. But as you pointed out the channel and customer marketing become increasingly important, which is why most of the marketing automation platforms support the ability to create campaigns that target the installed base as well as net new demand.

Agreed Jonathon. The bigger topic that your indirectly hitting on - adoption rates of MA, need for CRM w/ integrated MA and SFA, etc is a more interesting point for discussion. Though I was not at your conf earlier this month, I was struck by the tweets about the 10% adoption rate for MA. I would love to follow up with you on that stat.

Viewing this move as anything other than assets picked up at a fire sale would be a mistake. If this acquisition were strategic, it would have to have obvious benefits for Oracle. How does this help Oracle?  
 
First, M2L is not integrated with CRM On Demand (SFDC Competitor) or any other Oracle platform out of the box. There are several leading MAP vendors that are. 
 
Second, as far as I am aware, M2L never had its own email facility (my sources say they used Exact Target), so any issues with this facility in Siebel Marketing, which as you state doesn’t match up against the leaders in this space, will remain or they have to pay Exact Target to fix them.  
 
Third, M2L is widely regarded as very difficult to use. Thus, a lot of work will need to be done before this acquisition would have a positive impact for future Oracle users or current M2L customers.  
 
Finally, it is obvious this purchase wasn’t executed for sales. If M2L was competitive, profitable or had a marquis customer list, this would have been a purchase, not an asset sale. Thus, no help on this front either. 
 
This is a good example of what over investing has done to the MAP market. The top companies in this space (revenue wise, not product features) have taken obscene amounts of cash and not made a profit or made very little. Thus to acquire one, it is going to take a lot of money to satisfy initial investors. In the end, however, a potential purchaser is essentially buying a cost burden that has proven it cannot scale profitably. So the only prudent thing about Oracle’s approach is the fact that they didn’t over pay. They likely bought garbage, but they paid what it was worth by buying the assets at a fire sale rather than buying the company. There ultimately could be a nugget of code that makes this purchase worthwhile at a bargain basement price, but that is the extent of it. 
 
The folks that really get stuck here are the customers. They confused revenue growth with success. Now they have the expense and pain of having to switch platforms or stay with a dying one.  
 

Erich, thanks for your comments. 
 
Just because M2L didn't integrate with Oracle is more a reflection of M2L; I doubt Oracle will have any problems integrated whatever parts of the technology into their own platform. 
 
On the difficult to use issue, every vendor has customers that complain about usability/customer experience. While it's true in many cases, it's also just as a often a lack of skills or process development on the customer side.

Eric, I'm sure you would agree usability and ease of use are like  
 
comparing apples and oranges. Further as functionality increases ease of use gets impacted that is just a fact of nature not an M2L phenomenon. A wheel barrow is easy to use but is useless in large scale construction projects.  
 
 
 
Market2Lead is a feature rich enterprise class MAP solution. Market2Lead powers billion dollar brands, Cisco, Redhat, Citrix, NetApp, OfficeDepot and several others for several years. Surely you are not implying that these market leaders and leading analyst are intellectually challenged.  
 
 
 
You should pay more attention to folks who have actually used M2L like 
 
http://www.leadsloth.com/blog/oracle-market2lead-acquisition/ and can 
 
attest that M2L is a feature rich product and not express opinions based on hearsay or competitor FUD.  
 
 
 
Salesforce.com and Oracle are sworn enemies, so Oracle and M2L  
 
played their cards right by structuring this deal as an asset sale and not a stock sale. I cannot see it any other way. Oracle is smart they will get great technology, technical talent 
 
and M2L Marquis customers as part of this transaction. M2L competitors would die to get a hold of M2L marqui customers and my sources tell me that is not going to happen as Oracle will get these customers as well integrated with Salesforce.com and so there is no need to switch as you incorrectly state.  
 
 
 
Perception and reality are two different things, the proof is in the pudding just wait and see.  
 

Kevin, 
 
I have to agree with Erich here.  
 
 
 
First, you seem to be arguing that to be “Enterprise Class” a product must be difficult to use? Isn’t it true the “ease of use” of SaaS products like SF.com are replacing on premise CRM’s like Seibel and Saleslogix at an alarming rate. Isn’t the commonly accepted principal of disruptive technology that it comes up from the bottom of the market? Didn’t the PC ultimately replace the mainframe? 
 
Second, confusing a customer list with success is a mistake. The valley is littered with named companies who bought software from companies that ultimately went out of business but had a few good reference accounts. Worse yet it is littered with companies who bought software from named brand suppliers for projects that turned into colossal failures.  
 
As for Analysts, they can be helpful here but they can be strongly influenced by those who pay their fees (no offense to Sirius Decisions intended here) so one must be careful. If Gartner and others only took fees from end users, you might have a point. Alas, Gartner doesn't even put M2L in their category of top MAP products. I frankly only recall seeing Unica and Terradata in the upper quadrants while companies who sell much more than they do and are also regarded as more powerful AND easier to use by experts in this field are left off the list. Want to guess which companies paid Gartner more money? 
 
Third, M2L and Oracle sworn enemies? Really?  
 
Oracle revenue $20Bn+, Quarterly Profit $1Bn + M2L last two round of funding approx. $7.5M, approx. $10M I seriously doubt M2L came up very often in Oracle war rooms. 
 
Finally, asset sales vs. acquisition mean there was no value left in acquiring the company. If there were the deal would have been structured that way and Oracle would have written off the “good will” from the purchase value over and above the asset values for years. Good people don’t usually stick around when the ship is sinking. Top named accounts behave in a similar fashion. The one thing I do agree with you on is that time will tell.  
 
 
 
 
 

I'm the administrator of a marketing automation platform that is not M2L; however, we are an Oracle shop. This move is an interesting one for us as we've spent money and a great deal of effort to get marketing automation functionality that CRMOD was sadly missing.  
 
 
 
I believe we will probably be asked to use Oracle Marketing (once the new technology is embedded). So, I hope that they get it right. I am concerned that when evaluating M2L in the buying process, I realized that M2L did not have functionality to cookie a prospect/customer as easily as some of the other leading vendors. This limits the ability to track their behavior and interests. 
 
 
 
It will be interesting to see what happens within the industry in the next several years.

Sarah 
 
You may want to recheck your sources, Market2Lead did not raise a penny in venture capital. This added to YOUR comment that "money talks" when it comes to industry analysts, actually shines light on the strength of Market2Lead's product offering and why billion dollar brands love Market2Lead's offering. 
 
They are several reasons on why deals are structured as asset sales as opposed to stock sales. While I agree with you that most transactions are not structured as asset sales, the fact of the matter is that ALL buyers (not just Oracle) would love to structure any deal as an asset sale for several reasons. A little google search would explain.  
 
Also, I'm sure you are not suggesting that Enterprise executives are intellectually challenged by investing in specialized salesforce.com administrators to manage the complexity of an enterprise? It is also true that salesforce.com has over a several revisions (5-10 years) has evolved to be an enterprise offering obviously at a cost. I love salesforce.com so please don't consider my comments as anything but just a natural progressions for any company. You start small with limited features and over the years add on.  
 
Usability and ease of use are like comparing apples and oranges. The people in the best position to judge ease of use as it pertains to enterprise capabilities are customers. M2L customers have spoken via case studies and their check books.  
 
I would not downplay Oracle's smarts. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I hope that Oracle gets it right, we are an Oracle CRM OnDemand shop and I am interested to see if the promisses from Oracle for release 18 (the release the includes M2L functionality) will work as advertised.