A couple of weeks ago, I met with Stuart Williams and Seth Ulinski, analysts at TBR, who shared some of their latest digital marketing technology research with me. Many fascinating findings — including the stat that I shared at MarTech in Boston, that over 75% of enterprises now have an executive explicitly responsible for leading …

The Forrester Wave™: Web Analytics, Q4 2017 names AT Internet a leader! Download the report for free and discover why Forrester has ranked us so highly.

The full report includes:

Market evaluation and analysis of 15 CRM lead management vendors
Insights for selecting a vendor based on your organization's requirements
Opportunities and challenges faced when deploying lead management systems

Marketo’s new partnership with Google Cloud will not only improve the scalability and reliability of the marketing automation and engagement platform, it could also give the martech landscape a shake-up, analysts claim.

Last week, Marketo announced a multi-year collaboration agreement with Google Cloud that will see the vendor shift its infrastructure into the search giant’s public cloud offering. As a result, all running of Marketo’s products, end-to-end, will be delivered out of a third-party cloud.

The two companies are also planning to work together to create integrated solutions for marketers, uniting Marketo’s Engagement Platform with Google’s G Suite and data analytics offerings, and bringing more of Google’s machine learning smarts into the former’s platform.

But in addition to the back-end benefits for Marketo, IDC marketing and sales technology research director, Gerry Murray, foresaw a potential shake-up of the martech hierarchy long-term. He saw the partnership improving and extending Google’s enterprise marketing technology offering by bringing in the missing engagement platform piece.

Drip is a complete email marketing automation tool that makes the subscribers get in and out of the campaigns, send emails, apply tags, record the lead conversions, and transfer them to another automation system. This self-managing software tool has a great user interface also.

Schedule your social media posts using AI. Add your content to SmartKai and it posts the best update at the best time to maximize website traffic

Terry Tillman with SunTrust RobinsonHumphrey today initiated coverage on 13 different cloud software companies, assigning ten of them a Buy rating, including Salesforce.com (CRM), arguing you should look for “category killers,” whose business is “positioned to become verbs in their markets."

Tillman argues cloud software in general provides “attractive exposure to high growth opportunities” and that “20%-plus growth” in revenue can keep up for a while for these names, on average.

The other nine Buys are Blackline (BL), Everbridge (EVBG), RingCentral (RNG), HubSpot (HUBS), Instructure (INST), Q2 Holdings (QTWO), Ultimate Software (ULTI), Upland Software (UPLD), and Workiva (WK); Tillman’s three Hold-rated names are Manhattan Associates (MANH), Paylocity (PCTY), and Shopify (SHOP).

CabinetM, the discovery and management platform for marketing technology strategy and digital transformation, today announced it has exceeded 7,000 products in its industry-leading technology database. Comprised of products in marketing technology, sales tech and adtech, CabinetM’s database has catalogued products in more than 300 categories, allowing marketers and those who utilize marketing technology in their roles, to easily find the products they need.

The energy is palpable at the offices of Lead Liaison this week, as they release OneFocus™ CRM with several of their current Lead Management Automation (LMA)™ clients. In recent weeks, the marketing and sales software provider has slowly pulled back the curtains to unveil their most exciting project yet: a free CRM. Starting this week, Lead Liaison is officially provisioning OneFocus™ CRM with clients interested in being an early adopter. Because they want to launch and walk through the platform live with each early adopter, they have decided to do it on an individual basis.

OneFocus™ CRM pairs perfectly with other packages that the company offers, including their marketing automation solution, Lead Management Automation (LMA)™, and their visitor tracking solution, ProspectVision™. OneFocus™ CRM completes the trifecta, making Lead Liaison the most powerful marketing and sales solution provider in the world.

Lead Liaison's goal was to complete the suite of services for their clients. For customers that weren't happy with their existing CRM provider or did not have a CRM, it didn't make sense to send them elsewhere. OneFocus™ is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution that syncs seamlessly with Lead Liaison's other offerings. Lead Liaison now provides all of the solutions needed for a company of any size to monitor website visitors, automate marketing efforts, and manage all interaction with clients and partners - in one place.

Earlier this week, Oracle announced that it's buying Moat, a provider of tools that measure how ads are viewed and engaged with across various devices, and who is looking at them. Terms are undisclosed, but Re/code reports Oracle paid over $850 million.

Sources speaking with AdExchanger suggest Moat's ability to drive large, recurring, subscription software fees appealed to Oracle, and that its ability to measure the effectiveness of ads appealed to suitors in general. But as the Moat and Krux deals show, marketing software/services leaders remain quite open to snapping up smaller peers that can provide differentiated technology and/or fill product line holes.

In addition, private-equity firms have shown an interest in this space. Vista Equity bought marketing automation firm Marketo last year for $1.8 billion, and marketing data/analytics provider Neustar is set to be acquired by Golden Gate Capital for $2.9 billion.

MarTech Advisor, the world’s leading resource for marketing technology related news, research, product comparisons and expert views, on April 7th released their exclusive Q1 2017 Investscape that analyzes venture funding in the martech space. Identifying the top 10 companies receiving major investments and the top categories that equity players have shown interest in, the data is a useful ready reckoner for B2B enterprise marketers as they plan their marketing technology purchase decisions.
When compared to Q1 ’16, Q1 ’17 witnessed a 29% drop in VC funding from $2.24 billion in Q1 last year to a moderate figure of $1.59 billion. The kinds of categories invested in and the average amount invested in each has reduced, even though the number of VCs actively investing have gone up from 90-plus firms to 200-plus equity ventures diversifying into this booming tech sector. So far, 2017 has seen select martech companies capture niche, micro-landscapes, while helping enterprises take giant steps in their customer fulfillment journey.

It’s been a sedate start to the new year for martech companies with a 29% drop in VC funds compared to the same quarter last year. (from $2.24 billion in Q1’16 to $1.59 billion in Q1’17. 2016 closed Q4 with $3.87 billion in funding, still higher than what Q1’17 has garnered. Consider this: 200+ VCs invested in 95 martech companies across 30 Categories in Q1’17, compared to 90+ VCs investing in 107 martech Companies across 41 categories (of a possible 44 categories) in Q1’16. Both the sweep of categories invested in, and the average amount invested has reduced, considering the actual VCs active have gone up from 90+ to 200+. The top investor for Q1’17 - Greycroft Partners (with 4 Investments already!) were also among the top 9 investors in 2016 with 7 investments.

Leadberry is a new B2B lead generation platform, powered by Google Analytics. The tool is designed to help boost sales efforts by identifying website visitors and turning them into B2B leads.

Leadberry analyzes website visitor data to identify B2B sales leads. In addition to providing basic data about prospect companies (such as mailing address or phone number), the platform collects instantly additional information, such as email addresses, company officers, social data from Twitter and Facebook, or LinkedIn connections.
Users can also connect Leadberry with CRM tools, set real-time alerts for yourself, or download reports to streamline the sales process.

Technology plays a huge role in how business is conducted today and operations are the gatekeepers for go-to-market technologies. But given the broad nature of both marketing and sales functions, it’s important for ops to have an intimate understanding of what technologies and service providers are available in the market, how they can help support revenue initiatives, and what these solutions are capable of.

To help in this endeavor and to narrow the list of tools available to them, we created this Revenue Ops Landscape. Given the comprehensiveness of other landscapes (some that were mentioned earlier), only a sampling of the key players are included in this landscape and sorted based on the pillars in the Revenue Ops framework.

As the chart illustrates, based on where a particular vendor is placed on the Reality Check, you'd want to further drill-down on aspects such as - 

• Is the slow pace of product development causing "technical debt" to pile up and will you be saddled with an outdated product, right out of the gate?
• Migration headaches, buggy new releases, all your customizations may not work - lots of thorny issues here. Also, vendor marketing hype gets ahead of new product capabilities
• Is the vendor pivoting and are their focus areas changing? Were they just acquired (a particularly risky time for you)? Will they be continue to support the business use cases that are important to you?
• Is there so much turbulence that should you be looking at alternatives?