Over the past few weeks, we have been showcasing the leading vendors in the marketing funnel. All this has led to our latest infographic, Lead Farming: Three Steps to Grow Leads. Lead generation is a process. Like a crop, you can’t just acquire a raw lead and bring it to market. Leads have to be nurtured over time before they can be properly harvested. We identified 40 enterprise vendors that help marketers better farm their leads. There are three main stages of lead farming: Planting a Lead, Nurturing a Lead and Harvesting a Lead. This week’s VendorStack represent the three stages in the lead farming marketing funnel: LeanData, ActiveCampaign and GoodData.

You can download the infographic here (registration required).

Planting a lead

First, identify and contextualize the lead. Get more than just a name and number. Make sure you get information to understand where they are coming from. Among the vendors in this stage, we chose LeanData because they recognize the importance of having normalized data across all your channels and tools. LeanData provides a turnkey, fully managed service to ensure the integrity of your vital business data. Evan Liang, CEO & co-founder of LeanData, estimates:

LeanData’s combination of a native salesforce app, algorithms plus on-demand human intelligence has shown to decrease the cost of managing list uploads by 75% and increase the turnaround time by 5X.

Nurturing a Lead

Now that you have your lead, you have to nurture them with various touch points to better qualify them. Make sure your leads see you as a source of industry leading information. Email marketing remains a critical tool for marketers. This is probably why we have more than 30 email marketing vendors on VendorStack. To narrow the list down, we identified 14 vendors that service a wide range of customer archetypes. ActiveCampaign, in particular, has shown to be very effective with small and medium sized enterprises and with their social media integration. Adam Tuttle, Partner & Business Development at ActiveCampaign urges:

TEST TEST TEST! Way too often email marketers get caught in the rut of sending the emails formatted the exact same way with only changing the content as needed. However, not all emails are the same and not all emails have the same goal. Try placing the call to action in a different place, changing the formatting, mixing up the balance of text vs. images. If you don’t know where to even start making these types of changes ask these two questions:

1. What is the goal of the email?

2. What changes might help the goal succeed? Test variances from the answers you get.

Harvesting a Lead

Now that your leads are engaged, it’s time to take them through the end of the marketing funnel towards your sales team. These vendors all help bubble up leads that are ready to be harvested. Leads are only as good as the data that has qualified them. The rise of data and analytics to marketing has fundamentally changed how resources are allocated in the sales and marketing stack. Leads can be properly scored based on the effectiveness of a campaign or a channel, thanks to these data analytics vendors. Our last vendor, GoodData does this in spades by converting big data into profitable insights and strategies for business executives. John Rode, Senior Director of Marketing at GoodData suggests:

Don’t get blindsided by a sudden lack of production by your marketing or lead development team! Use end-to-end analytics to deliver metrics that tell you immediately whether marketing is on track to deliver on its goals. And ensure your marketing KPIs map directly to the strategic success of your business.

If you want to learn more, be sure to download the full infographic (registration required).

We want to thank all the contributors to our infographic, including representatives from the following vendors: Adam Tuttle (Active Campaign), Jeff Epstein (Ambassador), Andy Turman (Bizible), Tony Cappaert (Contactually), Katya Constantine (Digishopgirl), Steve Woods (Eloqua), Dan Hoffer (Engajer), John Rode (GoodData), Evan Liang (Leandata), Koka Sexton (LinkedIn), Jana Fung (Mixrank), Darren Waddell (Radius), Anneke Seley (Reality Works), Chad Jackson (Sendicate), Ryan Buckley (Toofr).

Just fifteen years ago dinosaurs roamed the digital earth and a true Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution was out of reach for all but the biggest enterprises. Enter the ever popular cross-vertical SaaS CRMs! They help companies keep track of people and companies throughout their buying cycle and even into the support cycle. With customer data and touch-points in a structured format, sales forecasts are now within reach of even the smallest of sales teams. This weeks VendorStack features the three biggest vendors in the space: salesforce.com, SugarCRM and Zoho CRM.

Salesforce.com is the leader in SaaS CRM. Their app exchange features 1,800+ apps and counting making salesforce.com not only a CRM but also an extremely popular platform. Salesforce App Exchange increases the functionality of the basic CRM adding components like marketing automation by Marketo, electronic signing by DocuSign and document reporting by Conga. Because of the expansiveness of the App Exchange and scalability of its CRM, salesforce.com is a favorite from large Fortune 100 companies to two person companies with Fortune 100 aspirations.  Customers include Burberry, GE and NBCUniversal.

SugarCRM, the open source alternative, focuses on sell through value added resellers (VARs). It comes in both a cloud as well as a downloadable, on-premise form. The open-source on-premise version allows more technical users to tweak and improve to their hearts content and endears SugarCRM to the open-source community. End users who demand the ability to fully customize their CRM from front to back take advantage of the open-source backbone of SugarCRM to fit the CRM to their unique business practices.   Customers include Men’s Wearhouse, Coca-Cola Enterprise and TengoInternet.

Zoho CRM is freemium based meaning the basic package is free, and there are many options for improved functionality for a price following a popular ala carte model. Most of their functionality is built in-house rather than through acquisitions helping make ZohoCRM the lowest cost option. Because they are the low cost option, Zoho is most popular by companies with small or independent sales staffs that run on a tight budget. On a more light – or should I say dark-roast – note they also recognize the importance of coffee which gives them points in my book. Customers include BeeVPN, ArcSource and ActionCoach.

Nearly every sales staff has motivational methods such as a leaderboard, bell or gong. Recently, companies have automated and enhanced these old school methods using gamification software to motivate sales teams and change the nature of how people work. Gamification software helps companies measure and motivate employee performance from all departments with sales and marketing leading the way. Using data from existing systems, such as salesforce.com, these companies give leaders the recognition they deserve and motivate the entire sales staff via a friendly competition.  This week’s VendorStack focuses on three vendors in the space: Badgeville, Bunchball, and Hoopla.

Badgeville‘s CRM system integrations, including for popular salesforce.com, enables VPs of Sales to track and reward sales rep performance highlighting top performers in ways other than just closed deals. Badgeville allows companies to encourage behaviors include updating lead status, converting leads to opportunities, and more leading to more deals won. Badgeville suggests using gamification for tasks such as routinely cleaning out the sales funnel and increasing teamwork to move deals through the pipeline faster. Customers include Oracle, eBay and AOL.

Bunchball recently launch a new version of its Nitro sales gamification app for salesforce.com. The latest version of Bunchball’s Nitro helps get a gamification program up and running in a matter of minutes making salesforce.com’s CRM more engaging. Nitro allows VPs of Sales to more transparently reward their sales teams simplifying and  automating existing motivation programs. Bunchball boasts easy three step implementation using salesforce.com app store. Bunchball’s customers include Intel, Comcast and Southwest Airlines.

Hoopla’s sports style leaderboard allows sales leaders to broadcast team member successes contests and competitions on salesforce.com data. Hoopla‘s wall-mounted TVs displays display visualizations such as virtualized sales gongs and breaking news events. Hang the TVs displaying real-time metrics around the office. Hoopla suggests using these metrics to build a friendly workplace competition by setting team as well as individual goals and promoting fairness. Users include ReTargeter.

As we move leads down the marketing funnel into the sales funnel, one thing is clear: more data helps close deals. This is why sales teams have more tools at their disposal to nurture, track and follow-up with their leads. A good salesperson knows how to pitch a presentation; a better salesperson likely has additional tools at her disposal for that presentation. This week’s VendorStack focuses on sales presentation tools for the salesperson 2.0: Fileboard, Crunched, and ClearSlide.

Fileboard, a 500Startups-backed company, takes the mystery out of “is the other person paying attention?” in web presentations. With Fileboard, sales people send a Fileboard link to the recipient and can automatically track activity in the presentation, including time spent per slide and its viral factor within the organization. With better analytics, sales organizations can A/B test slide decks and check what the top sales people are doing with their pitches. Because all this activity is also automatically logged on your CRM, there’s no redundant data entry. Pricing is a bit more one-size fits all for non high-volume enterprise users, although their free option is still very useful. Vendors like Fileboard aren’t limited to just sales pitches. Here’s one review on Fileboard from a fundraising point of view: 

I love Fileboard! We use it for fundraising where it’s crucial that your confidential information NOT be shared. Fileboard allows us to control that access, while keeping us informed if and when people are reading our decks (or not). It takes a lot of the guessing game out of fundraising.

In the same vein, Crunched takes a similar approach to slide presentation analytics. In addition to slide analytics, Crunched provides screen sharing, web conferencing and online meeting rooms and webinars. Crunched is also widely being used also for fundraising, according to this nifty, albeit a little vulgar, infographic:

Pricing is transparent and grows with your team. Customers of Crunched include Yelp, CareerBuilder and Dyn.

Our final vendor is perhaps the granddaddy of sales presentation tools, ClearSlide. Like the other two vendors, ClearSlide removes the headache of traditional sales presentation, allowing sales teams to present either live online, through custom URLs or even on the go through a mobile device. Each iteration offers the same level of data analytics so sales team can track the best sales pitches, salespeople or even the best marketing/distribution channel (e.g., email, web-based, outside sales). ClearSlide also works with multiple file types (including Microsoft Office, PDF, OpenOffice, Keynote, video, audio, and Flash files). For high-power sales teams, ClearSlide may be your go-to vendor, especially since pricing is less transparent than their less-comprehensive aforementioned competitors. Customers of ClearSlide include RackSpace, LinkedIn and Intuit.

Email is dead. Long live email. Every so often, email is declared dead by the tech media and for good reason. Most people I know have thousands of unread emails in their inbox. It’s amazing they’re able to get things done when so much “work” is unread. But every so often, a new email innovation drops into our inboxes and we forget how much of work and life happens between the compose and send buttons. Whether it’s Hotmail (1996) or the first Blackberry smartphone (2003) or Gmail (2004) or most recently, Mailbox (2013), email is still improving. This is why email marketing is such a critical tool for marketers to reach their audience. This week’s VendorStack focuses on three email marketing platforms that reach the SMB audience: MailChimp, userfox and Sendicate.

Before we dive into these companies, it’s worth noting the email marketing space is crowded. In VendorStack, we have identified 30 vendors. We have vendors like ExactTarget that focuses on the Fortune 500 and is priced accordingly for massive scale. For some SMBs, Contant Contact has done a great job with SEO and has customers ranging from doctor’s offices to small retailers. We’ll cover some of the best practices shared by our users in our upcoming infographic. In the interim, check out Marketo‘s very succinct 10 Tips for Successful Email Marketing Campaigns.

For those in the SMB space, MailChimp is not a surprise pick. After all, they send more than 4 billion emails a month. But what is best about MailChimp is that it was the first breakout vendor to bring drag-and-drop, design-driven email newsletters to the tech-savviest small to middle market user base. Here’s a link to a great speech Ben Chesnut (co-founder and CEO) at last year’s 500Startups unSEXY conference (go to 32:30).

What is great about MailChimp is the sheer simplicity of everything it does and then it adds little things that some users love. If you didn’t know, MailChimp has an iPad solution for offline email collection called Chimpadeedoo, a QR code scanning tool called Pyow!, a SendGrid competitor called Mandrill, a robust open API for developers and a cool MailChimp Labs to focus on new projects and ideas. For example, here is a review on MailChimp from VendorStack:

A fantastic resource! Incredible set of options, great customer service and the fact that it’s FREE to start is a huge win. My favorite feature? The RSS-to-Email functionality. It allows you to auto-draw your blog and other RSS items (jobs, events, listings, etc.) directly into the e-mail and send automatically. If you’re a startup, thinking about e-mail, MailChimp is the answer

MailChimp‘s wide and deep set of features is what really sets them apart from their competitors. This is why it’s one of the most “used” vendors on VendorStack today. Customers of MailChimp include VendorStack, Rovio and Munchery.

userfox believes that email should be agile and lean. Like last week’s post on Movable Ink, userfox takes a behavior-driven approach to how to target your email audience. Recipients of a userfox customer’s emails get “dripped” as they engage the customer’s product. Depending on how you interact with the site or your profile, the recipient can get friendly reminders to add a credit card or to encourage a conversion from a trial customer. As we mentioned in our last post, lead conversion is the name of the game for trial products and having an automated tailored response to your hottest leads can mean the difference between making or missing your quarter.

Our last vendor, Sendicate, takes the design-driven approach of MailChimp to another level. Taking the cues of modern website design, Sendicate email templates focuses on large high-resolution images with beautiful fonts and various layouts. For SMBs who emphasize on their images as well as the substance of their copy should consider relative newcomer Sendicate. While it’s not exactly breaking new ground, few email marketing platforms have the same design chops as Sendicate.

Ultimately, there are no “wrong” answers when choosing an email marketing platform because each offers varying competitive levels of features at comparable prices. It really depends on what kind of user you are. If you’re a tech savvy weirdo and like to tinker with APIs, MailChimp and Freddie is your go-to guy. If data is your passion, then consider userfox. If you love design, you’ll love the templates provided by Sendicate.