Forrester Wave: L2RM Platform Vendors – Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Silverpop and More

by Barb Mosher Zinck | February 20, 2014 10:56 am

Forrester has a new Wave report out evaluating nine major players in Lead-to-Revenue Management platforms (L2RM). L2RM Platforms are essentially B2B marketing automation, but it’s a little more complex than simple marketing automation campaigns that many do today. These platforms can help you bridge the gap between marketing and sales and give marketers a bigger role in the actual selling of a brand’s products/services.

The vendors discussed in this report are: Act-On, Adobe, CallidusCloud, IBM, Marketo, Oracle, salesforce.com, Salesfusion and Silverpop. Forrester evaluated the vendors across 75 criteria, and from the perspective of best options for enterprise customers vs small-to-mid-sized customers.

These vendors offer a range of capabilities which include the expected lead generation features (lead capture, nurturing, scoring and promotion) as well as newer features such as social campaign, cross-channel execution, real-time contextual triggers, optimization and analytics (some of my favorite stuff).

Forrester defines six key stages in the L2RM process (capture, nurture, sell, build advocacy, cross-sell, up-sell), depicted in this diagram alongside the Buyer’s Journey:

Stages of L2RM process

Stages of L2RM process

In addition to outlining the key processes, Forrester also talks about four different strategic needs for L2RM platforms. These strategic needs relate to what kind of products you are selling and what you need focus on the most (lead netting, lead vetting, lead stewarding, lead mentoring). These strategic profiles are a topic of their own.

To get a feel for the evaluation process, Forrester’s criteria hit a number of categories, such as:

I said earlier that Forrester evaluated the vendors by suitability for enterprises vs small-to-mid-sized companies. What they found when they did this was that:

The L2RM market is market in evolution. A number of these vendors have been around for a while, as far back as 2000, and have either developed and grown capabilities organically or bought them (lots of acquisitions in this space over the last two years). Forrester believes that we are closer to seeing a full L2RM platform because of this growth and that we should expect to see more acquisitions and IPO’s in near future.

Some of the capabilities we’ve seen these vendors build on lately, because customers demand them, are things like content collaboration tools, website personalization, improved reporting and analytics, especially predictive analytics, and multi-channel engagement.  Organizations need these capabilities to be competitive, and we while talked about them constantly last year, this is the year they will start to see them used more consistently.

One other point that Forrester made was the rise in need for B2B2C -focused L2RM platforms from markets such as financial services, healthcare , insurance and manufacturing. These organizations need L2RM platforms to support relationships that are highly considered or relationship driven or loyalty driven. So while Forrester focused on the B2B space, we can expect to see that change (and as many are saying out there today, there’s not many differences between B2B and B2C marketing – you are always marketing to people, not the organization itself).

Forrester also noted that many web content management vendors are starting to challenge traditional L2RM vendors as they continue to evolve from purely content management to include many customer experience capabilities that fall into this area. That makes sense. If you look at Adobe, it’s a perfect example of a L2RM vendor (because of its Neolane acquisition) with strong web experience management capabilities that are being  integrated for a single customer experience platform.

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