Adobe (Marketo) Again a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management
For the eighth consecutive year, Adobe (Marketo) has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management. And what a year it has been! With Marketo joining the Adobe Experience Cloud just one year ago, we believe our shared focus on marketing and customer experience is already paying off. In this 2019 report, we earned our best placement to-date in both categories evaluated by Gartner – completeness of vision and ability to execute. What’s more, Adobe (Marketo) continues to be on furthest right in completeness of vision among the 15 vendors evaluated. We are proud, grateful and looking forward to creating what comes next alongside our amazing customers and partners.
Access your complimentary copy of the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management.
What comes next
Gartner defines CRM Lead Management as “the process of capturing leads, tracking their activities and behavior, qualifying them, giving them constant attention to make them sales-ready, and then passing them on to the sales team” (but don’t let the name fool you, it’s evolved over the years to include multi-channel marketing, account-based marketing (ABM) and revenue attribution).
It wasn’t that long ago that this process was highly manual. Organizations tried, but it was extremely difficult to do well, let alone do well at scale. Today, lead management and technology are virtually inseparable. It’s incredible how technology has reshaped marketing and the careers of so many marketers who’ve embraced it.
Meanwhile, the world has not been standing still. Buyers are expecting seamless, personalized experiences across digital and offline channels. Our bosses, knowing we now have technology and data, are demanding we prove the impact and ROI of our growth strategies. And we, as marketers, are evolving. Even those who wouldn’t say they are doing account-based-marketing are likely benefiting from new ABM-inspired software capabilities as ABM converges with mainstream lead management.
Through it all, Adobe (Marketo) has been leading the way as the first marketing automation provider to deliver native multi-touch attribution, AI-driven content personalization, account-based marketing, sales engagement and more, influencing the very definition and scope of lead management. But our innovation goes beyond our product. Equally important has been the human connections with our customers – through the vast and highly-enthusiastic Marketing Nation community, our expert services teams, and our second-to-none partner ecosystem. With Marketo (now “Marketo Engage”) about to enter its second year as a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, innovation is only going to accelerate, and the possibilities are endless.
The 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management begins with the simple sentence, “Marketers see analytics and content management as key to CRM lead management.” We couldn’t agree more. We believe that as we continue to drive efficiency and business growth through our sophisticated, yet marketer-friendly automation, it is equally important that we harness the full power of data through analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to surface insights, make decisions and take action in real time. For marketers, this means we can truly embrace the unpredictability of customer journeys – journeys that have only become more unique as we’ve met customer demands for more and more digital experiences across an ever-expanding array of channels.
Ultimately, we will transcend rules-based marketing automation and achieve end-to-end experience automation. As it turns out, that is exactly what is required of all of us. In the modern world, every business must become an experience business to survive and thrive.
Over the course of this post, I’ve touched on some of the core components of modern marketing – the data, the insights (analytics), the logic (automation and A.I.), omni-channel engagement and the content. Let’s look a look a little closer at content. Content is the heart of marketing. It’s where the art and science come together. And it’s hard. It’s hard because our customers are people, not robots. There are so many beautifully humming lead management processes that fail to deliver results if the content isn’t right. Without the right content at the right time, you are not connecting with your audience – they’re tuning out, opting out and going elsewhere.
You may be familiar with the oft-cited 7/38/55 formula for human communication which says that the words you use influence only 7% of the message received by the other person. 38% comes from tone of voice. 55% comes from body language. Wow. In digital channels where attention is more fleeting, tone and visual design are potentially even more important. So, it’s not just fielding the right personalized message at the right time in the right channel (which high-achieving marketing teams – leveraging marketing technology – have become a lot better at), it’s design. And no one does design like Adobe. We aim to continue to lead the charge on content design, personalization and activation that fuels effective engagement and customer experiences for companies of all sizes.
Lastly, it’s common to associate “lead management” and “marketing automation” with B2B marketing. They go together like peanut butter and jelly or like, say, Adobe and Marketo. Easy enough. But the need for deep and ongoing engagement isn’t solely the domain of B2B marketing. As noted by Gartner in this report, “For two years, we have seen increased deployment of lead management applications in B2C environments, especially where individual products and services require careful customer consideration” (think choosing a healthcare provider, higher education institution or wealth manager).
Marketo Engage delivers on all of these use cases (often within a single company) and you can take things even further together with the broader Adobe Experience Cloud and Experience Platform. The bottom line is that if you’re ready to differentiate your business and drive growth through personalized customer experiences, and embrace the unpredictable nature of today’s customer journeys, Adobe can help you and your organization win. Here’s to creating what’s next together!
Access your complimentary copy of the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management.