With only about four percent of U.S. companies using marketing automation platforms, there are a lot of targets out there.
Atlanta-based Salesfusion has chosen the mid-market, and today it is announcing new funding of $5 million and the appointment of a new CEO, Carol O’Kelley.
Salesfusion “helps marketers drive more qualified leads to sales and helps sales qualify and close those leads more efficiently,” O’Kelley told VentureBeat via email. Her background includes senior executive stints at supply chain solution providers JDA and Manhattan Associates, and Oracle.
A marketer using the platform has tools for email creation and campaigns, event management, paid search, lead nurturing, and list management for qualifying leads, sending them personalized messages, and nurturing them “until they’re ready for a salesperson,” she said. An integration with CRM allows a marketer to hand off a lead to sales.
Of course, that description applies to many other marketing automation platforms out there. O’Kelley pointed to differences with three major competitors in particular — Marketo, Act-On, and Salesforce’s Pardot.
Marketo, O’Kelley said, is focused on enterprises, compared to the mid-market for Salesfusion.
Salesfusion’s feature set is “most similar to Marketo,” she said, but the “total cost of ownership [of Marketo] is significantly more expensive.” She also said it takes longer to implement Marketo and requires a relatively large marketing department of 20 or more to run.
Salesfusion “offers a more intuitive product” than Act-On, she said, including the ability for marketers to insert such tasks as a phone call into the CRM so that “sales and marketing [work] directly from one, unified funnel.”
Although Pardot is part of Salesforce, its integration into Salesforce’s CRM “is not as robust or native [as] Salesfusion’s,” she said. O’Kelley noted that her company’s platform also supports Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Info CRM, SugarCRM, and Sage.
She pointed to “inherent limitations” in both Pardot’s and Act-On’s nurture designers, which allow marketers to build nurture campaigns. Both, O’Kelley said, “make creating and managing nurture flows very complex.”
Noro-Moseley was the lead investor for the new funding, which brings to $15 million the total that the company has raised since its founding in 2006. The company said the money will be spent on product innovation and expanded client services.
