Chief Marketer recently talked with Tracy Eiler, CMO of sales pipeline application provider Cloud9, on the current challenges facing marketers of B2B technology.
Eiler has more than 25 years of enterprise software marketing experience. Prior to joining Cloud9, she was the senior vice president of marketing for MarkLogic, and the vice president of global marketing at Postini.
CHIEF MARKETER: What’s the current climate for B2B technology marketing?
EILER: For SaaS software, where companies don’t have to invest in infrastructure or bother the IT staff [to do the implementation], it’s promising. But for other parts of the market it can be more difficult, unless the department that wants to make the purchase has its own budget. For example, sales departments typically have budgets, but sometimes marketing doesn’t.
CM: How has marketing automation changed things?
EILER: For us as marketers, it’s empowering. We can now be more scientific and deliver more metrics, and we didn’t have that before. In the past, we’d send out direct mail campaigns and then hope the needle moved in the right direction. We’d look at a 1% response rate and yell yahoo!
CM: Are B2B marketing technology buying cycles getting longer?
EILER: Not necessarily longer but definitely more cyclical and seasonal. At a recent conference, we had about a dozen big prospects come by our booth and tell us they need to put in a budget request if they want to thing about buying six months from now. There needs to be more front-end justification today
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