Infusionsoft is hardcore marketing automation…so they say. They don’t have a lot of social bells and whistles. They do have a complete suite of marketing and sales tools in the realm of CRM, despite their best efforts to distance themselves from CRM earlier this year. They are absolutely solid when it comes to companies in the below 75 employees range. Probably no one better that I know in the market. What’s interesting to me about them is that they are also ambitious in a cautious kind of way and while not offering social tools to the 75 or less small businesss, they use them to engage the 75 person or less small business. They have an Infusionsoft customer community that is active and lively and engaged. They use the community to solicit feedback, to create opportunity for peer engagement and to create conversation or just let them occur. They use Twitter for customer outreach and to engage analysts and other influencers. In other words, a marketing automation company that actually drinks its own Kool Aid and does what it recommends to others to do. They have a young and solid management team and are poised to take off. One interesting aspect of their offering is that they see sales and marketing as extensions of each other - a unified duo. They might see it as marketing with sales subsumed. Others might see it the other way. Doesn’t matter at this point. I think they’re right about the integration of the two. In fact, in the new edition of CRM at the Speed of Light, I’ve combined the sales and marketing chapter into one after a suggestion from my dear friend and uberanalyst Denis Pombriant and a lot of reflection. Infusionsoft presents their SaaS applications that way. They have reasonable pricing and a substantial clientele to act as a foundation for their future growth. What I’m glad to see is that their earlier attempt to declare CRM “dead” is removed from their website. The reason I’m glad? ‘Cause CRM isn’t dead. They still claim they aren’t CRM but truth be told - they are. Once they clean up their message a little, they are going to go far - and that will come in 2009 because small businesses under 75 employees will like what they see.
Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm
