What are some other good resources to find information on marketing automation?

Lauren you might try searching "marketing automation software reviews" and read the various reports and reviews of existing products, features and benefits and what is the right fit for what you are trying to do. I always look to the internet for my information and while there may be some inaccurate or biased information, it is usually easy to spot and sift thru.

Be careful, as most of the information on marketing automation is vendor supplied.
There are several key websites which appear to be impartial, but actually the information is supplied by vendors who pay to be on the site.
Several also act as implementation agents for particular suppliers and again have their preferred solutions they tilt the information towards.
Several have simply put up sites to make themselves look authoritative, so they get seminar and similar work from vendors.

I suggest you read widely and take most information with a very big pinch of salt.

Lauren, there is a new site called "Marketing Automation University" that offers some resources as well as classes. - http://www.marketingautomationuniversity.com/

Like Peter mentioned, some of the resources are supplied by vendors but they do a good job of keeping the content vendor neutral.

Peter's advice to "read widely and take most information with a very big pinch of salt" is quite sound. With that in mind, the vendors' own sites contain a great deal of valuable information about how to do marketing automation. Most of this is wholly generic although it might occasionally be tilted a bit in the direction of capabilities a particular product can do. Obviously you have to take a what a vendor says about their own product with a grain of salt, and frankly you should totally ignore anything they say about competitors.

Raab Associates also publishes a great deal of information, some free and some not, at www.raabguide.com and on my blog at http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/ This is as objective as we can make it, although we also rely on vendors for information (which we usually verify for ourselves) and occasionally do paid work for them.

The simple fact is that few businesses are willing to pay for quality information, precisely because so much is available for free. This is a problem facing all media today. Most of the "free" marketing automation information sites make their money selling lead names to vendors. This doesn't necessarily harm their objectivity, although you'll see that most don't do specific vendor comparisons. But buyers should do their own detailed research anyway, so perhaps this is a good thing.

I would recommend www.raabguide.com and www.leadsloth.com though Jep of LeadSloth is now working for Marketo.

Hope this helps.

Vaibhav Domkundwar
Founder & CEO
Nurture | Marketing Automation that is Personal & Human
http://www.nurturehq.com

@Peter: You know we always welcome your opinion, but in this case, you have it upside down and backwards. We augmented our partner program to open up our training and platform access to massive numbers of vendor agnostic “ambassadors.” We are focused on growing the category, not just gobbling up marketshare. Our updated partner program accounts for the fact that ambassadors and systems integrators can be vendor agnostic while still making their/our clients successful. Exclusivity in the reseller side of the business in no way limits the “inside information” made available to our ambassadors. Not at all. If you want more info, I’d be happy to connect you with our channel head. Happy to make that intro and continue the conversation one-on-one. Think I’ve just exceeded my public “inside baseball” quota!

Joe Chernov / Eloqua / @jchernov

Thanks Joe. You've managed to be condescending and insulting at the same time as well as making a metaphor no-one this side of the Atlantic can understand - not good for a global corporation. As I have no intention of entering into any cosy, behind the scenes conversations, let's ask some questions here to clarify positions.

It would appear that what's said here is less important here than what is not said.

A key part of this program according to your news release is to create a two tier system with the top tier being Eloqua Exclusive Resellers.
So what benefit do these companies get in return for giving up their objectivity and benefiting from learning at the feet of multiple vendors?
What sets them apart from the vendor agnostic ambassadors?
The answer is surely either price or knowledge. If it is price, then people who know all of the alternatives in the market are being priced out of it (they will always be undercut by a dedicated partner), if it is knowledge then ambassadors are not being given the information they need to make an informed sale.

More importantly, what benefit does the customer gain from dealing with someone who can only offer them one solution and who has a blinkered, uninformed view of the alternatives? Why should they choose an exclusive Eloqua partner over an unbiased Ambassador?

I find your bit about growing the category interesting. Eloqua was invented in the days when the internet was young and social media hadn't been invented. It was a clever email marketing system which would harvest leads and feed them into CRM on the now discredited "marketing makes leads for sales" model.

In between the development of MA1.0 and its popularity, the B2B world changed, thanks to social media. This meant that, while useful for its original task of maintaining customer relationships, CRM was useless for prospecting as buyers researched on the net and asked for recommendations through social media without contacting the vendor. The use of email also changed and building a new business lead generation model around email is now quite simply ludicrous.

A clever version of Marketing Automation, MA2.0, has thus been developed. So which category are you talking about - the old discredited one or the new one you haven't even entered yet?

@Peter,

Again, I am more than happy to set you up with a call with the head of our partner program to discuss your misconceptions. In the meantime, we've already hijacked a question that had nothing whatsoever to do with Eloqua's business model, which is why I suggested we speak off-line.

Arguing on the internet is like riding in the back of a pick-up truck: there is no way to do it and appear dignified. Should you wish to have an actual conversation about our business, again, we would be delighted to do so. Email me at joe.chernov ]at] eloqua.com.

Joe Chernov / Eloqua / @Jchernov

Accusing people of having misconceptions while not answering the questions reaised and trying to shut down their right to reply is what is making you appear undignified, Joe.

Perhaps you should answer my questions as the answers are important for everybody to know. They are also directly relevant to this thread as they affect how we should view a lot of information which has an Eloqua element.

We now need to treat all answers from Eloqua Dealers as proprietary, not as unbiased or independent views. That means discounting the views of some of the top people in the industry.

Eloqua has moved to make things even more proprietary.

Their new two tier structure (http://www.demandgenreport.com/archives/feature-articles/716-eloqua-announces...) means that only Eloqua exclusive partners will receive the inside information they need to make effective Eloqua installations.

This is a knife into the heart of consultancies who try to match customer needs with the right solution for them and it will severely reduce the confidence buyers can have in the quality of buying advice they receive.

I believe it is also a desperate approach by a company who is losing the battle for customers - they feel that their own associates are finding out about what Eloqua offers then using this knowledge to recommend other solutions. Now you have to cut yourself off from other vendors and their educational materials if you want to be an Eloqua dealer. You have to sign up to only one source of information in this fast moving environment. That's dangerous.

A good SQL Server business intelligence developer with business understanding would be able to give you a better solution to fit your need than any software that you will find.