What types of B2B marketing automation tools is your company utilizing?

I left a company (using enterprise marketing automation) to start my own company. To understand the marketing automation and CRM space, I started with pen and paper to track leads, moving to spreadsheets and then eventually standard technologies. Here are the things I've found to be most critical:

* The ability to generate interest: for my company, this means finding the most effective and efficient methods to generate traffic and leads. If I'm blogging, what should I blog about? If I'm cold calling, who should I call? If I'm cold emailing, what is worth sending that won't be considered spam?

* The ability to identify those interested: even with the right audience, less than ten percent will even consider buying right from anyone, so identifying those who will is critical. This means watching for anonymous leads on your website, measuring click through and conversion rates for your ads and emails, and producing content whose consumption signals active shoppers.

* The ability to accurately track, measure, and improve: what gets measured gets done. I'm not satisfied with the options in this area yet: many tools are quick to produce colorful graphs but slow to produce recommendations for action. Starting with no activity, the best value I've found here is seeing industry benchmarks. For example, if I know my industry lead--customer conversion rate is two percent, and I want thirty new customers this month, I have to generate 1500 leads. Seeing those benchmarks everyday keeps me on track. It doesn't even matter if they are precisely correct or not, so long as its in the right ballpark.

There are plenty of tools available to help with these things, but the tool you use is less important than identifying the problem you need to solve the most.