2013 2014 INSERT COMPANY LOGO HERE 20142013 Global North Marketing American Automation SSL Certificate Software Entrepreneurial Product Company Leadership of Award the Year Award
Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award Marketing Automation Software Global, 2014 Frost & Sullivan s Global Research Platform Frost & Sullivan is in its 50th year of business with a global research organization of 1,800 analysts and consultants who monitor more than 300 industries and 250,000 companies. The company s research philosophy originates with the CEO s 360-Degree Perspective, which serves as the foundation of its TEAM Research methodology. This unique approach enables us to determine how best-in-class companies worldwide manage growth, innovation and leadership. Based on the findings of this Best Practices research, Frost & Sullivan is proud to present the 2014 Global Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award in Marketing Automation Software to Act-On Software. Significance of the Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award Key Industry Challenges The Marketing Automation Software (MAS) market is rapidly evolving; it was created for new-age marketing needs to align businesses with the complex multi-channel customer lifecycle that exists today. The primary function of marketing automation software is to empower marketing and sales teams in organizations with information that will enable them to acquire, nurture, and retain their customers. Behavioral marketing, lead segmentation, and lead nurturing are some of the biggest benefits of marketing automation. Today s marketers recognize the need to nurture their website visitors so that they can constantly engage them until they are ready to make a purchase. Marketing automation software allows marketers to schedule their marketing tasks and send a series of messages to communicate with prospects. These communications are based on segmentation data stored in the software. MAS also stores and manages all the profile information of prospects and leads, thus enabling marketers to spend more time creating good quality content for their communications. MAS solutions have lead scoring capabilities that enable marketing and sales personnel to study the behaviors of their prospects, optimizing their efforts, and engaging the best opportunities more deeply and expeditiously. Marketing automation also helps marketers measure their social media campaigns effectively; this is critical as marketing teams are increasingly being held quantitatively accountable for the performance of their campaigns. That said, the MAS market is in a nebulous position today as marketers find it challenging to get in to an analytical role and make data-driven decisions. Traditional marketing has never been metric intensive, which is why marketers are going through a painful period of transformation. Their role has silently become a lot more technical, and MAS platforms, as business critical as they are, are still overwhelming to most marketers. Marketers are traditionally used to email marketing and the leap between email marketing and 2014 Frost & Sullivan 1 We Accelerate Growth
marketing automation is an extremely daunting one. It challenges them to overcome their skepticism about leaving their important marketing activities to the software while concentrating on generating great content and developing a solid marketing strategy to deal with BYOD-obsessed consumers. Multi-channel marketing is paramount but the onus is on vendors to be out there constantly engaging enterprises, educating marketers on the utility and usage of MAS platforms, and persuading decision makers on the ROI of their platforms. At this point, MAS vendors need to 'meet marketers halfway' by providing not only a powerful software platform but also supporting services that facilitate faster, deeper deployment of the MAS solution. Delivering MAS functionality that is sophisticated in function but simple in usage is crucial. However, this is a difficult task that requires vendors to come up with breakthrough innovations. The key is to make the product extremely easy-to-use, so that a marketer does not get lost in complex workflows and confusing campaign management activities. At the same time, the focus should also be on developing extremely powerful analytics so that the MAS dashboard becomes the go-to resource for marketers to view their progress and modify their approach dynamically, whenever needed. Key Benchmarking Criteria for the Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award For the Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award, the following criteria were used to benchmark Act-On Software s performance against key competitors: Growth Strategy Excellence Growth Implementation Excellence Degree of Innovation with Products and Technologies Leadership in Customer Value Speed of Response to Market Needs Decision Support Matrix and Measurement Criteria To support its evaluation of best practices across multiple business performance categories, Frost & Sullivan employs a customized Decision Support Matrix (DSM). The DSM is an analytical tool that compares companies performance relative to each other with an integration of quantitative and qualitative metrics. The DSM features criteria unique to each Award category and ranks importance by assigning weights to each criterion. The relative weighting reflects current market conditions and illustrates the associated importance of each criterion according to Frost & Sullivan. Fundamentally, each DSM is distinct for each market and Award category. The DSM allows our research and consulting teams to objectively analyze each company's performance on each criterion relative to its top 2014 Frost & Sullivan 2 We Accelerate Growth
competitors and assign performance ratings on that basis. The DSM follows a 10-point scale that allows for nuances in performance evaluation; ratings guidelines are shown in Chart 1. Chart 1: Performance-Based Ratings for Decision Support Matrix This exercise encompasses all criteria, leading to a weighted average ranking of each company. Researchers can then easily identify the company with the highest ranking. As a final step, the research team confirms the veracity of the model by ensuring that small changes to the ratings for a specific criterion do not lead to a significant change in the overall relative rankings of the companies. Chart 2: Frost & Sullivan s 10-Step Process for Identifying Award Recipients Best Practice Award Analysis for Act-On Software The Decision Support Matrix, shown in Chart 3, illustrates the relative importance of each criterion for the Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award and the ratings for each company under evaluation. To remain unbiased while also protecting the interests of the other organizations reviewed, we have chosen to refer to the other key players as Competitor 1 and Competitor 2. 2014 Frost & Sullivan 3 We Accelerate Growth
Growth Strategy Excellence Growth Implementation Excellence Degree of Innovation with Products and Technologies Leadership in Customer Value Speed of Response to Market Needs Weighted Rating BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH Chart 3: Decision Support Matrix for Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award Measurement of 1 10 (1 = lowest; 10 = highest) Award Criteria Relative Weight (%) 20% 20% 20% 20% 20% 100% Act-On Software 9.5 9.5 8 9.5 9 9.1 Competitor 1 8.0 7.0 8.5 7.0 8.0 7.7 Competitor 2 7.0 8.0 7.0 7.0 8.0 7.4 Frost & Sullivan analyzed 24+ global vendors in the Marketing Automation Software market during the course of the study. For the Decision Support Matrix, we compare the recipient with two competitors that are closest to its overall performance on the above mentioned benchmarking criteria. Criterion 1: Growth Implementation Excellence Growth Implementation Excellence evaluates the performance of the company in the past year in comparison with its competitors. Act-On Software enables small marketing teams, from mid-size and large organizations, to boost their online marketing efforts. The company has exhibited acute focus on product innovation, vertical strategy, and international expansion strategy. In this section, we focus on vertical strategy. Act-On Software grew its revenue by over 215% in 2013, and by 300% in both 2011 and 2012. This growth is more than twice the growth of the Marketing Automation market in general and they continue to outgrow most of their competitors by a factor of 3. With the right product market fit, Act-On Software s growth is only expected to continue. The company continually strives to help their customers generate maximum value from their platform. In terms of their vertical presence, Act-On Software is the most diverse among all other players in this space. They have customers in Retail, Advertising, Telecommunications, Travel & Leisure, Real Estate, Pharmaceuticals and Biotech, Non-Profit, Media & Entertainment, Energy & Utilities, Computer & Electronics, Education, Healthcare, and Consulting. The most high demand verticals for Act-On Software are High Tech, Software, Marketing Agencies and Financial Services. 2014 Frost & Sullivan 4 We Accelerate Growth
Criterion 2: Growth Strategy Excellence Growth Strategy excellence identifies the roadmap of growth given the expected market conditions in the next 3-5 years. Act-On Software provides simple yet powerful MAS aimed at the mid-market, which is less than 5% penetrated in North America. The product is currently being used primarily for customer acquisition programs; however, Act-On Software s leadership has a healthy forward outlook in terms of positioning its product offering for more advanced use that addresses the entire customer lifecycle process: Acquisition, Retention, and Expansion programs. With international sales contributing to roughly 10% of its revenue, Act-On Software is making an inroad overseas by integrating multiple language capabilities in the software. The solution is available in 32 languages including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. Act-On Software s end users have the ability to switch languages on the fly with the ability to select the language on the dashboard itself. Act-On Software has quickly responded to international customer demand by launching an office in London and Bangalore; this expansion is in line with its international growth strategy in Europe and Asia respectively. Criterion 3: Degree of Innovation with Products and Technologies Product and technology innovation demonstrates the depth of the company s product line. It evaluates how the company is shaping up for its future expansion plans into different verticals and/or geographies. In 2012, Act-On Software launched its online and social media tracking tool, known as Act- On Insight, aligning its product line with the explosive growth in the Social space. Act-On Insight allows organizations to measure their Social impact on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Act-On Software continued its product innovation with two major product launches earlier in 2013: Act-On Inbound and Act-On Mobile. Act-On Software realizes the importance of inbound traffic in the world of 'online marketing'. As the majority of online users search online for a product or service before making a purchase, search engineering is a critical part of online marketing. The Act-On Inbound tool allows users to optimize and manage their inbound marketing activities by combining search engineering with content marketing. To step up their efforts on the mobile side, they launched Act-On Mobile for Android and iphone users. The tool provides marketers, sales people, and executives access to real-time dashboards so that they can track their campaign performance and website visitors on their mobile phones. In Q4 of 2013, Act-On Software opened its APIs to third party developers, allowing innovative technologies to integrate with them. This enables the company to quickly expand its partner ecosystem. This move is in line with the technology convergence that is taking 2014 Frost & Sullivan 5 We Accelerate Growth
place in the industry as marketing technology vendors strive to provide a seamless experience to their end users who want all their marketing tools, database, and content in one place. Criterion 4: Leadership in Customer Value This criterion makes an assessment of how a company fares in terms of delivering on its promise to its end users and how satisfied the end user s business is as a result. Act-On Software has a sterling reputation for customer service and support. Each of its customers is assigned a dedicated customer support representative to provide a seamless experience when using the platform. It is one of the few successful vendors that offer a month-to-month subscription model, which is why the company needs to be relentless with its customer acquisition strategy. In spite of this challenging business model, Act-On Software has maintained an impressively high customer retention rate (90%). Its customers say that they are constantly learning better ways to market online and that they are completely satisfied with the value that Act-On Software generates for their businesses. Criterion 5: Speed of Response to Market Needs In this criterion, the ability to keep up with market trends is assessed, along with the company's growth implementation and strategy, to ensure that they adhere to the trends. Act-On Software s growth is a testament to the tremendous end user demand in the midmarket segment over the past couple of years. The company has successfully catered to businesses, establishing a strong position in the marketplace in a matter of just 4-5 years. Its focus is now on expanding its partner ecosystem and international presence over the next few years. Act-On Software is poised to have early success from regions outside of North America with immediate focus on Latin America, Asia, and Europe. Conclusion Marketing Automation Software solutions have to expand the breadth of their product line to keep up with technology convergence and overlapping complementary solutions, such as email marketing, analytics, content generation, and customer relationship management platforms. In order to grow aggressively, marketing automation vendors need sophisticated analytics tools in their platform while keeping their software highly intuitive so that marketers can get immediate value from it. Act-On Software has exhibited an impressive growth strategy while taking advantage of the increasing need for automating marketing efforts in this highly demanding online space. As marketing automation gains popularity as a metric driven marketing technology platform, Act-On Software is poised to 'ride the tide' of this popularity and expand its customer base in US as well as internationally. Its rapid growth and strong brand perception sets the bar high for its competitors and demonstrates how experienced leadership can transform the market landscape, which has been predominantly dominated by only a handful of players. Based on Frost & Sullivan's 2014 Frost & Sullivan 6 We Accelerate Growth
independent analysis on Marketing Automation Software, Act-On Software is recognized with the 2014 Global Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award. Critical Importance of TEAM Research Frost & Sullivan s TEAM Research methodology represents the analytical rigor of our research process. It offers a 360-degree view of industry challenges, trends, and issues by integrating all seven of Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies. Our experience has shown over the years that companies too often make important growth decisions based on a narrow understanding of their environment, leading to errors of both omission and commission. Frost & Sullivan contends that successful growth strategies are founded on a thorough understanding of market, technical, economic, financial, customer, best practices, and demographic analyses. In that vein, the letters T, E, A and M reflect our core technical, economic, applied (financial and best practices) and market analyses. The integration of these research disciplines into the TEAM Research methodology provides an evaluation platform for benchmarking industry players and for creating high-potential growth strategies for our clients. Chart 4: Benchmarking Performance with TEAM Research About Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best-practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses and the investment community from more than 40 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit http://www.frost.com. 2014 Frost & Sullivan 7 We Accelerate Growth