MarketingPilot's First Microsoft Release Online Only, Adds Dynamics CRM Integration

After its acquisition in October of 2012 by Microsoft, MarketingPilot went quiet for several months as it worked on the first phase life in the Microsoft Business Division. Now, under the Dynamics CRM umbrella, the product  team has emerged with a new release of its integrated marketing management (IMM) solution and a new integration for Dynamics CRM.

MarketingPilot 15 is an online release (the company offers both on-premise and online options). "We're leading with online," confirmed Dynamics CRM General Manager Seth Patton.  He added that the new Dynamics CRM Connector, however, will work with both Dynamics CRM 2011 on-premise and CRM Online.

According to Bob Stutz on the CRM Connection blog, version 15 and the MarketingPilot Connector are US-only for new customers but available to all existing customers worldwide.   "We expect to make MarketingPilot available in select international markets by the end of this year," he writes.

According to Ken Kornbluh of the MarketingPilot team, they have been hard at work developing the integration that will be released this month, which will enable the bi-directional integration of data for contacts, leads, opportunities, tasks, campaign data, and behavioral data like landing pages.

Outside of the integration points, MarketingPilot 15 offers a substantial range of capabilities including:

• Digital Asset Mgmt
• Project Management
• Collaboration tools
• Spend Management
• Budget Management
• Campaign Mgmt
• Marketing Database
• List Segmentation
• Behavior Analysis
• Campaign Automation
• Lead Management
• Landing Page Builder

According to MBD president Kirill Tatarinov, the decision to focus on identifying value in the CMO role sold him and his team on the concept of acquiring a product like MarketingPilot.  "We think about roles but also needs of the business," Tatarinov told an audience of press and analysts today. "Driving revenue and enhancing activities is what every enterprise is excited about. The CMO role's emergence and the realization by many of how ineffective their marketing spend has been in the past is something that drives emergence of the need and for us to move fast.  Very few have an understanding of return on marketing investment. Our job is to really see if they get any return at all from those adwords or if it is a waste of marketing investment."

Microsoft has not yet announced pricing details for its first MarketingPilot release, though Microosft representative said it will have per-user pricing, and the product remains on sale via MarketingPilot.com.  Before the acquisition the product was sold at two levels, though both included the majority or all of the capabilities listed above.

According to CRM analyst Paul Greenberg, IMM was a hole that had to be filled in the Dynamics CRM portfolio. "It was a missing piece. Interestingly enough, they actually chose a good product," he believes. "From a purely functional standpoint,it's got about two-thirds of Aprimo's [features] but at a significantly lower price point. Even though they haven't announced pricing yet, you know it's going to be at a Microsoft price point and not a Teradata Aprimo price point. I think the challenge is that it is so heavy on functionality that a marketer doesn't have much room to be creative if they have to use all of it. So what they'll need to do to make it a tremendously valuable piece is to simplify the functionality and be able to provide it as a managed service or offer it in pieces."

For Dynamics CRM program management architect Bill Patterson of Microsoft, bringing IMM into the Dynamics CRM story was a way for his team to answer a question that he felt had been lingering for some time:  "what did Dynamics CRM want to be when it grew up?" 

"[Dynamics CRM] had been on a rapid growth path, but with strength of ecosystem to get us to where we'd been.  So we help organizations automate. In today's economic climate, they want to get back to growth mode.  Automation is about productivity and savings. Growth is about the next generation. Marketing is nexus of that."

Patterson credits the leadership of corporate vice president Bob Stutz with taking on an IMM acquisition. Under Stutz's leadership, the Dynamics CRM team has started focusing on helping its clients focus on growing, Patterson says, and away from the productivity message of recent years.

In addition to pricing and packaging details, analysts at Convergence  want to see if and how the MarketingPilot functionality will serve Dynamics CRM customers, either as a whole or in pieces.  And as the MarketingPilot team gets more time, analysts will be watching for how the integration of functionality progresses.  "They will have to make it a native integration at some point," believes Paul Greenberg.

Or as Bill Patterson said, "we will make MarketingPilot a part of our family, to help our customers use marketing as a lever for growth."