I went to the technology for marketing exhibition at Olympia yesterday. Reactions:
- The subheading was technology for sales, and in fact we were looking for sales force automation tools. Couldn’t find one – except goldmine. This is despite there being 30+ listed in the exhibition index. Tick-all-the-box-itis strikes again.
- There were however a lot of CRM solutions, email marketing solutions and web analytics.
- I don’t quite understand what a web analytics tool costing ten grand a year does that the free Google analytics product doesn’t. I asked several to explain but never really got to the bottom of it. Throw-aways like ‘oh – the google product is just a lightweight system’ doesn’t cut the mustard – I want features and benefits and I didn’t get em.
- Great card trickster on one of the stands – but which company? I have no idea. He left me a playing card as a momento. What a chance missed that the company details were not printed on the back.
- Some of the people on the stands were not really up to the job. Too many didn’t understand their product or if they did were incapable of explaining what it did. We walked away from several stands bemused and wondering what the product did.
- Overall marginally interesting. But I am still wanting to find out about web based sales force automation tools other than salesforce.com
bob
Bob Browning's blog 
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