“Marketing Automation” is certainly not a new category.  There are lots of existing resources on the web today that outline the latest trends and companies.  (for instance, one of  Trinity Ventures portfolio companies I’m involved with, Tippit, offers this comprehensive resource center.)   But, in a nutshell, here is a quick recap of the evolution of this category and where we are today:

1.  The first wave was automating email campaigns.  Vendors provided templates and workflow to push large volumes of email out and offered the ability to track opens and click throughs.  This wave started gathering steam in 2003/2004.   Companies like ConstantContact got public on this wave.

2.  The second wave was to track website visits.  By tracking visitors to your corporate website and watching what those visitors (and likely potentialy buyers) are pausing  and clicking on started to yield a deeper view on a possible lead.  This wave started to grow in 2005 and 2006.  Companies like LeadLander and DemandBase are players here.

3.  We are currently in the midst of watching the third wave roll out.  This wave offers capability to take email campaigns and website visitors and to score those prospects into various tiers of qualified leads and activity.  These scored leads are fed in a more automated fashion from marketing to the sales department.  The field and/or inside sales team can then view these leads in a dashboard on an account by account basis and see which ones are showing real activity.   While the scoring algorithm is important, the real innovation of this wave is getting sales and marketing to work together as opposed to going off in opposite directions.  This is a good thing which ultimately results in what matters:  increased revenue.   According to analyst Ian Michiels at Aberdeen, about 1500 companies worldwide today deploy these types of solutions from private companies like Eloqua, Marketo, Genius, SilverPop, and NeoLane among others.  Even in the current downturn, there is healthy growth here and we’re likely to see some interesting exits down the road as folks like SalesForce, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle/Siebel look to add to their existing sales automation suites.

So, what’s next?

My bet is that the fourth wave will focus on how b2b marketers and sales teams can tap into the social web for lead generation, lead nurturing and lead monetization.  We are already starting to see this in companies like HootSuite and CoTweet (offers brands a streamlined capability to engage users on Twitter), Gist (on demand rich context around a lead or prospect) and TechValidate (customer-sourced marketing collateral).  Some of the third wave players are starting to make noise about this too.  These thought leaders are productizing what recent studies and books have shown – that is, that a greater personal connection between seller and buyer can leader to increased sales and the social web is making this connection easier to establish (see good synopsis of The FaceBook Era here by recent Trinity Ventures EIR, Sachin Rekhi).  

The opportunity and challenge for the new entrants trying to surf this fourth wave will be to execute aggressively enough to establish a great product and a beachhead of customers such that they stay ahead of incumbents who will inevitably want to add similar functionality over time (as SF.com just demonstrated).  It will be exciting to watch how this fourth wave breaks, feel free to drop in a comment below to share any thoughts or opinions.