Eloqua Melds Salesforce.com Chatter with Marketing Automation

Eloqua, a provider of revenue performance management solutions, today announced it will integrate the Salesforce.com Chatter enterprise social platform into its marketing automation system.

Chatter inside Eloqua is positioned as a way for salespeople and marketers to gain context around campaigns through real-time alerts and updates powered by the Chatter social layer. From the brainstorming period to execution and follow-up, Eloqua says one of the goals was to create a recorded history of everything that occurred during a marketing campaign.

Through an integrated search functionality, users can seek out subject matter experts, people working on similar campaigns, or colleagues who, based on their work history, for example, have garnered top email response metrics. If a prospect responds to an email triggered by a campaign, anyone following the campaign in Chatter inside Eloqua will be alerted.

"Within the marketing organization itself, getting all of the people working on a campaign together in one place can be very difficult," says Rob Bois, product marketing manager at Eloqua. "We're also addressing the alignment problem that's still apparent between sales and marketing, where the missing link is the human communication element."

According to a recent study by Corporate Visions, 65 percent of B2B sales and marketing professionals say their organization's sales team uses less than half of the demand generation content that marketing produces. When Corporate Visions looked at barriers preventing success in demand generation, 37 percent said content was not engaging enough, while 31 percent said it had to do with a lack of sales and marketing alignment.

"Sales may be going after a new segment or product line or geography, and if they're not having those conversations with marketing, [it can lead to] finger-pointing," Bois says. "Instead of just integrating a layer that passes leads back and forth, we feel this product will kind of give marketing or the CMO that entry point into the social enterprise."

"Eloqua and Salesforce.com are delivering an integration that has the power to align sales and marketing and impact our bottom line," Chris Boorman, chief marketing officer at client company Informatica, said in a statement.

The Chatter inside Eloqua product will ship in beta during Q3, with early availability in Q4 of this year, according to Egan Cheung, a product manager at Eloqua.