It seems to me the best business to start these days is an App business focused on sales or marketing. I wrote about the Proliferation Of Marketing/Sales Apps. In the past year the number of Marketing Technology Apps have gone from 947 to 1876, in 43 different marketing technology categories. Sales Automation, Customer Experience and related apps are going through a similar explosion, with dozens of new apps appearing every month.
Sales and Marketing Executives have a huge appetite for these technology solutions, spending $10’s of billions each year on these (just the apps, not implementation, integration, etc.). But it makes you wonder where it’s going and what it means to the victims, I mean users of these apps.
It’s kind of easy to see how we’ve gotten here. There’ve been two major factors that are driving this trend.
The first has come from the giant Sales and Marketing Automation vendors themselves. They built great tools. CRM systems, as an example, didn’t tend to be very specialized. They were designed to do an adequate job against a breadth of requirements, lead, opportunity, contact, pipeline, activity management. They provided general purpose reporting, analysis and other tools. They didn’t pretend to be the deepest, best tools for Major Account Planning, as an example.
