Constellation ShortList™ B2B Marketing Automation for Small and Midsize Business

About This Constellation ShortList™

Small to midsize (SMB) business-to-business (B2B) organizations must engage customers and prospects through a wide range of online and offline channels to rapidly influence sales decisions. SMBs operate at “enterprise velocity” without enterprise budgets. To level the playing field, SMBs are actively looking to deliver on sophisticated personalized engagements with targeted decision-makers and influencers to accelerate and sway decision cycles and outcomes. One-dimensional email campaigns won’t move the needle—transmedia marketing automation is a requirement.

Nurturing relationships that span complex account decision structures and an expanding list of engagement channels that must be monitored, managed and automated are often top of mind for the SMB marketing team, which is also asked to deliver results that rival much larger firms with must larger budgets. Marketing teams must focus to more effectively streamline and prioritize engagements that most directly contribute to revenue.

SMBs demand the power without the fuss and complications of large-scale enterprise tools. They want sophisticated tools, workflows and strategies in right-sized and flexible packages to fit the realities of smaller teams and scaling budgets. Bring on the generative AI and all the advanced productivity tools…in easy to deploy instances that don’t require massive IT support and a team of data scientists. These solutions often blur the lines between sales and marketing engagements for smaller, more integrated teams that must act quickly to stay ahead of the curve.

Threshold Criteria

Constellation considers the following criteria for these solutions:

• Ease of use with simple, intuitive user interface
• Web and mobile access and management
• CRM integration, quick connections to data sources
• Quickly and easily design campaigns with out of the box, editable templates
• Intuitive visual workflow creation and management
• Identify and manage key accounts to support account-based marketing 
• Seamless integration of cross-channel communication tools (mobile, social, web)
• Attribution of campaign ROI
• Product vision and road map with expansion of integrations and connectors
• Aggregated analytics and role-based reporting and dashboards
• Flexible workflow creation for compliance, privacy and regulatory demands
• Integration with advertising platforms including social media and content syndication
• AI- and machine language-powered recommendations for productivity, data and analytics support, lead and opportunity analysis, and campaign optimization
• Initial exploration of generativeAI to assist with content creation, audience segmentation and asset personalization
• Well-thought-out architecture, API connections and marketplace
• Automated alerts and integrated sales/revenue generating workflows including appointment scheduling, follow-ups
• Scalable, modular functions and upgrades to grow with the business