An op-ed I wrote for TechCrunch:

There are several enterprise players that want a share of Salesforce’s business, but just aren’t making headway by knuckling up against the company’s dominant, entrenched SaaS CRM offerings. Rather than competing head on, a smarter approach for these businesses is to “front door” Salesforce, instead.

By acquiring Marketo, a competitor could get into Salesforce’s accounts, then, over time, work themselves down the funnel and leverage better integrations with Marketo in order to eventually displace Salesforce. Marketo’s strategic foothold in the enterprise and its current market value relative to potential acquirers like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and even Salesforce make this a great time to buy the leading marketing automation vendor.

Many industry watchers overlook the mission-critical role Marketo plays in its customers’ go-to-market operations. The majority of Marketo’s 4,000 customers also use Salesforce, but the marketing automation system has access to more data about the funnel than its CRM counterpart. Marketo can sync bi-directionally with Salesforce, capturing all the data stored there, while also holding top-of-the-funnel lead behavior data that doesn’t get stored in CRM. Hence, it has access to an invaluable superset of data about a company’s potential and existing customers.

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