Q3 2013 Marketing Automation Benchmark: Gleanster Research Findings

On August 7, 2013, Gleanster Research announced its Q3 2013 Marketing Automation Benchmark, a 43-page report authored by Ian Michiels, Principal Analyst at Gleanster, based on the experiences and intentions of 220+ B2B companies with analyst commentary on 50+ marketing automation solution providers. This article restores the historical intent of that research as a retrospective, distinct from Gleanster's later 2014 Marketing Automation Benchmark — every statistic below is dated 2013 Gleanster research, not a description of today's market.

Executive Summary

Gleanster's Q3 2013 Marketing Automation Benchmark, announced August 7, 2013, reported on why 220+ B2B companies had implemented marketing automation and what separated Top Performers from other respondents. Gleanster reported that 79% of Top Performers cited increasing revenue as a compelling reason for adopting marketing automation, and 76% cited generating higher-quality leads. The research also found that 79% of Top Performers had been using marketing automation for more than two years, and that Top Performers were 5–6 times more likely than other organizations to invest in process optimization and change management. The report's central argument, in Michiels' own framing, was that the market had moved beyond lead quantity toward lead quality, and beyond early adoption toward validated, mainstream use.

Background of the Q3 2013 Benchmark

By mid-2013, marketing automation adoption had grown enough that Gleanster's research shifted focus from whether organizations should adopt the technology to how Top Performers were extracting value from it once adopted. The report's framing — "how Top Performing organizations are justifying investments in marketing automation and exactly how they utilize the tools" — reflected a market Gleanster viewed as past the early-adopter phase, where the more urgent question for buyers had become optimization rather than initial buy-in.

Research Methodology

The Q3 2013 benchmark drew on the experiences and intentions of 220+ B2B companies and included analyst commentary on 50+ marketing automation solution providers across a 43-page report. Consistent with Gleanster's Gleansight research format, the study combined survey-based findings with end-user-rated vendor assessment. Gleanster's Top Performer classification for this edition was defined around organizations that embraced advanced capabilities such as lead scoring and behavioral email triggers, prioritized lead quality over lead quantity, and invested more heavily in process optimization and organizational alignment than other respondents.

Why Organizations Implemented Marketing Automation

Gleanster reported in 2013 that CMOs at Top Performing companies cited increasing revenue as their most compelling reason for implementing marketing automation, at 79%, followed by generating higher-quality leads at 76%. Secondary citations of the same research also attribute the following reasons to Top Performers, in descending order of frequency: replacing or reducing fragmented marketing technologies (53%), increasing marketing and sales performance (51%), automating nurture marketing (45%), increasing lead quantity (44%), and lowering marketing costs (36%). These five figures come from vendor and press citations of the original report rather than a directly re-verified copy of Gleanster's underlying data tables, and are reported here with that caveat.

Lead Quality vs. Lead Quantity

The gap between lead quality (76%) and lead quantity (44%) as stated priorities was central to Gleanster's framing of the report: the research positioned this as evidence that the market had matured past treating marketing automation as a volume-generation tool. Michiels' own commentary on the release characterized this shift directly, framing the era as one where organizations were recognizing that success wasn't about lead quantity, but lead quality.

Marketing Technology Consolidation

Gleanster reported that Top Performers were looking to divest fragmented marketing technologies that produced disparate, often unusable customer data — consistent with the 53% figure cited for replacing or reducing fragmented marketing technologies as a reason for adopting or expanding marketing automation. This framing treated marketing automation partly as a consolidation play: a way to unify data and workflows previously spread across disconnected point tools, rather than purely as a new capability layered on top of an unchanged technology stack.

Marketing and Sales Alignment

Gleanster reported that 72% of respondents identified the ability to tie marketing performance to sales as an important marketing automation system criterion, and that 51% of Top Performers cited increasing marketing and sales performance as a reason for investment. Together, these findings positioned marketing-sales alignment as both a purchase criterion and a realized outcome for Top Performers, consistent with the broader theme — also present in Gleanster's other 2013 and 2014 research — that marketing automation's value depended on cross-functional adoption rather than marketing-department use alone.

Ease of Use and System Criteria

Gleanster reported that 92% of respondents identified ease of use as an important marketing automation system criterion — the highest-cited criterion in the research, ahead of tying marketing performance to sales at 72%. This finding is consistent with the FLASH-style, end-user-rated vendor evaluation format Gleanster used across its Gleansight research line, which scored vendors partly on reported ease of use rather than solely on analyst-assessed feature depth.

Characteristics of Top Performers

Gleanster's Top Performer definition for the Q3 2013 benchmark centered on three characteristics: embracing advanced capabilities such as lead scoring and behavioral email triggers, prioritizing lead quality over lead quantity, and investing more heavily in process optimization and organizational alignment. Gleanster reported that Top Performers were 5 to 6 times more likely than other organizations to invest in process optimization and change management — one of the report's clearest quantitative signals that Top Performer status was driven by organizational discipline as much as by which software a company had purchased. Gleanster also reported that 79% of Top Performers had been using marketing automation for more than two years, suggesting sustained, mature use rather than recent adoption was itself a marker of top-performing status.

Feature Usage and Top Challenges

Secondary citations of the Q3 2013 benchmark, consistent with an editorial companion piece Gleanster published around the same time discussing "unexpected findings" from the research, report the most commonly used marketing automation features among respondents: email marketing (89%), lead nurturing (84%), cross-channel campaign management (82%), and integrations with other systems such as CRM, mobile, and social platforms for centralizing customer intelligence (80%). The same secondary citations report the top four challenges respondents faced in reaching their marketing objectives: access to customer data (95%), aligning marketing with sales (90%), fragmented marketing systems (83%), and limitations with current technologies (80%).

Read together with the adoption figures elsewhere in this article, these numbers suggest email and lead nurturing remained the operational core of marketing automation use in 2013, even as Top Performers were reportedly moving toward more advanced, sales-aligned, and consolidated approaches. The high-ranking data-access and sales-alignment challenges (95% and 90% respectively) reinforce this article's earlier point about the 92%/72% system-criteria findings: usability and cross-functional alignment were reported as bigger obstacles than the marketing automation software's feature set itself.

Historical Vendor Landscape

The Q3 2013 report included analyst commentary on 50+ marketing automation solution providers. Vendors reported to have taken top honors across the report's key assessment dimensions include Adobe Neolane, Act-On, eTrigue, HubSpot, Infusionsoft, LeadLife Solutions, Marketo, Oracle Eloqua, Salesforce Pardot, Salesforce.com, and Silverpop.

This vendor information describes 2013 market participants only. The marketing automation vendor landscape changed substantially in the years that followed through acquisitions, platform consolidation, and rebranding — several vendors named above no longer exist as independent companies or standalone products. Nothing in this section should be read as a description of any vendor's current product, ranking, or market position.

Relationship to Gleanster's 2014 Benchmark

This Q3 2013 benchmark is a distinct research asset from Gleanster's subsequently published 2014 Marketing Automation Benchmark, which surveyed 250+ companies with commentary on 53 providers and reported that 8 of 10 Top Performers used marketing automation. The two reports share Gleanster's general research philosophy and author (Ian Michiels), and both examine Top Performer behavior, but they represent separate survey cycles with separate sample sizes, and this retrospective does not merge their statistics.

How the Market Changed Afterward

Marketing automation changed substantially in the years following the Q3 2013 benchmark. Vendor consolidation reshaped the field named above — Oracle had already acquired Eloqua and Adobe had already acquired Neolane by the time of this report, and further consolidation followed for Marketo, Silverpop, Pardot, and others. Artificial intelligence and predictive capabilities, largely absent from mainstream platforms in 2013, became standard features in later years, and account-based marketing grew from a niche tactic into a core use case. None of these later developments should be read back into the 2013 findings above — they are included here only to separate the historical research from the current market.

Lessons That Remain Relevant Today

Several themes from Gleanster's Q3 2013 research have held up well. The lead-quality-over-quantity argument remains a standard framing in how marketing technology is evaluated today, and the finding that Top Performers were defined more by process optimization and organizational alignment than by software choice alone continues to recur across later generations of marketing and sales technology. The 92% figure for ease of use as a top system criterion also anticipated a durable pattern in enterprise software buying more broadly: usability, not just feature breadth, drives which tools actually get adopted and sustained inside an organization.

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