Marketing Automation buys in the Midmarket: Salesfusion and LoopFuse
Marketing automation software vendor Salesfusion just acquired LoopFuse, a marketing automation vendor founded in 2007.
The fuse has the stated goal of expanding both through acquisition and organically. Or as Christian Nahas, CEO of Salesfusion said “to further extend our position as the top marketing automation vendor in the midmarket.
LoopFuse functions to be Fused into SalesFusion
We learn that Salesfusion is planning to embed LoopFuse’s dynamic social media publishing and monitoring tools into the Salesfusion suite. This would adding social listening, publishing and nurturing to the leading marketing automation suite for midsized businesses.
Provider brings predictive analytics
According to SalesFusion:”Expanding on current Loopfuse technology, Salesfusion will be the first provider to bring the power of predictive analytics to marketing automation, arming marketers with the first “smart” marketing automation solution and enabling them to interact with and nurture prospects and customers in a more efficient, intelligent way.” A bit of a hefty overstatement saying that you are the first to bring predictive analytics to the market. But all is forgiven, it was a press release.
The addition of LoopFuse customers to the Salesfusion portfolio makes Salesfusion a big sized fish amongst marketing automation software vendors focused specifically on the midmarket segment. SalesFusion focusses on Small to Medium Businesses who, more than others, prefer an “all-in-one” service instead of using multiple platforms and integrating them.
Acquisition as bait for Microsoft?
There has been a lot of consolidation the Marketing automation space in recently; Salesforce aquired ExactTarget and with that they got Pardot, Oracle acquired Responsys and Eloqua. But Microsoft, doesn’t have a strong marketing automation tool to go with its Dynamics CRM product. They did aquire Marketing Pilot in 2012, but that didn’t make much of a ripple. SalesFusion’s deepest CRM integration is with Microsoft Dynamics, so adding one plus one. They might be positioning themselves to be acquired by Microsoft. It makes sense to focus your operations on making the most attractive acquisition target possible.
Fred Tabsharni of Port25 added on his blog: ”In my opinion, with the acquisition of LoopFuse today, SalesFusion can be a buyout target for either Microsoft, or SAP. But, these buyers are looking for bigger for highly mature companies at this point. SalesFusion, would need to get another round of financing, grow their core business or think about getting purchased by a larger ESP or MAC.”
The terms of the sales were not disclosed.