One of the biggest draws of any marketing automation platform is the ability to create messages aimed at prospects and customers without all of the manual work on behalf of the sender. Marketing departments strapped for resources can now send out emails on Sales' behalf with the click of a button. High fives and fist pumps all around, right? Maybe so, but don't forget this is only half of the story; The other half, of course, is making a personal connection with the prospect.

In one of his books, physicist Richard Feynman, shares a few stories about inventions he concocted as a young boy. Although they were rather ingenious (one was a potato slicer), they were quickly cast aside with irritation by the grown-up crowd, regardless of how useful they were. The moral of the story is that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world.

For years, metrics and analysis have been arguing for validity among marketers. Sure, everyone talks about the importance, but as research has shown, this doesn’t always correlate to making its way into the budget. Even as recently as a year ago, I can remember being at a marketing awards show, in which one of the judges for the ‘measurable marketing’ category commented that the concentration was primarily subjective. Given the technology now available for tracking marketing spend, such a statement is now laughable. That said, the need for a ‘full spectrum’ analysis tool is growing at an exponential rate.