James Governor wrote a nice post that I paraphrased below:

Geoff Moore said that while the last 30 years of business automation have been about creating Systems Of Record, the next years will be about creating Systems of Engagement: getting closer to employees, customers and partners, encouraging greater participation in company ecosystems… The key buyer for Systems of Engagement will likely be the Office of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).

He described how Adobe is positioning themselves as the “ERP for Marketing”, having grown from the creative/design side of the house to web analytics and now social media analytics.

If you look at their proposed offerings, they will all be marketed to the Marketing Department.

Contrast that to Salesforce.com, which started from selling sales force automation software SaaS marketed to Sales department.  Rather than expanding their share of wallet within Sales, they moved into other departments, selling Service Cloud to Customer Support dept. and Chatter to typically Marketing or HR.

Interestingly, from my observation Sales typically has the the easier time justifying the purchase - especially compared to Marketing - since they can more easily track business impact of such investments.  Different departments to sell into also require new account relationships to cultivate.

Will they build new offerings for Sales recruiting, training, compensation management, performance management etc. that revolve around salespeople, and perhaps even eCommerce to enable customer’s multi-channel sales strategy? We shall see…