Salesfusion scoops up LoopFuse, helping marketers find more social leads

New marketing tools have increased marketers’ efficiency, automating a bevy of mundane tasks they have to do every day.

Now marketing automation vendor Salesfusion is planning to make those automated processes more intelligent.

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Two weeks after announcing an $8.25 million funding round, Salesfusion today told VentureBeat that has acquired a competitor: LoopFuse. In addition to an influx of engineering talent and new customers, the acquisition gives Salesfusion access to LoopFuse’s social listening tools.

That means Salesfusion will integrate social data — from LinkedIn, for example — when serving up new leads to marketers. Salesfusion intends to fully integrate LoopFuse’s technology into its platform in the second quarter of 2014.

“Rather than [serving just] the mundane muscle of marketing,” said Salesfusion CEO Christian Nahas, “we’re going to start to attack the brain.”

Salesfusion customers will see some additional changes, like automatic lead scoring. Instead of dumping thousands of leads into a customer relationship management (CRM) system, said Nahas, Salesfusion will ensure that each one is well-qualified.

“We want the tools to work for the marketer, not the marketer working for the tools,” he told VentureBeat in an interview.

Nahas declined to disclose the specific terms of the LoopFuse deal, but he told us that “a big part” of the company’s recent $8.25 million financing went toward the acquisition.

Salesfusion competes with several larger marketing automation tools, including Salesforce’s Pardot, Oracle’s Eloqua, and Marketo. Nahas thinks the recent consolidation in marketing automation has slowed down the pace of innovation, leading to bloated, impractical feature lists.

“Marketo and Pardot and everyone is just trying to add more stuff to the pile, but I firmly believe that marketers use about 40 to 50 percent of the stuff that’s on the pile today,” he said. “The easier you can make it to use, the more value you can get out of it.”

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That line of thinking figures into Salesfusion’s pricing, which starts at $750 per month. There are various add-ons that cost more, like one for setting up and managing events, but they’re not all bundled into the core package.

Now that LoopFuse is part of Salesfusion, the Atlanta-based company has 75 employees and nearly 1,000 customers. Most customers are mid-sized business-to-business firms, but it also serves a smattering of small businesses and enterprises.

Salesfusion’s software provides marketers with a huge amount of historical data on leads, from how long they’ve spent on a company site to where they came from, what links they clicked, what emails they saw, and so on. They can subsequently set up rules about which leads get sent to salespeople based on that information.

“I really believe it to be one of the most robust marketing automation platforms on the market today,” said Nahas.

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Earlier this month, Forrester labeled Salesfusion a “strong contender” in its lead-to-revenue management automation solutions Wave ranking. Oracle and Marketo topped that rankings list.