"Stealth mode" Loopfuse to be unveiled

Loopfuse has been actively selling to customers and blogging about its successes for nearly a year now. Yet such is the industry - where open source has become so mainstream that we often neglect the rise of truly innovative software - that it's not surprising thatIDG missed Loopfuse until now. We forgive you, IDG! :-)

Regardless, if you haven't heard of Loopfuse or started using its (or a competitor's) marketing automation software, you need to correct this fault. Immediately. Here's what it does:

Lead generation products track the activities of potential customers on a company's Web site and use factors like their job titles and activities on the site to assign "lead scores," which help salespeople to target their efforts. The products work in tandem with customer relationship management software.

This is, in part, what open-source Loopfuse (as well as proprietary products like Eloqua) does. It's more than this, though this would be enough.

In a nutshell, it's a way of hyper-accelerating any business that relies on the web. For open-source companies and web companies, it is an unforgivable sin to not be using something like this because it makes web businesses much more efficient and productive.

Again, whether you use Loopfuse or a competitive product, you need to be using marketing-automation software.

Disclosure: I am an advisor to Loopfuse.