Thanks for the feedback on our FreeView offering. I have provided some comments below:

“If your familiar with ‘Chasm Theory’ a la Geoffrey Moore the article suggests we are about to enter ‘the tornado’. Giving stuff away for free is one way of capturing market share. From a user perspective I’m sceptical that this will work in the long run.”

RESPONSE: Definitely a must-read for any marketer. The freemium model is one that has been successful for quite a while but is only now gaining noteriety (probably because there is now a catchy name for it… freemium). Here are some well-known examples of freemium plays :
* television (get out your rabbit ears and watch for free, or pay the cable company for more)
* baskin robbins has been giving away “tasting cups” for years
* paypal (no fees for personal payments up to a $ limit)
* opensource software (e.g. Red Hat)
* drug dealers have been doing it for decades!

The key is to provide a compelling enough reason for those who have become believers to actually convert to paying customers. Your skepticism is understandable given the delicate balance that must be maintained for this model to be successful. However, the executive team of LoopFuse has a strong background in opensource (which is really just a flavor of freemium) so hopefully we’ve learned a bit along the way.

“My view is that investing in Marketing Automation is just not a financial consideration. Marketing Automation delivers Sales & Marketing alignment and this is a strategic issue. In fact MA software is only one of several investments necessary.”

RESPONSE: Amen brother. Amen.

“The temptation for b2b marketers will be to use ‘free software’ and attempt to build alignment without the involvement of sales. What % of ’strategic projects that use free software and don’t involve anyone but marketing succeed?

RESPONSE: I wholeheartedly agree with your premise regarding the low percentage of successful strategic projects that involve only the marketing team (excluding the sales team). However, I would submit that this is true regardless of whether they use $100K in software or whether they use free software. Paying a lot of money for something does not make it inherently more valuable, useful, or successful. It just makes the effort more expensive. The idea is not only to lower the financial cost, but to remove false barriers that have kept adoption rates relatively low. See my blogpost on “Why Free? Why Now?” for more insight (http://www.loopfuse.com/blog/2010/06/30/why-free-why-now/)

I hope you will signup for a FreeView account and instrument your blog with us. We now have a wordpress plugin

Cheers!
-Quin’

Matthew Quinlan
LoopFuse