Marketing providers managed to hold onto the cloud spotlight last week thanks to a series of major product updates offering to help sales professionals take better advantage of the software-as-a-service model. Demandbase Inc. led the charge with the introduction of a hosted platform for tracking the behavior of customers throughout the different stages of the engagement cycle, a notoriously complicated task that is especially difficult to achieve in the business-to-business segment where its clients operate.

The challenge stems from the fact that corporate buyers are far fewer in number than everyday consumers, which leaves a proportionally smaller margin of error for the behavioral analyses that marketers rely on to target promotions. Demandbase’s new B2B Data Cloud promises to improve campaign accuracy with a homegrown IP lookup engine that is able to identify the company to which a particular website visitor belongs and estimate their role using a profiling capability gained through its acquisition of WhoToo Inc. two months ago. The results can then be correlated with third party information like advertising performance metrics to identify the best way of reaching out to that particular prospect.

Nearly as important as the targeting functionality itself is the fact that the platform enables marketers to carry out the entire process in a unified browser-based environment. A company called Cloud9 IDE Inc. set out to provide the same convenience for the developers who support corporate marketing campaigns behind the scenes last week with a new edition of its namesake coding platform that has been specially adapted to Salesforce.com. The integration makes it possible to create custom extensions for sub-components of the customer management service such as the Desk.com support app, which received an update of its own against the backdrop of Cloud9’s announcement.

Care representatives can now quickly access account details when fielding a complaint from a customer to gain a better understanding of their problem and thus hopefully solve the problem faster. Salesforce.com Inc. sees the functionality coming particularly useful when dealing with high-value users who might be more inclined to make additional purchases later down the road if their requests are handled in a timely manner.

Image via Geralt