By Scott Mersy, Genius.com

At this time of year, it’s always fun to both reflect on what we’ve seen, heard, and learned over the past 12 months and to look ahead to what’s still to come. Over the upcoming days, I’ll be writing about some of the key trends I see for Marketing Automation in 2010.To kick it off, here’s trend number one.

Trend 1. Inbound Marketing “Meets” Marketing Automation
“Inbound Marketing” had a big 2009. The Inbound Marketing Summit expanded to three events (looks like they’re doing four in 2010), Hubspot continues to do a great job evangelizing the art of “getting found by customers”, and Social Media, a pillar of Inbound Marketing, might have gotten a *little* attention! Eloqua just made an announcement about this too.

Getting found, generating web traffic, and converting that traffic are all admirable goals found within Inbound Marketing. However, in a complex selling environment (usually B2B), it’s not enough. After the lead is captured, lead nurturing and lead scoring need to kick in immediately to develop relationship with the prospect.

Do Your Prospects Travel a Predictable, Linear Path?

Why? The buying process in a complex selling environment is not linear - far from it! In fact, the buyer’s interactions are all over the place - up, down, left, right, zig-zag … kind of like a game of chutes and ladders.

How does a business determine who has done more than just respond (shown inbound interest)? Which inbound prospects are truly engaged? In an eCommerce environment, the sale is fulfilled online, in a shopping cart, and it’s easy to see who completed the transactions or who abandoned. In a complex sale, however, the sale gets fulfilled through a person. A connection needs to be made, but up to 70% of inbound leads aren’t “sales ready”. In this environment, there needs to be more. After inbound interest, Marketing Automation enables delivery of appropriate messages, emails, website personalization - all designed to drive a “right-time” interaction with sales.

It comes down to a simple hard truth: Inbound Marketing by itself isn’t enough in B2B. Maximize the revenue opportunity from inbound leads and optimize the burgeoning customer relationship after and expression of inbound interest is expressed through Lead Management.

Read more: Paul Dunay recently called this Inbound Interaction Management on his Buzz Marketing for Technology blog.