Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow is worth maybe a hundred million dollars more today than he was two weeks ago.

You'll never believe whom he has to thank.

During a conference call to announce that Salesforce.com has acquired Facebook marketing company Buddy Media for ~$700 million, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff justified the buy with one statistic that he mentioned four times:

• By 2017, CMOs will spend more on tech than CIOs, and 15% of that spending will be on CRM, or customer-relationship management – Salesforce.com's bread-and-butter.

Benioff credited a report from Gartner for the statistic. (It's behind a paywall. Forbes has a decent write-up here.)

So: congrats, Laura McLellan, Research VP at Gartner – your January 2012 report has made Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow a very rich man.

He owes you a beer!

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