In my experience there are more people applying marketing automation in B2C and retail settings. The preference for B2C is something I see with many marketers. Often it’s the more “glamorous” of the marketing industries, with fancy retail websites (fashion, health) and lots of volume.
That last one, volume, is a big factor in making marketing automation successful: if you get a lot of people making decisions on your website (e.g. buying something, even if it’s something small), you get data that much faster. B2C marketing automation tends to be about increasing customer value (they’ve bought once, let’s see if we can get them to buy more). B2B marketing automation, on the other hand, is all about generating sales-ready leads for higher priced products or services.
To answer your question: when considering taking a new contract, I always look for businesses that already have volume. My ideal problem to solve is: we’ve got traffic, we’ve got leads, but sales isn’t happy with them. That’s often a good indication that B2B marketing automation is going to help you by helping you nurture and qualify your leads. Separating the good ones from the ones that aren’t a good fit.
One might even state that marketing automation in B2B isn’t about generating more leads at all: it’s about generating better leads. So if you’re in a position where you’re actually getting too many leads and sales is just wasting time talking to them all… that’s a perfect use case.
In B2C, as mentioned, it’s easier. There’s marketing, sure, but there is a lot more of a customer journey going on after the first sale. You can leverage marketing automation to make someone the right follow-up offers, even over the span of years.

Interesting article @Henrik Becker:disqus,
as Founder of marketing automation platform I don’t see any issue to
apply the MA to any particular Industries, for sure is ideal for
b2b where the value of lead/deal is high instead to classic b2c.
In the small
business I see more often the issue of mental approach of applying automation
solutions or strategies through workflow, I see this market particularly
interesting for consultants/marketers.
Is very important to assist the company to implement a correct marketing automation strategy.
The software is not a genius but need to be reliable and easy to use.
Enjoy!

@hgdybecker:disqus @bradwages:disqus
That is interesting. Certainly there are different types of Marketing automation platforms and maturity levels.
But I would like to know in which type of business / industry Marketing Automation especially would or would not not be a good idea. Thoughts guys?

Thanks for your kind words, Brad! Yeah, while I’m a big fan of scaling and automation (obviously), it certainly isn’t for everyone. The stage of your business and the market you’re in should be important factors in determining which marketing tactics and tools you’re going to be using.