Adobe Marketo Engage (acquired by Adobe in 2018) is a marketing automation platform whose basic features include email marketing, drip nurturing, landing pages, and lead scoring, but other editions offer additional advanced features. Typical customers are B2B firms with complex sales cycles.
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SAS 360 Plan
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Formerly SAS Marketing Operations Management, a solution to integrate and manage all marketing processes for greater consistency, efficiency and effectiveness – from marketing strategy development and planning to content creation, campaign execution and post-campaign analysis.
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Traction Complete
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Traction Complete develops software that enhances the native capabilities and functionality of Salesforce, with a complete suite of solutions for effortless account hierarchies and simplified, seamless lead management.
Adobe Marketo Engage is an excellent tool for hosting registration forms and sending out tokenized emails based on a particular person's information within your database. For example, if someone attends an event or webinar and indicates that they'd like to learn more about your product, then Adobe Marketo Engage can easily trigger a specific email template to that person that will be personalized with tokens about them. The pixel tracking that can be applied to any web page is also very helpful. If you want to focus on a more 1:1 type of follow up with a Lead, then the automated emails are not going to be as useful.
Traction Complete is very well suited for lead to account matching and for automatic, criteria based lead routing and processing. For example, when a lead is created, it can be matched to an account, and Traction Complete can populate account demographics like Industry or Annual Revenue. And once the lead's score reaches a certain threshold, Traction Complete can then evaluate any of the leads data (including the industry and annual revenue that the lead was previously enriched with), route the lead to a person or queue , and at the same time update the lead status and or enrich the lead with information to track funnel progression (e.g., MQL Date, Assigned Date, etc.).
It keeps all of our very important lead data in one place. It's very flexible, allows us to do a lot of different things around list building and segmentation. It deploys our email campaigns for us and it's also where our landing pages are built. So it does a lot of the things that we need to do from a data and deployment perspective.
Create and manage a detailed plan for a marketing campaign: when you create detailed project plans and then task and role levels, SAS Marketing Operations Management (SAS MOM) makes it easier to coordinate between projects with very little, if any, issues.
Share, reuse and leverage existing marketing assets: Like some marketing tools, SAS MOM allows you to create and reuse assets across various channels.
Manage project collaboration and execution: You are allowed to set up a workflow that helps move processes along without having to manage each step of the project.
Adobe Marketo Engage crashes a lot or freezes. We don't have many users and less than 300k contacts so there's no reason it should ever crash.
It's really expensive! It would be nice to pick which features we want a la cart versus being stuck paying more for a feature and not using the others in the package.
Because of our integration with Dynamics, we had to use a 3rd party tool called Scribe for field matching. No one at Adobe will help us now that we have a 3rd party tool
Traction Complete continues to improve and innovate, and their staff does a great job of informing us of new functionality and how we can use it to get more value from Traction Complete. And at its core, it covers a gap inherent in Salesforce CRM - the fact that leads are a standalone object and not connected to the other main CRM objects like accounts, contacts, and opportunities. Traction Complete bridges that gap without requiring us to convert leads to contacts and degrade the data quality of the contact records. This functionality is key to a holistic process from initial inquiry to MQL, SAL, SQL, New Customer, and repeat business.
In some aspects, the tool can feel quite clunky in parts. But with the rich feature set it has, it's understandable. There is a lot of room for improvement for the user interface. The system itself doesn't have a slick or modern feel, so the usability could feel nicer to use with these areas considered.
It's very usable overall and much easier than using native functionality. If there is anything I'd want to improve, and I'm being critical here, there are a few minor items. 1) It would be nice if the initial load time of flows was faster, but I understand that given the number of elements we have in the assignment flow, I should not expect a two second load time. 2) It would be great if the different flow versions had fields to capture properties/attributes like a verbose description to make version control better. My sense is that it will be available in a future version. 3) When editing flows, every now and then, the pop-up windows of elements are a bit sticky on the screen when trying to move/drag them - however, I usually experience this only in Safari and am often too lazy to fire up Chrome.
Marketo provides different way and abilities to connect. If you are having product support or unexplained errors you can get someone on Marketo support 24 hours a day. One of Marketo's greatest assets in my opinion however would be the community. Often times our company is just looking for case success stories from someone else. In the community you can search for problems you are currently facing and see others having the same issue and solutions for those issues. If not, you can pose a question to the whole community and champions of the product and others can chime in to provide suggestions to fix your needs. The community is truly a 24/7 place to get your answers quickly.
There are times when it is slightly slow for us, where we sit on a screen waiting for it to load. This could be our internet since we have had the same issue occasionally with other systems, but it is enough to make you crazy.
On multiple occasions we've had Marketo support (technical and license based) issues. Technical issues were minor and resolved within a day. License based issues (even things encouraged by Marketo for partners, like provisioning another license) took WEEKS. They actually took so long to respond that the client we were working with withdrew from the contract because they were no longer convinced Marketo was capable of supporting their business. As an agency trying to sell the software, you can only explain away so much before they just made us look silly.
The support team at Traction Complete has always been responsive, knowledgeable, and professional. They took the time to understand our business needs and helped us during the initial implementation, as well as with configuration changes when needed.
Our account rep stopped out in Lincoln, NE to ensure we were properly set up and running. This was very much appreciated. I was very, very new at this point, so I can't comment very much on the extent of what was taught because I was still brand new to the company and the system
I had never used Marketo prior to taking this job so online training was my starting point. I was able to follow along, it was interesting and quickly and efficiently taught me what I needed to know without a lot of fluff. It was far from boring and really helped me get my hands dirty with Marketo.
1. Have a content marketing plan to run in parallel with the marketing automation installation--you'll need a lot of content to make full use of Marketo's capabilities. 2. Work with sales (and ISRs) to define and document a workflow--build your Marketo installation around how you do business--not figure out how to apply your business to the tools 3. Spend time of data cleaning--both an initial project as well as a strategy for ongoing data management. We found some change manaement issues (no more appending ZZZ to the first name to identify contacts who have left the company, for example, or prohibiting the entry of "info@company.com" email addresses). 4. Find some champions in the sales and ISR teams. You'll have both fans and detractors--work with the fans to build some success stories
I've been part of 3 implementations, and the Traction Complete team has always met or exceeded expectations and delivered on their commitments/promises.
Adobe Marketo Engage is one of the best email sending platforms I have worked with, because there is so much you can do on a lead scoring area and also then connect this to other platforms such as Salesforce. It allows for seamless reporting and working alongside sales colleagues. We chose Adobe Marketo Engage because it allows for more sophisticated audience segmentation and management of ongoing large scale nurture flows across a number of complex criteria.
Traction Complete offered more ease of use, less complexity, and an overall lower cost of ownership compared to other options. And while Salesforce can handle some of the automation, which requires more technical skill to configure, it does not provide the lead to account matching.
We look at scaleability in a few different ways. First, the speed while using Marketo has remained relatively the same as our database has grown. Though I would say Marketo is slow at times, it has not gotten slower over the last few years. If anything, it has improved, and they are working to improve it. Second, the amount of programs we have developed in Marketo has exponentially grown as well. Marketo has allowed us to drastically increase our output without having to drastically increase our headcount.
