Item: Act-On Software
Rating: 10
Author: Michael Artinger

Overall Satisfaction with Act-On

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a small life science instrument company, we have a very targeted customer base, so ad-words and social aren't very effective. The ability to plan, implement and track content marketing is our primary approach, and Act-On gives me excellent visibility of the results in real-time. We have more than quadrupled our lead database and can prioritize who our internal sales team and distributors follow-up with based on a ranking of their Act-On Activity score in our CRM.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to implement and use, especially for small marketing teams
Effective integration with SFDC allows dispersed sales teams to access Act-On information within the CRM
Outstanding technical support -- awesome people!
Cost-effective pricing

Cons

Initially, I'd say that the analytics could be more powerful, but the expected release of a new version with funnel reporting should go a long way towards addressing this.

Return on Investment

Increased our lead database by more than 5X
Allowed ranking of leads and prioritization of sales efforts
Implementation of progressive profiling provides sales teams with better understanding of customer needs before contacting them
Enables clear insight into which marketing initiative are the most effective
Dashboard views make monthly, quarterly and annual updates to the CEO and Board of Directors higher impact and less time-consuming

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot

Act-On has a very low pressure sales approach. The other systems I looked at had a different method that I found very off-putting. The month-to-month agreement with Act-On gave me confidence that , if I didn't like the system, I wasn't committed for a year.

Likelihood to Renew

Great product. Outstanding people. Frequent updates based on customer input. No BS.

Likelihood to Recommend

Act-On is an ideal solution for small to mid-sized companies with lean marketing teams that don't have a lot of resources to set-up a system. Since we focus on content marketing using high quality, thought-leader materials (white papers, presentations, etc.), I can't speak to the integration with social, SEO optimization or ad-words. The sales process was very low pressure, and they really wanted to understand our business model and how the system would address our specific marketing requirements.

Comments

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Awesome Product & People!