Revenue Optimizer module should be included!
October 16, 2012

Revenue Optimizer module should be included!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review

Modules Used

  • Core marketing automation package
  • Sales Insight Module

Overall Satisfaction

  • It is reasonably useable.
  • It performs fine for our users and is bug free. It does the tasks it’s supposed to perform.
  • It is harder to do reporting than it should be – specifically around connecting initial lead creation into sales. I use Salesforce.com to do that. Marketo say that you need our Revenue Optimizer Module to do that, but I believe that should be included in the core package.
  • Visibility to specific parts of the lead funnel.
  • Operational scale, e.g. the fact that I can knock out 10-15 landing pages with one person with limited support from creative is a huge benefit.
  • The fact that my team can design good looking email campaigns without technical assistance.
  • The fact it plugs into Salesforce.com so my team doesn’t have to constantly be running reports. By contrast, we had to do that with MailChimp.
The service works and it is reasonably well priced.
There is nothing about it that would prompt me to re-evaluate.
However, I am not in love with the product. By contrast, I would rate Salesforce.com a 9.
I would however not give a higher rating to any other Marketing Automation tool. I have used Eloqua before and would probably give them a 5. The core functionality in Eloqua worked pretty well. The problem with it is the more advanced features were buggy and hard to set-up.
In general comparing Eloqua to Marketo:

• Eloqua – complex but powerful – but making it all work is not worth it for me
• Marketo – straightforward, but not overly sophisticated.
• Eloqua is buggy, Marketo mostly bug free.

Product Usage

15 - 5 directly (in marketing)
10 use indirectly through the sales insights module (sales)
0.15 - We have an administrator. They are a demand generation specialist and previously worked with Eloqua.

System administration of the system is about 15% of their job.

It is a relatively easy to find skill set. If you are a B2B content marketer, you have to have used one of these tools.
  • We are content marketers and a marketing automation tool like Marketo is the only way I can scale outreach of our content with traceability on who’s engaging.
  • We have integrated with our CRM Salesforce.com so our sales team can also get insights on leads based upon activity.
  • I use Marketo for my team to get operational scalability – to execute campaigns, get operational performance and to pass on tasks.

Evaluation and Selection

Implementation

We were satisfied.

They would not start configuration until you’d done training which is an interesting model – not that unreasonable.

We as a company learned some best practices from them. When you signed a contract, they immediately gave specific information on how the implementation was going to work. It was very clear on steps, timing. It avoids miss set expectations. I thought that was superb.
  • Vendor implemented
  • Implemented in-house

Training

It taught the basics, but I didn’t learn anything that persuaded me to do all my reporting in Marketo.

Support

There are good intentions but you have to bug them sometimes to get better answers.

My team have all used Marketo, Eloqua or similar products before, so the basic answers are not going to satisfy us.

Their first line support people are not great.

In general, the quality of personnel you deal with is variable. The project people are good. Their general account people are not very good. They lack deep insight and some have significant language challenges.
No - They have never asked me, but I would pay for a premium support package. Answers in a short amount of time are worth $$ to me.

We pay $1-2k per quarter for consulting services i.e. how to set-up campaigns etc. In general, the consulting has gone fine. It helps us get some specific reports and abilities otherwise wouldn’t have.

We had them do an audit of what we were not taking advantage of in the product. The v1 audit sucked but after we complained, they assigned a different person and the v2 report was very good. They do this as part of the renewal process. They scored us in 6 different areas.

Usability

You can basically navigate around the application and I can get the basics done.

It is however not intuitive for helping me at the next level. For example, I can see our subscriber growth rate and go into a specific campaign, but there’s nothing that makes it easy for me to segment, e.g. what % in this campaign were new vs. old. It doesn’t take me to the next level on things that I should think about. MailChimp by comparison is better at this.

It feels like an operating environment vs. an environment to optimize decisions. I do all that kind of reporting in Salesforce.com. Frankly I am more comfortable knocking around in Salesforce.com.

Reliability

I cannot think of any serious outages.

Integration

  • Salesforce.com
  • Wordpress website for landing forms
The integration with Salesforce.com is native. For us, out of the box Salesforce.com integration is sufficient. It is harder if you depart from the stock integration. You need someone who understands objects etc.

Vendor Relationship

The rep said if you don’t have to do demos, trials i.e. agree to a faster sales cycle, you can get 15% off.
There’s potential to get a larger discount if you pay annually.
They tend to get more aggressive with pricing if you mention Eloqua or Pardot.