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Sales team loves Sales Insight module.
Updated June 19, 2015

Sales team loves Sales Insight module.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

Standard (not enterprise)

Modules Used

  • Core package
  • Revenue Cycle Modeler
  • Sales Insights

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo Marketing Automation

  • It takes the complex concept of marketing automation and makes it easy for a relatively non-technical person to execute upon. Marketing automation in itself is a skill and is so new and so few people have a good understanding of how to do it well. That being said, Marketo makes it easier to execute on the ideas you have and want to carry out.
  • It is a constantly evolving product with monthly updates. They communicate well and updates are customer driven.
  • Salesforce integration is a strength. The set-up for integration of Marketo with Salesforce.com is a 10 minute exercise versus a day long exercise for Eloqua. Integration maintenance is also a lot easier as it relies on profile permissions in Salesforce.com
  • The design editing tools are a lot smoother (than Eloqua) and user friendly for those without HTML coding knowledge.
  • The speed at which contacts processed is very good. Most are done instantly. By contrast, Eloqua takes 15 minutes for each step in a program e.g. lead scoring. Our lead scoring in Eloqua had 60 steps so it took 15 mins x 60 steps to complete. Eventually I was able to tweak the system to priority run mode, but it is very painful and you are limited to a certain number of programs that can run in priority mode.
  • It is much better than the other systems I have used - Eloqua, Hubspot. I only say 7 as there’s still a lot of room for growth. If someone asks me to recommend an automation platform, I would instantly say Marketo. I have not used Pardot, but have seen a demo and talked to reps. I think it’s fine, but Marketo’s product development pace and feedback loops with customers and design of application trumps the others. There’s a reason why Pardot is less expensive.
  • Marketo auto saves every change you make. There’s no undo or go-back capability. You have to remember what you changed and manually change it back. That’s frustrating when you are testing things and it is limiting.
  • Security – in Salesforce.com, you can create user profiles, lock things down, and do version control. Marketo has user profiles, and you can lock down functionality, but you cannot report on who changed objects and lock down specific fields, e.g. allow only regional managers to change things.
  • Form integration – they have 3 ways – 1) drop a form on landing page hosted, 2) iframe into own page; 3) SOAP API. Handling iFrames requires names to match to Marketo’s generated names. If you have pre-existing forms in your site named, you have to rename them. You cannot create field mapping in Marketo.
  • Eloqua had something called ADC which looks up data on a cookie record to customize email content. I think Marketo is starting to do this.
  • Both Marketo and Eloqua are not great at reporting compared to Salesforce.com. This is especially so with anonymous leads. We used Google Analytics for this. We had used LeadLander which matches company name with IP, and both Marketo and Eloque attempt to do this. We also tried DemandBase.
  • Understanding the level interest levels and relationships of prospects and customers.
  • Tracking marketing success/ROI. Being able to trace back all campaigns and sync back to salesforce.com to measure ROI of campaigns, impact measurement to pipeline, funnel.
  • Scalability to create repeatable programs.
10,000 to 25,000
We recently acquired another company that also used Marketo. We have run into challenges in the migration process of combining 2 marketing databases. We both have clients/prospects cookied and one system has to trump the other, we cannot merge.

Using Marketo Marketing Automation

70 - 10 users for the full standard package of which 5 could be classified as core users.

We have 60 users in sales, using the Sales Insight module.
1 - Primary marketing automation product usage - 5 campaign managers including myself.

Administration - took 50% of my time initially. Now I spend just 15% of my time on administration.

We didn't have any business analysts or other IT involvement post implementation. IT were involved in implementation to set-up email parameters.
  • Marketing emails - customer, partner and prospect communications.
  • Capturing / landing page forms – managing inbound lead processes.
Overall, it is much better than the other systems I have used - Eloqua, Hubspot.

The sales insight module is really good, super solid, very helpful for the sales team.

With respect to the revenue cycle modeler module – we don't use it as all calculations are based on standard amount field in Salesforce.com. Our company doesn’t use the amount field in same way and the revenue cycle modeler doesn’t allow you to pick fields. It can use qualitative data from custom fields, but not quantitative. Also, it looks clunky. Where they are going is advanced, but the execution needs some work. Even the trainers were not familiar with different facets of application.

Evaluating Marketo and Competitors

Yes - Frankly, Eloqua shot themselves in the foot. We had given them 6 months advanced notice to correct the situation and they didn’t.

Marketo's product roadmap was good to see, specifically the updates they had done in the past and the fact that the solution was constantly evolving influenced our decision to buy.

Marketo Implementation

I was very satisfied – it was very easy to do.

We migrated from a tool (Eloqua) that I had used for two years and took many months to integrate to Salesforce. By contrast with Marketo, I had it up and running in 2 days, and had pairing functionality in 2 weeks, and in 2 months we had expanded upon where we started. The key implementation lesson is to plan and strategize what you want to do first.

I also recommend developing naming conventions/folder hierarchies before building things. Consider also building templates you can clone so that you can a have repeatable marketing activity process (e.g. template for client newsletters).

  • Implemented in-house

Marketo Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
It was very basic. I was in a unique situation because I had used Eloqua for so long and had done a lot of research. We got the higher level and it was still not advanced enough.

Configuring Marketo

Continues to allow for the right amount of flexibility, with a best in class Salesforce integration and diverse enough feature set to satisfy most marketers. Email templates can be clunky to code and customize for more diverse email creation, but you can still get the job done, and I've found similar weaknesses in other tools

Marketo Support

I would rate it a 9 with premium support, but a 7 without. They do have a very good user community online.

Overall, I prefer their service model over Eloqua’s. With Marketo, we have a sales rep and a support tech. With Eloqua, we had an account manager or client success manager. This role did not have tech expertise and also seemed overloaded. They were more interested in renewing our contract than truly partnering. I had cases open 1.5 yrs at Eloqua which even after I escalated to the VP products had no solution.
Yes - We paid Marketo extra for premium support which gave us a dedicated rep. He was the best technical rep I have ever worked with – knowledgeable and honest, championed solutions internally if we encountered bugs.


Using Marketo

• Generally very easy to use, but not being able to undo is the biggest issue.

Marketo Reliability

It has never gone down.
There are days when it‘s slow

Integrating Marketo

  • Salesforce.com
Pre-built integration - very easy to set-up.

Relationship with Marketo

Don’t buy the revenue cycle modeler – Marketo reps will try and up-sell you on it

We customized terms for downtime SLA. We added rebates for if they were down for a certain amount of time (server response rate terminology).