Great UI, strong Salesforce integration.
November 14, 2012

Great UI, strong Salesforce integration.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

Small and Medium Business

Overall Satisfaction

Pros

  • Marketo handles the CRM integration, especially with Salesforce very well. It also provides an intuitive interface that is easy for non-technical people to use.

Cons

  • It lags behind Eloqua when supporting users of other timezones. This is especially painful for users outside of the US. It has a limited field mapping function when uploading data—you have to be very strict with your CSV format and column headers to map the data correctly.
  • It is missing an event module—all event registration and follow-up workflow processes have to be built from scratch.
  • Leads appear to be making it through the scoring process faster and are getting delivered to the teleprospecting team quicker. MQL numbers have been especially high since we started using it, though we have not done enough analysis to directly attribute this to Marketo.

Product Usage

5 - All marketing people.
  • Capturing new lead information from the website and marketing campaigns, primarily email marketing campaigns.
  • Sending out large batch and automated emails.
  • Scoring and qualifying leads for sales readiness, and use it for doing some data cleaning and appending.
  • Providing the teleprospecting team with a picture of the type of current engagement of the lead and/or account in an easily digestible format.
  • Metrics that report the success of these activities.

Implementation

Overall, it worked pretty well. The drawback in our particular case was that someone with high-level SFDC admin access has to do most of the implementation, and we were at the mercy of his schedule to get the implementation completed.

Marketo doesn't map ALL SFDC fields over. There are some native SFDC fields their developers have chosen not to integrate. This was not explained very clearly at the beginning, and we had to talk to a few levels of support to discover this. Custom SFDC fields usually do map after they are created in SFDC, and the sync is disabled and then re-enabled. Some custom fields that teams may need to build their Smart Lists won't be there due to the permission restrictions that your IT team has set on the Marketo user to view these fields.
  • Implemented in-house

Training

  • In-person training
For brand new users, especially ones using a Marketing Automation system for the first time, and ones developing a revenue lifecycle model for the first time, they are especially helpful. Early training was very useful. It is a lot harder to find people at Marketo to assist you with more advanced integration and Smart Campaign setup needs. The “mentor sessions” they offer are more helpful for this, as they appear to assign a true subject matter expert to your session.

Configuration

Support

Customer support during the first 30 days was amazingly responsive, and the people who handled my calls understood exactly what I needed. After that, it seemed that they put more junior-level support people on the account to handle our support calls, and responsive time began to lag.

Usability

Drag and drop functionality. Auto-save, Auto-lookup of information, WYSYWIG interface for landing pages that is truly a WYSYWIG and almost always delivers full cross-browser compliance.

Integration

  • Just SFDC currently.
The integration works almost seamlessly and is almost instant, compared to Eloqua. However, there is still a lag time that we learned of after the implementation. Once the integration is up and running and tens of thousands of leads are being updated across both systems each hour, the promised “five minute sync time” can stretch out to a full hour-two hours.

It was relatively easy. With a dedicated SFDC admin on the project, it can be completed in an hour, and the syncing of our data (about a million records) took about two days to completely finish.
  • There is a feature request out to Marketo to provide a native ReadyTalk integration.

Vendor Relationship

The contract was set up with an initial cost estimate based on estimated number of leads in our database, with costs added based on modules purchased. Revenue Cycle Explorer and Sales Insight are two big modules that come extra. We were also sold an additional amount of training hours in a training package add-on. There was some initial mention of a seat-cost charge around the Sales Insight module, but we do not appear to be getting charged for this feature, as most of our sales and AM team now have access to it, and we are not charged any additional fees for adding Sales Insight to their SFDC profiles.

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