Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 8
Author: Andy Caron

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo

Pros and Cons

Pros

They have good customer support. When something goes wrong, they usually can pinpoint why and help to resolve.
The platform is fairly intuitive and mostly simple to navigate once you get the logic of where they put everything.
The triggering and timing with Salesforce efforts is a HUGE time saver and allows for a lot more outreach than our Sales Team could execute on their own.

Cons

The new engagement modeler only allows for 4, one stream, programs. Unfortunately Marketo touts the 5 stage funnel... Beyond that there isn't a way to set a random cadence, you have to edit yourself weekly to change it.
EMAILS! It is impossible to change the template on a cloned email or one that has been saved if you change branding or creative you have to redo EVERYTHING... Also, you have to be careful with images containing links in emails, there isn't a library so you have to have the link, and if you align the image and then try to add a link it won't take. Finally they're still not mobile friendly so some of my templates look jacked on my smartphone.
Some of their logic steps just plain don't work. The Salesforce "Task was Updated" does nothing. It took us months to realize the ANY step on those programs were only picking up the trigger and not the filter.
There are a lot of little gotcha's in the program. Triple check your logic. Always!

It had the functionality that we needed at a reasonable price point and we knew we'd be able to operate the platform. Hubspot didn't seem to have a robust enough email and landing page offering at the time, and Eloqua raised concerns about the technical competencies needed. Silverpop was too email focused for us. Ultimately Marketo was the best choice.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would say, think about what you need. Is it an email marketing tool? Do you need inbound funnel generation with minimal outbound efforts, or are you looking for email, inbound and outbound. There are only a handful that do all, and do them well. If you are very technologically advanced, Eloqua is good, but it requires a programer a lot of the time. With Marketo you could benefit from HTML knowledge but you'll only use it when creating templates. Marketo has only one version and you don't have to transition back and forth. They're still driving monumental change in their offerings and they don't seem to be stopping.

Using Marketo

Likelihood to Renew

Based on the other products out there, I think Marketo is the most intuitive and it gives us what we need. There are some hiccups but you're going to have that with any high-level tech being run by humans. The price is reasonable and we're able to execute the programs that we want to implement. It integrates with Salesforce VERY well, and the sales guys are addicted to it. I've had no problems with adoption from end users.

Return on Investment

We haven't been able to establish an ROI.
Our sales team is spending less time on email follow-up.
We actually have some idea what our online audience is doing with regard to our brand material

Evaluating Marketo and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - We replaced Act-On with Marketo. It was kind of our gateway marketing automation tool. Unfortunately, there were only forms and emails, and they were extremely limited. We had so many problems with Act-On that internally we referred to it as Act-Up. It was a good proving ground for that level of insight into our online traffic, but ultimately it wasn't robust enough for our needs.

Key Differentiators

Price
Product Features
Product Usability
Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
Third-party Reviews

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I wouldn't change our process. It was exhaustive and we made the right decision.

Comments

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A Sales and Marketing Operations Perspective

Software Version

Modules Used