Yes, Another Marketo Lover...
Updated March 04, 2016

Yes, Another Marketo Lover...

Dory Viscogliosi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

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Modules Used

  • Marketo Lead Management
  • Marketo Sales Insight

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo

We use Marketo for Acquisition Marketing, from adding new contacts to our database to nurturing those already in our database, and also for client engagement. It's used across several departments, including our Sales and Marketing teams, as well as our Ad Sales teams. Development works with the product as well as we are integrated with our own website. Marketo helps us to stay on top of our database, and reach out to people appropriately based on their current status and stage in the buying cycle.

Pros

  • Lead management and nurture - the new engagement programs really help us to stay on top of our prospects and clients
  • Listening to their users and coming up with improvements to the platform
  • Providing a community for users to communicate with other users and network

Cons

  • Reporting can always use some improvements, although it's getting better as time goes on
  • Smart list subscriptions! Would be a huge timesaver
  • Speed of processing can sometimes be slow if you're dealing with a large record volume or a lot of filters and inclusions/exclusions, increased speed would be great.
  • Eloqua,Pardot,HubSpot
250,000 to 1 million
What are your main business goals? I previously used Hubspot at another B2B organization, and found that it (at the time) was much better suited to B2C organizations.

Using Marketo

7 - We have two components to our company: the media sales side and a product sales side. Our media sales team uses Marketo to distribute our daily newsletter (of which there are currently 5 different versions), a secondary newsletter, and sponsored content mailings. The marketing team uses Marketo for customer acquisition, as well as the entire customer lifecycle. We are contemplating shifting some of our product emails into Marketo as well.
3 - We have one main person who is responsible for all things in Marketo. This person works closely with the CRM (SFDC) team, as well as the media team, client teams, sales team, and product teams. There are several other people who utilize Marketo extensively for their roles in both the marketing and media departments. There are also plans to add another email specialist to our team within the next year.
  • Email marketing to prospects and clients
  • Engagement through the entire buying cycle.
  • Vehicle for our media sales property.
  • Personalized experience for visitors on our website.
  • We initially didn't plan to shift the mailings of our entire media property to Marketo, but we made the shift to consolidate systems and have been happy with the results.
Once you are embedded in your use of Marketo, it's highly unlikely that you'd switch! Partly due to satisfaction, and partly due to necessity.
  • Increased lead conversion without as much influence required by sales
  • Improved performance in maintaining relationships with current clients
  • Allowed us to move into CPC and CPL arenas more easily

Marketo Implementation

Be prepared to take a lot of time cleaning up your CRM before any integrations are done. That will be time very well spent!
  • Implemented in-house
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled
  • Ongoing SFDC sync issues with APEX CPU timeouts.

Marketo Support

There is a lot to be desired with Marketo support. Some of the interactions that I've had with their team have been phenomenal; quick responses that addressed my problem and allowed me to quickly continue working. Other interactions that we've had took months to resolve, and began with them pointing the finger at us as the problem, instead of looking at their internal systems first. They also don't always communicate well with their engineering/development teams so support assumes that everything is working properly on their end, when an update might have just been released for something and they have no idea that they've broken a lot of things on the back-end.

If you can get the right person's attention, you are likely in a much better position to have problems solved quickly, but it's hard to get to that point.
ProsCons
Good followup
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
Quick Initial Response
Less knowledgeable
Escalation required
Difficult to get immediate help
Need to explain problems multiple times
No - We have the standard support with our instance of Marketo. This is sufficient for handling our requests. They have an increased option where you can get more call-ins per month, but I find myself almost exclusively filing support tickets through the website because our issues aren't the kind where I can pick up the phone, someone can diagnose the issue, and then we have a fix. Typically, when we run into issues it's something that needs to be reviewed by an engineering team, and some type of patch or fix released.
Yes - It was resolved to our satisfaction, but often not in the most timely fashion. While it's hard to account for everything that customers might be doing in their instances, I think there might be room for improvement in their QA processes (especially with specific products). There have been several bugs that we've identified for one of their products, and these take considerably more time to fix, usually resulting in us not having access to features for some amount of time.
There are several people at Marketo who I can email directly (although I also go through proper support channels so that the cases are logged) regarding issues and support escalations. When these people get involved in cases, the response is significantly better and faster which helps our entire workflow! They have also helped us create custom scripting for a newer product that they released, and what they developed for us has since made it into their standard documentation for the product.

Using Marketo

Overall, once you get to know Marketo, it is a simple system to use and to be "good" at using. Most of the complexity comes from each unique integration with a CRM which leads to many many more fields, more variables, but also much more insight. You can also go beyond basic usage very quickly, and get more in-depth campaigns and reporting -- but you don't have to in order to be successful with Marketo.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Convenient
Feel confident using
None
  • Cloning of programs that have already been created so that you don't have to recreate the wheel every time
  • Ad hoc reporting of specific numbers based on many different variables (fields in your database)
  • Desktop and mobile-ready landing pages
  • Email editor could use a lot of updating
  • Troubleshooting why something went wrong is a very manual task, and sometimes you have to just give up on understanding why something went wrong if it didn't have a huge impact on your system.
  • Support with Marketo can be like pushing a rock up a huge hill. Some of their techs are great, but others leave a lot to be desired from a communication standpoint, as well as knowledge standpoint.
Yes - They have an app that can be used for reviewing a limited number of things such as upcoming scheduled sends, as well as past scheduled sends. You cannot review triggered occurrences, nor can you change programs that are currently running. If you access the standard site from a mobile device, you can accomplish a few things, but often you can only see the main tree of your programs, and then everything else is unable to be modified or viewed. This is a huge frustration, because I'd love to have complete access on-the-go. Also, since most of the creation of campaigns is done using a drag-and-drop of triggers and filters, you cannot use most tablets or ipads to access remotely -- you need to have an actual computer to feel like you have full access.

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