Feeling Grumpy about Marketo After 3 Years
December 14, 2015
Feeling Grumpy about Marketo After 3 Years
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Global Enterprise
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Sales Insight
- Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
I run the marketing demand gen group at a young and growing startup. We bought Marketo three years ago as a platform solution for all of our marketing programs to be tracked and coordinated. We were very excited to have a single aggregator of data about our prospects tracking email activity and consumption of our website content. Jon Miller's method of marketing was key in my mind to positioning Marketo as the leading product in my mind. I remember listening to him transparently show the Marketo lead charts including cost of acquisition, stage of leads, scoring of those leads and pipeline created by any given marketing program. I wanted that for our company.
Sadly those results have been elusive partly because of the complexity of using Marketo but even more so because of our own challenge getting sales to update data values on leads in our pipeline, including activity with leads and association with opportunities through the Salesforce "contact roles" field.
Sadly those results have been elusive partly because of the complexity of using Marketo but even more so because of our own challenge getting sales to update data values on leads in our pipeline, including activity with leads and association with opportunities through the Salesforce "contact roles" field.
- Email - it is the core functionality we still use today. The editor is easy, the smart list functionality makes it easy to define our segments and the reporting works.
- Scoring - we have just scraped the surface when it comes to creating complex tracking and scoring for behavior. The Marketo tools are very robust to be advanced in your tracking. In the end our efforts were beaten down by sales who discredited the leads that passed our score threshold and moved to inside sales. We ended up abandoning the effort to win them over but are coming back around to making scoring work better now that the inside sales function is hungry for more help. I guess the lack of hunger was a major factor for them disregarding the scoring model previously.
- Website monitoring - Knowing what our prospects do on the site is awesome.
- Analytics and reporting - I have been really disappointed in their RCA (revenue cycle analytics) tool. We paid a chunk of change to get these tools and they fell flat on their face. The interface has been clunky for the last two years - we can't see enough data in the screens no matter the size of monitor and it takes 24 hours for us to see the results of our changes.
- Sales alerting when their prospects are active in real time - I have never seen this functionality in Marketo and frankly I am looking for it right now but I'm enamored to see other marketing automation companies that have browser plugins or installed software that prompts a sales owner when their prospect is doing something on the site or with an email in that moment.
- One to one email tracking - our sales teams never fully adopted the idea of sending tracked emails from within Salesforce but they do want tracking. So we ended up buying them ihance licenses for their one-to-one tracking of emails sent to prospects. They love that tool but they don't get value out of Marketo.
- Tools for anonymous user tracking - We have tens of thousands of leads who consume our content and never fill out a form mostly because that is our model and I wish marketo would give us tools to see what those people are doing. Maybe they do but the complexity of the tool has kept us from discovering it.
- Set up simplicity - We paid a consultant and spent 6 months getting marketo up and going. The process was super painful and expensive. It felt there should have been an easier way to get going.
- It has been a time sink to get set up and to manage.
- We don't have a comparison right now as it is the only tool we have used but it still has been important for tracking our email results and providing insight into what our prospects do on the site.
- It has been an expensive proposition - I sound like a Debbie downer but I'm not too hip on them right now.
Marketo is more robust and complex. I used Pardot in 2007 and loved its simplicity to use. It was beautiful to look at. We chose Marketo because of its market leadership and its robust set of training resources. In the end the size and complexity of Marketo has bogged us down and I've wanted to implement Pardot but the switching costs don't make sense. I was excited when Salesforce bought Pardot as I thought the integration and feature set would get better than Marketo but we just looked at them and the exciting things about Pardot are still on the roadmap so we didn't switch.
100,000 to 250,000