Read this before you sign a contract with Marketo! Be sure to thoroughly evaluate other options & if you don't have a large, dedicated team or lots of monetary resources, be wary.
June 20, 2016
Read this before you sign a contract with Marketo! Be sure to thoroughly evaluate other options & if you don't have a large, dedicated team or lots of monetary resources, be wary.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Select
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Sales Insight
- Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
- Marketo Real-Time Analytics
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
It's only being used by the marketing department at this time. Possible use by recruiting team in the future. Marketo helps us send emails and better track activity, opportunities, and revenue potential. It also provides us with more robust reporting.
- Tracking and analysis - once set up properly, it gives you many insights that you would not likely have without this sort of tool.
- Sales insights - allows sales people to see if their leads are on the website, which leads have opened and clicked emails, etc. - helps prioritize.
- Provides information - their blog and information shared is usually pretty good. Though HubSpot definitely takes the cake in that arena.
- Extremely hard to implement - if you don't have a full team (including IT, SFDC admin and designers + someone familiar with implementing Marketo), it'll take you way too long to get everything set up. In fact, it's likely you wouldn't even be able to do it unless you had this team or over $20k to pay a vendor to do it for you. And even for that amount, there will still be more to do to get it working fully. We paid a vendor because we don't have a full team, and even after that, the only thing we're able to do at this point are email blasts and basic reporting. Pretty disappointing and not fun to explain to the leadership team.
- User interface/UX needs work badly - they sell you on emails and landing pages being easy to create - not true, even with design experience. Expect to pay a vendor to create some decent emails for you unless you have an in-house coder or if you're fine with using generic templates. The cascading folders are also ridiculous -- just to get to my current campaign, I have to expand about 10 folders... can't even image how many it will be in the years to come. It's a logical system, but definitely not that user-friendly or intuitive.
- Support - if you don't pay for premium support, expect to get thrown around the ringer a few times before you can get a straight answer. Also, you can only depend on support to answer questions or point you in the right direction. They don't actually do anything. So again, if you're looking to have good support, but you can't pay for the premium (which is ridiculously expensive for support), you might want to look somewhere else.
- Shared IPs - our deliverability has been low. Recently I learned that this is partially due to Marketo's poor IP reputation. This is not necessarily the fault of Marketo, but since lots of their customers are on the shared IP, your sender reputation can get damaged by others' poor practices. This is likely the case with any MA shared IP, but something to think about. Consider purchasing a dedicated IP, but be careful not to mess it up.
- Huge learning curve for first time marketing automation users - I took this project on in our company with everyone knowing that I have no experience with MA tools. However, I was the most qualified for the job because I do know a lot about digital markeitng, email, etc., and can pick up new technologies easily. The only problem? Marketo does not come with out of the box aids (as I would call them) to help you get started on the right foot. You need to do tons of self learning before you even get started with the tool if you don't want to screw it up. I'm sure there are other options out there that provide much more support and safety nets for newer users or organizations that have never had MA before.
- I don't use it in this industry.
- Engage and grow customers over time
- Measure marketing investment
These are what we're hoping to achieve and what I believe are possible with Marketo. Only problem is, it'll probably be a full year before you're even close to this state unless you have lots of money to put in after the initial purchase and a large team supporting the tool.
How Marketo stacks up against...
HubSpot - We thought Marketo was better for us because HubSpot was typically used for smaller organizations and didn't (apparently) have as much to offer by way of features and capabilities. Now I'm not so sure if that's actually true or if Marketo just had more adamant sales reps. Maybe the HubSpot reps were just more straightforward.
Eloqua - Eloqua is a huge tool and even more expensive. It was going to take even more resources to get set up and maintain than Marketo would.
Act-On - It seemed like our organization was too large for Act-On and they didn't have enough experience supporting large enterprises at the time. However, I found their sales approach and interface to be much more pleasant and user-friendly compared to Marketo's.
We ultimately selected Marketo because it had all of the capabilities we were looking for and they had experience with larger enterprises. At this point, I'm honestly not sure if we made the right choice or not. The massive, expensive implementation process has really slowed us down. I hope that the tool will redeem itself once all is set up and fully-functioning.
HubSpot - We thought Marketo was better for us because HubSpot was typically used for smaller organizations and didn't (apparently) have as much to offer by way of features and capabilities. Now I'm not so sure if that's actually true or if Marketo just had more adamant sales reps. Maybe the HubSpot reps were just more straightforward.
Eloqua - Eloqua is a huge tool and even more expensive. It was going to take even more resources to get set up and maintain than Marketo would.
Act-On - It seemed like our organization was too large for Act-On and they didn't have enough experience supporting large enterprises at the time. However, I found their sales approach and interface to be much more pleasant and user-friendly compared to Marketo's.
We ultimately selected Marketo because it had all of the capabilities we were looking for and they had experience with larger enterprises. At this point, I'm honestly not sure if we made the right choice or not. The massive, expensive implementation process has really slowed us down. I hope that the tool will redeem itself once all is set up and fully-functioning.
25,000 to 100,000