I only use Marketo
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo Marketing Automation
Marketo was implemented over 3 years ago to manage the entire lead flow and to score and nurture leads until they are ready to engage with our sales team. Our sales cycle is quite long, since our product requires a lot of education on the lead side. Marketo helps us with automating the entire process while tagging leads appropriately in Salesforce. We implemented a scoring process in Marketo to prioritize leads and we leverage the overall score using Sales Insight, which makes it easy for the reps to rank the leads based on quality and urgency. The lead nurturing, which for us is the most important feature, is managed using the Customer Engagement Engine in Marketo. This new feature introduced last Summer makes it extremely easy to create nurture tracks based on persona and funnel stage and to add new content with a couple of clicks. We track responses and opportunities from this feature and so far the ROI has been phenomenal. On top of the nurturing tracks, we run several email campaigns per week, in particular for new webinar or new event invitations. We also use Marketo batch campaign functionality to clean up and standardize the fields and make sure that we have clean data. We recently purchased the Revenue Cycle Analytics to measure the effectiveness of our programs and to monitor how leads are moving through the funnel stages.
Pros
- LEAD NURTURING - The new Customer Engagement Engine is extremely powerful and easy to use. You can create tracks of content based on personas and schedule the frequency. Adding and removing content only takes a couple of clicks. The dashboard included with this feature gives you a really clear picture of the effectiveness of your nurturing program.
- LEAD FLOW - You can automate the entire lead flow using Marketo triggered campaigns. If a lead fills out a form, you can setup automatic email responses based on his behavior. Marketo UI is very user friendly compared to other solutions.
- LEAD PRIORITIZATION - Using Marketo Sales Insight your sales team will be able to see which leads they should call first. The prioritization is based on both lead quality and lead behavior.
- CLEAN DATA IN SALESFORCE - We use Marketo to run daily batch campaigns to clean and standardize certain fields (e.g. Country = USA).
Cons
- DATABASE QUERY SPEED - Sometimes running elaborate queries takes too much time. Marketo has been working on this issue for a while.
- ANALYTICS - The analytics in Marketo is definitely their weakest feature. We prefer to run most of the reports in Salesforce. The Revenue Analytics Cycle has improved the situation but many reports available out of the box are useless
- BETTER VISIBILITY INTO SALESFORCE OPPORTUNITIES - Eloqua does a better job integrating with the Opportunity and Account objects in Salesforce
- LEAD ENGAGEMENT MORE EFFECTIVE - Our product is very technical and leads must get educated before they are ready to buy. Marketo helps us with staying engaged with leads through the Customer Engagement Engine. Most of our pipeline derives from nurtured leads.
- FASTER LEAD RESPONSE - Marketo monitors every lead action and allows our sales team to respond quickly thanks to the "alert" feature.
- DISCOVER NEW OPPORTUNITIES - Marketo includes reports that show what companies are visiting our website, even if they remain anonymous. We use this report to proactively engage with those companies and discover new opportunities that we would have missed.
- Act-On,Pardot,Eloqua
Marketo is more powerful than Act-On and Pardot, which are a better fit for smaller companies. Eloqua is also very powerful but more complicated to use. Marketo Customer Engine is a unique feature and it really makes lead nurturing easy and effective. Marketo is also better than Eloqua in innovating with new features (Customer Engagement Engine, SEO, Marketing Calendar).
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