Hi Sean,
I fully agree on your points. I have not been able to make it, despite the fact that I was registered, and was hoping to be able to catch up through the videos. Too bad...
A good implementation does not cost $200k either... You should be able to get some good quality help for about a fourth to a third of this price 
-Greg
Thanks again for the insight Greg. I'm a sucker for self implementation. Self implemented SF, self implemented Netsuite, self implemented Marketo
Despite the lack of resources from Marketo's side to help a customer get anything more than a smart campaign activated to change a data value, as mentioned, thanks to users sharing their actual operational program/tokenised templates, I reckon we've done that $70k baseline ourselves.
It's not half bad either looking at people who are 5+ years into their projects. We're a small nimble team and because I am a director + was the sales person (inbound/outbound/AE) + marketing then director sales and marketing + SF admin + way back front-end developer, I basically designed the whole sales process and implemented it into SF/marketo to quite an enterprise level. Meant we've been able to build Marketo quick because we had a well modeled SF framework. The issue is the lack of any Marketo best practice content to even get a simple baseline instance up and running.
That said, 6 months of full time study, consuming (literally) everything the web/community has available (thanks to users sharing) got me there. I managed to convince my business partners we needed to move a full-time dev to MarkOps and secured it!! I've spent 2 months training her and she is next level amazing. Totally gets it all and has a passion for Marketing, so we're going to kill it from here in. But that's a freak example because to be honest, the business had me. I can't see how normal medium sized businesses (30-50 staff) could even come close without paying for pre-built best practice frameworks.
I always look back at the Salesforce example. I managed to implement a complete Enterprise org which SF consultants marvels at, single handed. And it's all because of the sheer amount of content out there, their open support, their open community (not gated), their immense amount of sharing from Dreamforce.
I am a massive SF advocate, even modelled a lot of my own company of SF/Atlassian/Marketo and I've never raised a single SF support ticket.
That's amazing and something I aspire to provide to my own customers.
Long story short.
If they really didn't record these sessions, they wasted a gigantic amount of content that would have helped them grow/retain customers.
Hi Sean,
The problem with self implementation is that you have to reinvent the wheel and make all the mistakes by yourself. That's true with Marketo as well as Salesforce. I have been a consultant for both solutions for years now and I have quite a few customers that tried to self-implement, and finally turned to us. All of them had some stuff right and some completely wrong.
As I often say, the main value of a consultant is to avoid his customers doing all the mistakes that he has already made (and since 2010 and above 60 projects, I personally have done many). My estimate is that a good consultant on Marketo can (should be able to) drive you in 4 to 6 months to a level that a good self-implementation (done by people who are excellent learners, have an excellent marketing-tech knowledge mix and are not afraid of trying and learning) can achieve in 2 years, sometimes 3. And self-implementers usually forget to account for the cost of errors and additional delays when comparing the 2 approaches. As you said, it took you 6 months of a full-time work, and you do not even know what's right and wrong in the way you did it, you can only guess, or hope
The big difference between SFDC and Marketo is that the heavy lifting in the platform is not supposed to be done by the same profile of people. Setting up SFDC is about customizing, while setting up Marketo is about operations (there is some customizing, but it's minimal). Of course, people with both a strong business acumen and excellent understanding of technology and algorithmic principle will excel on both products. But as much as you can expect SFDC consultants or admins to have this dual profile, you cannot expect Marketers to all be developers as well. You would not expect this from sales people either, but usually, sales people do get to customize SFDC, while Marketers do get to operate Marketo.
-Greg
And BTW, $70k is a baseline project for a large enterprise, but for an medium-size company, it's a comprehensive one.
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