Marketo ABM Add-on Functionality Vs. Other Vendors

Anonymous
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Marketo ABM Add-on Functionality Vs. Other Vendors

Hi All,


I have been tasked with researching various tools for our journey into ABM next year. I, being the main Marketo user, am partial to evaluating Marketo as I want to keep our tech stack manageable and I believe in the Marketo philosophy. Other team members have asked me to compare and contrast DemandBase and Terminus to ABM in Marketo.

I was hoping for people who have implemented ABM to run me through the pros and cons to using Marketo for ABM and why Marketo ABM was your choice originally. Additionally, if you have any insights to DemandBase or Terminus I would appreciate the candor.

Thanks for the help!


Happy Holidays,

Murph

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8 REPLIES 8
Anonymous
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Re: Marketo ABM Add-on Functionality Vs. Other Vendors

Any update to this? Curious what you found.

Anonymous
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Re: Marketo ABM Add-on Functionality Vs. Other Vendors

Hi Charles,


As far as an integrated one stop shop for ABM, if you currently use Marketo, the ABM tool will be your best bet.

Terminus was a distant third, but Demandbase was compelling for the advertising and paid search side of things. At the time of evaluation tracking in Google Analytics was difficult for Marketo, but the new release remedies that. Furthermore, Demandbase is almost insultingly expensive for the quote they threw our way. I believe they a managed service removing the work from your team on creating and placing ads (so your budget is contained within the price of Demandbase). That being said I am not a paid search expert, I am mostly in Marketo running the email strategy, lead management and analytics within Marketo. The added bonuses for Marketo ABM around email was robust and I know it would make my work more effective and life far easier.


I do not want to misrepresent the pros of the two other solutions but I know my team was shocked by the cost of DemandBase. We postponed further evaluation of an ABM solution but I want to get the ball rolling again with Marketo at some point.

Hope this helps.

Best,

Murphy

Janet_Dulsky
Marketo Employee

Re: Marketo ABM Add-on Functionality Vs. Other Vendors

Murphy Vandervelde​, you may want to post your question in our Account-Based Marketing Virtual User Group. We have a number of expert services partners who are part of that group. Perhaps one or more has experience with DemandBase and Terminus and can give you some advice. Of course, you know, my vote. Good luck!

Anonymous
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Re: Marketo ABM Add-on Functionality Vs. Other Vendors

Janet, thanks for the suggestion. I moved it!

David_Gaible
Level 7

Re: Marketo ABM Add-on Functionality Vs. Other Vendors

Hi Murphy Vandervelde​ - I led a similar project at my company, evaluating ABM vendors. We selected Marketo (only to have our budget pulled) in a large part because senior leadership wanted to stay with an existing vendor. For us, it came down to Marketo vs. Engagio. I think both are full-featured that would work well for our needs, but I certainly did like the idea of staying with Marketo. So - my advice - do you due diligence and include Engagio in the discussion, but you can't go wrong staying with Marketo.

Anonymous
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Re: Marketo ABM Add-on Functionality Vs. Other Vendors

Murphy, good to meet with you and great question!

Before I give my response (long response!) to it, I want to share that I am from Marketo, however my response below is not biased towards Marketo ABM. I am rather sharing pointers to hopefully help you decide the right product or solution for your ABM strategy:

At a high level, you have 2 types of solutions out there to execute your ABM strategy:

  1. Foundational: This is where you should start ABM! You need to determine what makes your ABM foundation strong and if that will live with you for years. Marketo ABM is a foundational solution. If you believe your data is not good, then you need a data provider which helps you to enrich that. Most common foundational ABM tech stack that I have seen so far is: Marketing Automation(with Marketo ABM Add-on)+CRM (e.g. Salesforce, Dynamics) +Data Provider (e.g. Reachforce or D&B). Good news is that you already have Marketo and CRM today, you just need to add a native Marketo ABM add-on to your Marketo instance to start your ABM journey!
  2. Point Solutions: This is completely need based! Some very common point solutions that I have seen needed for ABM executions are around predictive analytics & scoring, lead-to-account (L2A) matching. In such cases, your tech stack will look like this: Marketing Automation (with Marketo ABM Add-on)+CRM+Data Provider+Predictive+L2A.

Providers that are offering Foundational solution must have following characteristics at the least:

  1. Robust Multi-Channel Engagement Platform (Natively Built): Successful ABM strategy depends on ability to engage people from target accounts across different channels, at any stage of customer lifecycle. Be very clear who is the engagement platform and who is not. Most of the ABM providers are NOT the engagement platforms, rather they are aggregators highly dependent on the engagement platform such as Marketo. They are merely aggregating information from many different solutions e.g. Marketing Automation, CRM, Predictive Analytics, Data providers etc. and presenting it in a single user interface but they do not own any of the core components. Just do your due diligence whether you need to spend money in such aggregators.
  2. CRM Integrated (Natively): Having a product that has sophisticated CRM integration is paramount. It takes years to build the right integration with CRM such as what Marketo built over the years. This is essential component for ABM.
  3. Strong Marketing Focused: It goes without saying that ABM is all about aligning Marketing and Sales closely. But most of the solutions there are highly sales focused, leaving Marketing a non-function in an ABM strategy. Marketing is a key function in making ABM work and must be armed with tools that helps influence the pipeline and revenue. Sales don’t have time to build/nurture personalized engagement with target accounts, that’s not their job, it’s Marketing’s job. Your ABM foundation starts with a solution that is Marketing focused as much as it should be Sales focused.   
  4. Long-Term Product Roadmap: ABM is a new cool kid on the street. Everyone who is offering a solution today including Marketo is at the early stage. You must ask for a roadmap to evaluate who has the best plan and what meets your needs in a long term. I would avoid short term benefits and look at the long-term benefits.
  5. Total Cost of Ownership: You have basically 2 options, either use multiple point solutions to achieve what you want to achieve which incurs higher cost over also  you need to learn all different tools and stitch them together OR use single unified platform which Marketo ABM provides.

Providers that are offering Point solutions must have the following:

  1. Pluggable: Can these solutions easily plug-into your foundational solutions? Are they part of the partner eco-system of vendors that are offering foundational solutions e.g. Marketo Launchpoint
  2. Financially Stable: There are many point solutions out there with funding from investors but how do you know who will stay there for you in a long run. What if you invest year or 2 in a solution and the business runs out of money or dies? You need to start over, right? Therefore, you must look for a vendor who is financially stable.

I have seen many customers getting started with point solutions such as Lead-to-Account matching or Predictive and spending many months perfecting it first before they start engaging with those accounts. That is not necessary and shouldn't be the approach!! You don't need to  L2A, Data Enrichment or Predictive scoring first to get started with ABM. You can always start your ABM with just your marketing automation and CRM system e.g. for existing customers where your see cross-sell/up-sell opportunities or known prospects that already showed interest in your brand and are part your lead/company database already.

Marketo ABM is a foundational solution but open enough for point solutions to plug-in to it.

Hope you find the ABM solution that fits your needs! Let me know if I can help answer any other questions on this topic. 

Anonymous
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Re: Marketo ABM Add-on Functionality Vs. Other Vendors

I led a similar project here and actually ended up replacing Terminus with Marketo (mostly due to budget). The real key advantage of Terminus over Marketo ABM is that you can target ads based on their database of IPs. So basically you can say I want to advertise to X company and you can do that even if they've never been cookied on your site. The reporting on Terminus is not very useful, but you can pull the key info into Salesforce if you use that.

Demandbase does the same thing, but is generally more powerful. But, like you, we found it wildly expensive. It looks extremely cool though. They can also do on-site personalization based off of IP address, so you can personalize based on industry, for example, even if they haven't actually filled out a form or anything on your site. Marketo personalization can also do this.

We ultimately decided we could live with Marketo's tools for now and hope they add the IP-based targeting like Terminus in the future, rather than paying for it now.

Hope this helps!

Anonymous
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Re: Marketo ABM Add-on Functionality Vs. Other Vendors

Hey guys,

SUPER helpful info in this thread so thank you for everyone!!

I am also wanting to know the same thing for Madison Logic.  Have any of you had to compare the Marketo add-on to this one?

Cheers.