Companies with RCE: Is it worth it?

[Anonymous]

We're coming up on the end of our current Marketo contract and their team is making a push for revenue cycle explorer. We were on a demo today and it looks like a really nice to have, but getting the funds for it will get tough. Does anyone with an experience of going from the automation platform up to analytics have any feedback, anecdotal or statistical, about solid ROI?

[David_Gaible]

Hi Michael Patterson​,

At my last in-house role we built a new Marketo instance from the ground up and it included RCE. I highly recommend RCE, but can understand a hesitancy to spend more money with Marketo. As you make your decision, consider what metrics are important to your team, and how easy or difficult it is to pull the metrics now. For us, we were running Eloqua, and were only able to pull single (last) touch attribution, and the process took our business analyst days at the end of each month. After getting RCE up and running, I was able to get reports that anyone could run in seconds - and we had multi-touch attribution, pipeline velocity, all sorts of additional metrics we didn't have before. The time savings of our analyst alone paid for the system in the first six months.

On the downside, the UI is hilariously dated.

Shoot me a note if you'd like more details.

[Anonymous]

Hi Michael -

I agree with David - RCE is a great tool to have to really complement all of the executional work your team does within Marketo.  We recommend our clients go through a reporting discovery exercise, define which reports you want to pull, at what cadence and with what data.  This will help identify the gaps in your ability to report on what you want/need to see with your current set of tools.  As David mentions, RCE provides all different types of out of the box reports that allow you to analyze your marketing efforts and make strategic decisions.

Thank you!

Christine

[Lucho_Soto]

Definitely worth it if you have the budget for it. Some decent ROI reporting is possible in Marketo without the RCE add-on but has a lot of limitations.

My only caution would be to make sure your Marketo instance is already prepared to use RCE before you purchase it. Do you have defined channels, program status flows, period costs and "success" definitions for each channel clearly established?

A good way to test this is to use the Program Analyzer (bubble chart) in the analytics tab. If you have already been using it to calculate ROI for different marketing channels and now want even better ROI data, then RCE will be of great benefit to you from Day 1.

If this isn't the case yet (or something looks really off in the Program Analyzer), I would make sure your program management and CRM integrations are airtight before getting RCE. No one wants to get a powerful (and expensive) tool and then not be able to use it for the first few months.

Hope that helps!