Dear Marketo PM,
I know Christmas is over, but still we are in January and I decided to write that post with the hope that it would be read and taken care of, for good. It's about that long list of apparently minor things that at the end of the day, dramatically impair the productivity and, even worse, induce user errors.
As any one who is a little active on the community, I very often bump into some repetitive questions about the exact same issues. What's really frustrating is that all of these issues are in the Idea section, some of them have been there for 5 years or more. Each of them, taken alone, seems minor, but when you gather them all together, you discover, as I did, that is sums up to a significant amount of frustration and wasted time for regular users.
Of course, this list is not exhaustive, and obviously subjective. I have deliberately left out key features that would indeed represent significant improvements but also be changes in the functionalities of the software. Instead, I concentrated here on these "minor" things that impact our day-to-day operation of the core product but which fix would not change what we can do with Marketo. Of course again, I'll add on any other missing "minor" feature readers point to me. I also encourage the readers to vote for all the ideas listed here and express their willingness to have them fixed.
Here they are:
In addition to the speed of the product it-self (some simple queries even on a 50k or 200k DB can take minutes to return a result) See (Thx c3fe9112321230d5eee5edffd64ff2ec9f973314 and also Iryna Zhuravel for pointing this out) here is a list of issues that make us waste operating time:
There are 50+ points listed in this page, and 60+ ideas, and it's really impossible for a normal Marketo user to run a working session without bumping into many of them, and this many times a day, every day. People do change their cars because they do not like the radio or because of some repetitive glitches in the windscreen wiper. They may as well change their marketing automation system because after a while they tend to see more the defaults above than all the good things that Marketo does for them.
-Greg
SO happy that someone has taken the time (and it must have taken some time to write that post) to pull all these things into light. I admit I inherited Marketo in our company and there is NO WAY I would have chosen this tool. It is cumbersome, unintuitive, and a generally horrible user experience. As soon as our contract is up I will ditch this tool for something that operates like a 2016 software tool should do.
Tabitha, I can certainly empathize with many of the customers who either inherit the platform within their company (and may have no prior Marketo experience) or decide to dive right in without going through any sort of training (or preferably, consulting with Marketo experts).
Marketo is a very powerful and complex platform. It's not something you just start using without properly configuring the environment and understanding how the system works. It takes time, patience and experience (it took us over a year to fully deploy Marketo across our global organization).
The platform isn't perfect (as you can see by this post and others in the community). But what SaaS/on-premise platform is perfect? It doesn't exist. I can tell you this: if you take the time to configure Marketo according to your organization's structure and business processes, properly integrate with your CRM platform, and take the time to learn how to efficiently use Marketo, you'll be rewarded with a solid marketing platform that will transform your ability to operate as a modern marketing organization.
Last, but not least, you have an incredible community of active and enthusiastic members who are here to assist you along the way.
Hi Tabitha,
I fully agree with Dan.
I have not written this post to show how horrible Marketo is but just to enlighten the fact that some "minor" misses should be fixed, because they are not that minor, and would make the user's life even better.
As a consulting company, we have some experience on many other marketing automation, emailing and CRM tools, and Marketo is, by far, the one we prefer to work with.
Some alternatives will be easier to use, but at the detriment of the functional scope: many things that are easy to do with Marketo will simply disappear and the loss in productivity will be major (e.g. program cloning). Or it will make the whole environment unsuited to large organizations (e.g. Workspaces and partitions)
Some other solutions will be as complete as Marketo on a functional standpoint, but the real usability will really be bad, because of the complexity. For instance, the creation of a target list that is so fast with Marketo will take far more time, just because of the number of clicks it takes to bring a simple criteria on the filter list. Another example is the engagement programs. Other product can-of-worm-like graphics seem nice in demo, but the maintenance of it is a nightmare. Just try to interpose a content in the middle of a stream once this stream is live and make sure that every stream member will get it, whatever the content they were sent so far...
Bottom line is: using Marketo on a daily basis demonstrates that it has been designed by marketers who have to use it daily, not by engineers who think that they know better.
Last point: if you really think that other cloud software are exempt of bugs, give them a try, the grass always looks greener on the other side of the fence
-Greg
Another example is the engagement programs. Can-of-worm-like graphics seem nice in demo, but the maintenance of it is a nightmare. Just try to interpose a content in the middle of a stream once this stream is live and make sure that every stream member will get it, whatever the content they were sent so far...
Are you saying you CAN'T do this in Marketo or you CAN? Because the program I created does this.
Hi Robb,
You can do this in Marketo easily, while it's difficult with most of other software, because the content are rigidly "linked", rather than in the form of a list of content with priorities as it is in Marketo EP.
-Greg
Hi again, Gregoire!
I voted up many of these and want you to know that I appreciate your work!
Lynn
Hi Lynn,
Thx.
-Greg
Thank you so very much, Gregoire!
Brilliant, inspiring, informative, and empowering!!
Lynn
And when you search for something, first off....why the lightbox AFTER I search? Second, does it HAVE to keep all of the sections expanded when I clear the search?
Hi Robb,
If fact the lightbox appears if you hit the "Enter" key, which is not needed to run the search. A little surprising, I agree.
-Greg
Also, sometimes if I don't type a search phrase fast enough Marketo completely locks up.
I'm getting the feeling that Marketo can't handle big companies.
Added the need to be able to quickly expand or collapse sections off the marketing activities tree.
-Greg
Time waster:
Need a Live View for template / LP editing. I've been working on code and token driven landing pages. To check them I have to approve the template, approve a sample LP, then refresh a page. I'd like to be able to automatically generate a sample LP with all of the referenced tokens so I can live-view changes.
HI Robb,
Have you logged an idea ?
-Greg
Grégoire Michel and contributors,
First and foremost, on behalf of the Marketo Product Management and User Experience teams, thank you for the amazing passion and dedication you have contributed to this post -- and obviously the rest that you all do to make Marketo Community such a vibrant and valuable asset both to Marketo users and employees!
By way of introduction, for those who don't me, I'm Director of Product Management for Analytics and Predictive, but speak on behalf of the rest of the product organization. I wanted to reply with some specifics around this collection of issues and next steps. As a team, we regularly meet to review the Ideas submitted to Community, and below is the status of many items we're reviewed so far.
Already Prioritized on Roadmap, Started or not yet Working on:
Great Suggestion! Now Prioritized on our Roadmap:
We're continuing to review these, and all Ideas submitted on Community, so please keep sending us your great ideas!
And, if you're coming to Marketo Summit 2016, don't forget to attend the Customer Love session to hear more on what we're fixing from the Community.
Thanks,
Brian, and the Marketo Product and User Experience teams!
Hi Brian,
Thx a lot for coming back to us with these. Looking forward getting these features and reading some news about the rest of them.
-Greg