Just do it! Marketo so-called minor missing features

[Robb_Barrett]

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.

[Anonymous]

Thank you so very much, Gregoire!

Brilliant, inspiring, informative, and empowering!!

Lynn

[Anonymous]

Hi again, Gregoire!

I voted up many of these and want you to know that I appreciate your work!

Lynn

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Lynn,

Thx.

-Greg

[Anonymous]

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.

[Dan_Stevens_]

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.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

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

[SanfordWhiteman]

[Robb_Barrett]

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.