Marketo is lagging behind

[Diego_Lineros2]

After 6 or more years using Marketo, I can say Marketo is starting to dissapoint. Every release is slimmer than the previous, or out of focus.

Why I am saying this?

• Basic missing features that for years are being requested are still missing. In the era of AI you can't even evaluate a date token without calling a webhook.
• The reporting is outrageous, many promisses but nothing happens, we are still with a 2000 style reporting.
• Sky... ohh Sky, many years of promises and it is still an useless interface with little or none advantage.
• We are still dependant on smart lists based on stored data or triggers, not in future inference or likelihood.
• Still the eternal problem of duplications...

I can go on and on ... but Marketo, its time to wake up!

[Josh_Hill13]

There's another bug? We had at least 3 of these with LI/FB late last year that were resolved as bugs. Yes, it took a long time to find the right engineer to fix.

[Dori_Raveh2]

Can't agree more. I think all comments speak for themselves. Time to wake up Marketo

[Rachel_Tam]

Can't agree more. I think Adobe needs to hire a new team of engineers to work on this project.

[AnneMarie_C]

Diego Lineros‌

Thank you for taking the time to share your concerns regarding Marketo.  We understand how frustrating it can be to have these concerns, and as a customer-obsessed company, this kind of feedback is critical to continuing to improve and create an exceptional customer experience.  Because our service has not met your expectations, we will work with you, and other customers who have provided feedback in this thread, to address these comments directly.

We are currently reviewing issues brought up within this thread and will be responding in more detail. If you have any additional concerns that are not part of this thread, please email me directly at acovelli@adobe.com, and I will either answer your questions or connect you with the right point of contact to ensure we evaluate your feedback as part of this effort.

Our ultimate goal is to provide an exceptional level of customer service and that our product consistently meets or exceeds your expectations.

Best regards,

AnneMarie

Marketo Customer Support

[Kevin_Schultz]

If anyone actually receives a response to their concerns here that actually addresses their concerns to a level of satisfaction - it would be great to know that, so come back and share with us how Marketo solved your problem! 

Recently I had one of my many days where Marketo makes me question my sanity and I made a post like this one, got a nice mea culpa comment like this one with a suggestion that we take the conversation to email (out of public view) and the result were a few phone calls where we talked in circles and no real action was taken. 

I find it comical that you'd describe Marketo as a "customer-obsessed company" - whatever it is you're obsessed with, it's very surface level. 

[Justin_Cooperm2]

Kevin, 

I echo the sentiments from AnneMarie. I've been at Marketo for quite some time and can assure you that, during this entire time, the product team has always read and engaged with customers publicly in these forums (like I am right now ). I have personally looked through Oracle, Salesforce, HubSpot (and other) communities and do not see their product leadership engage at the level we do (if at all). I am proud of that and it's what makes Marketo special. 

We come to work every morning to make our customers happy and to deliver a fantastic product. We're also not oblivious to the fact that there are times when customers get frustrated. I hear this loud and clear and we all take this feedback very seriously and try to put it into action. Your input matters and it will 100% be read...the more thoughtful you are about it, the better the results will be. Of course, not everything can be done overnight but we gain so much from the invaluable insights of our customers. 

Justin

[Kevin_Schultz]

I appreciate the response, Justin - but I can't say it engenders any new confidence within me. I hear the implicit direction from you to be more thoughtful about my feedback but frankly my concerns are more expansive than the particular criticisms of product that are the purpose of the original post, and I would assume, the main concern of the product team you are a part of. 

What I hope you and others hear in this thread are the other ongoing challenges we face as customers in addition to a product that lags - we might be able to deal with a product that is slightly behind the times (and even be compassionate to the challenges you face in balancing all of our needs) if it wasn't for the fact that issues exist elsewhere too - like in support, sales, and professional services to name a few. 

As others have noted in this thread, we have to deal with seemingly helpless L1 support that requires escalation to solve any actual problem - and there are even examples given here about being totally in the dark about P1 level issues that takes months to resolve even after escalation.

Others have also noted in this thread that we have to deal with broken promises from sales around pricing and access to certain product offerings as they evolve - Marketo has changed the names / classifications of parts of the product so many times that I'm honestly not sure anything in my company's contract with Marketo even corresponds to something anyone at Marketo understands anymore - every time we ask, we're given more confusing and misleading information, along with the opportunity to simply pay Marketo even more money to get access to what we thought we already had. In my case, you're constantly trying to squeeze an extra couple thousand here and there out of a six figure customer - it's not necessarily that I can't afford it, it's that I feel incredibly offended you'd treat me that way. 

And to top it all off, there's the incredibly high staff turnover rate - especially in professional services. I'm glad you've been at Marketo a while, but I imagine many of your coworkers haven't - at least the ones that have been on my projects. That says something to me about the environment internally - and it's not something good. 

And finally - to your point about your product team being active in these forums - I'd return to my original assessment that whatever it is you're doing here, it's superficial. I may not get responded to by a product manager in the Salesforce forums - but guess what, if I want a phone call with the owner of the product I use at Salesforce, I get that call easily - and that real-time interaction is much more valuable to me. We spend an incredible amount on both Salesforce and Marketo - and Salesforce takes great care to show me how they value me at the highest levels - Marketo certainly does not. 

[Alyssa_Meyer]

Ever since Adobe acquired Marketo, they've been increasingly difficult to work with. It feels like they are trying harder than ever to squeeze every possible penny out of their customers.

[Grant_Booth]

Our experience has been the opposite, and I think this may simply vary by your CSM and/or their manager. When Marketo was owned by Vista, we felt like our CSM was very aggressive and we were being arbitrarily squeezed, where as our current CSM seems more focused on building a healthy long-term relationship with us. My impression was that while Vista was focused on flipping the company for sales (as venture capital firms tend to do), Adobe is more focused on the long-term health of the product. But acquisitions are chaotic, and it could take years to see the fruits of that.

[Amy_Lepre]

To add insult to injury, they reneged on the promise of all customers getting ABM for free. Now they are offering it at a "significant cost reduction" instead. Abhorrent business practice.

[Josh_Hill13]

How are we defining Marketo's ABM? The last time I really looked it was essentially a special smart list.

[Amy_Lepre]

I am referring to the paid add-on feature that has existed for a number of years that was then promised to all Marketo customers free of charge at the Adobe Summit. We've never had the feature so I've never used it, so I can't speak to how it works (if it's essentially a special smart list).

[Josh_Hill13]

1. Lagging behind compared to what? Like, everyone complains but what would the next gen system look like? Are there competitors you think do this better?
2. Idea List is long and yes, very few critical User Ideas have launched in years. Sky does cover some of these, but it's a long slog for some reason.
3. Ideas - post them! They are looking. Sometimes they are easy to fix.
4. Reporting - what kind of reporting? I'm not disagreeing with your thought, but what would something better look like? Should Marketo do that, or should a third party integration do that?
5. AI - what do you believe it would do for you? I see a lot of talk at Marketo about AI and other firms promising this, but very few real world examples in B2B. Are your programs sophisticated enough to even use AI? Could you hack influence, inference, or next best asset in other ways? There are a ton of ideas and Marketo has some add ons for this. I'd rather Marketo spend resources in other areas than worry about AI.

Something to consider is that Marketo was originally built for Marketers to make their lives easier. Now we're all MOPS/Tech people who want it to be much more and offer deeper tools.

[Paul_Trushin8]

Josh,

1. It's not that Marketo is lagging behind compared to any product, but Marketo is lagging behind compared to the technology that's already available - in Adobe Sensei, for example, there's already some AI implemented and the technology has been available for the last 3-4 years at least. Marketo is still leading the charge in its segment.

5. I've been working in marketing automation for the last 7 years and in my opinion, AI will be critical to the continuing success of any marketing automation platform in the nearest future. An existing one or a new one, which actually makes AI part of its core functionality, that's left to be determined in the nearest future. Really hoping Marketo is working on something like this for future releases - the Marketo-Adobe alliance should help some new technologies trickle down. Just to give an idea of what AI really means for marketing automation - right now you have to build reports to find answers to some basic questions:

- how are my different marketing activities doing in terms of driving MQLs, overtime? 
- What should I spend more money on to get more bang for my buck?
- What events gave me the most in terms of ROI and what is their predicted impact next year?

Not only do you have to set the whole thing up manually, you also have to *analyze it yourself*: read every single line, analyze every single event, which greatly limits the capacity of how much information you can actually digest and get actionable insights from. With the technology available now, it's like driving a horse cart while a Volvo drives by. Yes, you can do that and the Amish still do that, but should you? AI would analyze all main data points and provide you with some suggestions to work with but without the hassle of setting up a bunch of reports and without the loss of time associated with actually reading through all these reports.  

The same works for a lot of activities in Marketo. Testing different types of copy for emails should be happening in the background and the user shouldn't have to set up different test groups himself - Marketo already has all the data, that the Admin would use - so Marketo should be able to do it with minimum training and should be able to educate itself based on previous experience. Moreover at some point it should be able to tell us what we are doing wrong/should be doing right  - like poorly chosing the time to send emails to people in Australia when we are in EST or failing to communicate to a group of leads for more than 1-2 months. Marketo already has all the data in activity log, but doesn't really educate itself with that data and what it actually means for business so as to become more self-driving rather than remain a platform fully dependent on both, human activity and human analysis, for further action.

In the end as the matters stand in 2019 (and that's true for all marketing automation platforms, I'd say) if you are servicing a great deal of customers unless you have a dozen people working in marketing automation alone, you end up spending most of your time *doing manual stuff* and *reading stuff about stuff* just to get to the bottomline - thinking through actionable ideas - whereas AI would allow us to spend less time on ops and more on marketing. Don't get me wrong, it's not like any product can fill that void at the moment - I love Marketo, but the technology is already there and has been there for quite a while and the potential specifically for marketing automation can't be overstated.  

As for why we are all tech people now - well, the industry itself is changing. A yet another digital revolution is approaching with 5G making a global hit in the next couple of years, expect everything to go online: all the things in your house, in your car, the house itself, the car itself. Which means more data to consume for a marketing automation platform and even more data to work with - without AI it would be impossible to process such an amount of data. To be a marketeer today is radically different from what it was 7 years ago, as you well know, but tomorrow it would also require to be at least partially a tech guy who understands what's under the hood to be efficient. Just my 0.02, sorry if I'm rambling a little bit, I've been thinking about this for quite a while.

[Josh_Hill13]

Paul,

I was attempting to be diplomatic. I am very well aware of Marketo's shortcomings and lack of focus on the features you mention and lack of focus on many User Ideas that are partially coming out in Sky.

I am also sorely disappointed in many of these areas.

Yet, some areas you mention aren't really Marketo's expertise. And I'd question any platform that attempts to buy or incorporate these into the "kernel" which we've seen with MSFT and SFDC.

- how are my different marketing activities doing in terms of driving MQLs, overtime? 
- What should I spend more money on to get more bang for my buck?
- What events gave me the most in terms of ROI and what is their predicted impact next year?

RCE/RCA did answer much of that if you had it, and you had set it up correctly. That required a lot of work...and it was very advanced through 2015/16 or so. And if you still use it, you can answer all three questions still with limited additional analysis. Now, if you want a custom Attribution system or go beyond Channel Source, then you need to go to other options.

Then tools like Tableau, Domo, etc came out and with some programming, those could pull in your entire database and redisplay the data more flexibly. Should Marketo make that native? I don't know, but maybe they should work on other areas that would help us marketers deliver more data to those external tools.

Ultimately, Marketo is a workflow engine. Do all the flow steps and backend items exist? No. Is the email engine providing enough information and able to handle the AB Testing, Timezone, Best Time features? Not entirely. Should it in 2019? Yes.

The fun part of Marketo sometimes is in workarounds and finding cool vendors to plug into that. Is that always ideal, no it is not.

I have had many conversations directly with Marketo staff on these topics.

[Jaime_Henrique3]

I agree Paul. For example, I have worked with teams using both Marketo and outreach.IO. Because it is so difficult to duplicate what Outreach is doing in Marketo.

[Josh_Hill13]

I disagree that Outreach is that much superior to Marketo's workflows except in certain Sales workflows and sales activity reporting. What I see is Salespeople running off doing their own thing, taking back Nurture and Prospecting from Marketers (the way Marketo sold us on taking the burden off of Sales in 2010). Now Sales wants it back for all sorts of reasons. >> some of which are valid (like more mass customization).

Engagio had a better concept because it had approval levels to send on behalf of higher ups and was more intentional in its ABM approach (like, not sending 5000 emails per rep).

Then we all complain about getting BDRs prospecting Marketers for all sorts of martech using such tools. And the marketers aren't reining in email or branding practices.

At least in Marketo, marketers can control the messaging better.

[Jaime_Henrique3]

Thank you for your thoughts Josh. I didn't mean to sound like Outreach is superior to Marketo. Marketo and Outreach are both great tools. But one thing that I see outreach doing is making it easy to build sequencing of emails and phone calls in one place and tracking replies to the sales emails. The A/B testing is also AI powered to make life better. 

I am sure the growing pains will pay off and Marketo  will deliver  a better tool as a result. 

[Riz_Alvi]

Hi Josh,

Have you looked at HubSpot lately? 95% of the Marketo features are there and they are super fast in deploying new features. The customer service of HubSpot is the gold standard. 

Thanks!

[Paul_Trushin8]

Hubspot doesn't come even close. I worked with their API last year - it's chaotic. And don't get me started on their SFDC-Hubspot sync set-up.

[Josh_Hill13]

I'd be curious about this because HB has generally focused on SMBs and not adding the more powerful options like APIs and the way that Marketo flows work.