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.  ... View more

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.  ... View more

Sadly, no! I haven't given up yet, but this problem is yet to be solved.  ... View more

Hi Scott, you're resourceful and found my email before I got a chance to email you! Happy to chat - though, it's not the first time someone has offered to help, only to explain to me how there's no help to be had. Maybe you're the magic key I've been looking for to open the door to success! ... View more

Thanks for the thoughtful reply - and the write up overall! I'll certainly hope for the best in the future. Appreciate the potential loop in of additional resources on the support side - our CSM is pretty disinterested in our account / our success. We've leaned on him before without much help. Adobe shut down the office where our original account executive and CSM worked, so we were tossed into someone else's load of customers and it's been a pretty negative experience generally. Our original client team was nothing to write home about, but I generally get the feeling that Marketo doesn't care too much about us as a client. I am at least happy that Marketo has cultivated an ecosystem like this to help connect smart folks. Have a great day! ... View more

Do you get the sense that those " less well-developed Marketo features" are subtly being abandoned in favor of, in the long term, pushing customers to purchase / convert to the more mature and robust Adobe products? You certainly float the idea - wondering if you have any more explicit thoughts on it. We've recently had some P1-level issues with web personalization that Marketo has been very happy to ignore and I find it concerning. I had been pondering the issue but reading your article really crystallized it. I had innocently hoped Marketo wouldn't become a bad investment for those of us that aren't interested in committing to Adobe, but that's seeming less likely every day, and I think your post really nails the issue on the head. ... View more