Sales Automation. Yesware, ToutApp Salesloft, etc.

I have done recent (January) demos with ToutApp and Salesloft. I also was asking about the Marketo piece here SalesLoft users? But no responses. We have opted not continue looking at these apps for now as we want to keep our SDRs in SFDC but the Marketo piece was a barrier for me.

Thats usually the route to take when an application is not directly integrated with Marketo.  SFDC integration to Marketo.

Yeah, a lot of these firms are targeting the sales team and salespeople say yes to anything that might look like this.

The question is how much control does sales need/want? It does overlap a bit with MSI, but I think a lot of these tools can conflict with existing marketing efforts. I think it's better to have good alignment and help build a similar system in Marketo. To some degree, you might need a response tool like siftrock as well.

For early stage firms, this may be a good alternative to Marketo at the low end of the market. Of course, all of them are adding automation tools, so be careful about how emails work in those situations.

I don't see any controls mentioned by these. But maybe the demo specs can help.

We started to implement ToutApp but had to pull the plug on them because it wasn't actually performing the way it was supposed to with our instance of SF. We are now in the middle of implementing InsideSales.

In my experience with each, they don't truly integrate with Marketo (even though both companies claimed they did when the sales team demoed their products). As you mentioned in your question, primarily you have to be able to pull the information you need from the SF activity log. The nice thing about InsideSales is that we are going to be able have much deeper insight into the emails that the sales team is sending (but you can't get that info in Marketo ). One thing I struggle with is that you either have to build the email templates in the InsideSales tool or in SF, it would be nice if we could have complete control over that piece in Marketo. The other thing I have struggled with is that Marketo is limited on the triggers you can use from the SF activity log.

My thoughts on your specific questions:

- Scoring: I would also be curious if anyone has added (or plans to add) scoring off of activities using these tools. This is something we have been going back and forth on.

- Tracking: we are primarily using member/program statuses to track leads in Marketo. I'm sure there is more we could be doing, but we are just getting ramped up at this point.

- In order to prevent over mailing between sales and marketing we are using campaigns to track everything - if they are an active member of a Sales campaign, they won't be receiving nurture emails from the marketing team. We established an SLA of 4 weeks for the sales team to follow up on the leads we are pushing into their campaigns. If they haven't converted by the end of the 4 weeks, marketing will start pushing those leads through our campaigns again.

Hi All,

Thought I'd chime in with our experiences, but first wanted to give some context of our program/goals. Our sales team has requested a tool that can send email cadences directly from their Outlook accounts (as opposed to the shared IP that Marketo uses) and would automatically remove prospects if their lead status changes in SFDC. We initially tried moving the prospecting cadences into Marketo, but quickly abandoned that idea since delivery rates were terrible and it ultimately hurt our sender reputation. My company had purchased SalesLoft before I joined the organization (my thoughts on the app below) and I'm currently evaluating Outreach.io and PersistIQ. I'll update my post after some more time with those tools.

SalesLoft

Pros

• Good deliverability - sends directly from invidiuals' Outlook Exchange accounts
• Button to import members of a SFDC campaign into a cadence
• Option to pause cadence automatically if a prospect replies or the message bounces

Cons

• No true 2-way integration with SFDC - SalesLoft cannot see changes in SFDC until you re-import a prospect
• Cannot trigger off changes to fields in SFDC
• No centralized email templates - if you make a change in a template, you need to make that change in each rep's SalesLoft account

Integration with Marketo

• SalesLoft creates SFDC activities for sent emails and email replies so technically you could create scoring rules using Activity Logged. However, there's nothing unique in the task Subject so you couldn't do something like contains "SalesLoft Email". The format is Email: [Subject Line of Email] and Reply: [Subject Line of Email].
• Since there is no 2-way integration, you have manually manage unsubscribes between systems.
• As for over-mailing prospects, SFDC campaign membership is what we're using for visibility