Best CRMs with Marketo

only had experience with Salesforce but it works pretty damn well

here's another thread that goes into this: CRM Reviews - Which one should we choose?

How your CRM integrates with Marketo is probably a narrow way of choosing a CRM, but if you look into this, as Josh pointed out, SFDC is ahead of the others. MSD connector with Marketo is limited functionally and the connector between Marketo and Sugar is event worse. I have never tested the SAP connector.

-Greg

There is no such thing as best, only what's best for you and your company. Sorry.

With that in mind, if you're looking to pick a CRM vendor, there's some major questions to keep in mind:

- What's your record volume like? Are you going to have 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, 1 million, 10 million, 100 million records of people? How do you need to store opportunities? Do you have structured data that you'd want to store? Do you have any CRM in place today, homegrown or off-the-shelf?

- Who, realistically, will own the CRM: IT? Sales? Marketing? Will you have someone whose position is that of "CRM Product Owner" or will it be part of someone else's responsibilities?

- What needs to integrate with your CRM? There's a lot more than just Marketo going on. What about your ERP? Any external sales tools? Anything homegrown?

- What's your budget? Some CRMs are cheap (heck, Sugar is technically free!) but are expensive to implement. Some CRMs are expensive but easy to implement. If you're looking to hire someone as a product owner, you'll likely pay more or have a harder time hiring someone with Dynamics or Sugar. This is to say nothing of Oracle or SAP on both those fronts.

- Are you in a specialized field? Certain areas such as financial services, healthcare, insurance and other regulated fields need some additional protections, processes and requirements; not all CRMs meet the bill.

Once you've really defined your business requirements, you can make a better decision. I will note that majority of Marketo clients do use Salesforce, since there's a lot of similar company sizes with similar needs between the two companies, so you'll see a lot of mentions of that. Likewise, Marketo themselves put the most emphasis and time on supporting Salesforce over other CRMs, but this isn't to say there's no support for others--just that it may be harder if you're starting from scratch.

@Dan Banning​ - we integrated our Dynamics CRM with Marketo, so if you're researching this system at all, I'm happy to chat. I've never worked with Salesforce, so I can't weigh in on popular opinion.

Marketo seems to offer ​some additional functionalities with a SFDC system, but it's nothing that I can't find a workaround. I've been appointed the CRM system admin, and as a person with zero technical abilities, Dynamics is really easy to customize.

I echo everyone's statement above on figuring out what your requirements are for the system: additional integrations, workflows, and licensing costs. Happy to bounce any ideas off you if you want a second pair of eyes and ears!

Hi Dan,

I agree with above responses. I would personally lean towards Salesforce. If you are looking for something more than a CRM considering their breadth of offerings(listed few below) that caters to different business needs, they might offer a better price. Our company always had a better customer experience with Salesforce and they offer better support services.

Service cloud

eCommerce

Einstein

Multi-org strategy if you are multi-product company

CPQ

Case Management

Thanks,

vineela.

SFDC is the most widely-used with Marketo. It's got the most documentation, and most Marketo experts have experience with SFDC. And there are a lot more SFDC Admins than any other platform. So with SFDC you'll have the widest pool of experienced people to run your Marketo, run your CRM, and ask questions of in the general community.

I have had mixed experience with Dynamics 365 integration. Intermittent and unexplained  sync failures through their native connector resulting in Contact inserts initiated in CRM not syncing across. Similar sync issues with other custom entities. I understand Marketo is built on the Salesforce platform so I expect their connectors may be more reliable with Salesforce integrations. Though I have no direct experience of this myself