Marketo
Starts at $895/mo
Best for
Marketo is the enterprise marketing automation standard, and for good reason — its lead scoring and nurture capabilities are unmatched. But here's the thing most teams get wrong: they treat it as a marketing tool in isolation. The real value is the handoff layer between marketing and sales. If your MQL-to-SQL conversion is broken, Marketo is where you fix it. If you don't have the ops resources to maintain it, HubSpot will serve you better.
Marketo Engage, now part of Adobe, is an enterprise marketing automation platform that handles lead scoring, email nurture campaigns, landing pages, and multi-touch attribution. It’s the marketing-side counterpart to Salesforce on the sales side.
Why outbound teams use it
Lead scoring done right means reps only work leads with real buying intent. Marketo tracks every touchpoint — email opens, page visits, content downloads, webinar attendance — and rolls it into a score that tells sales which leads are warm. For outbound teams, this means knowing when a cold account starts engaging with marketing content.
Where it fits in the stack
Marketo owns the top and middle of the funnel. It captures leads, scores them, nurtures the ones that aren’t ready, and hands off the ones that are. It syncs bidirectionally with Salesforce, feeding lead intelligence to sales and pulling deal data back for attribution. Outreach or Salesloft handle the outbound sequences; Marketo handles the marketing air cover.
Watch out for
Marketo’s learning curve is steep. It takes a dedicated marketing ops person to build and maintain programs, scoring models, and integrations. If you don’t have that resource, you’ll end up with a half-configured system that scores leads inaccurately and frustrates your sales team.
Integrations
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