Act-On Software vs. Sales Engine International

If you have MS Dynamics CRM, this is the automation platform for you and your operations. Act-On Software easily syncs with dynamics, and we've never had a problem with this since we set ours up years ago. If you use a different CRM, I'd check to see if other options might make more sense. Having that ability for the systems to seamlessly talk is critical.

Incentivized

Increasing your contact limit can be very costly, so I would go in with a good grasp on where you'll be in a year or two, minimum, and try to plan ahead so that you're not trying to justify budget later on

• The templates are easy to use and set up campaigns.
• It's simple to use, and the email editor features a drag-and-drop interface.
• It's easy to set up a drip campaign or a series of scheduled emails.
• It has the flexibility of having a variety of scheduling options and the use of user experience automation.

Incentivized

• CRM Integration - This product (Manticore) is extremely easy to integrate with Microsoft CRM and with Saleforce.com. It takes mere minutes to set up the integration and does not require IT support to integrate. Other systems I looked at required a days work for integration and an extra fee for integration and/or support.
• Marketing Automation - It is very easy to drag and drop actions for workflow development. Once an automated process is activated, it also shows you how many people are at what stage of the process and allows you to download these people at that particular step.
• Email Creation - Manticore gives you a variety of email creation options, Templates, WYSIWYG editor, and HTML code options. The tabs when creating an email are simple to follow and take you through each step to test and launch a campaign.

• Building email and landing page templates are difficult, the drag and drop builder is not straightforward, and requires coding knowledge
• The workflow tool is cumbersome and not as intuitive as I'd expect a best in class marketing software's to be
• Domain connections and domain management functionality made it difficult to manage multiple company domains and subdomains for pages

Incentivized

• Technical/customer support
• Overall compatibility with different internet browsers
• Email/template designer

It's my single biggest asset in my current role. With limited resources, its enabled Anachron to punch well above our weight marketing wise and although we're still at the beginning of our journey I know the system can scale with us

I've been incredibly pleased with Manticore/SEI and have selected them at several companies now. It's worked in a variety of different business environments, both big and small, and everyone on both the sales and marketing side have been extremely pleased with the results

It's good, but not quite brilliant. Some parts of the interface are still a bit outdated. The product has been evolving very fast, though, and I believe in a few months it will be up there with the best of them, interface wise as well.

Incentivized

Some of the actions require you to be in a specific section before actions are available to you, like adding a list. You first have to navigate to that section for options to be available to you

I have always found them quick to respond to my query by web inquiry. In those instances when I call, I have always reached help quickly. They are conscientious and skilled in discussing my concern and finding a solution to my problem. Other tech organizations should use Act-On as a model for top-notch customer service.

Manticore hardly ever has "product down time" and almost never during a normal work day for our company

Sometimes the server loading speed is a little slow but most often runs fine and if it doesn't their tech support is quick to respond

Email campaigns are deployed instantly when you launch, unlike other Marketing Automation tools I've used in the past that queue emails in batches and can take hours to complete a send

Since we start using Act-on for ourselves and our clients, we have been supported very well. Often we need to integrate with legacy systems and we find the support team on our side during the whole endeavor. Always asking if they can help us further, always willing to do a better job. The support of Act-On is one of the main differentiators

The Manticore team is very knowledgeable, I haven't had an issue where a ticket was left unanswered or unresolved

Dan D. was great. He took the time to understand how I needed the program to run, and was very flexible to our special CRM setup.

The system is very user friendly, I think we were up and running within a day or so of having the product. It took very few online training for me to learn a large chunk of the functionality of this system.

Training was done online, but was one-on-one, giving me a lot of time to ask very specific product questions. They also walk you through setting up a test campaign, email, and landing page

What impressed me most is that Act-On showed full committment in making our implementation successful, even when it required additional support from their team. This gave me a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings. Most other software software vendors are not anywhere close to being this responsive and effective

It was the easiest integration and implementation that I've ever experienced. I've implemented other CRM integrated services before that provided the same services as Manticore that were extremely technical and expensive to integrate with Salesforce.com or Microsoft CRM Dynamics, or just plain couldn't integrate

We chose Act-On for its ability to support our customers within a single account. The Marketing Network is a huge benefit to our business and the offerings we provide to our customers. In previously working with Hubpsot and Salesforce, we found the support to be lacking - often being referred to a forum or landing page rather than getting hands-on guided help from a knowledgeable person on their team. We LOVE Act-On and the team that they have servicing our account!

Incentivized

We migrated to Marketo approximately 6 months
ago, and were extremely happy with the change. Besides the higher sticker
price and the "everything's a sales pitch" communications from
Marketo, we can't find any fault.

Sales
Engine International - Manticore (commonly referred to as Manti-beast
internally) created many problems for us. And while they did integrate
with our Microsoft Dynamics environment, the software quickly ate through our
purchased storage and forced us to constantly purchase more. That alone
cost us many hundreds of dollars in Microsoft Dynamics CRM storage every year.
And, when confronted about it, Manticore support flat out lied about how
much storage their activities were taking up in our system. So, while it
integrates, it's a very poor integration.

Before I feel like I need more features, the Act-On customer service reps are contacting me telling about new features as part of my account.

• Positive- quick setup for webinars between 3 different tools, made it easy to do in high volume
• Negative- lots of processes with the designer tools that made email/landing page design take longer than it should have, costing man hours
• Positive- email automation with different types of campaigns we could have flowing at once or could span across multiple audience segments made it so we could consistently create touch points and increase our engagement, thus our ROI over time

Incentivized

• Errors in forms led to a decrease in registrations - found workaround to correct it, but was never informed of certain incompatibilities
• Reports have been inaccurate and very inflexible, and have not allowed for reliable forecasting/planning