eTrigue DemandCenter vs. Sales Engine International

I would not recommend DemandCenter for anyone who doesn't know what they're doing or what they want. That sounds like a no-brainer, but it seems like a huge number of organizations want something to fill that "Marketing Automation" gap, not having the marketing infrastructure in place to support it. That is, a technically savvy person to design complex campaign logic and manage data, good web people for designing landing pages and emails, and content writers & managers & marketing specialists for everything else. Investing in a marketing automation tool does not mean you can exclude these resources - it simply means you can DO MORE with those resources. If you don't know what you want, and want to be babysat through the whole process but don't mind the limitations, you can always go with the MA tool that rhymes with "BubSpot".

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

• Putting prospects in the system from spreadsheets is easy. Contacts can also be automatically brought into eTrigue from your CRM. (If you have Salesforce.)
• Campaign reports show the actual numbers of prospects at each step of the campaign. The detail behind the number is available just by clicking on it.

• 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.

• I wish they could be able to customize URLs for landing pages for better SEO and branding.
• Better SEO functionality and ability to customize those options on landing pages would be nice.
• More useful and better detailed analytics would be nice.

Incentivized

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

We rely on this tool. Going forward as we implement new back end architecture we may be forced to change to an integrated platform with our master data management infrastructure, but we will do so kicking and screaming. While marketing gets to make the choice, we will choose eTrigue.

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

Having used Marketo, Act-On, and Pardot, eTrigue is MUCH easier to use and easier to train new team members to use.

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

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

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

Been very happy with their responsiveness and ability to resolve issues

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

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

You will need to think about which users you want to have each role, and the features allowed in each role. You should watch the training videos before you get live training. It saved us several hours as they had already answered 90% of our questions.

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

As an agency we have experience with several other marketing automation platforms. We support clients that are not using eTrigue DemandCenter-- we'll work with them to create various campaign assets. This said, if our clients want us to also run their marketing automation campaigns-- implement the campaigns after the assets are created, we only work in eTrigue as this our platform of choice. Our ability to support the robust and fast-paced needs of our clients requires us to use a platform that they can easily implement and that we can easily work in, make ongoing changes in. eTrigue DemandCenter is the platform that delivers.

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.

• We get the upper hand on follow-up with return visitors... not by reverse DNS lookup or pattern match but by direct cookie validation. Inside sales productivity is boosted by 33% easy with eTrigue.
• The alerts and data are lightning fast, giving marketing immediate feedback on campaign data and prospects.

• 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