When speaking with leading enterprise marketers who chose to re-platform, many expressed the need to change their marketing automation system due to issues with vendor support, price, performance, scalability and sometimes their own ability (or inability) to work with IT. Looking at the underlying issues we found, you can see several factors with the following anonymized quotes which led to the decision to switch:

• “The business grew ten-fold in the last few years and the volume of customer interactions grew even more. A new marketing system was needed that could scale with the business.”
• “Once the volume of customer interactions increased, the prior system started to have slow performance. For example, when analyzing huge data sets, queries could take a long time. Marketers don’t want to sacrifice system performance for scale.”
• “The system reached its limits to deliver more complex or higher scale campaigns. Many vendors have solutions which are perfectly suited for small to medium-sized organizations. But when marketing demands grow to be enterprise-class, their systems failed to keep up with our needs.”

Switching to a new marketing automation solution can be a sizable commitment of money and effort. Many marketers feel reluctant to invest in an enterprise-class solution for fear of paying for features they don’t believe they currently need. However, with today’s cloud solutions and consumption-based pricing, marketers need only pay for the features they use, making it easier for marketers to justify an upgrade in technology and purchase solutions which can scale with their needs.

Bait-and-switch Features

Marketers who moved to Oracle Marketing Cloud solutions from other systems, often complain that their previous vendor did not deliver the features and functionality that was initially shown in the sales demo or disclosed in the RFP. Some marketing vendors offer alternate versions (on-premise and cloud) of their marketing automation software with varying capabilities.  

Frequently a sales team will present the best features and capabilities that exist across both versions. After the purchase, the marketers are left with partial solutions which they felt could do one thing but lack many of the features of what they really need to be successful. Be careful of these bait and switch tactics and only buy from a trusted vendor who can deliver on their promises set in the sales cycle. 

Hidden Fees

Hidden fees are usually the talk of the town in the cell-phone industry.  So, we were really surprised to hear of customers encountering hidden fees after purchasing a marketing automation solution. 

Some marketers found that after purchasing a new solution, key features they require to be successful actually cost extra. These fees can add up and in many cases can justify the expenditure of switching to a new vendor just to avoid the long-term costs. 

At Oracle Marketing Cloud, with our one price model, we have made the purchasing decision for marketing clients even easier, by providing simpler, flexible and transparent prices. To learn more, click here. 

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