As I’ve now spent more time with Eloqua, I can say it leaves much more room for customization than Marketo. There’s several layers of interconnected systems and subsystems in Eloqua that are just completely missing in Marketo. In some cases this yields some greater freedom and sophistication with programs. But as often it can add bloat to processes, and almost always means a more time consuming system to maintain.
Lead scoring is a great example of this. The system in Eloqua so different than Marketo, and manages to be at times much more useful, and others time maddeningly limited.
Here’s the gist of it. In Marketo, lead scoring works out of the box as a purely numeric score. You can break out behavioral/fit properties like job title, industry, etc from engagement properties like event attendance or form submissions, but it ultimately is just a single (or perhaps two) numeric values. You can add or subtract points for whatever action you want, and you can let the scores climb as high as you want too.
In Eloqua, score works off a matrix of fit and engagement criteria. A1 through D4. The alpha characters represent the fit, and the numbers represent engagement. Because the bounds of the Eloqua score model are fixed around these groups, scoring instead works by weighting different properties and activities to add up to a total 100% score for each category. So if you want to weight job title more highly than industry, you’d simply give it a higher % weight in the fit score area.
The key benefit of the Eloqua score model is the boundaries it sets. Increasing score in one area means a reduction in score for other properties. You have to make tradeoffs, as it’s not possible to score beyond the bounds of the A1-D4 matrix. And most valuable of all, since all scoring criteria in Eloqua are weighted relative to one another, if you change the model, you can automatically re-score every lead with the latest criteria.
This last piece is what makes the Eloqua model so useful. Not to say you cannot also re-score Marketo leads. But it is a lot more work to do. In short, Eloqua model makes it a lot harder to screw up a scoring model.
As someone so used to the Marketo way of doing things, I’m a little torn on who does it best. On the one hand, I like the controls and logic of the Eloqua model. It’s a much more on-rails experience that helps you avoid the common pitfalls of scoring models. But the lack of flexibility with it is odd, especially compared to the rest of the platform.
Ultimately I think the differences are mostly by preference – you can likely accomplish your scoring needs with either system. Just know that the philosophy and execution between the two is very different.