Marketo (Adobe)

Marketo's core idea has held up since Phil Fernandez, Jon Miller, and David Morandi founded the company: score leads based on behavior, run them through nurture programs called Engagement Programs, and hand qualified leads to sales automatically once they cross a threshold. Adobe bought Marketo in 2018 for $4.75 billion and folded it into Adobe Experience Cloud, and the CRM integration remains one of its strongest points, syncing lead and opportunity data bidirectionally with Salesforce or Dynamics rather than treating the CRM as an export destination.

Marketo doesn't publish pricing, and there's no free trial, so getting a number means talking to sales. Billing is based on the size of your mailable contact database rather than emails sent, and independent estimates put entry packages around $1,000 to $1,500 a month for smaller databases, climbing to tens of thousands a month for larger contact volumes with add-on modules. That opacity and the multi-week implementation typical of a Marketo rollout make it a fit for B2B companies with a dedicated marketing operations function, not a team looking for a quick self-serve signup.