Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Be hungry and teach yourself. There's a ton of documentation available, it's just a matter of focus and dedicating the time to learn it. It's not difficult. The Association Managers, always ready to help, the Support line if there's ever a question (even down to telling me my forgotten class schedule) are major pluses. Love the detailed tracking for sends, Automation Studio for teams where I is more prevalent than we, and the self-serve capacity of the tool. Help if I need it, but well packaged if I don't and need to schedule a timely email at 2am. Triggered emails, Automation, b2c or b2b, it can handle it all.

The user interface isn't always the easiest to interact with. It's difficult for the casual user to become proficient because it is so robust and complex. There are many features that really require a developer background in order to fully leverage them. Everything from the product itself is woeful. The account management team also operate the sales function so as soon as you've signed on the dotted line there's no reason for any further care. The training is inadequate, the integration was a nightmare and any time a problem crops up we've by and large had to resolve it ourselves. The support function are attentive people but not thoroughly versed in the goals clients are trying to achieve and consequently take so long to solve things that it's more time-efficient to do it ourselves

Exact Target has so many options and such robust functionality that you can do almost anything. We started with them four years ago when our program was beautiful basic, and ET has allowed us to become much more cultured, leveraging our data to use personalization, subdivision, and dynamic content to get ever closer to true marketing.