Implementing Across Global, Regional & Digital Teams

Nomad rolled out Marketo at Akeneo in two phases. A soft launch first, focused on the globally affected teams, converting the high-value forms from the website, all content, and global nurture streams. Regional teams followed. Enablement included an in-person session in the UK at one of Akeneo’s marketing offsites, with Nomad consultant Jack flying over to run the training in person.

The volume the team moved through Marketo in Q1 alone tells the rest of the story. Akeneo built and launched:

• 161 programs
• 36 landing pages
• 157 emails sent
• 9 webinars
• 59 pieces of gated content

Change management on a migration of that size is rarely smooth. Nomad’s availability through the rollout, especially the one-on-one training sessions for team members who needed extra support or wanted a helping hand while walking through the process in live time.

“When I surveyed the team and the leaders using Marketo, one message resounded. Without Nomad’s support, this would have been a complete mess. We needed someone who knew our stack, implemented it and could then manage the support requests.”

From Help Desk to Embedded Team

The original plan had a clear endpoint. Nomad would implement Marketo, hand it off, and Akeneo would lean on Adobe Premium Support and internal ops for the rest. That plan changed quickly as the engagement evolved.

“Nomad turned into an extension of our team as opposed to just being a help desk.”

What started as triage moved into proactive problem-solving, then into custom builds. Nomad now supports Akeneo’s integrations across LinkedIn, Salesforce, and the company’s own product, plus the systems behind training and certification, the partner portal, and the academy learning platform. Much of that work has run through Jack, who first showed up on the implementation team and never quite left.

“I have to shout out Jack. The number of time zones and people that he has had to work with to actually make all of my internal MarTech dreams come true.”

Some of those builds were never in scope at the start. Akeneo accelerated them, and the Nomad team absorbed them.

“We accelerated those, and the Nomad team has just stepped in every single time to help with that.”

Kateri’s own day-to-day shifted in parallel. When Marketo first launched, she was inside the platform every day putting out fires. The change in her bandwidth felt as though it happened overnight.

“I have very much stepped out of the day-to-day. The Nomad team has stepped in to really take over all of the day-to-day. For me, it was a big pivot to hand over something that I worked in and with from the start to sit on the sidelines. ”

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Consolidating What Would Otherwise Be Four or Five Vendors & Consultants

The economics of the model came up unprompted. Without Nomad, Akeneo’s alternative was a rotating list of vendors and consultants who specialized in certain areas- tech stack efficiency, marketing ops, Marketo specialists, each for a few months at a time, plus the cost and time of onboarding each one to Akeneo’s systems and stakeholders.

“We don’t want to rotate through specialists every few months between contractors, agencies, and technology consultants; it's not an efficient use of budget or time. Having all of that sit with Nomad has been exceptionally effective for us as a business.”

That includes the parts of the work that rarely make a scope document. Onboarding new vendors. Getting them familiar with Akeneo’s systems. Routing access, introducing them to internal teams. All of it sits with Nomad instead of consuming Kateri’s team.

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Where AI Stopped, and the Human Team Started

Akeneo ran a real test on whether AI could replace some of what Nomad does. Kateri asked her team to self-source answers first using Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude before bringing questions to Nomad for self discovery, problem solving and learning. The team tried it for a few weeks.

“I even tried it a few times too. At least 50% of the time, the AI would return an old answer. A feature or a process had been deprecated. You’d have to go back and tell the AI it was wrong, and then it would come back with, ‘You’re right, I knew that.’”

The experiment ended where most experiments like it end. The team went back to working through Nomad for every question. In addition to questions on how to, where to find, what should I do if this breaks, they needed to embed forms into other customer built systems to ensure complete governance. 

“The level of complexity that we had to map different internal MarTech systems, as well as our own custom built systems, with Marketo is not something that we would leverage AI to do, no matter how much vibe coding happened.”

Kateri uses AI for 50 to 60 percent of her own day, by her own account. The point is not that AI is unhelpful. The point is that this would have taken a much longer time and with a lot more errors; with AI alone, it was faster and more accurate to route it to people who have done it hundreds of times.

Why Kateri Stayed with Nomad

When asked what she would tell another buyer evaluating Nomad, Kateri came back to the same word three times: transparency.

“Nomad is very transparent. There are no hidden surprises, no hidden fees, no hidden costs. There really isn’t a no. There wasn’t a no ever, which is a little scary, probably for you guys.”

She traced it back to the proposal itself and to how it held up across every phase of the relationship.

“The way the proposal was delivered, it was clean. It was clear. No fluff. Just here’s what we do, here’s how we do it, and here’s what it costs. And they answered just as quickly in implementation as they did in sales, and in day-to-day support.”

She offered her own line for the summary, unprompted.

“I chose Nomad for the transparency, the clarity, and the professionalism during the sales process. I worked with them during the integration phase, and continued their services post implementation. So I am now a repeat customer, and I would continue to be a repeat customer. You can always tell a good vendor based on their customers, and if they continue to pick them.”

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