Why I chose an integrated sales and martech stack?

I needed to communicate my message to my target audience at different touch points in their buyer’s journey. I bought a website builder tool which required little to no coding for designing a website.

Very soon, I realised that the website builder tool didn’t have the capability to create landing pages. The blogging software didn’t have the capability to address my SEO needs, as well.

I needed a CRM tool for lead management and storing customer data. The CRM would enable me to track progress of my leads and opportunities in my pipeline. I bought a CRM software, which is a great investment for small businesses as well.

Landing Pages

I needed to nurture leads via email marketing campaigns. I needed an email marketing tool to manage my email lists and maintain regular communication with prospective customers. 

I needed an email marketing software that had the capability to send emails with personalised subject lines and email body.

I wanted an email marketing software that had email workflow automation and pre-built email templates like welcome emails, newsletter.

It was becoming quite cumbersome for me to log into multiple tools for doing marketing activities. This included website management, landing page creation, lead generation and lead nurture.

I spent a lot of time trying to integrate different technology platforms. This took time away from my day to day marketing activities. This held me back from meeting my marketing goals, sales goals and business goals.

The lead list in my email marketing database was separate to the lead list that I maintained in my CRM. I needed to integrate two technology platforms. This was required to get a full picture of my overall marketing efforts.

Marketing Automation Solutions

It became very hard to implement a marketing automation strategy for my business. This is because I had to deal with multiple sources of truth. It became very hard to build automated workflows for basic marketing tasks. Marketing automation tools are essential for automating marketing tasks.

Analytics Tools

The use of multiple analytics tools (website analytics, landing page analytics, blog analytics, google analytics etc.) also made it hard to measure campaign performance across different digital channels.

The blogging feature in the website builder tool didn’t meet my SEO needs. I very quickly hit my page limit in my website builder tool. I didn’t realise that the website builder tool had a page limit (i.e. the number of web pages I could create using the tool) while buying the tool.

This started to bog down my marketing efforts. There was no easy way of upgrading my existing website builder to a higher version with a higher page limit. I was left with no other option but to recreate my website in another CMS platform.

As a digital marketing and sales professional, I wanted an integrated sales and martech software that would address my above challenges. I was looking for a software that would help me execute my digital marketing channel and campaign strategy.

I had a content marketing strategy that I could not fully execute as my technology stack (refer above challenges) was holding me back. I wanted to evaluate a new Content Management System (CMS) for my website. My desktop research made me realise that a few popular Content Management Systems were very expensive.

In my desktop research, I came across HubSpot CMS. This was my starting point for exploring all capabilities that HubSpot offered - HubSpot Marketing hub, HubSpot Sales hub, HubSpot CMS hub.

I found the HubSpot suite would address my above challenges. HubSpot came with a good suite of marketing automation capability that I could activate as my business grew. HubSpot Marketing hub is one among many marketing automation platforms. As a digital marketing and sales professional, I thought it would be a good tool for both sales and marketing teams.

I signed up for a free version of HubSpot CMS to explore CMS and blogging capabilities. I realised that it had all the capabilities that I was looking for in one place - website, blogging, landing pages, forms, email marketing tools, CRM etc. It checked all my boxes:

Conclusion

I help businesses grow web traffic, leads & sales. I am a digital marketing director specialising in SEO, Google Ads, email marketing & content marketing campaigns. I've supported the growth story of 30+ brands in software, financial services, automotive, manufacturing & B2B. I’ve 10+ years of digital marketing industry experience, as a founder, digital marketing strategist & consultant.

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