The B2B Marketing Tech Stack

Introduction

You’ve raised your seed round from First Round Capital, hired some engineers and built V1 of your product. You’re ready to bring it to market. Perhaps you’re a CEO who isn’t prepared to hire marketing yet, or you’re the first marketing hire. You know you want to do some advertising, send some emails, host your website, but you don’t know what tools to use. This article is for you.

Marketing is a big field. Most non-marketers, or at least non-tech people, think it is advertising. It is so much more than that! In fact, it is so big that many tech executives and even marketers don’t know where to start. And I literally mean start, like what do you do when you start a company? Almost everyone begins by putting up a website, but what happens after that? After a ton of time in companies ranging from 10 person seed round companies to 175 person Series B companies, I figured I would share with you my hard-learned lessons. I’m currently at a 40 person Series A company and was the first marketing hire.

One area that I feel is criminally under-hired in start-ups is marketing operations. This position is in charge of the marketing tech stack, which means deciding what tools to use, setting them up correctly, and getting the most out of them. Perhaps most important, ensuring all the tools work together. Unfortunately, when you’re the first marketing hire, you’re also the first <insert every marketing position here>, including the first marketing operations person.

And finally, let’s narrow this down a little further. When you’re at a start-up, you’re working with scarce resources. You need to do a lot with a little, so I’m not going to give myself an infinite budget for this. That leaves us with:

Goals

  • A system that has all the marketing tools you need to run a marketing organization at a B2B SaaS company where you’re the only person
  • A total spend of less than $1,000 per month in total
  • All the tools need to work together, i.e. no silos

Assumptions

  • You have a typical lead funnel.  Something like lead > MQL > SQL > Customer
  • You have a normal volume for an early company, i.e. you’re not processing 100,000 leads per months right at the start.
  • You have some money to spend on this

I started a new position ten months ago and I needed to put a new, from scratch marketing tech stack in place. I’m sharing how I did that with you in this series. I’ll also share some other options in case you don’t like my choices, but there are a million tools out there, and I’m only going to talk about ones that I have personal experience with and can recommend. I’ll finish with some specialized, yet pretty expensive tools in case you have some more money to spend. Maybe, more importantly, I’ll go over some things that will help you get the most out of every tool. Unfortunately, marketers have the habit of spending a lot of money on tools and then only using 10% of it. Finally, remember, at the end of the day, you need a system that works for you. I hope this helps you get started. And if this helped you and you’re building the next Google, be sure to send a few (thousand) shares my way 🙂

First things first: Salesforce

While this series is about the marketing tech stack, it is impossible to separate sales and marketing. The sales team usually has its technology, primarily a salesforce automation tool. The easy answer here is just to use Salesforce. It is a great platform, and it is user-based, which means it doesn’t cost that much when you’re small and grows (and increases in price) with you as you grow. It is a real platform, so it integrates with lots of tools, and you can build custom apps on top of it. It has dashboards and reports. Lots of people know how to use it so you won’t struggle to find people to help. Many of your current employees, especially salespeople, have probably worked with it before. It is truly ubiquitous.

The downside is that it is a behemoth. While it has a default set-up, the chances are you’re going to want to modify it. Probably significantly. I’m fond of telling people that you can give me lumber and some tools and it doesn’t mean I can make you a cabinet. The same is true for Salesforce. It is the lumber and tools. It is up to you to make something with it. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can make some choices that truly hamper you down the road, but if you hire someone to help you, it can get costly quickly. And even the base price, while cheaper when you are small, still isn’t that cheap. Salesforce is NOT the least cost solution.

There are alternatives out there like Copper (formerly Prosperworks), Sugar and more. I would advise you to spend a little bit of time upfront to figure out what tool will work for you. As of this writing, here are the basic costs associated with each of the platforms I’ve mentioned:

  • Salesforce: $30/user/mo / $75/user/mo for next level up
  • Copper: $19/user/mo / $49/user/mo
  • Sugar CRM: $40/user/mo / $65/user/mo

Unfortunately, it is not as easy as just looking at the prices though because you don’t get the same features from each company. Also, it is tough to make the $25/user/mo Salesforce product work for a B2B SaaS company. Too many missing features in that version. These costs are NOT part of my $1,000/mo marketing tech stack goal because I’m attributing this cost to sales. I mean, hey, it’s right in the name 🙂

Finally, from a marketing perspective, you want a tool that will allow you to report on ever more sophisticated campaigns as you grow. In Salesforce, this means setting up campaign tracking. Campaign tracking will enable you to move to attribution tracking instead of simple first touch or last touch reporting. Even if you don’t do attribution tracking at the beginning, you’ll want to do it eventually, so put the processes in place now to track them and make sure you get a tool that supports it.

Bottom line, though, is you’re going to need a salesforce automation tool. You’re going to want a digital repository of your leads and customers. You’re going to want dashboards and reports. You’re probably going to want a place to track customer tickets for your customer success team. You’re going to want a source of truth that is the final arbiter of all discrepancies. For example, it seems like it should be pretty easy to count leads, but you’ll quickly find out that Salesforce will give you one number, Google Analytics will tell you something else, and none will match your landing page tools or Google Ads. That sucks, but it is the reality. I’m tempted to tell you to use Salesforce, but hey, it’s your job 🙂

The Series

Next up: Hosting your website

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