I find far too often that companies of similar size — or slightly larger than ours — are WAY over blown with their current technology stack. Too much or too little, either way it’s not what you need and is costing you sales and leads.
I was blown away when conducting research for my recent article on what top CMOs do that you should too and came across the astronomical numbers of Marketing technology available to the public.
It’s ridiculously overwhelming! 7,000+ options overwhelming. Headache!
I’m often asked what tech stack we use in our day-to-day and thought it would be helpful to share. Although we’re not a large company with hundreds on our team, I do have the answer if you’re a smaller organization with fewer than 25 in your total sales and marketing department.
Most of our technology stack has stood the test of time and met our needs for years — while continuing to impress.
Communications
The effectiveness of a team relies on their ability to communicate well — internally and externally. Aside from the traditional Outlook mix, we are huge fans of Slack. We consider Slack as part of our marketing software because we often drop content — clients’ and our own — into convos for everyone on the team to engage with.
I keep our team of partners in their own Slack channels as well, so we can regularly communicate and share resources to support their sales success.
Email Marketing
Although we’re a 20-year marketing agency, believe it or not we no longer use HubSpot. Shocking, I know! Our team is certified with HubSpot, but we quickly came to realize that for us, and many clients of similar size, HubSpot is overkill.
If you want a super simple method for handling drip campaigns and contact management — one that integrates with the rest of your tech stack — be it click funnels, webinar software, etc. — our longest standing go-to is ActiveCampaign.
Maybe we’re biased because they’re name is so like ours, ActiveBlogs . . . HA! But really, over the years, we’ve managed almost every email marketing software under the sun for our clients, and ActiveCampaign absolutely crushes it for us.
CRM
Similar to what I’ve seen with email marketing software — you are probably overdoing it with your CRM as well. No, you do not need the Salesforces of the world as your CRM if you’re not running a large enterprise.
There are simpler and more cost-effective options that rock! Having an over-the-top, grandiose CRM is not only a direct cost, but also a cost on your time.
Most sales and marketing teams waste more time f*cking around with their software than they spend selling — or marketing!
I’ve been using Pipedrive for years. We’ve even tried switching to a number of different options over the years, only to find ourselves coming right back. If you’re selling larger B2B accounts, this visual CRM is stupid easy and syncs well with all our other tools.
Their website headline perfectly encompasses how I’ve felt using their tech, “Designed to keep you selling.”
Scheduling
Again, we like simple. It keeps us more productive in a single day than most are in a week. When it comes to scheduling anything from sales leads to client meetings, Calendly makes it easy. I also love that it integrates well with ActiveCampaign — whenever a lead schedules on my calendar, they are automatically placed on a drip campaign.
Proposal Software
Our go-to proposal software is decorated with awards — and for a good reason. It makes those lame-looking, overused PDFs and Docusigns seem like an elementary way to provide your offerings to potential clients.
Proposify has been an exceptionally reliable product and helped us close many sales for many years. It also works well for internal purposes, partnership contracts, you name it. Its Zapier integrates with almost any software you need it to work with, and it streamlines the proposal process and makes it a bit more fun.
My only complaint is the WYSIWYG can be a bit wonky at times, but not enough to deter long-time fans.
Website Analytics
In B2B marketing, only around 3% of your website visitors convert into leads when they hit your pages. Google Analytics does not provide enough data to get you retargeting the other 97% of potential prospects you may have just lost to competitors.
ConvertAVisit has been a staple for us and the client content campaigns we run. It provides much more valuable data matching on what companies are coming to your site, time spent, engagement level, how to convert them, and many more bells and whistles that are easy to manage.
We get emails every day from ConvertAVisit that highlight the prospects on our site for the previous day. It makes life easy for us to measure how effective we’re being, where we need to improve, and what needs following up.
The sales and marketing greats are strategic in selecting their software stack. They work hard to eliminate noisy, overly hyped software and keep it simple — winning back more time for higher impact activities.
Option overload is everywhere nowadays and hopefully I’ve helped make life a bit easier for you today with some insights on what’s worked well for us over the years.
