Do You Have the Right Marketing Tech Stack for Business Growth?

If you're running a sales-driven B2B company, this scenario probably sounds familiar: Your sales team is closing deals, but your pipeline feels inconsistent. Leads come in sporadically, follow-up happens when someone remembers, and you're not entirely sure which sales or marketing efforts actually result in closed sales. If that’s the case, we're sorry, and we get it. 

We work with B2B companies that excel at sales but sometimes struggle with utilizing marketing infrastructure to scale predictably. Marketing should support sales efforts by building your brand awareness,  nurturing leads, automating communications, and helping to keep the pipeline full, but the sales and marketing technology landscape feels overwhelming.

This isn't about picking the trendiest tools, platforms or building an enterprise-level tech stack. It's about selecting marketing technology that supports your sales process, proves ROI, and grows with your business.

Start With Your Sales Process, Not the CRM or Technology

When companies get it wrong, they start looking for sales & marketing technology platforms before they’ve outlined their sales workflow. You may know of several of the big ones already (Salesforce, HubSpot), but there are many other options out there that may fit your process better. Sadly, going with big-name tools they’ve heard before usually results in expensive tools that don't flow with your process or how you work.

Before evaluating any marketing or CRM platform, you need to map out your current lead-to-close journey:

• Where do leads enter your system?
• What touchpoints exist between first contact and close?
• Where do deals stall or fall through?
• What is missing now?

The answers to these questions (and others) reveal where technology can fill those gaps. You can check out our buyer’s journey templates to get an idea of what content and marketing support you should have in place for your buyers.

The Most Important Things Your Marketing Tech Stack Should Do

1. Provide one place where your sales team can track prospects through the pipeline and marketing touches. 
2. Give your sales and marketing people a way to manage and measure leads 
3. Enable salespeople and improve their productivity with automated outreach and communications
4. Give sales and leadership some predictive insights with lead-to-close ratios, pipeline value and of course, ROI on sales and marketing efforts

In a time when everyone is talking about “using AI” it’s important to consider how and what impact any AI tools can bring to your marketing technologies. Many platforms have AI within them to provide insights, to make suggestions, to answer your questions and more. AI can provide insights from campaigns, it can look for similarities between prospects, and much much more. You can also bet that nearly any SAAS platform you’re using today will have AI pieces added in the near future, if they aren’t already. 

The Most Important Parts of Your Marketing Tech Stack

You don't need everything, but you do need the right things working together. Think of your marketing tech stack as an integrated ecosystem—each component serves a specific purpose but becomes more powerful when integrated with the others.

Your Website: The Hub

Your website isn't just a digital brochure—it's a lead generation engine and often the first impression prospects have of your capabilities. According to HubSpot's research, 75% of users judge a company's credibility based on its website design.

How Your Website is the Hub of a Marketing Tech Stack:

• Capture leads through strategic forms and calls-to-action
• Track visitor behavior and conversion paths
• Integrate with your CRM to pass lead information automatically
• Provide content that nurtures prospects through their buying journey
• Be optimized to attract organic traffic in search engines and now to provide answers in LLMs (AI)

CRM: Your Single Source of Truth

Your Customer Relationship Management system should be the backbone of your sales and marketing tech stack. If sales won't use it, everything else fails. This is why we recommend starting simple and scaling or adding modules as you grow and learn.

Every prospect interaction—website visits, email opens, phone calls, meetings—should be visible in one place. This gives your sales team context for every next conversation and helps marketing understand which efforts actually drive closed deals.

Key considerations:

• Choose ease of use over enterprise features you'll never use
• Ensure mobile accessibility for field sales teams
• Consider native integrations with other tools
• Start with something accessible and scalable

Common mistake: Many B2B companies pay for marketing automation platforms when they really just need a solid CRM with basic email capabilities to get them started.

Email Marketing & Automation 

Consistent communication without manual effort, that was and is the promise of email marketing automation. We know it can be scary to automate emails or to develop that sequence. When your CRM data is correct, then these automated emails based on that criteria are a no-brainer, cost-effective and efficient way to stay in front of prospects with relevant information.

Basic Email Automation Sequences to Consider: 

• New lead nurture sequences that welcome & educate prospects automatically. This can be a simple email that they receive after they fill out a form. Easily automated.
• Re-engagement campaigns for prospects who've gone cold. 
• Customer nurture and upsell campaigns. Yes, you can segment your customers by product or service line to support retention efforts and cross-sell new products or services.
• Sales follow-up emails that ensure consistency. These are also personalized with the prospect's name, as well as the sales rep it’s from.

Social Media Management Tools

Social media might not drive as many direct leads as your website, but it plays a critical role in brand awareness and credibility when done correctly. Prospects are doing their research and will likely see you on LinkedIn and other platforms too.

If you’re doing social media in-house, we’d recommend looking for tools that allow multi-platform scheduling, content libraries, analytics, and team collaboration, all to keep your company’s social media aligned with sales & marketing efforts.

We use Sendible for client social media posting and reporting.

Website Analytics & Tracking

Without analytics, you're flying blind. Google Analytics shows:

• Which pages prospects visit before requesting a quote
• What blog posts drive the most engagement
• Where are visitors dropping off or exiting
• What’s our conversion rate for calls, form entries, etc. 

Attribution is getting tougher with ad blockers and privacy regulations; that’s no secret. This makes proper first-party tracking on your own website even more critical.

We work with clients to connect website behavior to closed deals to calculate true marketing ROI. We also utilize heat map tracking to monitor visitor behavior on a website, and add in annotations with analytics so we know what was changed as we monitor impact. 

Reporting & Analytics Dashboard

Raw data is useless if stakeholders can't understand it. Having a simple reporting dashboard that translates marketing activity into business insights is very helpful. Our team uses Agency Analytics to build client dashboards for all key platforms, and provides insights tied to your business goals.

What Should Monthly Sales & Marketing Reports Include?

• Marketing-sourced leads and conversion rates - web, SEO/AIO, paid ads, others
• Cost per lead by channel
• Pipeline value, based on the average value of a lead
• Marketing's contribution to closed revenue
• Month-over-month and year-over-year trends. We find that year over year (YoY provides better insights for most clients, even more so for seasonal industries like boating, etc.

According to HubSpot's State of Marketing Report, 40% of marketers say proving ROI is their top challenge. We Agree! It can be a big challenge. The right reporting dashboard helps by connecting marketing activities to business outcomes. 

BUT (you knew that was coming), you should have a clear lead value so the pipeline value is also in your reporting. Curious about finding out your lead value? Check out our Marketing Math article with a worksheet you can use to find your marketing ROI.

Integration is Everything

When tools are not connected, it can create more work for sales and marketing teams. Every time data has to be manually transferred between systems, you're introducing inefficiency, errors, and frustration.

The real power of your marketing tech stack can come from integration. Imagine prospect data flowing seamlessly from your website to your CRM to your email platform to your reporting dashboard. Everything becomes more efficient and accurate. We know this isn’t easy, and there are ways to connect various platforms to learn, improve and ensure the right tools are in place first.

Questions to ask before adding any new sales or marketing technology:

• Does it or could it integrate with our CRM?
  • Native integration might be great, but API integration is an option, too!
• Will it require manual data transfer?
  • Moving a CRM or email platform can have a decent lift of admin time to move data. What is the data migration process like?
• Can it pull and push data automatically?
• What happens if the integration breaks? What does support look like?

Build or Optimize Your Tech Stack in Phases

The biggest mistake companies make is trying to implement everything at once. The marketing tech stack touches many areas of the business. No one wants to end up with half-configured tools, overwhelmed staff, and no clear sense of what's actually working.

This is just a sample timeline to use when approaching new marketing technologies and platforms.

Phase 1: Foundations

• CRM implementation and team training
• Website tracking and analytics setup
• Lead capture forms that feed your CRM

Phase 2: Automation 

• Email marketing platform connection to CRM, or a plan to ensure email platform data is updated with CRM data and vice versa
• First automated sequences (new lead nurture, follow-up workflows)
• Basic reporting dashboards 

Phase 3: Optimization

• Advanced segmentation and personalization, use the prospect data
• A/B testing implementation for subject lines or calls to action
• Enhanced reporting and attribution

Phase 4: Scale 

• Advanced automation and AI tools
• Predictive analytics
• Account-based marketing capabilities

Your business might move faster or slower through these phases—that's perfectly fine. What matters is building on a solid foundation rather than implementing everything at once and executing nothing well.

In fact, you may have a great CRM already, but data isn’t as clean as it could be. It may be worthwhile to do a data clean-up project vs a new installation. When it comes to email marketing and other automations, think about rules you can create where: If this happens, then this happens. 

One automation we talk about with clients who have contracts in their industry is knowing the prospect's current provider, their contract end date, and the industry they are in. 

• That information is in the CRM,
• Then we can outline an email sequence by industry based on contract end dates
• Prospects get a personalized, customized message, automatically, based on how many months out their contract end date is, i.e., 12 months out, 11 months out and so on. 

Common Mistakes to Avoid in Marketing Tech Stack Selection

1. Choosing tools sales won't adopt: The fanciest platform is worthless if your team doesn't use it. Please, please Involve sales and service teams in the selection process.
2. Over-buying features you'll never use: Start with what you need now, not what you might need in 3 years. Every platform we’ve ever seen offers different levels and features. 
3. Ignoring implementation and training costs: Thinking someone on the team can handle the implementation sounds nice. But realistically, consider setting aside a budget 2-3x the annual software cost for the first year when you factor in setup, training, and management time.
4. Not establishing processes before adding technology: Technology amplifies your process—good or bad. Fix broken processes first, then add tools.
5. Forgetting about the human element: Marketing automation still needs human oversight for monitoring, optimizing, and ensuring relevance.

Strategy and Execution Trump Tools

The most sophisticated tech stack in the world won't save you if you don’t have a clear strategy and consistent execution.

Start with your sales workflow, not with the tools. Understand where leads come from, where they get stuck, and where technology can genuinely help. Build your stack in phases, ensuring that your team actually uses it, and it connects with other systems.

Focus on metrics that matter; these are the ones that connect to revenue and business growth. Resist the temptation to chase vanity metrics or implement tools just because competitors have them.

Technology enables great marketing, but strategy and consistent execution drive results.

Next Steps: Take Action This Quarter

Don't let this be another article you read and forget. Here's what to do next:

Week 1: Audit your current tech stack

• Can sales access lead information easily?
• Are leads being followed up with consistently?
• Do you know which marketing efforts drive closed deals?

Week 2: Map your complete lead-to-close process and identify gaps. Need help? Ask us.

Week 3: Choose ONE improvement to implement this quarter—not five

Week 4: Create an implementation timeline with clear ownership and success metrics

The companies that win aren't those with the latest tools or the largest tech stack; they're the ones that execute consistently and measure what matters.

Need help building or optimizing your marketing tech stack? RED66 Marketing works with B2B companies to develop and execute strategic marketing plans that keep sales pipelines full and support business growth.  Ask us anything!