In this episode of the B2B Lead Gen Podcast, Scott Brinker, vice president of platform ecosystem at HubSpot and editor at Chief MarTech talks about stack business value with marketing technology.

Brinker is also chair of the MarTech Conference and a graduate of the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He launched Chiefmartec.com 13 years ago to explore the intermingling of marketing and technology, before B2B customer journeys were well understood, and before the concept of content marketing funnels or B2B lead generation had really evolved.

The site, whose name is an abbreviation of the “Chief Marketing Technologist” job title, covers the latest digital marketing news, vertically integrated vs. best-of-breed marketing stacks, and produces its own trade show.

Though he’s still very invested in Chiefmartec, Scott spends the majority of his time at Hubspot, which came to prominence a few years ago by making a huge investment in B2B content marketing.

“We really found that pivot point where people were going more and more to the internet to actually make decisions about who they wanted to do business with, the whole shift from outbound sales and heavy advertising budgets to a model that would attract customers by publishing content that was useful to them, would show up in Google and social networks,” Brinker says.

Although they do have enterprise clients, Hubspot is currently seeing the most growth in the midmarket, so they’re not just marketing to a CTO persona. They’re marketing directly to founders and entrepreneurs as well.

Since then, Hubspot has become a full martech stack for marketing, sales and customer service with around third-party 700 app partners marketing SaaS applications to inetgrate with their platform. Scott celebrates the explosion of the Hubspot ecosystem, but he also sees it as a big challenge.

“Sure, I can buy all these specialized tools, but do I get them to work together? My mission at Hubspot is to help solve that problem by saying ‘Ok, Hubspot is at the center of your stack, we’d like to work with all those companies that have out-of-the-box integration, so you just don’t have to think about that, you just plug them in and they work,” he says.

One of the big changes brought about by Hubspot is giving many small businesses the chance to use advanced digital marketing tools. But how can a small start-up spec its stack, get a scope study going and minimize risk?

“A small business that is new to this should not read my blog, it will only distract them and freak them out”, Scott says with a smile. Not surprisingly, he suggests resorting to Hubspot instead. “It does so much out of the box and it provides such good educational materials. It’s just the way to go,” says Brinker.

He says that while much of the digital marketing tech is cool, when you’re doing things like optimizing the web experience with content marketing, B2B search engine marketing, email marketing best practices, and finding a B2B keyword topic cluster you can compete in, the real work is the actual content creation and lead qualification.

Brinker says Hubspot minimizes the risk of winding up with a Frankenstack, but like anything else in the software world, successful deployments rely on how well you gather data across different functions, fine-tune the customer experience and how well you customize your workflows.

But for the right customers, Hubspot’s integrated sales, service, and marketing applications are an off-the-shelf revenue operations stack worth looking into.

Listen to the full interview with Scott Brinker, and if you’d like to support this podcast, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts here.

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