Selecting the Right Marketing Automation Platform: Hubspot vs. Marketo

6 min readJun 27, 2021

Choosing the right marketing automation platform is a daunting and important decision. You need a tool that can scale with your company, that can integrate with your current and future stack, that fits your budget, and that your team can actually use. It’s a costly endeavor to implement a new marketing automation platform, but even more costly if you have to re-implement a different system in a couple of years because you made the wrong decision the first time.

One of the first big projects in my new position at PetDesk was to select and implement a new Marketing Automation (MA) platform to replace Pardot. This is the seventh MA implementation I have been part of in my career and the fourth I am leading. With this most recent project, I feel like I have landed on a solid discovery, scope, and comparison process that can be easily adapted for any business and will help ensure that you are choosing the best solution for your particular needs.

1. Don’t skip discovery

Take the time to do proper discovery, even if it is a company you have worked at for a decade—and be sure you speak to both the sales team and marketing team! Not taking a couple of hours to talk to the sales team that will experience the most downstream impact from a new platform is setting yourself, your marketing team, and your company up for failure.

Discovery for a marketing automation implementation can be challenging because some of the most important users and benefactors may not even know the potential of a fully integrated and utilized MA platform. To help get the most out of discovery conversations with your sales team, executives, and non-technical marketers, tailor the conversations for each group. Here are some of the questions I like to ask:

For Sales Teams:

What are some of the pain points with our current inbound process?
What data would like to see from marketing?
Are there activities that are most important for you to know about a lead? What are they and how would you use them?
When would you like to receive notifications concerning prospects?

For Executives:

What are the biggest pain points caused by the current system?
What business goals do you think a new MA platform will impact?
What are your must-have requirements?
Describe your dream state.
What reporting or data do you imagine you will need from the MA platform?
Are there any other systems or expansions that are planned or budgeted in the next 12 months?

For Marketing Teams:

What are the biggest pain points with our current system?
What do you wish was easier in the current system?
What data or reporting is challenging to get and analyze?
Are there things you love about the current system? Why?
What are your must-have requirements?

2. Limit your options

There are a lot of options out there for marketing automation platforms — and as the market matures, the companies in the space continue to push themselves and their competition to make improvements and innovations. To keep your sanity, create a list of limiting factors—those things that are deal-breakers for your team, your company, or you—to narrow your options and focus your energy.

The most common limiting factors are:

Budget: If you have a small budget, let’s say under $2,000 a month, this will naturally limit your options.
Scalability: If your company plans to grow 10x year over year and you need a Marketing Automation platform that can scale with you, focus on established companies. Look for options that can handle your projected number of contacts two years from now and the anticipated complexity that comes with a high-growth company.
Depth of Technical Acumen: If your team is young, inexperienced, or less technical or if you do not have an experienced and dedicated Marketing Ops role, prioritize platforms that have a stellar customer support rating, up-to-date documentation, and are easy to use.
Technical Limitations: If your CRM instance is heavily customized or your sales process is complex, check for integration or customization limitations early on when vetting options to make sure you are only evaluating those that can handle your complexity.

For us, scalability and depth of technical acumen were our limiting factors. I was brought on to help scale and operationalize the macgyvered systems and processes from the company’s early days of bootstrap sales and marketing. This meant I needed to choose a tool that could scale with us as we expanded over the next several years. Also, our marketing team, while talented, does not have a lot of technical depth so finding a marketing automation solution that would be intuitive with a reputation for solid customer support was important. Our limiting factors helped us focus on two platforms: Hubspot and Marketo.

3. Focus on outcomes first, requirements second

Translating discovery interviews, technical requirements and limitations, business goals, timelines, and budgets into a comprehensive yet easy-to-understand scope document is an art. Over the years, I have refined my process for doing this and after reading, Outcomes over Output have fully committed to starting with outcomes.

Starting with outcomes forces you to translate the needs, requirements, and desires for a new platform into simple statements that focus on the customer or user behaviors that drive specific change. Once crafted, outcomes become the foundation for creating requirements and re-focusing scope alignment throughout the implementation process.

3. Align your requirements

Once your outcomes are written and you have buy-in from your stakeholders, it’s time to write your requirements. Think of each outcome individually and ask yourself, what needs to happen in order to achieve this? Writing requirements this way naturally creates a checklist you can use to compare platforms so you can make an informed and logical decision. In the example below, you can see that the requirements are not tasks that need to be done (that comes later), but are instead drill-down “must-haves” for the system that are needed to meet the specific outcome.

4. Take control of the sales process

Once you have your options narrowed down, go through the demo and sales process. Keep your outcomes and requirements top-of-mind and ask questions and drive demos so they are focused on your particular needs. Don’t be afraid to share your requirements with your sales representative and don’t be shy during the sales process. Make sure you are getting the information you need to make a decision—don’t let them show you all the bells and whistles that might be useful for you, but aren’t what you really need.

5. Put together a comparison doc

When you’ve seen the products, understand the technical possibilities and limitations of the tools, and have a reasonable idea of cost, I highly recommend going through the (somewhat tedious) process of putting together a comparison document. Go through each requirement one by one and compare the two platforms against it. When I did this, I found it extremely helpful to slow down and systematically evaluate Hubspot and Marketo against our business needs. It also forced me to explore each system’s knowledge base as I also wanted to include documentation where I could.

After completing the comparison document, I made a strong recommendation for a marketing automation platform for PetDesk. For us, HubSpot ended up narrowly winning out over Marketo primarily because of its easy-to-use interface, some impressive improvements to its email editor functionality, and phenomenal customer support and up-to-date documentation.

I consider myself lucky to have so much experience in MA implementations especially since it has exposed me to a multitude of platforms — Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot, Mailchimp — for different types and sizes of businesses. I hope my process helps you avoid choosing the wrong marketing tool for your company and team.