True Cost of Bad Data for B2B Firms: How to Maximize ROI with HubSpot

By now, most companies have no problems gathering data. A 2021 Simon Data study found that from 2020 to 2021, the amount of data collected annually increased 10-fold. Your company has an opportunity to use data to inform strategy, implement effective automation, and deliver unique and valuable customer experiences to ramp up customer acquisition.

You must show ROI because your tech stack and the people it takes to maintain it represent a significant percentage of your budget. According to Gartner, martech alone eats up 26.2% of the average marketing budget.

You can't afford to fail to get your money's worth out of this investment. But you must also prove your ability to do so to the CEO. You recognize many of the capabilities of the technologies you're using. But actually generating the promised benefits—and making your CEO happy in the process—has been elusive. As long as you're working with bad data too many disconnected technologies, misalignment will continue to exist.

Customers expect more. As customers become aware of businesses' ability to personalize and streamline their journey, delivering anything other than a customized, martech-driven customer experience seems just plain lazy to them.

Marketers have had to ramp up their use of advanced marketing technology seemingly overnight. They've had to persuade C-suite to invest because customers demand it, and the competition is already doing it.

According to a Scott Brinker 2019 study, the average company now has 91 different marketing cloud services in its martech stack. What's more, when leaders were asked how many different technologies they thought their marketing departments were using, they underestimated it by half. They had twice the technologies they assumed!

In 2020, Ventana Research found that 70% of organizations are trying to integrate more than 6 different data sources.

It's like trying to estimate a plane's arrival time using 91 different clocks that all have a slightly different time. You're going to be late in somebody's book—your customers.Large Martech stacks are not just expensive to acquire.

They also have several recurring costs, such as:

• Maintenance
• Upgrades
• Missed opportunities
• Keeping different systems communicating and dealing with it when they don't
• Staff up-skilling
• Technical support

Enterprise stacks have accumulated layers over the years, leaving teams not even knowing where the data is or what data resides. Marketing technology is critical to today’s marketing function. But it has become overwhelming.

Just add one more advanced tech to your stack. It will change everything. This sentiment is all too familiar.

Other common issues include difficulty scaling programs due to poor integration between solutions and lack of visibility into customer journeys, resulting in decreased customer acquisition, engagement, and retention.

But here's the truth. Fragmented data workflows are high-maintenance for teams at best and generators of a poor customer experience at worst. Marketing and sales aren't speaking the same language because they don't play by a single playbook.

There's a psychological bias that everyone falls into from time to time, called the "sunk cost fallacy", which Harvard Business Review defines as an effect that "occurs when someone chooses to do or continue something just because they have invested (unrecoverable) resources in it in the past."

When leadership falls into this trap, the effects are detrimental. But it happens all the time. The good news is that, as with all biases, once you become aware of it, it loses its hold on you.

Bad data and misconfigured marketing technology are ubiquitous. They have marketing, sales, service, and strategic leadership running in different directions with no common source of truth.

Inefficient? Yes! Costly? You better believe it. Fixable? Absolutely! The solution isn't as unattainable as it may feel right now.

Like many, you may have already switched to HubSpot to unite your team with consistent and useful data. But if you're underutilizing its native capabilities to their fullest, you may be unable to let go of the point “solutions” you're trying to stack on top of it.

It's like buying a plane to get from here to there. But you're not sure how any of the buttons or levers work. It doesn't matter how many new features you add to your plane if you haven't figured out how to fly it.

Here's what we wish more HubSpot users knew. It's a comprehensive CRM complete with:

• Website Content Management
• Marketing and sales automation
• Customer service hub

Through HubSpot, you can manage all aspects of the business and grow with you as you scale your business to enterprise. One tool can bring every marketing and sales activity under a unified roof to generate true sales, marketing and customer service alignment.

And because HubSpot is a marketing-sales-service platform with a CRM at its center, everything is integrated. Data is consistent throughout the buyer's journey. Leadership in every department can work together to optimize revenue.

If you have HubSpot but are currently paying for other technologies that have similar functions, it's time to get more out of HubSpot. But to do that, don't you have to have a manual?

Consider this scenario: marketing technology accounts for 26% of your marketing budget, yet you might not be fully leveraging the tools you're investing in. A 2020 Gartner Study found that the average marketing stack capability utilization is 57%... So, 43% of martech’s capabilities go unused. How do we generate ROI if half of the technology we're paying for sits dormant?

There’s actionable strategies that can be taken to streamline these features and tools.

To ensure you're not missing out on the value of your current tools, it's crucial to find experts who have a proven history of making enhancements.

HubSpot Platform consultants are seasoned professionals who can provide effective guidance, optimizing your resources for better results.

Here’s how it happens

Poor setup and lack of training or strategy are the most common reasons businesses fail to use HubSpot’s features and tools. Underused, misconfigured, or incorrectly implemented solutions can create issues in so many areas, such as:

• Data accuracy
• Customer segmentation
• Customer engagement
• Conversion optimization
• Analytics and Attribution Reporting
• Marketing automation

HubSpot is more than a technical solution for your business goals. Making informed decisions lies at the heart of any successful business. Analytics and data have become indispensable for gaining those crucial insights.

Creating a data-backed growth strategy is not a one-time effort but an ongoing process. Building a data-driven growth strategy should start with auditing gaps in your strategy. The Growth Gap Analyzer highlights opportunities for growth making goals clear and actionable.

Your results incorporate insights gained from your data analysis. They can even be applied to a strategy to create revenue-driven outcomes like these.

From team productivity hacks like comments and pinned notes to lead scoring and personalization to robust revenue attribution and customer journey analytics, HubSpot unifies data, analytics, workflows, and people to delight customers and consistently achieve business goals.

It’s like finally having the manual to help you. Now, you're just flying the plane; you're taking it where you want to go.