Rebuilding Bizimply’s Marketing Technology Stack

Bizimply are a SaaS (software-as-a-service) company that provide a workforce management platform for the hospitality and retail industries.

Like many B2B software companies, Bizimply have been using an inbound marketing approach to generate leads and drive business.

While marketing solutions were adopted from early on, they weren’t implemented in a holistic matter. Instead, the business followed the ‘natural evolution’ of small business martech, where every piece of software added was more of a momentary solution for a particular problem.

I joined Bizimply in July 2018 as the company’s first Demand Generation Manager. One of my first assignments was to review and improve the existing marketing technology stack and marketing processes.

One of the key challenges was the lack of developed marketing function, which meant marketing processes, technology and data had no real owners.

Furthermore, there were limited sources of information regarding these processes and the alignment between marketing and sales was not fully formed.

The biggest challenge, however, was the resource constraints. It was a priority for the business to have an efficient, sophisticated, scalable and affordable technology stack implemented.

At the same time, I had to set up and run a marketing function and develop a marketing strategy as the company’s sole marketer.

Research

I started the project with the initial research, which involved talking to everyone from the different departments (incl. sales, customer success, product) who had any insights on the marketing processes.

I also reviewed the handover documents of former employees who had previously worked on the marketing technology stack to get a better understanding of the system.

These helped me create a list of tools and processes which I had to review during the audit phase.

Audit

Following the research, I proceeded with a more deep-dive audit, during which I took a closer look at the following:

• How the system in place was aligned with marketing objectives.
• How the current system helped marketing strategy enablement.
• The existing marketing processes and operations.
• the connection between the different sales and marketing tools.
• Where and how data was stored and processed.
• The existing user journeys.

Some of the key findings included:

• Lack of two-way (or bi-directional) data synchronisation between the CRM and the main marketing platform;
• Disparate systems and databases;
• Lack of quality data;
• Overcomplicated processes and user journeys;
• Several unnecessary/redundant tools used;
• Poor alignment between marketing and sales;
• Potential GDPR issues.

The audit not only highlighted the main issues but also listed recommendations on how they should be solved.

Visualisation

A crucial part of the audit was creating clear & detailed visualisations of the tools, their relationships and the processes in place.

I designed the following visual aids to supplement the audit:

• A diagram of the entire marketing technology stack;
• A diagram of the ideal martech stack (based on business needs and objectives);
• Marketing process & data flow maps;
• Maps of the existing customer journeys (e.g. demo booking, quote request);
• Maps of the ideal customer journeys.

Expanding the project

After putting together the audit documentation and discussing it with the wider team, it became obvious that the scope of the project could be extended to include other business and operational processes driven by technology.

I teamed up with Bizimply’s Operations Manager and Head of Sales to do an audit of the entire business tech.

After the audit finished, we reviewed our findings and created a list of requirements we needed from our technology stack.

Vendor evaluation & selection

After the assessment of our needs and requirements, we evaluated several technology vendors.

Eventually, we chose HubSpot’s Growth Suite to replace the existing CRM, marketing platform and several other tools.

We built a business case and presented it to the Board of Directors who accepted our proposal to purchase and implement the new system.

Implementation

The implementation of the new sales & marketing platform started in December 2018. As the project lead, I supervised the implementation and data migration, set up the core elements of the technology stack and built all marketing processes and automation.

By the end of January 2019, we seamlessly switched over to the new system.

We saw the benefits of the rebuilt technology stack straight away. The new system:

• Simplified and automated certain sales & marketing process.
• Improved the alignment between the two functions.
• Provided more and better data.
• Enabled a 360-degree customer view.
• Lowered the business tech expenses (by reducing the number of tools).
• Provided full GDPR compliance.

The new marketing/sales technology stack also let Bizimply grow faster. Soon after the implementation, we started seeing a continuous 15-20% increase in qualified leads generated quarter-on-quarter.

Compared to the year before, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) generated during the months of 2019 increased by an average of 80%.

The platform also improved customer communications, which was important to boost customer satisfaction, reduce churn and help the customer referral programme.