The podcast powered by the MSP Marketing Edge

Welcome to Episode 301 of the MSP Marketing Podcast with me, Paul Green. This week…

• Should your MSP get HubSpot? A review: The system you use to manage marketing with your prospects has to be a good match for your MSP, otherwise you could have a very costly waste of time on your hands. So, is Hubspot the right choice for you?


• Free Windows 10 end of life marketing materials: Windows 10 end of life is now less than two months away and this could be a massive once a decade marketing opportunity for you.


• How to run your MSP by the numbers – and which to track: If I asked you about the most important marketing and growth numbers in your MSP would you know what those numbers should be? My guest works with MSPs to help them understand just this.


• Paul’s Personal Peer Group: 

Should your MSP get HubSpot? A review

Whatever you do, don’t pick a CRM for your MSP until you’ve heard this, and especially if you’re looking at HubSpot. The system you use to manage marketing with your prospects has to be a good match for your business, otherwise you could have a very costly waste of time on your hands. So which is the right CRM for MSPs? Have you been considering systems like MailChimp, MailerLite, Growably from the Tech Tribe or even HubSpot? Eight months ago I switched my business to HubSpot, so let’s review it eight months on and see if I’d recommend it for your MSP.

On the 14th of April 2009 I committed to my first serious CRM. It was called Infusionsoft. I know the date because I’ve still got the welcome email. Now, back then I owned a different business, actually one I sold in 2016 just before entering the channel, but even back then I knew that finding and committing to good software that sat at the heart of my marketing was critical.

At the time, Infusionsoft was the hot property. In fact, I’d say it was instrumental in our success building that business. It allowed me to build up a large audience of prospects. I had 12,000 of them in that last business and using Infusionsoft I could grow a relationship with those prospects using content marketing all sent out in that CRM. And I had a telesales team whose job was to call those prospects and book them in meetings with our salespeople, and that allowed us to convert the relationships from prospects into clients.

I look back now at that 2009 to 2016 period and realise that was kind of a golden time for Infusionsoft, because since then it really has gone off the boil. First, there was a focus on not just being a CRM and a marketing platform, but becoming a payment platform as well. And then the original founders left and then the new people that took over, the new management team, they rebranded it as Keap, and they created a second CRM, which seemed to do the same things as the first CRM but in a different way. And then the original founder took control again and then they tried to bring those two products together as one, and I’m not quite sure how successful that was. And then they were trying to turn themselves into an automation business, but there was no clear roadmap of what that meant or how they were going to do it, and they also massively hiked up the prices.

Now I’ve been using Infusionsoft (or Keap) in the MSP Marketing Edge since day one, since we opened back in 2017, and I’ve been feeling for a while up to last year that we needed to change our CRM. But our use of it was so extensive, I mean, it was weaved throughout the whole of the MSP Marketing Edge that the thought of migrating to something new made me feel sick inside because as I say, we don’t just use it for our marketing. We run all of our portal automation, all of our clever stuff gets run through the CRM. The trigger that caused me to change happened in October last year, so in 2024, when Keap was sold to a company called Thryv, and I decided that that was a fire sale just based on the sale price that was sold compared to their revenue. That was my trigger to move.

There were only really two CRMs that we took seriously. The first was GoHighLevel, which as you may know, powers Growably in the Tech Tribe and a whole load of other platforms used across the channel. So if you are with a vendor that offers you a CRM or any kind of marketing level automation, the chances are pretty high that they’ve built it on GoHighLevel because that’s what that does. It gives you something that you can white label for your agency or your platform, and we looked very seriously at this for a long time. The pricing is very good, but we found it a bit buggy and because it had been built to be white labelled to do what we wanted to do with it would’ve required a huge amount of development time, probably another full-time developer.

So instead we decided to migrate to HubSpot, and as I stand here eight months on, I am still highly impressed with the HubSpot product. It’s amazing, and I realise how much using Keap was holding us back. Using HubSpot has allowed us to do more things across more channels and connect all of our activity together in the backend so much more easily. You can automate so many more things and now we are held back by our ideas rather than functionality.

It’s very rare for us to come up with an idea and then not be able to figure out a way to do it on HubSpot.

It’s now quick and easy to spin out new marketing initiatives to generate landing pages that allow me to launch those initiatives within 24 hours of thinking of them, and I can track exactly what prospects are doing on our website and on email and some other platforms to a certain extent. We get an idea of what they’re doing on social media, you are a bit restricted by the actual social media platforms themselves rather than HubSpot, but there’s more and more things that you can put into HubSpot and integrate and it all just act together. It’s amazing.

Increasingly, my team and I are spending more time in HubSpot, encouraging more engagement and more marketing activity with our prospects. And our database is growing as well, our ability to see who is a good fit for our MSP Marketing Edge is getting better all the time, right down to we can even see which of the prospects in our database are in available areas. A key part of the MSP Marketing Edge is that we only sell it to one MSP per area and that’s a genuine lock. When we are working with someone, let’s say in your area, we won’t work with anyone else, so being able to narrow our prospect list down – we’ve got around about a thousand MSPs in our database who are in an available area, they could buy what we sell – this is incredibly powerful and the ability to do that is completely automated. No human has to do anything to maintain that list, which is constantly changing every single day. I love it.

So overall, I’m very happy with HubSpot. I do have, for balance, two complaints and both of them eight months on are minor complaints at this stage. But the first is that I found the onboarding to be a massive headache. The lady onboarding us was very pleasant to deal with and she knew her stuff, but standing back and taking a big picture view, it was really poorly informed. None of the info that we handed out during the very long sales process was passed on to the onboarding lady. It was really frustrating having to explain our business again and how we were going to use it. Because we were a complicated case, we weren’t just the CRM, we were going to use it to power our portal and we’re doing that migration now. It was actually very stressful during the onboarding.

They set some arbitrary deadlines for when the onboarding must be completed and those were often thrown at me almost as like a punishment because I got a little bit behind on the things that I said I do, and almost every single call started with, oh, you need to hit this deadline. You need to be off onboarding by a week on Thursday, I guess because the onboarding person had targets to hit. And at one point I said, I do feel like the tail is wagging the dog here. I’ve paid a lot of money for onboarding and I’m being beaten up during that onboarding because it was also wildly expensive. We paid a few thousand pounds or dollars for mandatory onboarding and there was no choice to skip that, which I do understand as it ensures that new clients use the software, but it was kind of useful, but it was also the worst value for money for anything I’ve bought in the last few years. We ended up hiring a HubSpot consultant who is amazing and he’s still working with us today. Side note, if you would like a referral into our HubSpot consultant, just send me a DM or just comment on this post and I’ll give you his details. He’s been invaluable in integrating HubSpot into our business, but he was an external consultant outside of HubSpot and of course he’s a cost as well. He’s cost us thousands and thousands of pounds, none of which I anticipated when I started migration, and I don’t resent that at all, but obviously the bill has been high. The overall HubSpot bill has been high.

Which leads me onto my other complaint. The cost of HubSpot. You really do pay through the nose for every single bit of functionality that you want to use and let’s not beat around the bush. What they have designed is amazing. It’s an amazing piece of software that works very well. It’s logical, it has a few bugs, but those bugs get fixed. There’s very few things in HubSpot that you cannot do. There’s very few things that you c