The situation
A mid-market firm runs marketing on an all-in-one platform — HubSpot-class: email, forms, landing pages, lead scoring, attribution, all in one subscription. The team of eight uses perhaps a third of it, but the pricing tiers are bundled, so they pay for all of it — and the bill climbs with the contact database, which only ever grows. Call it £40,000–£70,000 a year at the marketing-plus-CRM tiers many mid-market firms land on, before add-ons.
The sharper pain isn’t the bill. It’s that the platform’s model of “a funnel” isn’t theirs. Their buying cycle runs through distributors and quarterly trade events; attribution that assumes a clean web-form journey tells them comforting nonsense. The data they actually need — which distributor activity correlates with which end-customer orders — lives in the ERP the platform has never heard of.
The old options
Live with it (most do), stack more point tools on top, or commission a bespoke marketing stack — which, in the old economics, nobody sane did for a team of eight. The new economics make it a real option for the first time.
What we’d build
Not a HubSpot clone — the parts this firm actually uses, built around the funnel they actually have:
- Campaign and email journeys with the segmentation that matters to them: distributor region, product line, event attendance
- Lead capture and scoring fed by the real signals — quote requests and ERP order history, not just page views
- Attribution that joins marketing activity to orders in the ERP, answering the question the board actually asks: what moved revenue?
- GDPR-clean contact management with consent history, owned in the firm’s own database
- Email delivery via a commodity sending service at commodity prices — the expensive part of the platform was never the sending
The build
Discovery call, scope in writing within days, then a prototype in days: the attribution view running on a copy of last year’s campaign and order data — the report they’ve wanted for years, visible before they’ve committed to the full build. Production in weeks, with the email journeys migrated one at a time alongside the old platform until cutover.
The economics
Typically 60–80% less than a traditional build, and against the platform subscription: the build pays for itself within a couple of years of cancelled licences, after which the cost is modest support and pennies-per-thousand email delivery. The contact database can grow without the bill growing with it. The firm owns the data, the logic and the asset.
Month three
The team runs the same journeys with less fighting. The board gets attribution tied to orders, not form-fills. And the annual “platform renewal negotiation” calendar entry quietly disappears.