As the IT experts for their clients, MSPs often have to make business software recommendations. When it comes to sales and marketing automation tools, SMBs are often faced with a choice of expensive offerings, choosing an all-in-one solution, or cobbling together several lower-end tools.
As an example, HubSpot recently introduced a new sales and marketing tool that packs a lot of functionality in a single package. HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise is aimed at SMBs and is designed for those clients who want a complete solution, rather than buying different parts of the sales and marketing stack off the shelf.
The larger players in this space – Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft – have often used their substantial financial resources to buy the pieces in the stack they were missing. They then worked to incorporate those target companies into a larger product family. HubSpot is offering a fully home-grown solution as an alternative for SMBs, especially those companies at the larger end of the SMB spectrum.
What’s more, the HubSpot solution doesn’t completely discount the smaller companies in the SMB demographic. It believes that if businesses start with them at an early stage, they can grow into the product they scale.
Complete or best in class
As an MSP, you should consider advising your clients on whether having an all-in-one solution from a single vendor is a better choice than picking and choosing from best-of-breed solutions. It’s a complicated decision because it pits simplicity versus functionality. The problem is that sometimes all-in-one packages excel at certain things and are weaker at others.
Your client may ultimately think good enough is good enough. In fact, it may be, particularly when they’re small and the problems they have are fairly basic. As a company grows and evolves, you could be faced with helping them choose an entirely new sales and marketing stack to meet those changing requirements. That can complicate matters for a growing company.
It goes without saying that clients want to get their sales and marketing tools right because they have such a huge impact on the company’s bottom line. These tools help you attract new customers and track those customers as they turn into revenue.
There is no right answer here. HubSpot’s new tool set is just one of many out there from vendors large and small. It’s up to you, the MSP, to help your clients sort through all of this and find the solution that best fits their needs – now and as they grow.
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