The marketing budget is clearly going to be a major consideration when choosing your tech stack. This is a challenging step in the process because there are so many technology tools available and many of them have built-in solutions and native integrations, some of which you'll need and some of which you won't.

HubSpot, for example, offers a chat bot, but it's not customizable with HubSpot's entry level packages. If converting website visitors into leads is part of your strategy, you'll need a customizable bot.

The first decision needs to be your CRM and marketing automation platforms. When evaluating those foundational tools, see if some of the tools you will need are included or at least available via an API or integrated app.

Some of the most popular apps that are used with a CRM are:

• Data cleaning tool e.g., NeverBounce
• Webinar integration e.g., Zoom
• Gmail & Outlook
• WordPress
• Zapier
• Facebook
• Google Ads
• Slack
• Linkedin Navigator
• Twitter
• Survey Monkey
• PandaDoc
• WooCommerce

As you are evaluating a CRM and email automation solution, find out how many integration partners they have. The integration you’ll need will depend on your marketing plan.

If, for example, you are planning to import contact lists, you’ll need a data cleansing tool. If you are prospecting on Linkedin, you can use automation tools to import your new prospects into your CRM, without having to do any manual data entry.

The list goes on and on...

The major players offer dozens and dozens of integrations. Some of these work better than others so it’s worth taking a deeper dive into the integrations that are available from your CRM and your email automation platform before making any firm commitments.

If you don't have a database of contacts or any other historical data at this stage, then, yes, you can skip this step!

But if you do, remember to consider how you will import your legacy data into your new marketing tech stack tools.

Some questions to ask yourself about the solution and the package you are considering:

• Does it have the capability to host all my data?
• Can it tag my data by customer, persona and other segmentation criteria?
• Are there custom fields I can add to manage customer data points that are specific to my business?
• Can I tag contacts who have previously bounced or opted-out so I can comply with GDPR requirements?

This step is particularly important if you are migrating businesses processes , beyond marketing and sales data into a new platform.

Scalability and security are areas that will require input from the technology specialists.

But make you take this step very seriously.

Think about how your business will scale, how you will comply with data privacy laws and other security issues that could make your website and your marketing technology tools vulnerable to cyber attacks.

If you are using Microsoft for email, then you may already be using their calendar, OneDrive, OneNote, TEAMS and other Microsoft products to manage your business.

If you’re using Google for your email, then you’re likely using their calendar, Drive, Meet, Sheets and other Google tools.

This is important to consider when you’re building your marketing technology stack because, again, you’ll want to automate as much as possible throughout your organization. Some simple examples include integrating your email with your CRM so you have a full history of your email conversations with your prospects, and integrating your calendar so your prospects so you can set up a “Schedule a meeting” link to send your prospects.

Your business may also have financial packages such as QuickBooks, WooCommerce, an Applicant Tracking System or other tools that are being used to run your operations. It's worth automating as many processes as possible so consider all those when building out your tech stack.

Try to avoid picking a tool in the short-term and thinking you can always migrate to a different foundation tool later.

Marketing campaigns, for example, are intended to nurture contacts over a long period of time. Therefore, marketing analytics become more valuable over time.

Automation tools provide insights about your contacts such as topics they are interested in, content that they consume, webinars they attend, etc. And when it comes to your CRM, you’ll have a history of activities, meetings, notes, documents, etc.

It would be very time consuming to migrate all of that sales and marketing intelligence from one foundational CRM to another, and after all that, there's a good chance that you still won't be able to migrate the data in a way that will be easy to access.

Another thing to consider is hosting Landing Pages on a CRM, such as HubSpot. If you decide to move to another CRM in the future, you'd have to re-create all of those marketing assets from scratch, and you'd lose the historical data.

When evaluating your marketing technology tools, consider the reporting and analytics that are available from the solution.

Go back to your marketing KPIs and try to find tools that will help you track the results of those KPIs.

Pulling together marketing metrics can be a time-consuming task for the marketing team—time that is better spent executing campaigns.

The more that can be automated, the better.

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