Achieving marketing harmony: SAGE Group's HubSpot transformation

About SAGE Group

The challenge: marketing across multiple platforms

SAGE Group's success in acquiring complementary businesses created an unexpected challenge: a fragmented digital marketing ecosystem across five separate HubSpot portals. This digital division created several significant hurdles:

• Their customer data existed in separate systems, making it difficult to identify contacts who might benefit from services across multiple SAGE brands.
• Their marketing operations lacked cohesion, with each brand following different processes for similar activities.
• More critically, there was no integration between their marketing platforms and Salesforce, resulting in inconsistent lead follow-up and significant blind spots in their reporting. This disconnect between marketing and sales created friction in the customer journey and made it impossible to accurately measure marketing's impact on revenue.

As SAGE continued evolving from traditional sales approaches to more sophisticated digital strategies, they recognised that this fragmented approach couldn't support their future vision. They needed a unified platform that could scale with their business, connect seamlessly with sales, and still maintain what makes each brand unique.

The solution: unified platform, distinct identities

Bc developed a transformation strategy designed to bring order to SAGE's digital marketing while preserving the essence of each brand in their portfolio.

We began with discovery workshops to map the current state of each portal, understand pain points, and envision a unified future. This groundwork established a clear migration roadmap that prioritised business continuity alongside transformation.

The core of our solution leveraged HubSpot's Business Units feature, creating a unified platform where each brand maintained its distinct identity. This approach allowed for shared resources and standardised processes while preserving brand-specific assets and customer experiences.

Our data migration strategy ensured customer information transferred cleanly while standardising how contacts move through their buyer journey across all brands. We developed a custom approach to lifecycle stage management that accommodated both b2b-focused brands and those serving individual professionals.

The Salesforce integration was a crucial component, creating a seamless connection between marketing and sales for the first time. This integration established clear lead handover processes, consistent follow-up procedures, and comprehensive reporting across the entire customer journey.