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For VARs, MSPs, and SaaS companies, marketing automation offers a chance to scale outreach, nurture leads, and close more deals, even with lots of competition, tight margins, and rising customer acquisition costs. But while it’s easy to see the potential in automation, it’s all too common for organizations to fall into the trap of confusing automation with effectiveness.
Throwing tools at your marketing doesn’t automatically generate ROI. The real power lies in building an engine, then tracking what matters and eliminating what doesn’t. Learning how to automate effectively will change your life and your business, so let’s break down how to do exactly that.
Marketing automation can sound like a dream: plug in your workflows, sit back, and watch the leads roll in. For many tech organizations though, especially VARs and MSPs juggling multiple services and buyer personas, automation can become a bloated, over-engineered beast.
You end up with a maze of email drips, lead scoring rules, and campaign tags that no one really understands. Worse, your sales team tunes out because none of it actually aligns with real revenue.
This happens when teams optimize for activity, instead of outcomes.
Not all KPIs are created equal. If you’re measuring click rates and open rates in isolation, you're missing the forest for the trees. It’s important to assign different weights to different metrics and understand how they all work together to influence purchasing decisions. It’s also important to ensure you’re tracking the metrics that are relevant to your specific goals.
For example, here are a few ROI-centric metrics worth tracking:
Lead-to-Customer Conversion Rate: Of all the leads marketing automation touches, how many become paying customers?
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much are you spending on marketing automation (tools, time, ad spend) to land one new client?
Sales Velocity: Are automated campaigns accelerating the path from first touch to closed deal?
Revenue per Lead Source: Which automated workflows and campaigns are actually generating revenue — not just leads?
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Are automation-qualified customers more loyal or profitable?
These metrics tie directly to the bottom line.
One major reason automation fails to deliver ROI is misalignment with the customer journey.
SaaS buyers don’t want cold drip emails if they’re deep in a trial. MSP prospects don’t need top-of-funnel blogs when they’re evaluating vendors for a near-term switch.
But you can use automation to deliver contextual experiences for the different segments in your list:
ToF (Top-of-Funnel): Lead magnets, blog subscriptions, event invites.
MoF (Middle-of-Funnel): Case studies, ROI calculators, demo offers.
BoF (Bottom-of-Funnel): Sales follow-ups, proposal templates, onboarding previews.
Marketing automation platforms like HubSpot enable you to build workflows that nudge rather than spam, and content that delivers value, expertise, and your unique insight. Then, use behavior-based triggers (like visiting your pricing page or engaging with a webinar) to tailor follow-up.
If your marketing automation platform isn’t synced with your CRM, you’re flying blind.
VARs and MSPs often deal with complex sales cycles that involve multiple decision-makers and custom proposals. Automation can help with lead nurturing, but only if sales has visibility into what marketing is doing, and vice versa.
Critical integrations include:
Lead Scoring + CRM Fields: Make sure scores translate into actions for sales. If a lead hits a certain threshold, trigger a notification or task in the CRM.
Campaign Attribution: Use UTM tracking and proper source tagging so you can attribute closed revenue to the right workflows.
Sales Feedback Loop: Create structured feedback channels for sales to rate lead quality. Adjust scoring and workflows accordingly.
Remember, marketing and sales work together, on the same team, towards the same goals. You also each have important insights and feedback to help further strengthen the work you’re doing to build the pipeline, close deals, and create advocates for your business. An automation-driven marketing funnel can only work effectively if its design and efficacy are shared with sales. Working from a platform like HubSpot helps you keep everyone looped in and on the same page.
One of the most underrated parts of maximizing ROI? Letting go, whether it’s an idea you loved that’s just not working or a workflow you completely forgot about.
For example, it's incredibly common for all kinds of businesses to launch a sequence, get excited about it for a short period of time, but then forget it. MSPs may run a nurture series that once worked but now gets 1% click-through and no replies. VARs may pump money into retargeting ads without checking lead quality.
Here’s how to clean house:
Quarterly Workflow Audits: Review campaign performance. Archive anything with declining engagement or low conversion.
Split-Test Ruthlessly: A/B test subject lines, CTA buttons, send times, and content formats. Kill losers fast.
Consolidate Tech Stack: Many companies are paying for overlapping tools. Look for consolidation opportunities or ditch underused platforms.
Customer Feedback: Talk to leads and clients. Find out what content they found helpful vs. annoying. Use this to refine messaging.
ROI thrives in simplicity. The fewer, more effective workflows you have, the easier it is to scale them.
ROI isn’t static. Your best-performing email campaign this quarter might flatline next quarter (but then revive the next). New competitors emerge. Buyer behavior shifts.
That’s why you need a culture of continuous optimization:
Set Benchmarks: What’s your baseline conversion rate, CAC, and sales cycle length today?
Monitor Monthly: Use dashboards to spot early performance drops or engagement changes.
Run Experiments: Introduce one new automation tactic per month. Measure its impact and either double down or ditch it.
Celebrate Wins: Share positive ROI stories internally. Show how automation helped close a deal or reclaim lost leads.
Track Patterns and Don’t Overemphasize Outliers: Maybe you have a newsletter that consistently performs, but then dive-bombs one month. Keep paying attention to metrics, make small adjustments as needed, but don’t let one poor performance tank something that’s been working. Make the best educated hypothesis you can—perhaps it’s the season, or a topic that didn’t resonate—then see if this is a pattern that continues, or if you pick back up in the next couple of sends.
In other words, treat marketing automation as a living system, not a one-and-done install.Marketing automation will change your life and make your task list much easier, but it isn’t about sending more emails or building bigger workflows. It’s about delivering smarter, more timely interactions that help your prospects solve problems and make buying decisions faster.
For tech companies, the ROI of automation is real, but only if you’re focused on the right metrics, aligned with sales, and willing to kill what’s not working.
In the end, tools matter. But your business also needs the discipline to use them intentionally.
Most IT companies know they should be marketing themselves, but it can be tough to justify the investment when you haven’t figured out how to reap the reward. We get it. Let's ensure you've got the right tools, you're making the right investment, and that your business is set up for success.
