CRM, Marketing and Automation Platforms We Work With

Most people who contact us about a platform are really asking about something underneath it. The HubSpot portal still assigns a share of inbound leads to a rep who left in the spring. The Klaviyo flows all run, but no one can say which customers count as at risk. The Mailchimp account has six audiences and the same person sits in four of them.

Those problems show up inside a specific tool, and fixing them takes real working knowledge of that tool: its objects, its trigger logic, the settings that quietly override each other. The cause, though, is usually upstream. Nobody decided what the system needs to know about a customer, which change in that customer’s state should set something in motion, and how anyone would tell whether it worked.

So we start with the data, the customer states and the business rules, then configure the platform to carry them. Platform knowledge decides how well that gets built; it can’t stand in for the decisions themselves.

Platforms by category

HubSpot and Klaviyo are where we spend most of our time. The others are platforms we regularly audit, configure and connect. Each page covers how that platform models customers and where its setups tend to break.

Choosing or switching platforms

Switching platforms rarely fixes a lifecycle problem on its own. A store moves from Mailchimp to Klaviyo because “we can’t segment properly.” Two months later the same complaint comes back, because the team never agreed what a repeat customer is, and the new account was rebuilt from the old one’s habits.

Sometimes a move is the right call. A B2B sales team running deals out of an email tool with no real pipeline will hit a ceiling. An ecommerce brand that needs event-level purchase and browsing data in its marketing system needs a platform built around that. Before we recommend either direction, we look at a few practical questions:

• Is the limit in the platform’s data model, or in how the account was set up?
• Who works in the system every day: sales reps, a marketer, an operations lead?
• Where does order, billing or booking data actually live, and can it reach the platform reliably?
• What would a move cost in rebuilt automation, lost history and retraining?

If the answer is “fix what you have,” a CRM audit shows where to start. If it’s “move,” we plan the data model and automation first and run the move as a planned CRM migration, not a copy-paste exercise.

Where integrations fit

A CRM rarely works alone. Forms, the online store, billing, scheduling, the support desk and ad platforms all hold part of the customer picture, and the platform is only as current as the data reaching it.

Zapier, Make and n8n are integration platforms. They move data between systems; they are not CRMs, and they’re a poor place to keep customer logic. When a qualification rule lives inside a Zap, nobody looking at the CRM can see why a record changed. We use them for transport and keep the business rules where the team can find them. See how we approach integrations.