If you're weighing up whether to bring in outside help for HubSpot or Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the question you're really asking isn't what a marketing automation consultant does; it's what they will deliver in terms of tangible business outcomes.
6 mins
How can a marketing automation consultant help your business? It’s a fair question, and I'd rather answer it with evidence than a description of our services. So that's what this post does. Below you'll find a collection of MarCloud client stories, organised by the type of challenge we were brought in to solve, along with what we did and the results.
Our clients span different industries, different platforms (HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud), and different stages of marketing maturity. But all of them come to us with a specific problem and a clear expectation that their investment will lead to later returns.
Before we dive in, it’s worth noting that every engagement described here was guided by the MarCloud ROI Framework, a five-stage methodology that covers implementation, data readiness, intelligent execution, ROI reporting, and AI enablement. We use it to make sure we're working on the things that will move your business towards revenue growth.
A marketing automation consultant helps businesses get more measurable value from platforms like HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, typically by fixing what isn't working, building what doesn't yet exist, or both.
As you can imagine, this covers a fairly wide range of work. It might start with HubSpot onboarding or an audit of an existing setup, where we review how the platform is configured, where data is missing or inconsistent, which workflows are overlapping, and why reporting doesn't add up.
From there, it usually moves into technical work, such as reducing sync errors and database bloat, rebuilding automation logic, fixing integrations, structuring campaigns properly, and setting up attribution so that marketing activity can be tied back to revenue.
Beyond the technical side, a good Salesforce or HubSpot consultant brings something difficult to build in-house: experience in your chosen platform(s). When you've seen the same data quality problem surface in a dozen different portals, you know exactly what's causing it and how to fix it without spending weeks diagnosing it from scratch.
Sometimes clients come to MarCloud about a HubSpot migration that was completed six months ago, yet things haven’t worked properly since. Sometimes it's the realisation that the platform has been live for two years and reporting still doesn't prove marketing ROI. Or it's a campaign that didn't perform the way it should have, and no one can work out why.
Other common situations include:
a rapidly growing database that hasn't been cleaned in years
integration between HubSpot and Salesforce keeps producing sync errors
a lead scoring model that sales reps don’t trust
or a team that doesn't have the bandwidth to build automations
Whether the trigger is a new financial year, a change in leadership, or an external deadline that prompts marketing leaders to address their marketing automation woes, the story is pretty much the same: something isn't working, and fixing it in-house is either too slow or beyond the team's current capacity.
The following examples are drawn from real client engagements across HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Each is organised around the type of challenge we were brought in to solve, so if you're facing something similar, it should be straightforward to find the relevant section.
One of the most common scenarios we see is a business with a large database of contacts who showed interest at some point (they enquired, attended a webinar, downloaded something, visited the site repeatedly, etc.) but have since gone cold.
Bruntwood, a major UK property management business, came to us with exactly this situation. They had a solid list of direct enquiries in Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot), all people who had previously expressed interest in leasing workspace.
But the sales team didn't have the time to follow up with contacts of uncertain quality manually. The brief was to design and manage an automated re-engagement campaign that would surface the most interested prospects and give sales a prioritised, actionable list.
We segmented the database rather than treating all contacts the same, built a multi-touch email sequence with personalisation based on each contact's prior behaviour, and created a high-converting landing page tied to a time-limited promotional offer.
Recipients received different follow-up communications depending on whether they opened, clicked, visited the landing page, or didn't engage at all.
As a result, Bruntwood achieved a 17,650% ROI, with the campaign directly tied to leaseholder sign-ups and measurable revenue.
“The services MarCloud provided – and continue to provide – during the implementation, build and management of Pardot have been pivotal to the success of Bruntwood’s marketing, business development and innovation services teams, a project that kicked off in 2019. We’ve been working with the team ever since, a relationship that has gone from strength to strength and has evolved and developed around various business needs and customer engagement goals.”
Common, a commercial real estate business, faced a similar challenge on a larger scale. They had over 150,000 disengaged prospects in their database, skewing reports and increasing usage costs.
We designed separate automated engagement tracks based on each contact's last activity and area of interest, with progressive profiling built in to gather updated information over time, and opt-out triggers throughout to ensure GDPR compliance. The campaign generated tour bookings, new contracts, and a significantly more engaged database.
The consistent lesson from re-engagement work is that segmentation and journey logic matter far more than volume. Instead of sending emails to a large list, it’s better to build an automated sequence that responds to behaviour and routes the right contacts to sales.
“MarCloud has not only demonstrated a firm grasp over Pardot + Salesforce that results in creative custom solutions that fit our current setup but also have shown an incredible dedication to responsive and thorough client management.”
Some of the most important work we do happens when a business is under time pressure. For example, there’s a deadline that can't move, a campaign that needs to go live quickly, or an external event that has changed the marketing picture overnight.
Kirkpatrick Price, a US-based information security firm, came to us at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their in-person services had effectively stopped, and they needed to pivot quickly to promoting their remote services to an existing but not-yet-scored database.
The challenge was getting the right leads to the sales team fast enough to maintain business momentum during a period of huge uncertainty.
We set up scoring and grading in their Account Engagement instance so the database could be ranked by propensity to convert, built the automated campaign, and configured automated Salesforce Tasks that delivered warm leads directly to sales reps at the right moment, removing the manual effort of chasing contacts and ensuring no lead was missed.
“The team at MarCloud has provided us with a level of guidance and expertise that is unrivaled. Whether wrestling with native support, or trying to hunt down solutions through Google searches and video tutorials, we were always unsatisfied with results and we really were unable to tap into Pardot’s full capabilities. With MarCloud’s help, though, we’ve been able to get caught up on best practices, and we’re already seeing results. No matter the question we have, the team has a solution. They’ve saved me countless hours and, by avoiding an expensive hire, many dollars, too.”
Pieta, an Irish mental health and suicide prevention charity, faced a different kind of pressure: the annual Darkness Into Light fundraising campaign, which runs on a fixed date, involves complex supporter segmentation and carries enormous emotional weight.
With a small internal team and a hard deadline, they needed their Account Engagement setup to be reliable, sensitive to context, and capable of handling campaign communications at scale without putting additional strain on staff.
Our work together started with a discovery phase to understand Pieta's audience segments and campaign goals. Then we focused on automating the repetitive parts of the campaign, such as segmenting the supporter database, aligning email content to each group, and introducing reporting dashboards that gave the team clear visibility of performance without requiring manual analysis.
The result was a 97% increase over the fundraising target, with the team spending less time on administration and more time on storytelling and strategy.
“Working with MarCloud felt seamless, from clear project tracking to high-quality turnarounds and incredible attention to detail. It wasn’t just marketing support. It was a true partnership.”
What both of these examples show is that marketing automation consultants are hugely valuable when the margin for error is small or the timeline doesn't allow for a learning curve.
ROI from marketing automation is usually thought of as implicit leads or a revenue spike. But sometimes it shows up as hours given back to a team that was spending its limited time on tasks that should have been faster, easier, or automated entirely.
Roland DG EMEA, the European arm of the global imaging and printing manufacturer, had accumulated more than 1,000 Account Engagement forms across their EMEA operations. Each form had been built at a different point in time, for a different market, product, or campaign, with no consistent naming convention or folder structure to hold it all together.
The marketing team was losing hours to basic admin: finding the right form, editing it, and keeping track of which version was live where.
We overhauled the entire form library: standardising the naming structure, reorganising the folder hierarchy, and reducing the number of forms overall.
The result was a 75% reduction in form management time, and tasks that previously took hours now take minutes. Roland DG were also experiencing over 2,000 sync errors between Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud, which we resolved as part of the wider engagement, removing a source of data inconsistency that was affecting reporting accuracy.
“Having to manage the hundreds of Account Engagement forms for our EMEA website was often a complex and time-consuming task. We needed a more efficient way to work and MarCloud has helped us to realise this with their solution. We can now spend minutes making changes that previously took hours.”
Migrations are one of the highest-stakes projects in marketing automation consulting because the consequences of getting them wrong can be disastrous. A poor migration leads to data anomalies, broken workflows, and attribution gaps that don't always show immediately and can wreak havoc on campaign reports for months.
Scott Logic, a UK technology and digital consultancy, came to us to manage a migration from Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) to HubSpot Marketing Hub, with the additional complexity of maintaining a live integration with Salesforce CRM.
We managed the migration end-to-end, with a focus on data integrity, correct configuration from day one, and a HubSpot setup structured to scale with the business rather than just replicate the old environment in a new platform. The Salesforce CRM integration was rebuilt properly, and the internal team was trained and handed over a system they understood.
“We worked with MarCloud on a strategic migration from Salesforce to HubSpot, including a full rebuild of our marketing automation, data structure, and reporting. From the outset, they brought a clear methodology to planning, data mapping, and integration, which gave us confidence in tackling what was a complex, business-critical project.”
Another example is a long-standing client, Parameta Solutions, who had worked with MarCloud for several years as their Pardot partner before migrating to HubSpot. Alongside the migration, we resolved legacy Salesforce issues to prevent technical debt from carrying over and built out complex workflows to support lead management, lifecycle staging, and downstream reporting.
"Rather than applying a like-for-like migration, they actively remediated issues within the existing environment to ensure the HubSpot implementation would integrate seamlessly with Salesforce and support long-term scalability. Their disciplined delivery, combined with a deep understanding of both HubSpot and Salesforce, resulted in an implementation that is robust, well-integrated and aligned with our business and reporting needs."
Attribution means being able to show which marketing activity influenced revenue, and it’s one of the things marketing directors most want from their platforms, yet most frequently struggle with.
Sometimes, this is because the underlying integration, tracking, and data structure need to be set up correctly for attribution to mean anything, and that configuration work gets deprioritised when teams are chasing their tails to get campaigns live.
Terrapinn, an international events business, faced this challenge. As a fast-growing company with operations across multiple markets, their Salesforce CRM setup was creating pressure on the internal team and limiting their ability to report accurately across regions. We led a structured overhaul to implement Salesforce Data Cloud, reducing the operational strain, improving data consistency, and giving the team a more scalable platform to work from.
“Before Data Cloud, we were using around 145% of our storage. Now, we are down to 84% and continue to reduce numbers. MarCloud’s implementation allowed us to remove around 4.5m records that were bloating our CRM into more cost-effective storage.”
Some of the most productive consulting relationships are ongoing ones, where we function as an extension of the internal marketing team, available when needed, and picking up the technical work that would otherwise slow down or stall the campaign calendar.
For durhamlane, a B2B sales outsourcing business, we built out HubSpot live chat to enable automated customer engagement, lead qualification, and routing, which was a meaningful addition for a sales-led organisation where response speed has a direct effect on conversion.
“Tom and the team helped us to build out our HubSpot live chat to enable greater automated customer engagement, qualification and routing. Tom and the team were super helpful and responsive would happily work with them again.”
Ambition Institute, a non-profit focused on education leadership development, worked with us over a sustained period to build out their Account Engagement setup from a solid technical foundation through to more sophisticated Engagement Studio journeys for lead nurture. The work enabled them to attract and track more new business, which, for a non-profit, is as important a measure of success as it is for any commercial organisation.
“MarCloud’s knowledge on Pardot and Salesforce are second to none. They’ve supported us in making sure we have the basics set up well through to creating in-depth and creative Engagement Studios that have allowed us to attract and track more new business.”
With ongoing consulting, each improvement to the platform makes the next campaign easier to build, attribute, and optimise, and the consultant's growing familiarity with your account means more time spent on the things that make a difference to your business.
There are a handful of things that prove a highly effective consultant from an average one, regardless of which platform you're working with.
The first starting point is platform certifications. But more than this, you're looking for a Salesforce or HubSpot partner (or both!) who has proven work across multiple industries and account types. A consultant who has only ever worked in one sector or on one type of project will give you technically correct advice that may not account for specific dynamics.
Ask to see client results like those we’ve shared in this blog. Testimonials are useful, but it’s better to get examples of what was delivered and what changed as a result. If a consultant can't point to measurable outcomes from previous work, they may not be the best fit.
It's also worth paying attention to whether they ask the right questions before they propose anything. A great consultant won’t move quickly to solutions before they've understood the business problem. For example, if you’re seeking help with your HubSpot dashboards but overlooking the data quality and other factors that play into proving ROI.
Finally, consider how they handle the parts of the platform or project that aren’t in their wheelhouse. A good consultant will tell you when something is outside their area, or when a different approach would serve you better, rather than saying ‘yes’ to everything.
If any of the challenges described in this post sound familiar, whether it's a database that needs proper re-engagement, a migration that isn’t running smoothly, reporting you can't trust, or simply a software that isn't being used to its potential, let’s have a conversation.
MarCloud works with HubSpot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud clients across the UK, Europe, and the US. We offer audits, implementation, integration, ongoing consulting, and migration support, all guided by the MarCloud ROI Framework.
Book a call with one of our certified consultants to discuss where your setup currently stands and what the most impactful next step would be.
Founder & CEO of MarCloud, Tom has been on both sides of the fence, client-side and agency, working with Salesforce platforms for the best part of a decade. He's a Salesforce Marketing Champion and certified consultant who loves to co-host webinars and pen original guides and articles. A regular contributor to online business and marketing publications, he's passionate about marketing automation and, along with the team, is rapidly making MarCloud the go-to place for Marketing Cloud and Salesforce expertise. He unapologetically uses the terms Pardot, Account Engagement and MCAE interchangeably.
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