Opinion: Google’s CRM Play Is A Game-Changer For Agencies

Did Google’s mooted acquisition of HubSpot pass you by? Well, it shouldn’t have. Here, Todd McPhee, founder of tech consultancy Engaging.io, opines on why it might be a huge boost for agencies. 

Google’s owner Alphabet is eyeing a potential acquisition of HubSpot and should the deal be confirmed and pass regulatory scrutiny, it would be Google’s largest-ever purchase and make it a serious customer relationship management (CRM) player almost instantly.

The rationale behind the deal for Google is clear. HubSpot being folded into the Google tent enables it to compete with rival Microsoft in the lucrative and booming CRM and business application space, tapping into a wider base of enterprise customers who spend on marketing and advertising. While there are myriad of benefits for both parties, there are big plus sides for agencies willing to take them too – a seismic shift in the services offered for clients, while providing a welcome revenue boost in an increasingly disrupted and rapidly evolving marketing ecosystem.

For context and full disclosure, I started Engaging.io, which is now a global HubSpot Elite partner, 15 years ago after spending more than a decade working in media planning and buying agencies. Having worked at both sides of this equation, it’s not just about Google expanding its reach into CRM – it’s about agencies redefining their role and offering in the market.

For many marketing agencies, Google is already a large part of their client offering. An agency’s primary remit is to typically create campaigns to drive full-funnel marketing demand and ultimately drive sales. The agency will report, recommend and optimise campaigns to drive efficiencies, and they do a good job of this. But, there are many more interactions, such as email, chat, forms, text, lead nurture and scoring, sales, and customer service touchpoints that take place with prospective customers for which agencies are not usually engaged. Throw in the deep segmentation and personalisation capabilities the HubSpot CRM platform would bring to Google and that makes it an even more attractive proposition for agencies.

And that’s just the start. Where it gets really interesting for agencies, if the acquisition were to go ahead, is the chance to offer solutions in areas they haven’t traditionally played in. This being, CRM onboarding, systems integration, sales enablement and customer service.

The race to become an expert in these areas becomes a true unique selling point for agencies and vastly improves their offer and ‘stickiness’ with clients. Agencies can become the consultancies they talk about and strive to be, driving true business change from a technical, process and people perspective.

While agencies generally are in the CRM space with the use of first party data, this move by Google could help them take the next step by offering CRM migration, CRM customisation and systems integration services as part of their solution. This would move agencies from being a marketing tech partner to a business tech partner.

Sales enablement is a significant growth area for agencies. We often work with clients to build out revenue teams and refine the model of ‘marketing to sales handoff’ because the customer journey is not linear. Agencies need the tools to be able to bring together those functions in the one place, to measure not only attribution, but understand potential bottlenecks, or friction in the sales process and be able to recommend and perform optimisations to that process. If they can master this, they will unlock access to key business decision makers they haven’t traditionally dealt with – the head of sales.

Another area of growth is working with customer service teams. Agencies are good at retargeting, but this usually works on the assumption that everyone who purchases is the same. But what if you could include Net Promoter Scores (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction data into your strategies? How could you structure your messaging if you had access to customer service conversations?

If Google does eventually acquire a CRM, marketing, sales and service platform like HubSpot, it opens up significant new capabilities for traditional marketing agencies to evolve into a business consultancy, providing much broader and deeper solutions for clients. And, for those that can pivot early, a significant point of differentiation to competitors.