Why Standing Still Wasn’t an Option in 2024

Hey, it's Bob here. December is a great time to reflect on the year past and I'm excited to share these reflections and dive into all the opportunities that lay ahead for all of us here at Cultivate.

In a year when economic uncertainty and AI disruption dominated headlines and had many companies hitting pause, we saw last year differently: an opportunity to harness new technologies rather than fear them. As we reflect on 2024, what stands out isn't just how we adapted to change—it's how we actively embraced it to fuel growth.

A transformative partnership

After years with Salesforce, we made the decisive move to become a HubSpot Partner. This wasn't just a platform switch—it was a commitment to bringing our clients unprecedented visibility into their marketing engagement metrics and ROI.

While HubSpot offers powerful capabilities, realizing its full potential requires expert guidance and strategic implementation. It's not a plug-and-play solution – maximizing ROI demands deep platform knowledge and experience to properly configure and optimize the tools for each client's unique needs.

So to lead this transformation, we welcomed Erin Kasmarick as our Marketing Automation Growth Manager. In this role, Erin will bring her eight years of HubSpot expertise to help our clients onboard, train, and optimize their HubSpot investment to get maximum ROI on their marketing efforts.

Redefining revenue-focused marketing

This technological leap forward led us to crystallize our core mission into "Revenue Focused Marketing." This philosophy has always been part of our DNA, but needed to be brought to the forefront. It wasn't just a rebranding exercise; it was a strategic realignment based on deep client conversations about real value creation. By combining HubSpot's capabilities with our strategic expertise, we're helping clients:

• Transform data into actionable insights
• Create more personalized customer experiences
• Automate and optimize marketing workflows
• Track and measure ROI with unprecedented precision

In addition to helping clients, Erin has really led the charge since we became a HubSpot partner, making us - in effect - our own use case. As she puts it, “I live, breathe, and love everything orange, everything HubSpot. So you could definitely say we are drinking our own KoolAid! We just met a prospect and I tend to get super excited because I see the value that the platform can bring for these clients. It’s really an all-in-one enterprise platform with endless creative customizations you can utilize so that they work for you.”

Turning insights into action

The culmination of these efforts was our "Seven Steps to Accelerated Growth" campaign. We didn't just talk about growth—we provided a concrete roadmap for achieving it, complete with video guides breaking down complex strategies into actionable steps and downloadable worksheets for practical implementation

Building the future of marketing

Cultivate Unplugged

As part of our event series, Cultivate Unplugged, we brought Justin Roff-Marsh, acclaimed author of The Machine, for an all-day event in Pabst Brewing District in Milwaukee. His insights on achieving double-digit growth perfectly aligned with our vision of technology-enabled, revenue-focused marketing, so it was a value-packed session.

As we look toward 2025, we can’t wait to launch a series of events, including an upcoming March 2025 AI event that promises to be our most ambitious yet, bringing together innovators and thought leaders to share their digital transformation journeys.

Your growth partner in the AI era

At Cultivate, we've always believed in thinking before acting. Now, with a clear focus on revenue growth and a powerful marketing stack in HubSpot, we're better equipped than ever to help businesses thrive in this new era. Our strategic framework—built around strategy, execution, and platform optimization—ensures that every marketing dollar drives measurable business results.

To our forward-thinking clients who joined us on this journey and our dedicated team who made it possible: thank you for embracing change alongside us. The future of marketing is here, and it's more exciting than we imagined.