Hello All,
We are a startup company looking for some helpful information in regards to what is the best tech stack for CRM and marketing for a social media site and a private equity fund?
All suggestions and information are very helpful. Thank you very much in advance!
Hi @MetaEquityPtnrs,
Thanks for reaching out!
I would like to add some experts to our conversation - @johnelmer, @danmoyle, @Mike_Eastwood, @Ben_M, @Josh - Do you have any recommendations for @MetaEquityPtnrs?
Thank you!
Best,
Kristen
Hi @MetaEquityPtnrs. Of course it’d be great if the answer was a simple recipe, wouldn’t it? 
In lieu of asking a bunch of questions to help understand your needs and goals, I would say starting with the HubSpot Hubs of Sales and Marketing Pro (or Starter if really pushed) would be a perfect place to start. With those you’ll have CRM capabilities, plus great marketing tools in email, social media and reporting. Not to mention conversion paths with landing pages & forms.
What other technology needs are you looking for in your platform(s)?
@MetaEquityPtnrs Are you asking about two different businesses? Or about a private equity fund that wants to build a website to be used for blog posts and landing pages driven by social media posts? The answer would be different depending on which it is.
Having worked with a number of private equity firms, their needs for a website are usually fairly straightforward and tend to feature contact form, a Team page, an investment criteria page, and a page of links to their portfolio companies. The 15 page limitataion of HubSpot CMS Starter would still probably be OK. On the other hand, their use cases for a CRM are likely to be fairly complex. HubSpot Sales Hub Professional is likely to be required, or an industry vertical-specific CRM such as Dealcloud. Since private equity firms put significant efforts into attracting potential sellers of businesses, a marketing automation package like Marketing Hub Professional can be used to great effect to manage social media campaigns and email campaigns. If you use a non-HubSpot CRM, make sure it can be integrated with Marketing Hub (meaning that it has public APIs and good documentation).
DM me for more information.
Being quite honest, I would recommend you post in a few different locations and take some solutions for a test spin. Coming into Hubspot asking about a stack for CRM and Marketing, both of which they offer, is like walking into a Ford dealership and asking if I should walk out with a Ford, Honda, or Tesla.
For the CRM front, the obvious behemoths in this discussion will be Hubspot and Salesforce. There are a bunch of others (ie: Zoho, MS Dynamics, etc.). For the most part if you don’t need a lot of the bell and whistles and integrations that come with the Salesforce ecosystem, Hubspot is a good alternative and provides much of the same core functionality.
For a Marketing solution, these also vary quite a bit. In terms of automation platforms, you have Hubspot, Pardot, Eloqua, and Marketo as the big names. But with social media this could change depending on your needs and while Hubspot has a basic social media offering, there are others out there that specialize in social (ie: Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer).
I think the bigger question for me would be what do you need from a social media platform and do you have any specific questions with your CRM (ie: integrations, functionality, etc.)?