{"id":12055,"date":"2026-10-06T19:59:39","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T19:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rudlyn.com\/?post_type=case-studies&p=12055"},"modified":"2026-10-14T07:57:28","modified_gmt":"2026-10-14T07:57:28","slug":"marketing-automation-without-hiring-cycle","status":"publish","type":"case-studies","link":"https:\/\/rudlyn.com\/sa\/case-study\/marketing-automation-without-hiring-cycle\/","title":{"rendered":"Standing Up Marketing Automation Without a 6-Month Hiring Cycle"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Transparent with you:<\/strong> This is an illustrative case study. The company is a composite based on situations that are common in B2B marketing teams, not a specific Rudlyn client. We’ll publish real client stories here as they become available.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Case study at a glance<\/h2>\n
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Field<\/th>\nValue<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
Company<\/strong><\/td>\nB2B SaaS, around 250 employees, headquartered in Sydney, selling across Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Platform<\/strong><\/td>\nHubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise, connected to Salesforce<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The problem<\/strong><\/td>\nTheir only marketing operations manager left, and the platform went unmanaged for months<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
What they did<\/strong><\/td>\nBrought in a dedicated Rudlyn marketing automation specialist instead of waiting on a long hiring search<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Time to start<\/strong><\/td>\nAbout five weeks from first call to the specialist working in their HubSpot account, within Rudlyn’s standard 4\u20136 weeks<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n

The challenge: a HubSpot account with no owner<\/h2>\n

For three years, one person ran this company’s HubSpot account. She had built most of it herself: the nurture journeys, the lead scoring model, the integration with Salesforce, and a set of weekly reports the CMO relied on. When she left for a bigger role elsewhere, she gave four weeks’ notice and spent most of it trying to document what she’d built.<\/p>\n

The documentation helped, but only so far. Within a month, small things started going wrong. A form field changed on the website and quietly broke the routing rule for demo requests. Two journeys kept running with content that referenced a product tier the company had since retired. Nobody touched lead scoring, so it slowly drifted away from what sales actually considered a good lead.<\/p>\n

None of this showed up as a single obvious failure. Emails still went out and the dashboards still loaded. But by the end of the quarter, the sales team had stopped trusting MQLs, and the head of demand gen was spending her evenings in HubSpot trying to keep things running alongside her actual job.<\/p>\n

Why hiring a marketing automation specialist took too long<\/h2>\n

The obvious answer was to hire a replacement, and they did start there. The role was posted the week she resigned. Five months later, it was still open. They had interviewed a handful of candidates. Two strong ones accepted competing offers, and others knew marketing automation in general but had never worked in HubSpot at enterprise level or with a Salesforce integration as involved as theirs.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, they brought in a HubSpot agency for urgent fixes. That kept the worst problems from getting worse, but it worked through tickets. Each request needed a brief, a quote and a turnaround time, and the agency team changed from one request to the next, so context was constantly being rebuilt. Nobody was looking at the account as a whole, and nothing new was being built.<\/p>\n

The solution: a dedicated marketing automation specialist<\/h2>\n

\"rudlyn<\/p>\n

The CMO’s question was simple: could they get someone who would work in their HubSpot account full-time, as part of the team, without starting another long recruitment search from scratch?<\/p>\n

Weeks 1 to 5: shortlisting, interviews and onboarding<\/h3>\n

That’s the gap a dedicated specialist fills. Within the first two weeks, Rudlyn shared a shortlist of four pre-vetted candidates, each with a full assessment covering HubSpot, Salesforce integration work and a real-world scenario test. The head of demand gen interviewed three of them and chose a HubSpot-certified specialist who had handled a similar Salesforce sync before. The final decision was hers.<\/p>\n

The specialist was employed and managed by Rudlyn in India, but worked only on this company’s account, joined their Slack and stand-ups, and took direction from the head of demand gen. Rudlyn took care of the contract, equipment, background checks and payroll. From the first call to the specialist logging into HubSpot took about five weeks, and they started on a structured 30-60-90 day onboarding plan.<\/p>\n

Days 1 to 30: auditing the HubSpot account<\/h3>\n

The specialist started with an audit rather than a rebuild. Over the first two weeks they mapped every active workflow, list and integration, and noted what each one was meant to do and whether it was still doing it. The broken demo-request routing was found and fixed in the first week. So were the two journeys still promoting the retired product tier.<\/p>\n

The audit also turned up things nobody had asked about. Around 12,000 contacts had no consent status recorded, a leftover from an old import. A third of the active workflows hadn’t enrolled anyone in more than six months. These went on a list, sorted by risk, and the head of demand gen decided the order.<\/p>\n

Days 30 to 90: rebuilding lead scoring, data and journeys<\/h3>\n

With the account stable, the work shifted to the things the company actually needed. Three changes made the biggest difference:<\/p>\n