The Catalyst Stack - July 10, 2025

INTRO
Welcome to This Week’s The Catalyst Stack

Welcome to the first issue of The Catalyst Stack, a weekly breakdown of practical insights for growing small and mid-sized businesses. Each edition will spotlight one or two areas we work on regularly with clients, whether it’s configuring HubSpot, launching marketing workflows, building websites, or simplifying tech stack decisions. The goal is to help founders, C-suite leaders, and martech leads at growing companies scale smarter by making better use of the right systems, whether they’re already in place or still being put together.

Each week, we’ll spotlight one or two areas from the list below, based on new developments, tool updates, or timely topics. Over time, you’ll get a practical mix of insights across all of these core themes.

• CRM & Sales Enablement - HubSpot Sales Hub guidance including segmentation, workflows, deal tracking, lead management, notifications, call logging, data modeling, and more.

• Marketing Activation & Campaigns - Nurture campaign configuration, progressive profiling, retargeting, automation, and other Marketing Hub features.

• Websites & Portals - Insights on lead-generation websites built with WordPress or Webflow, and on client-facing portals.

• Platform & Stack Guidance - Vendor-neutral recommendations on tools, integrations, and scale-readiness, based on what I see in the field as a systems advisor and fractional CIO.

• From the Stack - Short takeaways from project work, focused on what changed, why it mattered, and how you can apply it.

In this first issue, we’re covering a lightweight alternative to HubSpot’s built-in lead scoring. It’s ideal for teams that aren’t quite ready to invest in Marketing Hub Pro.

CRM & SALES ENABLEMENT
Lightweight Lead Scoring Without HubSpot Marketing Hub Pro

If your sales team needs help figuring out which contacts to prioritize, lead scoring is often a smart next step. Many organizations begin their journey using HubSpot Sales Hub before investing in Marketing Hub Pro, which is where the native lead scoring feature lives. The good news is that you can still build a basic scoring system using custom properties and workflows. It won’t be as smooth or scalable, but it’s a solid way to give your team structure while keeping your tech investment lean.

You can start by creating a custom property such as “Manual Lead Score,” then build simple workflows that adjust the score based on certain criteria. For example, you might assign points for visiting a pricing page, having a certain job title, or submitting a form. This gives you a lightweight way to surface signals of interest or fit, even if it’s not as automated as the full-featured version.

Tradeoffs to Consider

The biggest limitation of this manual approach is that your scoring logic ends up spread across multiple workflows. That makes it harder to manage and much harder for non-technical users to adjust or even understand what’s happening. In contrast, Marketing Hub Pro includes a built-in scoring interface where you can configure rules directly in one place, with clear visibility into how scores are calculated.

Another tradeoff is timing. You can assign a score right when a contact is created, based on information collected from an intake form. But this only works if you capture enough qualifying data up front. Long forms can hurt conversion rates, so it’s often better to collect information gradually through behavioral tracking or progressive profiling. These techniques allow you to assess lead quality over time and reduce friction early in the process, but they require features available in Marketing Hub Pro.

A Good Starting Point

If your scoring needs are simple, and your sales team just needs a basic way to identify engaged contacts, the manual approach using Sales Hub workflows can serve as a good starting point. Just be aware of the complexity that can build over time. As your automation grows and your team becomes more dependent on structured lead handoff, it will be worth upgrading to Marketing Hub Pro to get a centralized, scalable solution for scoring and qualification.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Scaling a small or mid-sized business is not just about adopting more tools. It’s about making smart use of the systems you already have, or selecting new ones that align with how your team actually works. That’s the approach we’ll take each week, whether we’re digging into websites, CRM setup, campaign automation, platform decisions, or how all of these connect behind the scenes.

If you’re aiming to grow without adding unnecessary complexity, The Catalyst Stack is here to provide practical, systems-focused guidance you can actually apply.