The Complete Guide to Marketing Automation Adoption

Key Takeaways

• Three gaps drive poor adoption: workflows that don’t match how your team works, no owner after handover, and automation that isn’t tied to revenue
• Underuse is widespread: Gartner’s 2023 survey found marketers use just 33% of their martech stack’s capability, down from 58% in 2020
• Audit before you rebuild: User logins, workflow enrolments, data quality, and reporting show exactly where adoption has stalled
• Fix in order: Set revenue goals, name an owner, simplify workflows, make training ongoing, then measure
• Adoption is recoverable: m|devices nearly replaced HubSpot, then saved more than 12 hours a week on reporting after a three-month program

Quick Answer

Marketing automation consulting gets underused when workflow, process, and strategy gaps open up after implementation. Workflows don’t reflect how the team operates, nobody owns automation after handover, and campaigns aren’t linked to revenue goals.

Fixing adoption starts with auditing all three gaps, then rebuilding ownership, training, and reporting around the workflows your team already needs.

If you want an expert view, RedPandas offers a free marketing automation adoption consultation for Australian businesses.

Book through the link below to get a review of your workflows, ownership, and reporting, plus a prioritised plan to lift adoption:

Get Your Free Marketing Automation Adoption Consultation

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The nurture workflow your consultant built last year still shows zero contacts enrolled. Lead scoring hasn’t been touched since handover. Your team is back to exporting lists and sending one-off emails by hand.

That pattern has clear causes.

Marketing teams underuse marketing automation consulting when three gaps open up after implementation:

1. Workflows that don’t match how the team actually works
2. No owner once the consultant leaves
3. A strategy that was never tied to pipeline targets

Gartner’s 2023 Marketing Technology Survey of 405 marketing leaders found teams use just 33 per cent of their martech stack’s capability, down from 58 per cent in 2020.

That number stings when renewal lands on your desk, and leadership asks what the spend delivered.

But it stings more when you’ve already paid experts once and little of it stuck.

RedPandas Digital, a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner, is often brought in at exactly this point: after go-live, when the automation exists and nobody uses it. One client, m|devices, nearly walked away from HubSpot entirely before RedPandas’ work got the team to full adoption.

This guide walks you through the same approach. You’ll learn the root causes behind poor adoption, a self-audit checklist to find your own gaps, and a step-by-step framework to fix them without rebuilding from scratch.

Why Marketing Automation Consulting Gets Underused

Underused automation usually traces back to one of three marketing automation adoption gaps. Each opens at a different point after implementation and needs a different fix:

Workflow Gaps

Workflow gaps appear when automation is designed around what the platform can do.

Picture a consultant who builds a 12-step nurture sequence, branching lead scoring, and five lifecycle workflows. Your team runs two campaigns a month and has never seen the logic behind any of it.

The result is automation nobody trusts enough to touch: people work around it, and manual processes creep back in.

Common signs of workflow gaps include:

• Dormant workflows with zero or near-zero enrolments months after launch
• Manual exports to send emails your automation should already handle
• Conflicting workflows firing on the same contacts
• Black-box logic that nobody can explain without opening the workflow

And capacity makes this worse.

A 2025 Manago AI survey of more than 150 marketing leaders found 47 per cent don’t have enough time to finish their tasks. Untangling a complex workflow loses to the next deadline every time.

Process Gaps

Process gaps start at handover.

The consultant delivers, runs one training session, and the engagement ends. Nobody inside the business is named as the owner of your marketing automation.

Without an owner, nothing gets reviewed, updated, or retired. Workflows go out of date as your offers, team, and sales process change.

Difficulty recruiting talent to drive adoption can be one of the biggest barriers to martech use.

In many Australian mid-sized businesses, “marketing ops” falls to a marketing manager who already has a full-time job.

Common signs of process gaps include:

• No documented owner for workflows, lists, or lead scoring
• One-off training that happened at go-live and never again
• Shoulder-tap onboarding, where new hires learn the system from whoever sits next to them
• Ad hoc changes made with no review process

Strategy Gaps

Strategy gaps sit underneath the other two.

Automation gets built to “nurture leads” or “save time”, with no link to pipeline targets or the sales handover.

Automation that isn’t measured against revenue struggles to earn budget or attention. The previously mentioned Manago survey found 40 per cent of marketing leaders find martech ROI hard to measure.

Common signs of strategy gaps include:

• Vanity reporting built on email opens and clicks, with no pipeline or revenue attribution
• Lead disputes, where sales and marketing disagree on what a qualified lead is
• Stale lifecycle stages that exist but never get updated
• No clear wins, so leadership can’t name one outcome automation delivered last quarter

Note: The three gaps compound. A strategy gap means nobody prioritises ownership. Without ownership, workflows drift until your team stops using them altogether.

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How To Audit Your Own Marketing Automation Adoption Gap

You can run this audit yourself as a focused version of a full HubSpot health check. You’ll need admin access to your marketing automation platform, last quarter’s marketing report, and about half a day.

The steps below use HubSpot, but most platforms have equivalent reports:

Step #1: Pull Your Usage Data

Start with evidence. Opinions on what’s “not working” vary by who you ask, and the data settles it quickly.

1. Export your user list. In HubSpot, go to Settings > Users & Teams > Actions > Export all users. The export includes each user’s last login date, so you can see who has stopped logging in. You’ll need Super Admin permissions
2. Review workflow performance. Open each active workflow’s details page and check the Performance tab for total and 7-day enrolments. Then open the Issues tab for errors nobody has fixed. This page needs a Professional or Enterprise subscription
3. Check data quality. Go to Data Management > Data Quality. HubSpot flags duplicates, formatting issues, unused properties, and unused workflows in one view
4. Open last quarter’s marketing report. Note whether it shows pipeline or revenue influenced by automation, or only email engagement

Step #2: Score Yourself Against The Three Gaps

Answer each question yes or no. Count your “no” answers:

Workflow Gaps

• Does every active workflow have enrolments in the last 30 days?
• Can your team explain what each workflow does without opening it?
• Have you retired workflows that no longer match your current offers?
• Is your team sending fewer one-off manual emails than it did six months ago?

Process Gaps

• Is one named person accountable for your marketing automation?
• Has your team had automation training since go-live?
• Do new hires get structured onboarding on your automation?
• Do workflow changes go through a review before going live?

Strategy Gaps

• Is each workflow tied to a measurable pipeline or revenue goal?
• Do sales and marketing share a written definition of a qualified lead?
• Are lifecycle stages updated automatically and kept accurate?
• Can leadership name one result automation delivered last quarter?

Step #3: Read Your Results

After going through each of the questions, tally everything up and figure out your next moves based on the table below:

Tip: Run this audit with someone from sales ops in the room. Sales sees the other end of the lead handover, and those blind spots often explain why marketing automation stalls.

A Framework For Fixing Marketing Automation Adoption

Once your audit shows where the gaps are, fix them in order. Strategy comes first, because every later step depends on knowing what your automation is for.

This is change management applied to your marketing automation, and it pays off:

Step #1: Tie Your Automation To Revenue Goals

Start by deciding what your automation needs to deliver.

1. Agree on a lead definition with sales: Write down what makes a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead, and get both teams to sign off
2. Set two or three revenue goals: Examples include shortening time to first sales contact, lifting MQL-to-SQL conversion, or re-engaging closed-lost deals
3. Map every workflow to one goal: Any workflow that doesn’t serve a goal gets flagged for retirement in Step 3

Step #2: Name An Owner And Set A Review Rhythm

Automation without an owner drifts. Give it one.

1. Name one accountable owner: This person approves changes and reports on performance. They don’t need to build every workflow themselves
2. Set a monthly workflow review: Check enrolments, errors, and goal alignment for each active workflow
3. Create a simple change process: Requests go to the owner, get reviewed, and are documented before going live
4. Adopt naming conventions: Consistent names and folders let anyone on your team find and understand a workflow quickly

Step #3: Simplify Your Workflows

Fewer workflows that people trust will outperform a large library nobody uses.

1. Retire dormant workflows: Use your audit data and HubSpot’s Data Quality tool, which flags unused workflows
2. Merge conflicting workflows: Remove overlaps so each contact receives one clear sequence
3. Rebuild priority workflows with your team: Start with three to five tied to your step one goals, and have the people who run campaigns help design them

Step #4: Make Training Ongoing

One session at go-live won’t hold adoption. Build training into how your team works.

1. Train on your own workflows: Walk your team through the automation they’ll actually use, beyond generic platform training
2. Use free HubSpot Academy courses to build baseline skills, then fill gaps with role-specific sessions
3. Document onboarding for new hires: A short guide to your workflows, naming conventions, and change process removes shoulder-tap learning
4. Schedule quarterly refreshers whenever workflows, offers, or team members change

Step #5: Measure Adoption And Report Outcomes

Track adoption the same way you’d track any campaign.

• Usage: User last-login dates and active users each month
• Workflow health: Enrolments in the last 30 days and open workflow issues
• Business impact: Pipeline and revenue influenced by each workflow
• Audit score: Your “no” count from the self-assessment, re-run quarterly

Share the business impact numbers with leadership every quarter. Visible results keep budget, attention, and ownership in place.

Tip: Don’t try to fix everything at once. Finish steps one and two before rebuilding any workflows, or you’ll end up rebuilding them twice.

How RedPandas Digital Approaches Marketing Automation Adoption

RedPandas Digital, a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner based in Sydney, focuses on the stage this guide covers: post-implementation CRM optimisation, when your automation is built and your team needs to use it.

The agency’s HubSpot Optimisation Program follows the same order as the framework above:

Coaching runs weekly throughout, so training happens alongside the rebuild and continues past handover.

Case study: m|devices

m|devices, an Australian business running HubSpot across sales, service, and marketing, was close to replacing the platform. Its problems may sound familiar to you:

• Manual processes for deal creation, follow-up tasks, and escalations
• Inconsistent campaign tracking, with website data disconnected from a single customer view
• Weak pipeline reporting, making revenue forecasting difficult
• Siloed teams, causing duplicate work and missed hand-offs

Over a three-month Optimisation Program, RedPandas mapped the customer journey, cleaned and segmented the data, and built more than 10 automation workflows across sales and service.

The team also set up custom dashboards and trained marketing and sales on their own portal.

The results:

• HubSpot licence retained after the business had considered replacing it
• More than 12 hours saved each week on reporting
• 4x faster customer response rates
• Full visibility of productivity, deals, and pipeline for leadership
• Consistent UTM tagging for reliable campaign tracking

Sam Chaisumdet, CEO of m|devices, said the RedPandas team “made a complex setup feel much more manageable.”

Read the full m|devices case study here.

Frequently Asked Questions: Marketing Automation Adoption

What’s Next For Your Marketing Automation?

Underused automation is a fixable problem. Your platform, data, and workflows are already in place. Strategy, ownership, and ongoing training are what turn them into results.

Start with the self-assessment this week. Count your “no” answers, find your biggest gap, and work through the framework in order.

Your next renewal conversation gets much easier when you can show leadership exactly what automation delivered.

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About RedPandas Digital

This article was written by the team at RedPandas Digital, a HubSpot Diamond Partner based in Sydney, Australia, and one of only four HubSpot-accredited Diamond partners in the Asia-Pacific region.

RedPandas has implemented and optimised HubSpot for businesses across construction, healthcare, legal, education, and professional services. Learn more in this HubSpot partner page.

About the Author

Manolo

Manolo is our content engine, blending sharp copywriting, smart journey design and content strategy to move people from “just browsing” to “where do I sign?”.

Before content calendars and launch plans, he was an international motorsport photographer, spending two years shooting development series races in Japan and covering local teams in the Philippines. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him in a BJJ class (at the expense of his joints) or running on a slightly alarming amount of black coffee