(and what does this mean for the marketing software industry)

Today we announced that we acquired the marketing automation company Performable. You can read the formal press release announcing the deal , and you can sign up for the webinar where we will demo the two products together . Here are some of the reasons why we made the acquisition, why we’re so excited about it, and what we think it means for the future.

Inbound marketing is about ToFu (top of the funnel) and MoFu (middle of the funnel)

The way people learn, shop for and buy products has changed, and marketers need to adapt to these changes if they want to succeed. Since 2006, we have been educating hundreds of thousands of marketers and business owners about how marketing is changing and the importance of implementing more inbound marketing into your sales and marketing funnel. But the less talked about story within inbound marketing is that MoFu is also changing. It is harder and harder to get into the email inbox, and relying on email as the primary communication with your prospects and leads in the future is not going to be a solid strategy. People communicate more and more with social media (spending more time on Facebook now than on email) and the way you manage your leads through the sales and marketing funnel needs to be a process that moves beyond email.

We’ve been thinking a lot about the changes in MoFu marketing lately. Our friends at Performable have been doing the same thing. And, we have a similar vision for how marketing is changing and how that affects inbound marketing through both ToFu and MoFu.

Performable is an innovative MoFu company

In a world where MoFu is changing so much, you don’t want to copy other products that have been around for 5-10 years and only have 500 or 1000 companies using them. You want to innovate and build the MoFu features that are going to be used by 10,000 or 100,000 companies to do inbound marketing (ToFu and MoFu) the way marketing should be done. This means integrating your MoFu marketing with social media, embracing mobile, integrating blogging and multimedia content, and generally embracing communication and collaboration into MoFu beyond just emailing segments of your database.

Among the marketing automation software companies, we found Performable to have the most innovative product functionality. It's a great team that matches the culture of HubSpot - and was a perfect fit for us.

We now have the best product development team in B2B software

We have admired the product development folks working at Performable for some time. In fact, Dharmesh Shah (our technical co-founder and CTO) has known David Cancel (Perfomable CEO and former CTO of Compete.com) since before he founded Compete.com. David is a visionary product development leader and does an especially good job of recruiting amazing product talent. David is going to serve as our Chief Product Officer. The team does not stop there however, because David has recruited some of the best minds for product development as well as product usability and design, and they are all joining HubSpot.

We believe that combining the Perfomable team with the already fantastic HubSpot product team will give us the best product development team in all of B2B software. All of us are very excited to see the HubSpot product evolve and improve over the coming months and years.

We can now grow along with our customers and serve larger companies

HubSpot has always been passionate about small business - and we always will be. We believe small business is the engine driving growth in the economy and we’re proud to have 4,500 small and medium sized companies using our software and look forward to serving 100,000 or more.

But the inbound marketing transformation sometimes does funny things. Small and medium sized companies become bigger. In fact, the average HubSpot customer grows their lead generation at a 300% annual rate. This compound growth of lead generation means they hire more salespeople and they close more customers. And all the sudden they are a bigger company. Because of this, some HubSpot customers have had to purchase other marketing software products to supplement what they do as their business has grown and become more complicated. In almost every case they told us they would prefer to use just HubSpot, but our product was missing a couple more advanced features they needed.

We wanted to be able to do a better job of growing with our best customers, and continuing to help them improve their marketing with great software tools. Now, with this acquisition, HubSpot has the capability to grow along with our customers, serve larger companies and offer more advanced marketing functionality to companies demanding more complex functionality.

What’s next?

There are no changes today for HubSpot customers or Performable customers. Keep what you have now at the same price. HubSpot customers who want to access the enhanced functionality immediately can purchase the Performable product starting today. If you’d like to learn more about how Performable and HubSpot work together and see a demo of the powerful MoFu functionality in action, please join us for a webinar and live Performable demonstration on June 28 at 1pm EST .

As always, thank you for being part of our team by sharing our content, by using our products and tools, by being an engaged member of the inbound marketing community, and by supporting and furthering the inbound marketing vision. We’re excited for the future and hope you are too.