The marketing automation model that drove 9x qualified lead growth in a secondary market

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Free and premium plans Agent Hub Your central home for building and managing AI agents across the platform Learn more Small Business Bundle The Starter edition of each product, built for startups and small businesses Learn more AEO (Beta) Answer engine optimization tools that track and improve your brand's visibility in AI results Learn more HubSpot Marketplace Connect your favorite apps to HubSpot See all integrations Home Marketing The marketing automation model that drove 9x qualified lead growth in a secondary market The marketing automation model that drove 9x qualified lead growth in a secondary market Written by: Sophia Zamora Barbosa HUBSPOT MARKETING SOFTWARE Get Started with HubSpot's Marketing Software for Free When we reviewed our Japan marketing automation programs last year, the picture wasn’t pretty. Our automated emails were generating about 12 qualified leads per month against a goal of 160. We could have done the obvious and by hiring a local marketing automation specialist in Japan. Instead, we rebuilt Japan’s entire email automation program in two months, with zero additional headcount, using a model any marketing team can replicate. Here’s what we learned. HubSpot is a US-headquartered company. And like most US-headquartered companies, our marketing automation investment has historically been concentrated in a handful of core markets: English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese. Those programs get built, refined, optimized, and rebuilt again. Markets outside that core group tend to get less dedicated attention, not because anyone decided to deprioritize them, but because the automation resources weren’t scoped to cover them. For Japan, that meant automation programs that were years old, partially built, or never meaningfully localized. The content existed, and the infrastructure was there. But it wasn’t performing because it wasn’t designed for the Japanese market. This is a pattern that shows up across companies operating in multiple regions. Wherever there’s a primary market and a secondary one, the secondary market tends to lag. That’s because the people with automation expertise are almost always scoped to the markets that generate the most volume. Marketing automation in markets outside the core group tends to fall into one of two failure modes: it was never built, or it was built years ago and never meaningfully updated. Japan was the second case. And the typical response, “we need to hire a local automation expert,” wasn’t realistic. What we needed was a different model. Easy marketing tools that deliver fast time-to-value, unified in one place. We were asking the wrong question. Instead of “Who can own this end to end?”, we should have asked, “Should one person own this?” Marketing automation has two fundamentally different jobs. One is technical: building journey logic, setting up workflows, defining enrollment criteria, creating segmentation, and configuring tracking. None of that requires speaking Japanese. The other job is cultural: making sure the message feels right, the tone lands, the pain points are real, the call-to-action makes sense. That absolutely requires someone who knows the market. The mistake teams make is assuming both jobs need to live with one person. They don’t. When you separate them cleanly, you don’t need a local automation specialist. You need an automation marketer who understands the technical side, and a local marketing or sales partner who owns the cultural validation. Together, they cover everything. With that model in place, here’s what two months of focused work produced for Japan: Within the first reporting period, automation-sourced qualified leads jumped roughly 9x (from 12 to over 115 per month), making a significant contribution to Japan’s monthly qualified lead goal. We estimate that translates to about 44 incremental deals per month. We deliberately focused on high-intent automation programs rather than trying to rebuild everything at once. Here’s why that paid off. Treating all email programs the same kills most rebuilds before they start.

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Source: HubSpot

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