Podcasts about hubspot inbound

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Play Episode Listen Later Mar 27, 2024 25:53

We're thrilled to host this week's special guest, Jay Schwedelson, president and CEO of Outcome Media, and one of America's foremost marketing authorities. He is celebrated as one the top 10 marketing experts nationwide. His Do This, Not That! is a top 10 marketing podcast—and a great listen if you love reality TV.After Roop's memorable encounters with him at recent HubSpot INBOUND conferences, it's our privilege to welcome Jay to Little Talks. He's here to share crucial B2B email marketing strategies for engaging your target audiences on a weekly basis—yes, that's right, weekly!So, grab your headphones and favorite junk food, and get the scoop on email tips and tricks from one of the best in the business.

AI Future, Creator Economy Trends & Hubspot Inbound Exclusives With Carly Baker

Content Is Profit

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2023 62:14

Welcome back to the show! Today we dive into the world of content creation, AI, and the challenges faced by creators in today's digital landscape. Carly Baker, from Hubspot, comes back and breaks down some of the most interesting trends happening in today's content creation industry. Join us as we explore the importance of knowing what to say when launching a podcast, the value of emotional editing and genuine human connection, and the potential of AI tools in content creation. Here are some of our favorite #GoldenBoulders from today's show: AI focus and how it can help you today! New types of shows and what is the most effective today. The explosion of faceless channels and is this the new Amazon Dropshipping? AI Social Caption Generator is the tool that everyone is begging for. Enjoy! Timestamped Overview: 00:04:36 Exciting event season over, AI focus. 00:07:52 AI assists content creation for faster results. 00:14:21 The importance of frameworks in content strategy. 00:19:31 Seeking feedback on content creation and podcasting. 00:21:44 HubSpot launching AI social caption generator for SEO optimization. 00:28:40 Creators use emotional editing to engage viewers. 00:35:47 Creator architect, content built on frameworks, YouTube's changing landscape. 00:41:10 Isaac's channel has unique and fun elements. 00:46:24 Challenges in business interviews and benefits of a mix of host styles. 00:52:51 Focus on essential tasks for achieving goals. 00:54:45 Struggling with results, keep iterating and going. 01:00:07 Your network is bigger than you think. Connect with BIZBROS: Join the Content Is Profit's Facebook Group! Facebook Instagram Connect with FONZI: Facebook Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Connect with LUISDA: Facebook Instagram LinkedIn Twitter Subscribe to the podcast on Youtube, Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, or anywhere you listen to your podcasts. You can find this episode plus all previous episodes here. If this episode was helpful, please don't forget to leave us a review by clicking here, and share it with a friend. You can go here to see the full list of episodes

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BONUS: Our Recap of HubSpot's Inbound Conference

Don't Say Content

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 21, 2023 23:55

Did you attend this year's HubSpot Inbound conference?Whether you did or not, Devin and Margaret are here to break down the highlights of everyone's favorite marketing conference. What did they take away? What was their favorite part? (And maybe even spill a little tea about where they leave room for improvement, too.)From juicy behind-the-scenes details of being a speaker at one of the top marketing conferences to tried-and-true conference strategies, this episode will have you both laughing and learning as Devin and Margaret reflect on their time at Inbound together.In this episode, we'll explore:The power of thinking outside the booth: Devin and Margaret dish on why getting a booth might not be the best move for your event marketing strategy. Discover out-of-the-box ideas that will raise eyebrows and set you apart from the sea of sponsors.Throw your own party: Who needs a boring sponsored event when you can throw a bar takeover?! Learn how brands grabbed attention, engaged marketers, and made lasting connections (with free drinks—you love to see it). Secrets from the green room: Devin and Margaret talk VIP experience for speakers and conference attendees alike, while also discussing some of their favorite backstage marketing efforts they've seen and executed—including a backstage video series at Appcues, where they tapped into the adrenaline-fueled minds of speakers post-presentation.Jump into the conversation:03:10 VIP vs. Regular Ticket05:30 Community Over Everything10:45 Best & Worst Conference Event Marketing Strategies Connect with Devin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/devinbramhall/Connect with Margaret: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaret-kelsey-104abba/Subscribe to our newsletter: https://dontsaycontent.substack.com/Created in partnership with Share Your Genius: https://www.shareyourgenius.com/

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Making Use of What Marketers Are Doing Right

Rooted In Revenue

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2023 25:29

We hear about all the ways marketers miss the mark - what they do wrong. What if we focused on what they are doing right and then expand the use of those tactics? Some companies have a team of one or less than five and each must wear several hats. If, as a group, you lay out what is working, analyze the results through Google Analytics and pulling in all the pieces, as a group, you can tackle what is next. It may be enhancing the most popular pages you have to ensure you move people along on the journey toward a conversation with your sales team. It may be creating a podcast or other content that appeals to your existing customers as the "inside group" rather than only talking to them when you want to sell them something new. Jeanne Hopkins goes through ways to bring out the best in the existing marketing plan, letting go of what's not working and allowing companies to divide and conquer what needs to be done to engage, then celebrating the mountain of measurable successes as a group. Join us for, "Making Use of What Marketers Are Doing Right." Links from this episode: Connect with Jeanne on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeannehopkins/ Connect with Susan on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/susanmfinch About Jeanne Hopkins, B2B Fractional CRO with growth marketing chops, Advice with Accountability, GTM, PLG; former @hubspot VP Marketing; Speaker; Author; Advisor; Mentor; Start-up Investors: Deep expertise in data-driven, high-velocity B2B and B2C customer acquisition, sales, marketing, and customer success organizations. Inbound (obviously)-based lead gen programs to support global demand for high-growth SaaS companies. Experienced in building GTM programs from scratch and turning around existing ones. Able to forge lasting partner marketing relationships with startups and enterprise-class organizations. Inbound marketing success in driving practical corporate, divisional and industry lead gen and nurturing programs. Success in growing and leading teams towards rapid results plus can enthusiastically manage many programs, people, vendors and campaigns concurrently, Proactive and highly productive w/analytical skills, thrive in a rapidly changing environment (start-up to corporate marketing), inspires excellence in others. Demonstrates concise, effective communication both written and spoken, able to handle ambiguity, a high workload, and an extreme amount of detail - all within budget. Building sustainable relationships that drive revenue via demand generation programs: Strategic, Technical & Creative - Co-chair MassTLC Sales & Marketing Group; Co-author, "Go Mobile", #1 best-selling mobile marketing book. Named to Sales Lead Management Association "Top 50" 3 years in a row and "20 Women to Watch" in 2015/14/13 & 2011; Named to VAR Guy Top Channel Leaders in 2015; MSPmentor People to Watch in 2014; BizJournal marketing experts; Speaker @ MarketingProfs B2B Forums, HubSpot Inbound 2011/12/13/14/15 Conferences, MIT Entrepreneurs Forum, AMA, Social Media Today, BrightTalk, MassTLC, Social Fresh. Advisor: OneScreen.io; Siemplify.co; Rank the Vote Digital Council; USEFULL (Coffee Cup Collective); Below The Fold (Acciyo) Author: Go Mobile!

How Are You Marketing To Your Employees?

Rooted In Revenue

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 11, 2023 12:24

A more complete title is, "How are you marketing to your employees, customers, prospects, community?" Today I'm talking with Jeanne Hopkins who is launching Salty Marketing Company this month. We'll cover what a fractional CMO is and isn't, the four elements of marketing that every company must include or fail. Employees Customers Prospects Community Consider this a wake-up call to marketers who are unable to justify their spending. This is part one of our session. Links from this episode: Connect with Jeanne on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeannehopkins/ Connect with Susan on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/susanmfinch About Jeanne Hopkins, B2B Fractional CRO with growth marketing chops, Advice with Accountability, GTM, PLG; former @hubspot VP Marketing; Speaker; Author; Advisor; Mentor; Start-up Investors: Deep expertise in data-driven, high-velocity B2B and B2C customer acquisition, sales, marketing, and customer success organizations. Inbound (obviously)-based lead gen programs to support global demand for high-growth SaaS companies. Experienced in building GTM programs from scratch and turning around existing ones. Able to forge lasting partner marketing relationships with startups and enterprise-class organizations. Inbound marketing success in driving practical corporate, divisional and industry lead gen and nurturing programs. Success in growing and leading teams towards rapid results plus can enthusiastically manage many programs, people, vendors and campaigns concurrently, Proactive and highly productive w/analytical skills, thrive in a rapidly changing environment (start-up to corporate marketing), inspires excellence in others. Demonstrates concise, effective communication both written and spoken, able to handle ambiguity, a high workload, and an extreme amount of detail - all within budget. Building sustainable relationships that drive revenue via demand generation programs: Strategic, Technical & Creative - Co-chair MassTLC Sales & Marketing Group; Co-author, "Go Mobile", #1 best-selling mobile marketing book. Named to Sales Lead Management Association "Top 50" 3 years in a row and "20 Women to Watch" in 2015/14/13 & 2011; Named to VAR Guy Top Channel Leaders in 2015; MSPmentor People to Watch in 2014; BizJournal marketing experts; Speaker @ MarketingProfs B2B Forums, HubSpot Inbound 2011/12/13/14/15 Conferences, MIT Entrepreneurs Forum, AMA, Social Media Today, BrightTalk, MassTLC, Social Fresh. Advisor: OneScreen.io; Siemplify.co; Rank the Vote Digital Council; USEFULL (Coffee Cup Collective); Below The Fold (Acciyo) Author: Go Mobile!

Why We're Doubling Down On Speaking in 2023 #2259

Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 26, 2022 3:46

In episode #2259, we talk about why we are doubling down on speaking in 2023. With the shutdowns of the pandemic, in-person events took an obvious knock, and it has been so nice for us to return to some exciting conferences since things have opened up. Tune in to hear the top reasons that we still love speaking in front of the right audience! TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES: [00:21] Today's topic: Why We're Doubling Down On Speaking in 2023. [00:25] Ramping up after the quiet period of the last two years. [00:45] Creating brand awareness and connecting with your ideal audience. [01:16] Repurposing content across channels, while building relationships. [02:27] Having fun at events while networking! [02:53] We all want to hang out with people who are working hard and doing cool things. [03:12] That's it for today! [03:15] Go to https://www.marketingschool.io to learn more! Links Mentioned in Today's Episode: Subscribe to our premium podcast (with tons of goodies!): https://www.marketingschool.io/pro HubSpot Inbound Leave Some Feedback: What should we talk about next? Please let us know in the comments below Did you enjoy this episode? If so, please leave a short review. Connect with Us: Neilpatel.com Quick Sprout Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @neilpatel Twitter @ericosiu

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Our Final HubSpot INBOUND Takeaways (For Awhile) and Why B2B Vertical Video Is Here to Stay

ohio takeaways awhile vertical video hubspot inbound tulsa state fair

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 12, 2022 27:56

Howdy and hello! Another day, another podcast from your favorite dynamic duo. We report in on our agency outing to the Tulsa State Fair and a great visit with our client Trencor as they journeyed from Ohio for a fascinating download on the business. The agency is headed to Cabin Boys Brewery this evening for […]

Our Final HubSpot INBOUND Takeaways (For Awhile) and Why B2B Vertical Video Is Here to Stay

ohio takeaways awhile vertical video hubspot inbound tulsa state fair

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 12, 2022 27:56

Our Final HubSpot INBOUND Takeaways (For Awhile) and Why B2B Vertical Video Is Here to Stay

ohio takeaways awhile vertical video hubspot inbound tulsa state fair

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 12, 2022 27:56

Live from Inbound: 5 ways you can leverage web3 in your marketing right now

Socialette: Bite-Sized Online Marketing Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 18, 2022 31:24

Recently I went to Boston to present a live podcast episode at the Hubspot Inbound conference. Today I'm excited to share this episode with you which is all about leveraging web3 in your marketing right now.In today's episode, I cover the following:- The recent shifts in online marketing and decentralized social media- As marketers, why should we be caring about Web3?- The technology that gives YOU property rights on the internet- The power of partnering with existing NFT communities- The benefits of using NFT assets in your marketing- Leveraging POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol)- The strategy behind rewarding your community actions through virtual rewards- The benefits of building a tokenised communitySHOW LINKS:- Want to access the resources from this episode? Visit https://stephtaylor.co/inbound- Get my Daily Biz Booster emails: https://stephtaylor.co/DBB- Want to join Launch Magic? Sign up here: https://stephtaylor.co/magic- 5 Simple Tweaks to Boost Your Launch Profits: https://stephtaylor.co/tweaks- Want me to spend a day working on your next launch? Book a VIP intensive: https://stephtaylor.co/vip- Get The A-Z Podcast Launch Plan: https://stephtaylor.co/plp-ig- Get a 30-day free trial of Kajabi: https://stephtaylor.co/kajabiLet's be Instagram friends: https://instagram.com/stephtaylor.co

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324 - LinkedIn Deep Dive with Daniel Murray

State of Demand Gen

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2022 53:27

Daniel Murray (Head of Media @ Sales Impact Academy and Founder @ The Marketing Millennials) joined Chris live in the Boston studio this week during Hubspot INBOUND. They talked through what the current state of LinkedIn is, how to make a company page work better than a personal profile, current pulse on live events, repurposed distribution, and what's working right now on TikTok. Thanks to our friends at Hatch for producing this episode. Get unlimited podcast editing at usehatch.fm.

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How LinkedIn Advertisers Use Their CRM Data - EP 71

LinkedIn Ads Show

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 8, 2022 34:49

Show Resources Here were the resources we covered in the episode: Lead Gen Form Ads Reporting UTM live builder NEW LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox Contact us at Podcast@B2Linked.com with ideas for what you'd like AJ to cover. Show Transcript I think B2B marketing and CRMs go together like chocolate and caramel. Today, we're diving into CRM reporting on this episode of the LinkedIn Ads Show. Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Here's your host, AJ Wilcox. Hey there, LinkedIn Ads fanatics! If you listened to the last episode about the cookiepocalypse, you know that conversion tracking as we know, it probably isn't going to be reliable in the future. Luckily, B2B and E commerce have something in common here. In E commerce, marketers will always have purchase data, whether or not it occurred, what the sale value was, etc. And no cookie can affect that. There's a very clear line all the way from ad impression to a purchase. In business to business. When someone fills out a form it goes into your CRM. So if you're doing it right, there's never a challenge in figuring out how many leads came from a specific effort. If someone filled out a form and submitted it, it's in the database, it's become increasingly important in business to business to make sure that we've got data available to us as marketers, so we can close the loop on reporting. That way, when a platforms conversion tracking is way under reporting, because cookie data is limited, or when a platform may be way over reporting because it's using some algorithm to calculate the estimated number of conversions, you can be totally carefree. On this episode, we're gonna dive into the connection between your ads efforts, and your CRM platform and show you what you can do with the day that to close that reporting. Another hat tip to Mark Bissoni for requesting this topic. And any of you out there who have a topic you'd like us to cover, please do reach out to us at Podcast@B2Linked.com. We are always looking forward to helping you become more super powered and hear about the topics that you're interested in. In the news, for you listeners who are attending HubSpot Inbound conference in Boston, I'm going to be speaking on Thursday there. So I'd love to get to connect if you're going to be in town. I heard a couple of weeks back that my session was totally filled up. So I hope you got registered early. But if not get there early to stand in the standby line, I speak at quite a few digital marketing conferences every year. And Inbound is by far the largest one that I speak at. And it's one of the ones I most look forward to every year. Okay, for the topic at hand, let's hit it. 2:27 What is a CRM? What is a CRM? First of all, we talk about it a lot in business to business, we may use the acronym, or we may say customer relationship management platform. But realistically, we're gonna say CRM, because the other one just hardly makes any sense. It's basically a database of your customers, your prospects, really anyone you'd want to keep track of. There are so many different types of CRMs out there. Really, anything can qualify as a CRM. If you just keep an Excel sheet, or a Google sheet of all of your current customers with some data about them, that is a really basic CRM. So don't be daunted when you hear the term if you haven't heard of it before. Some of the major CRMs that you've probably heard of before, are like Salesforce, HubSpot, Constant Contact. There's way, way, way too many to list all here. And all of them have their own personalities. Some are very tailored to sales, some are tailored more to marketing, some are better for email versus reps who are making calls. We B2Linked we actually went through several CRMs testing this, and we would have one that worked really, really well when we were doing outbound. And another that was much better with handling inbound. One connected to email really well and made it easier to do newsletters. And ultimately, you're gonna have to study all of the different capabilities based off of what you need your CRM to do. I would say most of our larger clients use Salesforce. And what's so cool about Salesforce is it's infinitely customizable. You can literally make it do whatever you want. But along with that customizability it means it's incredibly complex. Most of our clients who use salesforce.com have an internal Salesforce admin whose job it is just to keep the platform up and running. So if you don't want to hire a full time admin, there are certainly simpler CRMs. But it's great because you can make it do whatever you want. HubSpot has recently become a pretty great contender in the enterprise space. It offers the CRM functionality for free, but then the fees really start to kick in when you add on different marketing or different sales packages. I should say that HubSpot relationship with LinkedIn really makes it special. Because HubSpot and LinkedIn communicate really well. A lot of these integrations that we're going to talk about are done pretty much automatically. So as a marketer, why would you want to do this? Why should you care about a CRM? The simple fact is that your CRM extends your data, your ability to analyze, and your optimizations, beyond just those front end metrics. If all you do is rely on just LinkedIn's campaign manager, the deepest insights that you can get are things like a cost per lead, or a conversion rate, which as you'll remember from the last episode, those metrics are even getting muddy. So that means you can't actually get accurate lead counts, or number of qualified leads, or figure out your lead quality by campaign, or even solve the Holy Grail, which is calculating your ROI. You can't do any of this without involving your CRM. 5:26 Getting the advertising data into the CRM In order to connect your advertising data in with your CRM, you have to get the advertising data into the CRM. And there are two different ways to do that. The first is if you're using LinkedIn lead generation forms. If you want to know more about this, go back to Episode 17, where we did a deep dive on them. And these are really, really great, they tend to have super high conversion rates. But because that data actually lives on LinkedIn, you then have to get that data out. Of course, you could log into LinkedIn every day, and download the leads that have occurred in the past 24 hours, and then manually process them. But good heavens, if you are listening to this podcast, you are paid way too much for doing that activity. 6:07 Automation Okay, so let's figure out how to automate that. LinkedIn has partnered with several of these CRMs to allow you to just send that data directly into the CRM without any sort of human contact, Salesforce.com, HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, and quite a few others, I've included a link down below in the show notes so you can see all of the different integration partners with your LinkedIn Ads. But if you're not using one of the CRMs, that LinkedIn fully integrates with, don't worry about that, because you have a pretty cheap solution. Zapier.com, last time I checked, their $20 per month plan could get all of your LinkedIn lead gen formatted data directly into about any CRM or any workflow that you want. And $20 a month is definitely a cheap price to pay, compared to having to do that all manually. So that's LinkedIn lead gen forms. What if you're driving traffic to your website and you want the form on your website to pass into your CRM? That's definitely possible. We've all been doing that for years. And here's how that process works. First of all, when someone clicks on your ad and visits your landing page, the link that they visit, can and should have tracking information in it. We call these tracking parameters. So those tracking parameters are just sitting in the address bar when someone is there on your page. And then when they decide to fill out the form, the info that it asks for might be things like your name, your email, etc. And then they hit submit. But what they don't know is that before the form is submitted, the JavaScript of the page made note of the whole URL that was up in the address bar, and all of its tracking parameters that could have in it, and it sent them along into the CRM, along with those visible form fields. So the CRM now has data about who someone was, as well as a little bit of information about where that traffic came from, which is incredibly helpful to you as a marketer. So then your CRM needs to be configured to actually look for those parameters and how to recognize them. And it'll store them inside that lead record that was just created through that form submission. Since the vast majority of marketers out there are using Google Analytics, we should take some time to talk about UTM parameters. Now don't get confused by the acronym UTM. Hardly anyone knows what it means it doesn't really mean anything. It stands for urchin tracking module. Urchin was the company that Google acquired to actually turn it into Google Analytics. So it's just a brand name, you don't have to worry about it. But now we as marketers talk a lot about UTM parameters, because Google Analytics has a set of five standard parameters that it accepts natively. And those are source, medium, campaign, content, and term. The first three are required, you need to provide a source, a medium and a campaign, but content and term and then a whole bunch of other custom ones, they're optional. So I'll give you an example. If I was sending traffic from LinkedIn Ads into my website, my UTM parameter for source would probably be LinkedIn. It's the website or the channel that I'm using. For my medium, I like to identify the different ad formats I'm using. So if I'm sending sponsored content ads to my website, I would probably put SC for sponsored content in media. Then for campaign I like to actually include information about either the actual campaign within LinkedIn, or a description of the audience. And that way, if I go into Google Analytics, I can see all of my reporting by audience segment, which is really cool. Then we have content. And Google originally designed this to be a way that you could tell the difference between your AB tests that you're running. So when we create ads, every single ad has its own unique UTM content parameter. And because it absolutely has to be unique. By far the easiest way I've found to make something unique is to stick today's date in it because obviously today's dates not going to repeat itself. So one of our content parameters might look really daunting to someone who doesn't know what they're looking at. But it may say something like LI, short for LinkedIn, SC, short for sponsored content, and then a six digit number representing today's date. And then like 0102, an incremental digit for which ad this was that we were publishing. And what's so cool is because that content parameter includes all of that information, it allows us to go back and figure out the exact image, the exact everything that was associated with that ad later on. And we track that all internally with proprietary tools. So this is obviously a very proprietary way that we handle the UTM content parameter. But I hope just as an example, this was helpful or interesting to you. The last standard UTM parameter is term. And that was used to track the individual keyword from different search campaigns. But obviously, because we're dealing with paid social here with LinkedIn, we don't really bid by keyword. So term is just one of those ones that's leftover. You could use it for something if you want, but you don't have to. So whether you're using Google Analytics or not, you can still use Google's UTM parameters. Or you could really use anything else. For instance, if you use Adobe Analytics, which is very much used by those enterprise companies, they have a parameter called a CID parameter. And of course, it can be very customized. But this is oftentimes one parameter that represents everything that Google asked for five parameters to represent. When you're advertising on Google, on Google Ads, Google will automatically put something called a gclid, or a Google Click ID inside the URL. And a lot of people are able to grab that parameter and make it useful and identifying an individual click. Facebook has something similar, they call it the FBclid, or Facebook click identifier. And if you don't want to use any of these, you don't have to, you could do your own custom URL parameters. If you look at a URL, anything after the question mark doesn't usually change the content of the page or change the address of the page at all. It's just extra information for some system about that traffic. There are a few very technical exceptions here. But usually, when you look at a URL, the address of the page ends, right as soon as you hit the question mark, and then everything after that, you can change and make whatever you want. So the question mark becomes your first query parameter. And then if you have multiples, they are separated by the ampersand or the and sign. So you can have as many query parameters as you want, it's just the first one is going to start with a question mark. All the other ones after are ampersands. And there's absolutely nothing magic about the parameters that you choose, it just means that you're going to have to configure some system to recognize and identify them, and store them if you want to use them. So if you haven't built parameters before, especially if you're using Google Analytics, there are a whole bunch of free tools out there to build your UTM parameters and your URLs for you. We've linked to one down in the show notes called utmbuilder.com. But it's a very, very simple type of function. And so a whole bunch of different companies have evolved to do this for free. We actually do this all within Excel. We have an automatic URL builder that grabs things from all the different columns that we're building our ads inside of Excel with, and just concatenates them together in the right format. So there are a lot of options, you can really do this any way you want. And we're going to talk a lot about how this information makes it into your forms. But it's helpful to know that UTM parameters were originally designed just to tell your analytic solution, how to categorize the traffic that you're bringing in. So for instance, if you click on a post inside of LinkedIn, that takes you to someone's website, Google Analytics is going to see the referring URL as LinkedIn. And that's pretty much all it knows. And it knows that LinkedIn is a social platform. It's going to categorize that as an organic social referral, which is actually correct in this case. But what if you were running ads on LinkedIn, and you didn't put any sort of parameters in the URL, someone clicks from one of your ads and lands on your website. And now Google Analytics is categorizing it exactly the same, it thinks it was an organic referral from social. But if you put UTM parameters in your URLs, you're telling Google Analytics, this is how I need you to classify this traffic. This is not an organic referral. This is an ad click. And here's the audience that was targeting. And here's what ad type we were using all kinds of different information that you can pass to them be able to properly analyze your marketing efforts. They enable you to look inside of analytics and see website traffic behavior, broken down by any of the UTM parameters you set up. You can see things like average session duration, or pages viewed by campaign or audience or individual ad or ad type. Really, possibilities are nearly endless. Alright, here's a quick sponsor break and then we'll dive into the weaknesses of URL track. 14:52 The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linked.com, the LinkedIn Ads experts. 15:01 If you're a B2B company and care about getting more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, then chances are LinkedIn Ads are for you. But the platform isn't easy to use and can be painfully expensive on the front end, at B2Linked, we've cracked the code to maximizing ROI while minimizing costs. Our methodology includes building and executing LinkedIn Ad strategies, customized to your unique needs, and tailored to the way B2B companies buy today. Over the last 11 years, we've worked with some of LinkedIn largest advertisers in the world, we've spent over $150 million dollars on the platform, and we're official LinkedIn partners. If you want to generate more sales opportunities with your ideal prospects, book a discovery call at B2linkedin.com/apply, we'd absolutely love to get to work with you. 15:49 Weaknesses of URL tracking Alright, let's jump into the weaknesses of URL tracking. So first off, since it captures only traffic that submitting forms, this is best suited for what we would call the trust stage. We tend to break our stages down into three different stages, your awareness, your trust, and your advocacy. So you could have tracking parameters in your URLs. But if no one ever fills out a form, it really didn't do much except communicate to your analytics solution where the traffic came from, but nothing is going to make it into your CRM. So you wouldn't be able to tell from your CRM, about view through conversions, or assists from other platforms. The cool thing though, is that your analytics platform can still track what you define as a conversion. And the analytics solution is going to attempt to track all of the activity of that user. Of course, if you listen to our last episode about the cookie pocalypse conversion tracking may not be all that reliable in the future. So we'll just kind of have to wait and see. 16:43 Tracking Parameters And then some web developer decided they wanted their URLs to look clean. And so they do something in JavaScript called a URL rewrite. And then the website can I have come across some websites that do some crazy stuff with URLs. So for instance, you might send a URL with all of the tracking parameters. And then some web developer decided they wanted their URLs to look clean. And so they do something in JavaScript called a URL rewrite. And then the website can automatically strip out your tracking parameters to try to make the site look really clean to your user. The problem is that when that URL gets rewritten, it destroys your tracking. It might be great for visual cleanliness. But the vast majority of users are not going to care that they have junk at the end of their URL, we're so used to seeing long URLs with stuff that we don't understand. Another weakness that we've come across is if someone lands on the page, and then has URL parameters in their URL, but then they click to a different page, those parameters are then lost. Your analytic solution knows that that traffic came in from those parameters. But if that second page is the one with the contact form, and it's trying to grab those parameters, they're not there and it's just going to send through blanks. So when advertising on LinkedIn, my recommendation is to land traffic on a landing page that has the form on that same page. Don't give them opportunities to click elsewhere. Otherwise, you'll lose a lot of this tracking data, we actually experienced this ourselves, we sent ad traffic to a page with a link to a contact form. And of course, we love when someone chooses to contact us. But then as soon as the user navigated to the page with the form, it dropped their URL tracking parameters and so we lost them. We still ask them the discovery call where someone heard about us. So we'll still get a little bit of data about which channels are performing and turning into appointments for us. But it's not nearly as reliable as if I had the UTM content parameter telling me exactly which ad drove that person. So you need to make sure that you configure your CRM to accept this data that you're giving. And this is all to make sure that when someone submits the form, and that data is passed into your CRM, it carries with it information about the source of that traffic. And that means that any lead that enters into your CRM that had tracking parameters in the URL when the form was filled out, would communicate that source information on that lead form. So now once you have the data in your CRM, we get to do some really cool stuff. As a disclaimer here, I'm going to talk you through the steps that I would take in Excel to do this. So if you're not already comfortable with Excel, this may sound a little bit like gobbledygook. But first off, you want to go and find out in your CRM, how do you generate a report for a specific timeframe? What this report should look like the first column should be the date. The second column should be some tracking parameter. For us, it would be the UTM content parameter, but you could put anything you want in there, the UTM campaign, it could be an Adobe ad CID, or anything else. And all subsequent columns would be a count of the number of records for each of the down funnel conversion steps that you want to track. So for instance, in standard B2B, we might have like an MQL for marketing qualified leads and an SQL for sales qualified leads. We might have number of proposals sent out Number of close deals that happened. And that means any of my tracking parameters that brought in a lead, or graduated to an SQL or graduated to a proposal or a closed deal on that date, it would have an incremental digit in one of those columns. You export this to Excel so that you can get ready to combine it with your spend performance data. I'm going to refer to this CRM data as CRM data from now on. Then you want to actually go to your LinkedIn ads reporting. So you go into LinkedIn Ads, it's very important, you want to make sure you've set your timeframe for your reporting as the same timeframe that you're looking at for your CRM data, then you want to export your ad performance data into Excel. Now, it's really important that you do choose the ad Performance Report, because that's the report that is going to have all of your click URLs in them. And your click URLs is where your UTM parameters or other tracking parameters are housed. You should generate this as an all time report. Otherwise, you might have a row for every single ad that ran for every single month or every single day that it ran. So generate that as an all time combined report and then you won't need to run an extra Pivot Table on your data later, which would be a pain. If you haven't listened to Episode 69 of the podcast all about reporting, you'll definitely want to make sure you do that. Then the next steps that I do is I will take the destination URL column, which houses all of the URLs with their tracking parameters and I make a duplicate of that column. And someone who's really good at Excel is about to tell me how dumb I'm doing this, I need to strip out just the tracking parameters that I care about into their own columns. And so I do this with the search and replace function inside of Excel. If I'm trying to isolate just my UTM content parameter. For instance, I'm going to do a search and replace on that column in Excel. I'm going to start with the asterisk, which is a wildcard in Excel. And then I'm going to put UTM underscore content equals and then I'm going to leave the replace blank. So what happens is Excel is looking for anything that comes before UTM underscore content equals and replacing it with nothing. So now on the left side of that URL, I have only the contents of my UTM content parameter. If there are other parameters that came after it, I can do the same thing by doing a search and replace for whatever comes after that maybe the first few characters or something with a wildcard after that. And then again, replace that with nothing. Now I have a column where just the values of my UTM content parameters are housed. If I care about the other UTM parameters, I can do the same thing to isolate source, medium, campaign, term, etc. So now you have a column for each UTM parameter that was associated with each ad. So now I can create a pivot table where the row is the tracking parameter and then my values are the columns that I bring in are things like spend, impressions, clicks, and any other ad performance data I care about. So this sheet that you're working with right now becomes your base data, as I call it. So you want to keep this sheet open. And I'm going to refer to this as your ads data from now on. So if you're tracking so far, we have a spreadsheet containing your CRM data. And we have this one that contains your ad data. So now you want to go and take your CRM data and paste it into a new sheet in your workbook. That way, it's one Excel file that houses all of your CRM and your ad performance data. Then once it's all in one sheet, you get to start doing the magic work, you can start combining your ads data with your CRM data to find insights. So in your ads data, I would then go and create a new column for each of the lead stages. So I might create a column for MQL, one for SQL, one for proposal, one for closed deal. And then to fill those columns up, I'm going to do a V lookup, which allows me to bring in the number of each type of those conversions by whichever tracking parameter was there within my ads. So if I were doing it, I would look for that ads individual UTM content parameter, that's my tracking parameter, then I would go to our sheet that contains the CRM data and pull in the number of MQLs associated with that UTM parameter. I'd go and do the same thing, another lookup to bring in the second stage, maybe SQL, another one to bring in proposals, and other to bring in closes. So now we don't even need that sheet with our CRM data anymore. We can do everything from right within the ABS data. Now highlight all of your ABS data and create a pivot table from there. And again, you want your tracking parameter to be the row and then for your values. You want to bring in all of your ad performance. So your spend your impressions your clicks, video views, whatever you want to bring in. And then what I do is inside of that pivot table, I go to create additional calculated columns. You can do it manually is kind of the lazy way. But it's a lot easier to do this as calculated columns. So I'll go and create calculated columns for click through rate and cost per click. I'll create one for conversion rate, that is essentially my MQLs divided by my clicks, or leads, divided by clicks, whatever you're using, I can create one for cost per conversion. But now because I have these columns in my data for number of MQLs, number of SQL, all those further lead stages, I can create a calculated column of my cost per MQL, my cost per SQL, my cost per proposal, my cost per closed deal. Extra credit if you're actually pulling in the deal value from your CRM, then you could actually do a calculation of my actual return on adspend, or my return on investment. I also like to create columns for my close rate, or my graduation rate from every stage of the funnel. So I could show my graduation rate from MQL to SQL. So now you're actually looking at a report making decisions about the ad performance, based on the performance all the way down the funnel. It allows you to make decisions like oh, my cost per conversion is cheap with this audience, but they convert to sales qualified lead at a really poor rate. So it's really not worth us running. And there are so many more steps here that just talking you through, it isn't going to work very well. So I would encourage you to come follow us on YouTube. And I'm going to do a walkthrough of a down funnel report, the whole build, in the coming weeks, so you can follow along. And you can see the link to our YouTube channel, just down in the show notes below. Make sure you're subscribed. 26:44 Nurturing Your Leads So let's get away from the geeky stuff. Now, what can you do to actually nurture your leads, once they're in the CRM? Well, remember, your CRM is basically just a database of the people that you've put in there. So you could export from your CRM, all current customers, and then upload that into LinkedIn as a matched audience, to target and show messaging to those who are your current customers, which could be really good for retaining them. And once you have that list, you can also exclude it from your other targeting, so that you're not showing prospecting ads to people who are already paying you money. Something else I really like to do from nurture, is download a list of active leads, especially the companies that who have become leads, but haven't yet closed the deal. And I can upload that into LinkedIn, and create a warming campaign just around trying to inspire those active leads to close. But of course, if this is done inside of your CRM, most of the time, this is able to be pushed out through your marketing automation workflow, or as an email list. So the same advertising you could do to people who are active leads, but haven't closed, you could also send them emails to keep them informed. Or maybe your marketing automation system does SMS or text messaging. If you have a list of emails, most ad platforms, at least the major ones, allow you to upload those lists of emails and target them with ads, just like LinkedIn. But Facebook, custom audiences can do it. Google can, Quora can, Twitter can. So there's a lot here that you can do across all of your different platforms. And just another note here on lead quality reporting, you could wait for sales to give you some sort of a lead quality or a lead score on the leads as they come in. But I find if I have enough leads coming in just my graduation rate from MQL to SQL, or SQL, which might be stage two to stage three, whatever comes next is going to be really effective at telling me the quality of the leads that are coming through. If they're not graduating to stage two or stage three in my sales process, chances are sales does not think those leads are very high quality. So for instance, if one campaign has a higher cost per SQL than another campaign, you can take action by lowering the bids or pausing that campaign entirely. Or if you have one ad that has a terrible graduation rate, you could pause that ad and go and try something else. 27:16 Pitfalls As you're setting up your CRM to be able to do everything that we're talking about, there are some pitfalls that you might come across. So let's go through a few of those. We have had a situation several times with our clients CRMs, where our point of contact will ask us to send over the tracking parameters in advance so that they can set the CRM up to recognize and watch for that parameter to occur. We don't want to do this, since it requires human work before every ad launch. And if you happen to launch ads before that work has been done in the CRM, then the CRM won't properly track that traffic, which is not great. So just know that whatever CRM you're using, it can be set up so you don't have to do this. What it does is it just dynamically grabs every parameter from the URL and inserts it in the lead record. So make sure you're set up to do that. I should note that hubs Spot does this really, really well, because of its integration with LinkedIn. As traffic comes in from LinkedIn to your website into HubSpot, I'm pretty sure this is already right out of the gate. Another pitfall that we've come across is multiple forms being filled out by the same user ends up overwriting the tracking parameters from the last time. So for instance, if I clicked on a LinkedIn ad, and filled out a form, and then came back three weeks later from a Google retargeting ad, and then filled out a different form, as they both go into the CRM, a lot of times what happens is the CRM goes, oh, we have an update on this user and so I'm going to delete the tracking parameters that say that they came from LinkedIn and update it as now they came from Google. And I'm sure you can see why this is a problem. If you're trying to track your LinkedIn performance, you don't want to lose those leads that are just taking further action with the website. So what you want to happen is you want to stack all of their tracking parameters. So every time a user comes through, and fills out a form, and they come up with new tracking parameters, it just keeps record of all of the steps that that user took in their journey. You might also have some logic that decides how to treat duplicate form fills. Some teams really care about net new leads. So sure, you're gonna drive traffic from LinkedIn. And the same person over a two month period maybe has filled out a form twice so there's two conversions. But if the team says we only care about net new conversions, they might treat that just as a single conversion. I get asked a lot about different attribution models. Do we recommend first touch attribution, last touch, W shaped multi touch? Well, I definitely have an opinion here. But I don't have a blanket opinion that boosts one model up over another. The model I care about is what I call any touch attribution. Since we're managing only one ad channel, but our clients, our points of contact, they need to judge the performance over multiple channels that they oversee, they're going to need to select the attribution model that they care about and want to use. And we do of course, hope that it's one that fairly attributes the performance across all the channels. So that's attribution done by the manager. But I suggest every individual channel owner gets access to every single lead that was touched by their channel. And I call this any touch attribution. What this means is when we go to do reporting on LinkedIn ad performance, every ad and every conversion that was driven, I can then link up to spend that occurred on the platform. So we have a precise calculation for the cost per lead, and their cost per qualified lead, etc. And ultimately, if the manager decides that they want to give the credit for a deal, partially or fully to another channel, I don't care. What I care about is getting as much data about which of my ads and campaigns are driving actions. So I can then go and optimize towards those data points and make the LinkedIn account better. So as a recap here, managers over multiple accounts should be using a general attribution method. But individual channel owners should be running off of any touch attribution, because you're definitely going to want as much data about performance down funnel as possible to help improve your ad creative. 30:53 All right, I've got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around. Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away. 33:29 We mentioned lead gen form ads on LinkedIn, that's episode 17, so go and make sure you've listened to that. Also, Episode 69 is all about reporting so make sure you've caught up on that. To build UTM parameters onto your URLs, that's just utmbuilder.com, You can see the link in the show notes as well. There's also a link to our YouTube channel where you can see future reporting breakdowns that I'm gonna do. If you or someone on your team is looking to learn more about LinkedIn Ads, definitely pass them the course you'll see the link down below. It's the LinkedIn Learning course all about LinkedIn Ads that I'm the author of. It's by far the least expensive and the most in depth training that you can find on LinkedIn Ads right now. So check that out. Also, look down at your podcast player right now. If you haven't already, hit subscribe, and everything I'm sharing with you absolutely is free. But I hope you'll consider going to actually leave us a review in your podcast player. It is the biggest way that you can say thanks for us putting these episodes together with any questions, tips, tricks, suggestions, anything like that, hit us up at Podcast@B2Linked.com. And with that being said, we'll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.

HubHeroes EP5: INBOUND 2022, Pop Quiz, Preparing, Surviving, and Memory Lane

The HubHeroes Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 21, 2022 43:30

Y'all, it's almost here – HubSpot's INBOUND 2022 event, which is dedicated to showcasing incredible thought leadership across marketing, sales, customer success, and revenue operations. And I cannot even begin to tell you how stoked we are. Although to be selfish here for a moment, I'll admit there's one thing about INBOUND 2022 that makes me happy and sad at the same time:Once again, I'm speaking this year at INBOUND, and my session on pillar pages and content cluster strategies is already full! Again, it's exciting! And also sad! Is that strange? Anyway, I digress ... Given that Max, Devyn, and I are your humble HubHeroes, you just had to know that with HubSpot INBOUND 2022 right around the corner (September 7-9 in Boston and online!), we were going to be dedicating an episode to it. Especially given that it was 10 years ago that I attended my very first HubSpot INBOUND, and that's when everything changed in my life.It's crazy how time flies. It's also crazy about how much actionable HubSpot INBOUND 2022 goodness we were able to pack into this episode – whether you're attending in person, attending digitally, or thinking about whether or not HubSpot's annual event may be in your future someday, you should tune in and take notes.We talk about our favorite memories and speakers from years' past, we break down our secrets to making your HubSpot week absolute magic for you (as a human) and the goals you're trying to reach, and where you'll likely see us when the three of us during all of the endless festivities. WE ALSO TALK ABOUT ... How HubSpot INBOUND is about way more than just marketing. Seriously, if you think this is just an event for marketers by marketers, you are sorely mistaken. Pro-tips for first-time INBOUND attendees, from footwear to Boston public transportation secrets, we get very specific on to how to get the most out of what is an amazing event ... but it can also be very overwhelming if it's your first time. With Barack Obama speaking this year (crazy, right?!), we play a few pop quiz rounds on the speaking fees of some of the event's biggest headliners in recent years. The INBOUND 2022 speakers we're most excited to see and why. All the deets on the INBOUND 2022 meetups and get-togethers you need to know about – including a couple we're running ourselves! Also, is it possible to get compensated as a speaker at INBOUND in Dunkin' Donuts gift cards? Because, apparently, that's all you need to get Max to show up on your main stage – take note, event planners! Just typing all of that up got me hyped for INBOUND and for this episode.RESOURCES FOR THIS EPISODESome of these we talked about, others we're adding because they're only going to make the episode that much sweeter for you ... HubSpot INBOUND 2022 event page (in-person and some digital passes still available) BLACK@INBOUND Get to know the George B. Thomas origin story (And my 2012 HubSpot experience) Learn about the Content Creation Masterclass (limit of 20 spots) Join the HubHeroes community on Facebook HubHeroes Podcast, Ep. 1: Why HubSpot? Why Inbound? Wait, what the heck is The HubHeroes Podcast?! YOUR ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODEHubSpot INBOUND is an annual event that is so much more than many people think it is – even the folks who've attended in the past can sometimes forget how much it is evolving, and how expansive the wealth of knowledge is that HubSpot is sharing. So, your one thing if you're attending (online or in-person) is take the time to really research what's available to you through this year's programming and make a plan. SHOW TRANSCRIPTIONGeorge B Thomas (01:10):You know, I wonder if there's ever gonna be a day where we have to like, edit that intro to either like max, Devon and George now work for HubSpot or well anyway. Nevermind not why we're here. What ladies, gentlemen yeah.Mac Cohen (01:20)Right? What?George B Thomas (01:25):What a way to start the episode. No, I know nothing. I, I know zero. No, that's just, that's not true. I definitely don't know anything about working for HubSpot. I don't know how that would go. I'm kind of a weird dude, but speaking of HubSpot, let's dive into today's conversation, which we're actually taking a spin a little bit out of what we usually do.Usually we talk about tactics strategies, marketing sales, business, mentalities around things like buyer personas and all these good things. By the way, about 32 episodes already planned out for the future. So listeners just know that this podcast is here for you and your growth in the future. But today we're gonna spin. We're gonna talk about something that's coming up, that we're all excited about.We're gonna talk about inbound 20, 22, a couple things. First max and Devon. You had zero clue that this was coming well. I mean, you saw the show notes, hopefully. So you had some clue, but almost zero clue and no clue to the questions that I'm about to ask. Geez, geez. It's pop quiz and it's actually pop quiz for the listeners as well. Now I know both of you have computers in front of you. You're really not allowed to cheat, but no Googling. If you do. That's okay. LET'S START WITH A HUBSPOT INBOUND POP QUIZ (NO CHEATING!)Devyn Belamy (02:41):Was gonna say, define Google. Define cheating. Yeah.George B Thomas (02:44):Yeah. I mean it is an open book test. It is an open book test. So question number one. When was the first year that George B. Thomas went to inbound?Devyn Belamy (02:55):I wanna say 2010.George B Thomas (02:57):Nope. BUZZZZZMax Cohen (02:58):2012George B Thomas (03:00):Dinging, dinging, dinging, ding. There you go. Yes, max, you got it. 2012 was the first year that I went to inbound and a fun little Diddy is I won tickets. We didn't even pay the first time that we went. It was me and agency owner that owned that agency at the time. And that's when I learned about hub SWAT. Okay. Next question. When was the first year that black at inbound appeared at inbound? Well,Devyn Belamy (03:27):That's kind of cheating if I justGeorge B Thomas (03:29):Answer it. Look at Max's face. I wish people could see Max's face right now.Max Cohen (03:34):He's Devyn Belamy (03:35):Yes, max, when did it start, pleaseMax Cohen (03:37):Me. Hold, hold on, hold on. What year is it now? It's 20, 20 19.George B Thomas (03:43):See, I wanna say 18 older than that.Max Cohen (03:45):OlderGeorge B Thomas (03:45):Than that. I wanna say 18. It'sMax Cohen (03:47):Older than that. Wait, do you theGeorge B Thomas (03:48):AnswerMax Cohen (03:48):George 20, is it 20 17, 1Devyn Belamy (03:51):MoreGeorge B Thomas (03:54):20, 20 16. You myMax Cohen (03:55):Calculator 2016,George B Thomas (03:56):Ding, ding, ding, ding, all winners. It's 2016 black. It inbound 2016, which by the way, if you're not part of that, make sure you're part of that because Devon is crushing it with that community for sure.Devyn Belamy (04:07):Well, I'm just showing up at this point. There is a whole team of highly talented and motivated hubs spotters who run it now, even though it started as a community thing started as a hashtag. But now it is several people's full-time job.George B Thomas (04:21):I love it. I love it. All right. Pop quiz, question number three. How much is Barack Obama's speaking fee?Devyn Belamy (04:32):Ooh, isn't it like something like 200,000?George B Thomas (04:34):No, I know that's Michelle'sDevyn Belamy (04:36):Oh, that's Michelle's. I mean,Max Cohen (04:37):What we get is it's standard. Are there like tiered packages?George B Thomas (04:41):Devyn Belamy (04:42):I mean, how much Obama do you get?George B Thomas (04:44):I don't, I don't.Max Cohen (04:45):Is there a, is there a pricing page? Is it the same for everything? I, you know what I'm gonna say? Hey, worth it worth. Every penny is what I'll say.George B Thomas (04:52):Oh, I'm not gonna disagree, but, but here's the thing. So take a wild, just wild, wild guess of first of all here I'll I'll I'll level set here, Mr. Bill Clinton. His speaking fee is $750,000.Devyn Belamy (05:07):Oh, well, if, if Barack Obama doesn't go for the cool million thenGeorge B Thomas (05:12):Interest. WhatDevyn Belamy (05:13):Been talking about here? What goingGeorge B Thomas (05:14):All right. Give me your guesses. Give me your guesses.Max Cohen (05:17):My, my speaking fee is a dunking donuts gift card. Be honest.George B Thomas (05:22):Yeah. Two donuts and a large coffee. AMax Cohen (05:25):Oh a she, I dunno a mill. Yeah,George B Thomas (05:28):No, not it's less. It's less the, the, actually the highest price paid,Max Cohen (05:32):Just theGeorge B Thomas (05:33):Dollar, the higher, the highest price. Former president, at least the, the information that I'm looking at on Google is actually bill Clinton. So it's less than seven 50,000. Oh really? But, but, but we know it's more than Michelle. We know that it's more than Michelle, which I know that from years previous was like two, 250,500. Ooh, that's close. There'sMax Cohen (05:53):So many,Devyn Belamy (05:53):5 0 1 Bob George B Thomas (05:55):Ah, that that's funny. $400,000. What did now, can you that's a bargain of twice. That's can, can you imagine getting paid $400,000 for 45 minutes of talkingMax Cohen (06:09):In dunking donuts gift cards? Yes. Are you kidding me? I love it. INBOUND AS A MUST-ATTEND EVENT FOR AGENCY OWNERS AND MARKETING PROFESSIONALSGeorge B Thomas (06:14):Oh, I love it. All right. Let's go ahead and get into the episode. So here's the thing. There is a quote on the inbound page and it goes a must-attend event for agency owners and marketing professionals. This quote is from Forbes. I would agree that inbound is an event that if you have not attended it, you should attend.And now there's two things. If you're listening to this one, there is an in-person event. By the time you listen to this, it may almost be slightly impossible, but nothing's impossible for you to be at the in-person event, but there is a hybrid or virtual side of this that you could definitely do this year. And then next year, put it on your roadmap to go to this event. I want to go ahead and dive into your guys' brain around inbound. If we're talking about that, it's a must attend event. Why you gotta back up the claims. You gotta give evidence to the proof, by the way, this is, this is marketing and sales too. You gotta, you gotta have evidence when you say something. So Devon, why is inbound a must attend event for you?Devyn Belamy (07:14):For me, it's the caliber of information that you get and the caliber of training that you get from these breakout sessions, you aren't gonna find in one place anywhere else. Inbound has drastically improved. And I, and like no hyperbole drastically improved my skillset. As a marketer, I have gotten so much better at marketing and as, and management, as well as just being able to exist in a corporate environment. I owe a significant portion of that to the breakout sessions at inbound, there is a, an equation that I teach about how to basically identify the monetary value of your Mon marketing pipeline. I learned it at inbound. Like I, I regurgitate so much and people think I'm so smart. And I could just like wear a t-shirt that says I learned it in inboundGeorge B Thomas (08:19): oh, oh, oh, that's another t-shirt idea for hub heroes. Max, when you think about this question of why is inbound a must attend event? Where does your brain go? Well, HUBSPOT INBOUND IS ABOUT WAY MORE THAN MARKETINGMax Cohen (08:30):For me, selfishly, you know, cuz I've every inbound attended like event I've ever gone to has been as employee. Right? So for me it was you know, all about hugging all the friends that I was making so like for, you know, for me, like I, I, I very much used it sort of as a a really good excuse just to be able to meet folks in person that I'd been working with so closely for a long time. And you know, that was always super fun for me.But in terms of like everyone else who's actually attending, right? You look at the HubSpot community itself, we're a community that like educates itself. People are always sharing content. People are always like helping each other out in the different communities that have existed, be it online or these other sort of events that kind of pop out throughout the year.There's no better place to go to get just a concentrated, just power shot of the HubSpot community than, than inbound. Whether you want to go there for networking, whether you want to go there to actually learn something, especially from fellow folks in your community, there's no, you know, better way of doing that. In my opinion, also just, you know, go hug your customer, onboarding specialist, go, go shake hands with your CSM, go meet these people that actually really care a whole lot about, you know, your success, things like that. But you know, it's just a great way to kind of learn from each other. And I think also just see all these like different perspectives. You're gonna see a lot of people with a lot of different, you know, lenses in which they view this whole kind of world that we live in. I think you're gonna see a lot of sessions that kind of go out of some of the basic stuff you hear about over and over and over again in the inbound world, right?It's not all just about the inbound methodology or anything like that. There's there's many, many other topics you can learn kind of outside of our little inbound bubble too. And it's just, you know, they always got like great entertainment lined up, awesome speakers. Obviously this year is gonna be great. So yeah, there's a million reasons. Try to figure out what you want to get out of it. Cuz I think for every single person attending, whether you're HubSpot user or HubSpot employee, someone who's new to this whole community, someone who works at an agency partner or business owner or whatever, you can get different things out of it. If you just plan accordingly,George B Thomas (10:24):Ooh, planning, planning is a key thing. By the way, we might have to come back to planning for inbound as part of this show later on, I'm gonna up vote both of what you said, right? Education is key. The humans are key for me. What's interesting. I learned a long time ago with inbound, that it is the perfect place to become the T-shaped, whatever you want to be. Let me explain what I mean by that. You can go to the conversion rate optimization event and you can learn about conversion rate optimization. You can go to the like sales event and learn just about sales. But when you go to inbound, you have this ability to figure out what do I wanna be really, really, really, really good at the pillar of what makes me who I am as a marketer, as a sales rep, as a business owner and what are the 2, 3, 4 topics that I want to be the overlying tea of this T-shaped human being that I'm building myself to be as an example, when I think about this, HubSpot is my pillar of all pillars.I don't, I don't want there to be anybody on the planet that knows more. There are though by the way, but I don't want there to be anybody on the planet that knows more about HubSpot than me. Now the top part of my tea is actually content creation, podcasting video. That's the other stuff that I like to learn, but there's also like the side of inbound. That is the human side and the business side and the strategy that goes along with the tactics that you learn from the dope speakers. And so going back to kind of this planning of how can you plan to not only dive deeper into what it is that you are good at, but learn those ancillary pieces to the left and right of you. That really when you plug those in 10 X, any performance that you're gonna do in the future.So we have to ask you audience listeners, this is about you, but we're curious what you think, why for you has inbound been historically and must attend event. And if you haven't gone, why are you excited to go this year? Either in person or virtually used the hashtag hashtag hub heroes podcast and let us know on the socials. Here's the thing, Devon, max inbound. It's a little bit of a thing we're talking for days. We're talking like 12 to 16 hour days, depending if you go to the pubs and parties. So we might need a little bit of a survival guide. So when you think about things that we need to know to survive the four days, by the way, even virtually I sat at my desk virtually last year for like 12 hours doing an after hour show learning all that I could. So even I'm not, I'm not even just talking in person, but in person and virtually what are those things that we need to think about or know to survive inbound, IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST TIME GOING TO INBOUND, HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOWDevyn Belamy (13:16):If you're going in person, the first thing, it always wear comfortable shoes. If you show up in heels, you're gonna have a bad time. I mean, there's no true inbound dress code. I don't believe, but dress casual, dress comfortable. Be ready if you're doing the digital event, then the cool thing is, is a lot of what you're gonna be seeing is going to be accessible later. And so don't try and kill yourself, trying to get to everything, pace yourself. So you can not burn out at home cuz the, the energy level's different online than it is in person in person, the energy's contagious. People are running around. You wanna run around too. In person, you pass out every night in the hotel room, unless you live in Boston, then lucky you overpaying on your house. But if you are doing the digital thing, just, you know, pace yourself. And regardless of whether you're digital or in person, if you're attending with friends, split up, if you're attending coworkers, split up everybody, divide and conquer, get as much information as you can take good notes and compare notes afterwards.George B Thomas (14:26):Yes, that divide and conquer is a real deal. Holy field pro tip, without a doubt, if you see two or three people from the same company in the same room, get out of there doing it wrong, run. Max, what are your thoughts?Max Cohen (14:40):So for anyone who's not a Massachusetts native that's coming. First thing you need to know is the Massachusetts bay transit authority, which I think is what the acronym for the, the MBTA is the people who run our trains in our subways. It's less than reliable so it's terrible. The MBTA is absolutely awful. So just keep that in mind, if you are gonna rely on public transportation to get anywhere, if you're going to the physical event just or anywhere in general, make sure you give quite a bit of buffer time just because things tend to be late, stop working, not, not great. So just make sure you're, you're giving yourself a little extra time cuz the M BTA is always gonna M BTA in terms of if you're go and, and this, I guess you could say this is also like, if you're, whether you're going or whether you're going digital.One of the biggest scripts I always make and I've, I've really made it over the past two years too, with the digital events is not blocking out my calendar ahead of time. Yeah. If you're attending digitally, we're all probably still doing our jobs at that time. I doubt that like you're taking days off of work to attend a digital event. So if there are certain sessions go and take a look at the agenda ahead of time, go block your calendar out, go find the links that you need, get access to it, put it in your calendar description. Just make it super easy for you to jump into those events. Like when you actually want to do it otherwise, you know, you're gonna get a call book, something else is gonna come up. You're gonna forget what time it is. You're gonna, and I'm, I'm really bad at, at making sure I'm making the space and time to be able to like attend those digital events that I want to.So just make sure you do that. Like use your calendar wisely. I'm sure they have some sort of thing on the, on the website where you can add a calendar event, like to your calendar or something like that. Play it ahead. Cause it's very easy to miss a digital session. Also keep in mind, you may have something that are happening at the same time that you wanna see. So go ahead and like make a list of stuff. You know that you're gonna like watch on a recording later or something like that. If you do miss anything, cause you should be able to access that stuff. TAKE THE DAYS YOU'RE AT INBOUND OFF COMPLETELY FROM WORK (SERIOUSLY)George B Thomas (16:35):So I would challenge people with something you just said, max, I would challenge them to take the days off. I would challenge them to treat it like it is an event that they're going to, even though it's a virtual event. And the reason I bring this up is because the last two years I literally have taken those days, air quotes off, meaning I was still getting paid by the company that I worked for, but I wasn't doing anything else. I wasn't taking meetings. My calendar was completely blocked off and I was actually attending those sessions that I could attend, which leads me to my number one pro tip here for survival that I made sure I did all of the years and going or virtual snacks, baby snacks. You gotta have snacks. You gotta have granola bars. You gotta have bottled waters. You gotta have like an orange that you can grab because at some point in time, when you're either walking for like hours on end to get to your next session, or you've sat in that seat for five hours, listening to four different speakers, you're gonna need some energy.And so you gotta have some snacks handy. Now I do wanna dive into that whole calendar thing though, because I'm kind of joking about snacks, but snacks are not doable. I am actually being honest about snacks at the same time, you have to plan ahead. And so as soon as registration is letting you pick the things that you want, that's too late, you should have already kind of picked the things you want. Like right now, then when the gate opens you go and plug those in immediately. But here's the other thing I'm gonna say about planning plan space to do nothing. I know that sounds counterintuitive when you're at an event, but plan to do nothing because the magical moments of inbound, if you're going in person are in the hallways. If you're attending virtually is in the chat pains, I want you to think about the hallways or the chat pans is where you can make new friends. You can have strategy happening on a different level. You all sorts of fun conversations. And so plan what you wanna do, but plan time for what you might not even know is coming. And the universe is bringing to you during this time of inbound. Plus it's refreshing, right? We're talking about surviving, taking little time to take a breather, nothing wrong with that schedule. Bathroom breaks. No, I'm just kidding. you shouldn't schedule your bathroomDevyn Belamy (18:51):Breaks my first year at inbound, I, I burned out. I didn't realize just how mentally taxing the event could be and it, and it's big. If you haven't gone, it's big. It's gonna be smaller this year and it's still big. It's it's a lot.George B Thomas (19:10):All right. So let's switch from surviving and let's talk about what we're excited about. So when you think about breakout sessions, cause by the way, there's a completely different mindset around featured speakers, Barack other folks that are gonna be there. There's a difference. So we're gonna start with breakout speakers, you know, us little guys like Devin and George, who like get a room and get to talk to people for a while. Who are you most excited? Let's do two, two of your favorite breakout sessions this year. And why max, what are your thoughts? INBOUND 2022 SPEAKERS WE'RE MOST EXCITED ABOUTMax Cohen (19:46):So I'm, I'm a big fan of Mary growthy from house of revenue. If anyone's familiar with her and she's doing a session called plateaued sleuth your way to a refreshed go to market, that scales basically I think the session is around, like you have a startup, you grew it a little bit. It's kind of plateaued. How do you actually take that and then scale it and kind of break out of the, the stagnant zone that you might be in. I think that is super interesting. Especially I even like, remember back to when I was an implementation specialist and I'd be working with companies that had already kind of, you know, gotten to a certain point and they've been successful, but they don't really understand how to kind of take it to that next level. And me not being a business, strategic genius at all.I was kind of just, oh, let's use HubSpot and see how that goes. You know what I mean? I didn't really understand like kind of the strategies and how to think about it. So that's super interesting. And then also, I mean, Kyle Jepson is doing things every HubSpot admin needs to know let's go this was definitely the year of the HubSpot admin kind of emerging, which, you know, I had a lot of mixed feelings about, I guess, with that whole thing happening because you know, my cheeky little line that I always used to use is you don't need to hire someone full time to be an admin for HubSpot, but as HubSpot starts to move up market and starts to solve for much more complex teams and business use cases, you know, we are starting to see that people are making careers out of being, you know, HubSpot admins. And that is a thing now. So it'll be, it'll be interesting to hear kind of Kyle's perspective on that kind ofGeorge B Thomas (21:09):Stuff. Absolutely. Absolutely. So Devin two breakout sessions that you're excited about and whyDevyn Belamy (21:16):The first one for me, Deanna ZK, she is doing a session on rev, rev, op tips. She told me in a meeting that she's going to be referencing some of my quotes and I'm like, Ooh, cool. I'm gonna be there. Let's go. That made me feel warm and special inside. Yeah, there's that. And a course style session because like me personally, I have hung my hat on being a HubSpot admin for the past, like six years. It's my entire career has revolved around HubSpot of course the one that I'm doing, I'm doing a little mini talk on a partner, accreditations in the partner space. And that's what I'm excited about.George B Thomas (22:00):Yeah. There's a lot to be excited about. I would list mine as well. I'm excited to go do one, but that's not actually my favorite, but I'll tell you there's a couple in here. And, and by the way, I'm, I'm kind of a cheater, cuz it was really hard for me to just drill down to two of these bad boys. There's quite a few and they all have specific reasons. So first one, Lindsay, I don't even know how to say your last name. I apologize. It's like J E P K E M a. I have no clue. I don't know. I'm not even gonna try, but the title of this bad boy pulled me through the vortex of, oh hell yeah, I got to go to this one. And it's the Netflix ization of marketing, turning creativity into marketing fuel. And if anybody knows me over the past 10 years, it's create content, get creative.And so if you think about the description here, Netflix Disney plus, and even TikTok, they've raised the bar on audience expectations. I could stop right there and just ask people, Hey, have you raised your expectations of yourself to the content that you're creating and the way that you're allowing people to ingest that content? So I'm excited about that one. The other one, again, it's actually three people NA Michael and Karen and the title of this one is branded podcasts. Anybody wanna have a big guess? Why I want to go to that one? I mean, we are doing a podcast right now just saying, so branded podcast, getting real about the challenges and how to make it work. Now don't get me wrong people. I think that our podcast is working, but we can always make it better. So I'm looking for ideas of what we can do, how we can add more value, how we can implement the community into it, more different things like that. So those are, those are my two big ones. However, I'm gonna cheat. I'm gonna do three. Oh, because, becauseMax Cohen (24:03):Very dentistGeorge B Thomas (24:04): okay. I'll I'll give you a third one. My third one that I'm excited about. Again, three people Satcha Verda and Johnny hopefully I said those names, right? Again, I apologize if you're a listener and when I see you in person, you can just smack the crap out of the back of my head if I Jack that up. But the title because guys and gals, ladies and gentlemen, hub hero listeners, it's so important, so important. And this is simply around building an environment of belonging. Listen, fundamentally as humans, we all wanna belong to something. We wanna be part of a tribe, a community. And so some of the insights that I can learn from this, and again, there's a lot of letters and a lot of ands and a lot of pluses and a lot of things in this, but the things that I can learn from this and take it and use it in my own life and my own thinking in my own open mindedness. Anyway, I'll get off my pulpit or my soap box. And I'll give you guys, what is the third one? If you've picked a third one that you're super excited aboutMax Cohen (25:11):Another big one that I'm excited about is Christina K from reseller ratings. Oh yeah. Yeah. So she's doing a session called customer centered approach. Real life use case on growth with HubSpot's flywheel big thing here. She's actually gonna be showing how like her company reseller ratings switched from Salesforce after 15 years of using it into HubSpot, which, you know, it's, this is not me being, oh, the, you know, the guy saying, oh, look, you switch over from Salesforce. But showing how like a massive undertaking like that is possible for anyone that is either scared of such an endeavor or wants to know how like something like that worked. So I'm super stoked for that session. And also we gotta have Christina on the podcast at someGeorge B Thomas (25:52):Point. Yeah, we do at some point, by the way, by the way, I interviewed her about that transition, who back when I worked at impulse creative. So it's in some community somewhere because by the way, if anybody hasn't figured it out, all of the George B. Thomas videos on Sprocket talk have been taken down and they're somewhere, I don't know where they're at, but I interviewed Christina Kay about this transition and she is one smart cookie. And some of the things that she laid out in that interview worth it's weight in gold. Let me just tell you Devin, is there a third one that you were able to think about that you're excited about?Devyn Belamy (26:25):Absolutely. One of my favorite speakers at inbound, she comes every year is Taif and she is pretty big deal over in LinkedIn. She is going to be speaking. I'm looking at now category entry points in a B2B world, buying situations to brand sales. I think that her perspective is always unique. As you guys know, even though I'm a marketer by trade I have had to put on the sales hat on more than one occasion in my life. And I'm always thinking about sales whenever I'm doing what I do. So I'm pretty sure Ty's gonna crush it as per her usual. And if I may put down a no, I'm just kidding. GoGeorge B Thomas (27:05):UhohMax Cohen (27:06):Oh no, drop four. Who cares? There's no rule.George B Thomas (27:08): their only rule is there are no rules. Well,Devyn Belamy (27:11):In that case, Dave Becher, anything he talks about with SEO, he approaches it with this mindset that most people don't think about. And his SEO talks are always fire. I know he's a matter of fact, he's hosting SEO meetup. So that's gonna be awesome too.George B Thomas (27:26):Audience, let us know hub hero's podcast. Hashtag what are you excited about as far as breakouts? Now let's go into the featured speaker. I don't know how this is gonna turn out because it could be that we all three are like excited about the same one or two, who knows, but I'm willing to go down that road. And actually, again, I'm a cheater because I said one, your favorite? I couldn't pick just one, but I will tell you this, my, the one for sure that I'm excited about because I'm the old fart in the room. And I was actually around to hear, listen to the first episode of what this gentleman did and actually to see somebody that was gonna do like a seven day a week podcast at that point was unheard of, no, you can't do that type scenario. And so I'm really excited that John Lee Dumas is one of the featured speakers when you go to like the main page and just the fact that the entrepreneur on fire story is being told, who knows what lessons will be learned? Like again, somebody who took podcasting did something absolutely amazing with it and has turned it into an entire brand. It's just, I'm super excited about that one. Now the other one, the nerd in me. All right. Jimmy yang.Max Cohen (28:47):Yeah.George B Thomas (28:48):I mean, I mean, come on actor, comedian. That's all I'm gonna say. I don't. I feel like I don't need to say anything else then Jimmy yang, those two for me though, are definitely like, yep. Okay. Taking time out, making sure I'm there please. By all that is holy baby. Jesus. Don't let them speak while I'm speaking. Let's go knowing that I broke the rules. If you gentlemen wanna break the rules too and do more than one you're allowed to. But max, when you think about the featured speakers, where does your brain go?Max Cohen (29:19):So, I mean, well, let's the obvious one. It's it's, it's an honor to have Barack Obama coming to inbound this, this year. I mean, that's just flat out amazing. I don't think I need to speak too much to that. That that's gonna be incredible. Seeing Dr. Jane Goodall is gonna be awesome too, as well. She's doing a, her session's called rebuilding our collective future. I think that's gonna be super interesting. And of course, like I'm a huge Silicon valley fan, right? So, so Jimmy yang, I can't wait for, for his bit that he's gonna do it inbound at night. Most I've probably ever laughed in my entire life has been the sets for folks that, you know, whenever we have comedians coming for the the inbound entertainment sessions, it's it's gonna be great.George B Thomas (29:59):Yeah. They have been really good and it's easy to laugh when you've got like thousands of people around you laughing as with you. Yeah. It's just, it makes it easier. Yeah. Devin, what are your thoughts?Devyn Belamy (30:09):Definitely gotta hop on the Jimmy O yang train. The man is legit. Awesome. Yeah, absolutely hilarious. He definitely speaks to the awkward nerd child in me is just like he, he would've been high school. Devon's favorite comedian. No question. Like I probably would've followed him around the country. Dude's awesome. Viola Davis. Yes. I am really excited to hear what she has to say. Her topic is on capital creativity and community care. That one community is a big thing for me personally, both she and president Obama are gonna be talking about community as portions of their talks. And so I'm, I'm really excited to hear about that. Just come up with, hopefully come away with ideas on improving community and community relationships. Cuz as the old saying goes, it takes a village. INBOUND 2022 MEETUPS THAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUTGeorge B Thomas (31:10):Oh man does it. All right. So we already talked about how there's magic in the hallway moments and so, or the chat rooms. So when you think about meetups that are happening, that you're excited about, are there any meetups that just fundamentally you're like, yeah, this is something I definitely wanna take time to go to be part of.Devyn Belamy (31:32):So I'm gonna be spending all my time at BLACK@INBOUND tell you that right now that's , that's just where I'm gonna be this year is the first year that we have our own dedicated space.George B Thomas (31:43):Oh snap. Like,Devyn Belamy (31:44):Yeah. In, in the past in the beginning we were crashing Seaport parties and just drinking up free drinks, eating free food. And just in like, you got the badge you get in, it's like, all right, let's go. Then it turned into like our own meetups, but still crashing sea parties. But the last in person, inbound, there were hub spotters who worked to get us time in a space where we could have our own space and we had food and it was a cool networking opportunity. There's pictures of it floating around. Well, there was some like a hundred some out of us and we're like it, then it was, it was great. It was absolutely great. This year is going to be different this year. We are going to have foods. We're gonna have drinks. We're gonna have games. We're going to have, I believe someone's going to be there. Live painting. Shout out to paint killer cam, AKA cam is Z AKA cam Parker who was on who was in 2019, the one who was painting murals on the club, inbound floor. He's gonna be hanging out with us, but it's gonna be absolute fire, but that that's where I'm gonna be. And again, Dave Berman's link up our meetup, the SEO meetup looks like he's gonna be dopeMax Cohen (32:57):Too. There is one interesting one that I'm seeing here for meetups, for employee resource group leaders too, as well. I think that's something that we've seen a lot of success with here at HubSpot in terms of the different ERGs that we have, you know, and, and I know it's something that like a lot of companies have either had great success with struggled with or had issues with or, or, you know, are still exploring doing, you know, so it'd be really interesting to kind of go there and kind of see what the experience of other people or other, you know, companies have had actually like getting this kind of stuff off the ground. So there's that. And then there's also a solutions partners, growing pains and lessons learned to meet up too, for anyone out there who's currently growing a partner agency or anything like that sounds like a really great opportunity to go kind of meet up with some other folks that are in the same shoes. Maybe kind of walk the path that you're about to go on. Definitely check those out.George B Thomas (33:41):Yeah. So I'm actually excited because there's an unofficial meetup. Ooh. And I feel like it's almost like, you know, Devon knows the, the journey of like something that's not something. And then people try to actually make it something. And so somebody reached out to me and they're like, what do you think of this idea? And I think I said, I think it's a great idea. And we reached out to another person that we know, Hey, what do you think of this idea? They said, we think it's a great idea. And so we have officially put together and I put out on my socials and, and they've shared as well. And anybody listening to this podcast, if you happen to be a person of faith notice, I didn't say a particular faith. If you happen to be a person of notice, I didn't say men of faith.I didn't say women. I said, if you happen to be a person of faith, like that's it. We have an unofficial meetup happening eight o'clock in the morning, by the way, because we gotta hit it strong in the morning, but you can hit me up with any details that you wanna know about that. But if you are a person of faith and wanna meet other people that happen to do marketing sales, service, rev ops use HubSpot of faith as well, then this is gonna be a meetup that we're gonna have. So I'm super excited, which by the way, I didn't know until our speaker meeting two days ago that there's actually a prayer room at inbound this year as well. So, Hey, who knew except me now and you, because you're listening. And so now everybody knows at least in this circle.All right. So let's keep on moving favorite inbound memories. What is your favorite inbound memory? I'll go first. It was the year that Gary Vaynerchuk spoke to me and only me in the top tier of the building that we don't even, oh, no, he didn't really talk to me, but it, but it, it is a precipice moment where it, it wasn't even at the BCE C, it was at whatever place that we had it before then. I can't even remember the name of the place I was in the rafters. Gary Vaynerchuk was speaking and he pointed up in the vicinity of where I was sitting. It was at that moment with what he said. I knew that I wanted to end up on that stage. Hmm. I wanted to do HubSpot. I knew I wanted to educate people and I wanted to change my life. And what's fun is it took me from 2012 to 2015. So three years, three years later, I got to step on stage at inbound and do my first talk. And so knowing that 2012 was the, was the press ATEST moment that Gary Vanerchuk was the person that made the statement. And then three years later was able to then speak at the event. That's one of my favorite, like, wow, that's kind of a cool circle of life scenario.Max Cohen (36:11):I Also had a Gary Vader. Chuck moment was this, that's not gonna be my main one, but I remember like it was everywhere. It was, you know, it was, it was at a time when I was like, really, I was really into Gary Vaynerchuk cuz I, I just thought the way that he talked about content just made a whole lot of sense to me. That was right when I was coming into the realization that like, it's actually all about con you know, going through that whole arc. And, and he, he walked by me in the crowd at the BCC and I was like, oh my God, a famous person just walked by me. It was like a funny, weird moment for me. I think one of the best memories I have is I ran into one of my very first customers that I had onboarded.Max Cohen (36:46):And when we had started this person, she was completely new to the idea of inbound, completely new to the idea of HubSpot. But she had, she had run enough where she knew that deploying this strategy and kind of changing their ways was, was gonna be what was best for the company. And she was really excited to like learn it all and, and really kind of just Enro herself in all things inbound. And she did, we have a, we had a wonderful experience doing the onboarding and everything. We were working together for the, for the 90 days. And then, you know, kind of, she went off to continue working with HubSpot and then I got to meet her at inbound. And I wanna say this was about a year from when we had, when we had first kind of connected and she came up, she, she, she recognized me.Max Cohen (37:29):She ran up to me. She gave me a huge hug. And she told me about all the success that she had, that the company had and that she was going to give her first talk at an insurance conference about using inbound marketing for your, no, it wasn't like an insurance. It was, it was some kind of conference in like a, a little bit more of like a Bo like a dry, boring kind of industry. Like it was compliance or safety or something like that, but she was gonna go give her very first talk on how to do inbound marketing. And she was so stoked. And after that, I just started seeing her, she's doing all these talks in all these different, like places, all these different conferences. And it was just so awesome to be like, Hey, I was there when you started your journey and now you're here and, and, and now you're, you're grown with it. And it's, it was just, it was really cool for me cuz it was the first time in my life that I felt that I had somewhat of an IOT of an impact on somebody cuz you know, she came up to me and, and was talking about how it all started with us and everything. So it was just, it was a really cool moment, Beth, if you're listening, love you and hope you're doing awesome. And hopefully I'll see, edit in monsoon.George B Thomas (38:30):I love that dude. There's something special about the realization that you were the catalyst moment for somebody. Yeah. There's just something special about that. Devin. It seems like you might have had a catalyst moment in your life at inbound as well. Why don't you tell us about that?Devyn Belamy (38:45):Yeah, there have been a few, the most impactful one was probably 2016 when I was sitting in a semi. I don't even remember the name of the person who put it on. I just remember the name of the, the breakout was data driven marketing. I knew how to interpret analytics, but I didn't know how to present the information that I was interpreting. And that was when I learned about that equation and, and it wasn't even like the main portion. It was just like a throwaway piece. Oh, by the way, here's something you should know and then breaks down this like 12 slide equation on how to calculate lead values. And I knew that that was game changing information for me, that was, I knew, I knew it was life changing. Didn't know how life changing it would be until months later when I'm breaking out the slide deck.Devyn Belamy (39:44):And I, based on our conversion rates can tell them the monetary value of every lead that we get. And every time somebody fill out a form, this is how much money they're worth to us. That was the beginning of the change in my career. There was one management level job where they said, okay, we need you to analyze this pipeline because that equation not only did I know how to analyze the pipeline, but I was able to go back and tell them, it's like, well, did you mean 33 instead of 30? And this number here or else the numbers don't line up. Of course I got the job. So that was one game changing moment for me. But there was a lot of validation for me at inbound where it's easy to succumb imposter syndrome, but being able to sit in sessions in hearing people say things that you knew, we didn't realize, you know?And it's like, yeah, there's somebody on stage saying this thing then maybe I do know what I'm talking about. And then there were, of course the inbound rocks every year and this year we're calling inbound at night. Being able to see things in person that I, I never would've seen literally anywhere else. Like Trevor Noah just yes. Live like, and I was front row, Trevor Noah was right there. He was blown away. Or Leslie Odom Jr. When he sang like that was, that was amazing. Like he's, he's doing dear Theodosia in my face and it was like, it was just mind blowing or two dope Queens. That one was my absolute favorite, their whole set, because what we did is we had coordinated as a group, black and inbound. When the doors open, we were just gonna all rush the front row and get like the first two rows on stage.Right. And we got it, we did it. And so when they turned or when they were like, oh, there's all the black people. I was like, yeah, we're right here. And like, that was dope. And then the one guy told a star Trek joke or a star wars joke that literally no one got, because it was like, not only did you have to be a nerd, but you had to be familiar with black culture. And it was such a niche joke and it just fell flat except for the first two rows who were dying. And then he turns over and sees, oh, there's all five people, gang gang, I'm black tailGeorge B Thomas (42:10): we'reDevyn Belamy (42:11):Out here. And it was like, tho those kinds of memories were just unforgettable.George B Thomas (42:17):That's the thing I love about inbound is whether it be just a, a human spark, an educational spark, you know, a friendship, whatever. There are so many things that can happen inbound. So let's move forward because man, we've almost been doing this for 40 plus minutes at this point. Wow. And you know, we're, we usually love to add a ton of value. I think this conversation has been valuable, especially for people who are planning and strategizing for virtual or in person inbound this year. But let's talk about the lights. Get turned out, the parties over you're back at home, or you're back to normal at home. If you were attending virtually what are some action items that you guys think people should take post inbound to make sure they're actually getting the most out of the event that they attended, INBOUND DOESN'T HAVE TO END FOR YOU WHEN IT'S OVERDevyn Belamy (43:07):Watch the recordings. That's the biggest thing it's like inbound doesn't have to end when inbound ends the there's recordings that come with your passes, that you can go and see the keynotes. You could see breakouts that you didn't get a chance to attend. If they're recorded. There is so much value in adding inbound breakout sessions, just to hopefully you have a weekly learning session, time dedicated to growth, going back and reviewing. Those is some of the best things you could possibly do and take in one session that has nothing to do with you. One session that doesn't, that's not a part of your vertical, it's not a part of your job. It will give you so much perspective. Even just gleaning knowledge. If 75% of it doesn't make sense to you, there will be at least 25% of it that will allow you to get more broad view of the big picture in where you fit in, in relation to other people.Max Cohen (44:14):I think it's also, it's important to kind of realize that you're, you're gonna be going and drinking a fire hose of information or drinking from the fire hose of, of information. You're gonna see a lot of different perspectives, a lot of different opinions and perspectives on maybe some similar subjects, which can sometimes be confusing, right? Because you go there and you're like, Hey, I wanna hear from the experts. But maybe sometimes the experts are saying different things, things like that. So the other thing too, is like, you're gonna have so much new education and, and information that you're going home with. It's easy to get super overwhelmed and say, oh, I have to deploy all of this right now while it's fresh. You don't set yourself. Some, some realistic goals take all the information that you kind of collected and be like, Hey, what are 1, 2, 3 things I can pick from that experience and make small reasonable changes in the way I work in the strategy we deploy in the way we're using HubSpot and the, the new solutions that I learned about that I might want to go check out. Don't try to do it all at once. Make yourself the list, set some reasonable goals and try to fix or, or improve on just a couple things. Not everything, no one has the capacity to do that. And if you do try to do everything, you're gonna end up doing nothing. So just make sure you're not getting overwhelmed with the amount of stuff you could be doing better, just cuz you learned about it. You know what I mean? Otherwise you're not gonna make any small, meaningful changes with all this new, powerful information youGeorge B Thomas (45:37):Have. And it's, it's funny because it kind of aligns with something that I learned about four years ago and that I try to help everybody with, especially with events is you're gonna have a notepad. You're gonna have an iPad. You're gonna have something that you're taking these notes feverishly. And it ends up being like three books by the end of the four days of inbound. And you're like, ha, I go back through all of this. So what I want you to do is I want you to actually plan with the end in mind, meaning you're listening, this, you're getting ready to do inbound. And as you go to take notes, I just want you to do one thing. And that's for every session that you go to at the very top of the page, I want you to put hashtag one thing. And as you're learning all of this information, I want you to pick out one execution item that you can do when you get back from the event based on the information you learned, one, not all of them, but one thing that you know, you can easily or somewhat easily implement.Therefore when you get done, you know that you just go to the top of your iPad or the top of your paper or the top of wherever it is. And you look for the 5, 7, 9, depending on how many sessions you went to hashtag one things. And now you have a list that you can then prioritize. What is the most important hashtag one thing that I should do first, second, third, fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth. Then you can circle back around and watch the videos. Then you can circle back around and read your four novels that you got over four days. Then you can circle back around and start to do the minutia because you've taken care of what impacted you the most in the moment that you're actually attending inbound. Okay? Hub heroes we've reached the end of another episode, will Lord LA continue to loom over the community or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast?Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode, make sure you head over to the hub heroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes. FYI, if you're part of the league of heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox. And they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend, leave a review. If you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag hashtag hub euros podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next until next time when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.

HubSpot Inbound 2021 Event Takeaways

Digital Marketing Mondays

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2021 9:43

Hans and Devin discuss key points from HubSpot's Inbound 2021.

event takeaways hans hubspot inbound hubspot inbound

Patti Smith's Commencement Address

hubspot inbound patti smith pratt institute thinkific commencement address hubspot inbound

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 25, 2021 10:02

Patti Smith's Commencement Address at Pratt Institute, 2010. Sponsors: Thinkific: It's time to stop trading time for money and start reaching more clients and making a bigger impact - with online courses! Try Thinkific for free today at Thinkific.com/eof. HubSpot: INBOUND 2021, hosted with love by HubSpot, takes place online October 12-14! Learn more and register now for FREE at Inbound.com!

Patti Smith's Commencement Address

hubspot inbound patti smith pratt institute thinkific commencement address hubspot inbound

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 25, 2021 10:02

4 Lessons From Losing $1 Million Dollars with Mike Zeller

lessons losing genius million dollars tony robbins crises hubspot inbound jay abraham mike zeller value bombs hubspot inbound

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2021 46:44

Mike Zeller has done over $300,000 Million in sales study under the masters of the industry such as Tony Robbins, Russel Bronson, and Jay Abraham. He has mentored over a hundred high-level entrepreneurs from 4 different continents. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. Crises are there to remake you. 2. Do the personality tests and find your Zone of Genius. 3. Your identity precedes your destiny. Check out Mike Zeller's website - Meet Mike Sponsors: FranBridge: Jon Ostenson represents the premier source for the best opportunities in the non-food franchise world. Sign up for a free consultation call with Jon today at FranBridgeConsulting.com! HubSpot: INBOUND 2021, hosted with love by HubSpot, takes place online October 12-14! Learn more and register now for FREE at Inbound.com!

Calming the Chaos of Agency Operations

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2021 34:03

Karl Sakas is an Agency Consultant and Executive Coach at Sakas & Company where he consults with, coaches, and trains marketing agency owners struggling with various challenges related to their teams, their clients, and their services. His focus? To guide agency owners through risky decision-making, help them overcome constraints, enable them to grow profitably to the next level, and to make them “better bosses.” Karl has a strong agency operations background and has worked with agencies around the world. His team is often called in when an agency: Founder's network runs out and the agency needs to find new customers, Is slammed by new growth opportunities, or Needs help on a sales process . . . figuring out team member and client onboarding processes, smoothing delivery, or developing strategies for building long-term relationships. In this interview, Karl identifies six agency “roles”: Account managers sell additional services to existing clients and keep them happy; Project managers ensure that work progresses smoothly and profitably; Subject matter experts (SMEs) . . . the craft-focused analysts, developers, designers, and writers; Broadly experienced, client-facing Strategists; Business developers, who provide organizational marketing, sales, and partnership-building; and Support, the overarching leadership, and operations management team that ensures smooth agency function. In this interview, Karl recommends that overwhelmed agency owners offload tasks in a prescribed order (subject to agency-owner preferences); The SME work. Start using freelancers and later hire full-timers to do the highly visible client execution work. If an agency owner wants to spend all his or her time on “craft,” he or she should either be willing to hire six-figure management talent or shift to being a super-consultant and not own an agency. Project management, which is mostly (client-facing) internal coordination. Account management, so the agency owner is not the first person clients call when they need something. Sales . . . or strategy . . . depending on what the agency owner wants to “keep.” Or a hybrid, e.g., where another member of the team qualifies the client and the agency owner serves as the “closer.” This person does NOT have to be the expert the agency owner is . . . so he or she can be hired for less than the agency owner would pay for a personal clone. Karl notes that there is a big difference between delegation and abdication. He warns, “Don't just dump everything on someone and expect them to figure it all out.” The agency owner has to train these “replacements” and help them build the qualification process, so prospective clients, now vetted and talking with the agency owner, will be more ready to “sign on the line.” In 2016, Karl founded a CMOs-only mastermind group, where he guides non-client CMOs through their challenges. He compiles the data he gathers from these CMOs into anonymized insights which he passes on to his agency clients . . . to help them improve. Karl has built a ranking tool to help agencies assess current and future client value, clarify “fit,” and optimize client satisfaction and agency profitability. He will be running an “Ask Me Anything” session at HubSpot Inbound 2021, sharing scripts for difficult client conversations, talking about commitment to warmth and competence decision-making, and presenting a Reason, Options, Choose (ROC) negotiation framework that guides agency/client conflicts through chosen options toward mutually satisfactory solutions. Karl can be reached on his agency's website at: sakasandcompany.com, where he offers free newsletters and articles. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Karl Sakas, who is an Agency Consultant and Executive Coach at Sakas & Company based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to the podcast, Karl. KARL: Rob, great to be here. ROB: Excellent to have you here. This is a part of our annual Inbound series of podcasts. Karl, you'll be speaking at Inbound, and we'll get to that in a moment. But why don't you start off by telling us about Sakas & Company and what it is that you all do? KARL: Through Sakas & Company, I help owners of marketing agencies grow more profitably. That spans a range of areas. I've worked with agencies all over the world, every inhabited continent, around dealing with growing pains around getting to the next level, whatever that might be for each agency owner or owners. I come from an agency operations background. I actually started in digital marketing as a freelance web designer in high school back in the days of dial-up. Since then, I've been an Agency Project Manager, Director of Client Services, Director of Operations. This is my third business since high school, and I'm a fourth generation entrepreneur. The work that I do, I love that I'm helping agency owners who often are in over their head and they're struggling with different challenges around how to grow, how to grow profitably, major decisions related to their team and their clients and their services. I love being able to help them out. Several clients call me their agency therapist. Let me clarify, I'm not an actual therapist. Everyone ideally has an actual therapist, but when it comes to their agency, I love helping people out – helping them, as one client put it, “calm the chaos.” ROB: When you mention focusing on growth, what I hear is where a lot of agencies end up feeling stuck – one of the transition points; you've probably seen a couple – is they hit a lid in one way or another in terms of founder sales. KARL: Yes. ROB: Is that where people often end up turning to you, in that area? KARL: Sometimes. In that case, thinking of founder sales, often it is the founder's network. Their network lasts maybe a year or two into the business; maybe it lasts three or four years. But eventually it's like, “uh-oh” – they've realized that if their network is going to buy, they've bought. It's funny; the marketing agency needs to do its own marketing. There's a shoemaker's kids problem. Sometimes people reach out. Other times, and more often, given my operations background, they'll reach out when they are overwhelmed by new growth opportunities. They've got more leads than they can deal with. Their salesperson or salespeople are having trouble keeping up, whether the owner is doing sales or otherwise. Often I'm helping on sales process. Given my background as a PM, helping with onboarding, figuring out their onboarding process, both for team members and for clients, how to sort out delivery running smoothly, and figuring out how to build long-term relationships. All of my consulting, coaching, and training is exclusively with agencies. I don't work with any brand side clients. But through a marketing association, in 2016 I founded a CMOs-only mastermind group. No agencies allowed. Through that, I'm helping the CMOs, who are not my clients, through some of their challenges and I get them together. I'm able to share anonymized insights from that to help agencies do a better job, like the CMOs keep talking about revenue attribution through agency, because otherwise you're going to lose your clients to someone who is. ROB: That makes complete sense. In the middle of that, you mentioned process. Does process tend to be one of those Kryptonites and Waterloos of agencies in general? It seems like you have this double effect. First of all, you have someone who has deliberately opted out of some of the structured environments they could work in in a big corporation. Then you combine that, often, with a free-spirited and creative nature to building the agency, which may not turn to process as its first instinct to solve problems. KARL: That is a great point. It varies by agency, but part of my intake process if someone reaches out for my help, I'll ask why they started their agency and how things have turned out compared to what they expected. A very common thread – not for everyone, but very common – is they were working at an agency and they're like, “I can do this better.” Or as one agency owner put it, “If the CEO is going to be a moron, I want to be the moron.” Sort of the “I could do it better.” The problem is that people often find when they are now in charge, they have some new empathy for their former boss. When they saw the boss wasn't always making the best decisions or what have you, now they realize what the boss was going through, juggling all of these different stakeholders, clients, team members, suppliers, and others, and now they often don't have a sounding board. Sometimes if they have a business partner, they've got their business partner as a sounding board, “Is this normal?” Sometimes their romantic partner, who sometimes is also the business partner, which adds its own layer of complications. Bu they're both in the same situation. One of my coaching clients said that our coaching work helped him free up time in his therapy sessions because he wasn't having to tell his therapist all about his agency challenges – which the therapist couldn't really help with. I mean, in pieces, but not “Here are the best practices. Let's customize them to you.” ROB: Right, the therapist can help you with the psychology of being in the role, but it doesn't necessarily get you to what's effective for business. I'm sure in some cases when it's a romantic partnership that are also business partners, you are kind of in a therapist role at times. When we get to scaling past this founder or you have too much business coming in even for the people who are in the sales role, the first lever I see people pull, often, when they get capped out on sales is they'll just go hire salespeople. They'll hire one or two and send them into the world and tell them to go sell things. I think it usually doesn't turn out too well when that's the plan. KARL: By accident, that approach sometimes accidentally works. But usually not. ROB: Sometimes you're scaling the founder-led sales a little bit and sometimes you're distributing. How do you processize and get it so that you have – I think an enemy sometimes in sales is authenticity. You really have to get the right people at least to reflect your own agency's brand in that conversation. KARL: It starts by understanding, should you even outsource sales or something else? In my work, I've identified six agency roles. You've got account management (keep the clients happy, sell them more work); project management (get the work done smoothly and profitably); you've got your subject matter experts (depending on your agency's services, those are your designers, developers, writers, analysts, that kind of thing), who are primarily focusing on doing their craft all day long; you've got strategists, who are sort of like a super subject matter expert (they have broader experience, they tend to have more experience in general, they tend to be fairly client-facing); and then the last two, you've got biz dev, which is really marketing, sales, and partnerships; and then you've got support, which is operations and leadership, keeping things running smoothly. When it comes to getting things off your plate as an agency owner, my recommendation is to follow roughly this order, depending on your preferences. First thing to get off your plate: the SME work. If you are the owner of the agency and you are still in the client execution tools all day long, you probably should outsource that to someone else – maybe initially freelancers, eventually hiring people full-time, that kind of thing. Get that off your plate, the things that are more visible to your clients. The next thing to do probably is project management, the mostly internal coordination, though PMs are indeed client-facing. Then you may want to do account management – not being the first person clients call every single time they need something. And then the question becomes – and this is the piece to your question of getting sales off your plate – depending on your preferences, you might choose to hire someone to help with sales while you keep doing client strategy, or maybe the other way. You want to do client strategy, you don't want to do sales. There is an in-the-middle option, which is maybe you continue as the closer, you're closing the deal, but someone else on your team is doing the qualifying. If this were a really large sales organization, that would be a business development representative. The good news is they don't need to be as much of an expert as you are, which means that you can hire them for less than you would hire a clone of yourself. And if they do their job and you help them build process – they're not going to magically know who's qualified or not – you ultimately will find yourself on the phone solely with qualified, or at least initially qualified, prospects. On the other hand, if you like doing all the conversations but you've outsourced everything else, okay. Do what you want to do, but if you're doing something that you'd rather not do – as the owner of an agency, you're in a lucky spot. Most people out in the world don't get to choose what they do day to day. It's your business. But you do need to take some steps to make it happen rather than just – instead of delegating, sometimes people will abdicate. Don't just dump everything on someone and expect them to figure it all out. ROB: Yeah, I hear two traps in there that are pretty common. One is the abdication. Two is really, a lot of people get into the business not to build a business, but because they enjoy the delivery work. KARL: Yes. And if that's what you love most, you need someone on your team doing the rest, doing the support work, operations and leadership, doing the biz dev work, marketing, sales, and partnerships, and so on. But it is worth considering. Occasionally, out of the over 400 clients I've worked with in 36 countries, some of the clients conclude they don't like running an agency. Sometimes they don't like the sales; other times they don't like managing people. And there are things you can do to delegate aspects of management, though it's not cheap. You're hiring someone with a six-figure salary, profit-sharing, and potentially some sort of equity to take over for you if you don't love doing that. But sometimes people conclude they don't want to run an agency because they want to do the craft, primarily, and in that case, I call that shifting to the “super consultant” model. They might have one administrative person helping them stay on track, but their job is to do consulting, do their craft, whether it's SEO or marketing strategy or PR or something else. If you want to do your favorite craft all day long, you probably should not be an agency owner. ROB: And that might take us a little bit into even your own journey. You were leading in agencies, building a career. There were obviously plenty of places you could've gone from there, but you've got a much more focused scope of services now. How did you come to this conclusion for yourself of how you wanted to help agencies that maybe wasn't managing a bunch of delivery? KARL: Thinking about the moving parts, I realized after working for one agency and then another, while I was at the second agency, there was this opportunity. Agency owners typically start the agency because they love the work. At my first agency, there were three founders; one loved design, another loved SEO, another loved development. At the second agency, it was development and marketing strategy. The challenge is, suddenly you start an agency, you're now a business owner. You're dealing with hiring and firing and office supplies, or making sure someone bought the office supplies so you don't run out, that kind of thing. Often that's not as much fun. In my case, coming from an operations background, I was usually doing the things the owners didn't like doing. For instance, one of my first jobs as a Director of Client Services at an agency – I think they had not mentioned this as part of the hiring process – learned in the first week that I would be telling all of the clients that our prices had gone up about 30%. We'd been at an old rate for a long time. And you know what? Because I had been working with clients as a web designer in the days of dial-up and otherwise, it worked. Out of all of our retainer clients, all but one renewed at the new rate, and the one that didn't continued working on a project basis – and also was kind of a difficult client anyway, so that maybe wasn't terrible. But they delegated that to me and I got it done. Everything down to figuring out health insurance plan options. So operations is often doing stuff the owners don't want – and I have some clients where the owners do do operations, but that gets into a division of labor. But I realized there was this opportunity. Owners often don't love running the business smoothly, but if you don't do that, you're going to go out of business. Someone has to pay attention to that. In my case, business was just normal. My parents are both career army officers, and as they retired and after they retired, they started a small rental property management business and they put the kids to work. I'm the oldest of five, and starting in elementary school I was helping with things like cleanouts during tenant turnover and things like that. So I would see them negotiating with various stakeholders – with tenants, with suppliers and so on. Talking about business was normal. By high school, I was running the web design and technology consulting business that I built solely by a mix of referral and word-of-mouth in the Washington, D.C. area. I was later a business major in college. And it even goes back further than that. One of my grandfathers was a business professor for 47 years and a management consultant, so I'd hear stories focusing on organizational behavior about working with big companies, like GE and Caterpillar and Nestle, helping them work more effectively with their employees. There's a big theme around that today. In a sense, my secret mission is to make agency owners better bosses. Having been an employee at one agency and then another, agency life is often this rollercoaster. If you're the owner, you're at least in charge of controlling aspects of the rollercoaster, but if you're an employee, there are limits. So part of my goal is, yes, make life better for agency owners, help them secure what is typically their number one or number two financial asset, but also make things more stable, make work better for their employees. So I'm helping the owners and their families; I'm helping, more indirectly, agency employees and their families. This is thousands and thousands of people all over the world. ROB: It sounds rewarding to you personally on several levels, up against your own values. You mentioned something in that, and I think it's a good time to transition. You were talking about a client that wasn't such a good client. What you're speaking on – you'll be on a virtual stage at Inbound. Maybe next year we can get back to a real stage. You have an “Ask Me Anything” session, so people are just going to throw random things at you. You're going to be there and ready to respond. Your session description mentions how to keep your best clients happy. There are many different potential definitions for “best client.” How do you think about that before you figure out how to keep them happy? KARL: Best client is going to be unique to each agency, but typically they're clients who pay you reasonably for the work you do. Ideally and most often, your best clients are going to be your highest paying clients. Not always. They are profitable within the relationship. If the client is 3% of your revenue, they're roughly needing 3% of your time, not 10% of your team's time. That isn't ideal. You enjoy working with them. If you see there's an email from them or a text from them or a call from them, you are hopefully excited to see that they're reaching out, and your team is also excited. You're doing work that you can see the impact and the client appreciates the impact. The client is open to new ideas, trying new things that'll benefit them. The client generally trusts you, trusts the advice you have. That doesn't mean they would never have any questions, but generally they assume that if you've recommended it, it makes sense to explore. There could be other factors as well. I've actually built a spreadsheet for that that I use with my coaching and consulting clients. It's the client rating or ranking matrix. You put all your clients in and you look at them in terms of a few key criteria. One is, what is their current value (high, medium, or low)? That'll vary by your client mix. And also, what's their future potential (high, medium, or low)? That'll help you decide, is this a client you want to keep as-is? Is this a client you want to try to grow? Or maybe you should assume that you might lose them. And sometimes, if there's a client, especially if it's a lower budget client, that probably won't grow and you don't like working with them – probably time to fire them. ROB: Do you have any way that you suggest firing a client? Because I think that's one of those things that can probably be a little bit intimidating and feels, to an extent, counterintuitive. KARL: One of the big drivers is whether you're firing them because you've outgrown them or you're firing them because there are major dysfunctions. I was talking with a client about this yesterday. They've grown; they have a legacy client at $2,500 a month. Their goal for new clients is to be $10,000+, but they had some legacy clients. They reached out asking if the client wanted to expand their retainer, and the client declined – which made sense based on where their business was. They certainly couldn't get to $10,000 a month. It seemed like it was time to part ways. My advice to the agency owners that I was speaking with on the call was: frame it as you've enjoyed working with them; “Here's another agency or two that might be a match.” In that case, I said, “Do you have agencies who would be thrilled to get that $2,500 a month client?” “Yes, agencies that are earlier in their lifecycle, things like that, that my client knows and trusts.” I said, “Offer to introduce them.” Whether there's a referral fee or not, that's doing the right thing. Create a smooth transition. Point them somewhere. There's a second category, which is that the client is significantly dysfunctional. For instance, I mentioned the client that didn't renew their retainer but just projects – I really liked my day to day contact. Her boss was kind of terrible. I was on the phone with my day to day contact one day; I made a joke about something. She laughed and she said, “Thanks, I needed that. We don't laugh much here.” So sad. Her boss was terrible. I could understand the environment. That wasn't a client that we tried hard to keep. The work was interesting, but not ideal. But sometimes it's worse. I had a client in Toronto who had a smaller client who she said was making misogynistic comments to her team. In a coaching call – it actually ended up being an emergency support outreach – she was like, “Can I fire this guy as a client?” I knew the backstory on the client's size and things like that. It was a smaller client. I hadn't heard about the employee harassment; that was newer. I'm like, “Yeah, fire him. And you're under no obligation to help him find another agency based on his behavior.” So sometimes I think I'm helping people feel more confident in taking action on things they probably know they need to do, but they're looking for a nudge. ROB: Sure. A lot of times in the lead chair of an agency, or really any organization, you're missing that sounding board, so it is good to have that from a coach, from a consultant, from somebody, for sure. Frequently on this podcast, we talk about lessons learned. It sounds like a lot of your business is defined, almost, by lessons learned and things that you would share. I'd maybe twist the question a little bit and say – normally I say “What have you learned?” I would say, when you prepare for an Ask Me Anything session, I imagine there's an extent to which you already know some of the lessons you're going to put back into the audience. So apart from some things we've already talked about, what are some of the top questions that you end up fielding and teaching back to the audience in these sessions? KARL: One is maybe the owner is really good at account management, but they're like, “How do I get my team to improve at it? They have potential, but what can I do?” There are two things to keep in mind. One is a concept called warmth and competence. It comes from a book called The Human Brand by Chris Malone, who's a former Fortune 500 CMO, and Susan Fiske, who's a psychology professor at Princeton. The idea of warmth and competence – and you can use this to make better decisions – is this: whenever you're interacting with a person or a company or other organization, you're thinking about how is the warmth, how is the competence (high, medium, or low)? High competence is you're getting the job done, you're delivering as expected, everything is according to the specifications. High warmth is, do you make the person feel special? Do you make them feel that you value them? It's not just about the money. You can apply this in your client relationships and also with your team, your employee relationships. If you commit to warmth and competence from The Human Brand as one of your core values, your team can make better decisions. And I talk about this with my team. What's the warmth and competence solution? If it's in line with the overall values and it is high warmth and high competence, do it. It makes the decision-making a lot easier, and that helps with client retention. The second thing to think about is, when you're delegating client services or account management or delegating more of it, what do you do when a client wants something that isn't aligned to what you want to give them? I will be sharing a resource at my Inbound talk, the “Ask Me Anything” on working with clients, which is a couple dozen scripts for different scenarios that may be a difficult conversation. For instance, you have gone over budget and you haven't warned the client. Or maybe the client wants something that isn't in scope, but they seem to think it should be. The solution to that, apart from come to my Inbound session and sign up for the bonus of these scripts for handling difficult clients – and I'm always expanding those; I've added several in the past year – is a concept I call Reason, Options, Choose (ROC). The idea there is as a negotiation framework. A client wants something; you don't want to do that, or at least not under those terms. You cite a reason. Say they don't like the price you've quoted for something. “We'd love to do that. That is the price for that scope.” But then you give them two to three options that you hand-pick. You might say, “We looked at the lower budget you mentioned. Here's the smaller scope we could do. Do you want the full price, full scope (Option A)? Do you want the smaller scope, smaller budget (Option B)?” There's also in that case an implicit Option C, which is client doesn't want to pay anything – great, we don't do anything and we work on a client who will pay us for something. So you give them a reason, you give them two to three hand-picked options, and then you let them choose. You're not making them choose any specific one, and importantly, they're not making you do something you don't want to do. And any of the options are going to be acceptable to your agency because you have hand-picked them. Reason, Options, Choose. ROB: That seems like one of those things – a lot of these are almost muscles you have to exercise and get comfortable with. It's not going to be easy. But it seems like once you pattern them and model them, your team would even get used to it and start to think in that same mindset. KARL: Yes. You want the team to internalize it. Actually, I discovered that in an inside joke way. A client had a birthday coming up and she was really into wine. She was also a big fan of Reason, Options, Choose, and she had told her team about it. So the team decided to make some fake wine labels and put them on wine bottles, and one of the wines the team called “Riesling, Options, Choose.” They included some pairing notes: that it was a bittersweet blend best served with a pep talk from Karl, lots of proofreading, and apparently stress-eating pretzels. The more your team can make better decisions on your behalf through things like warmth and competence, through Reason, Options, Choose – by understanding your values, by understanding what is important – really, it's three things. I call it your VGR: your values, goals, and resources. Values on how you operate, goals on where you want to go, and resources in terms of time, money, people, tools to get things done. Your team can make better decisions on your behalf and ultimately find ways so that you can work less and earn more. ROB: Plenty to digest there. It's so helpful to have these tools. I talk to my team a lot about – I think especially folks in smaller businesses get a little scared; they're in a smaller business because they don't want to be beset by process. But there's a certain amount of process that exists not to avoid intelligence decisions, but to avoid decision paralysis and inaction. That's I think where process is so helpful and enabling. You don't have to decide what you're going to send. For example, you get a resume of someone you want to talk to. How do you decide you want to talk to them, and what do you send them when you decide? Or do you want to freelance that every time and get stuck in the mud? These processes are helpful in a lot of ways. KARL: Absolutely. That also includes making time to think through when to change. You ideally aren't changing processes every single day so your team's like, “Is this version 3.6 or version 4.28?” It makes sense to do an annual review, quarterly review. And importantly, get input from your team. Just because you're thinking about certain priorities and that's important, your team has some concerns. Two examples on that. With my grandfather's consulting years ago – I'm into trains. Turned out he did a consulting project for the New York Central Railroad, and he was interviewing employees about what they liked and didn't like. An employee was in the switching tower one hot summer day, and my grandfather asked him what he liked and didn't like about his job. He said, “The biggest problem is it's really hot. I've asked them to put in some window blinds, and they've even been out to measure them, but they haven't put them in.” And he shared about a safety concern. My grandfather asked, “Did you escalate that?” The guy was like, “Why should I? They didn't care about the window blinds. Why would they care about that?” An example of a small thing at an agency – I did an anonymous culture survey, which I'll sometimes do with my consulting clients, asking all the employees about what they liked or didn't like and a number of other questions. One of the feedback points was about the coffeemaker in the office. Now, the two owners did not drink coffee. They'd heard there were some issues with the coffeemaker, but it wasn't really a personal problem for them. But the feedback was that the coffeemaker was always breaking. This was from an employee who was a bigger coffee fan. My advice to the owners was: this is not going to be the most impactful thing you do, but buy a new coffeemaker, and someone will be thrilled. ROB: Yep. It's so many of those little things that you don't even realize, and it's just such a simple cost, but the intention is where it matters. KARL: Exactly. ROB: Karl, we'll look forward to your Ask Me Anything session at Inbound coming up in October. Between now and then, and maybe after, when people want to catch up with you and connect with you and Sakas & Company, where should they go to find you? KARL: Visit online sakasandcompany.com. I have hundreds of free articles. I have monthly live office hours, answering questions live and free of charge with agency owners all over the world, and also a number of courses and things like that. The latest is Agency PM 101 for people who are stuck as deputized project managers doing PM on top of their existing job and they'd rather not. It doesn't have to be quite so hard. So that's Agency PM 101. But also, again, hundreds of free articles and a newsletter that more than one agency owner has said is one of the only emails they read. That's sakasandcompany.com. Check it out. ROB: The email newsletter is always worth a try. If you don't like it, everybody knows how to find the unsubscribe button. Sounds like it's well worth it to many agency owners. Karl, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's good to draw on your wisdom and share with the audience. Thank you for sharing at Inbound as well. KARL: Thanks, Rob. ROB: Take care. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

4 Lessons From Losing $1 Million Dollars with Mike Zeller

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2021 46:44

How AI Disrupts Web Development with Tigran Nazaryan

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2021 31:12

Tigran Nazaryan is an experienced science, technology and WordPress professional turned CEO. With the vision of automaton of WordPress development he leads 10Web's team of 70 professionals on the way to become a unicorn. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. AI can help to create great tools for professionals. AI can really help to ease processes and simplify what professionals do. 2. Web development is not the same as it was 20 years ago. It can be more complex, having differentiation with front-end and back-end developers. We also see user interfaces becoming more complex, more dynamic, and more complicated for developers to build. 3. Automation is where the processes and workflow of professionals and agencies can scale. Connect with Tigran on LinkedIn - Tigran's LinkedIn Sponsors: FranBridge: Jon Ostenson represents the premier source for the best opportunities in the non-food franchise world. Sign up for a free consultation call with Jon today at FranBridgeConsulting.com! HubSpot: INBOUND 2021, hosted with love by HubSpot, takes place online October 12-14! Learn more and register now for FREE at Inbound.com!

How AI Disrupts Web Development with Tigran Nazaryan

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2021 31:12

How Third Party Delivery Apps are Draining the Lifeblood of Restaurants - Marketing with Nabeel Alamgir

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2021 26:35

Nabeel Alamgir is an immigrant and grew up homeless. He worked at Bareburger for 10 years before becoming the CMO at 25. He is now the CEO of LunchBox. He is revolutionizing third party delivery and how restaurants utilize marketing analytics. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. It is supposed to feel like hell, like a grind, or be exhausting. There will be days that you will be unsure, Friday nights that you wish you didn't do this. It's fine. Be optimistic. Going to bed is a huge problem-solver. Wake up and you're fine again. It's part of the process. Just keep going. 2. As a marketer, you get to throw everything on the wall and see what sticks. 3. Ghost kitchens also give restaurants ability to explore new areas. They give new entrepreneurs and chefs who can't open business be able to open one. Next-Gen Enterprise Online Ordering - Lunchbox.io Sponsors: Thinkific: It's time to stop trading time for money and start reaching more clients and making a bigger impact - with online courses! Try Thinkific for free today at Thinkific.com/eof. HubSpot: INBOUND 2021, hosted with love by HubSpot, takes place online October 12-14! Learn more and register now for FREE at Inbound.com!

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How Third Party Delivery Apps are Draining the Lifeblood of Restaurants – Marketing with Nabeel Alamgir

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2021 26:35

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Removing Friction

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2021 32:34

Ken Magma Marshall is Chief Growth Officer and Managing Partner at RevenueZen, an agency focused on helping high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn . . . to get real leads that actually convert. Ken started his agency four-and-a-half years ago. His first milestone was developing a successful, process that worked and that he could pass onto another person with his SOPS and get the same results. Instead of waiting for clients to request particular services like keyword research or gap analysis, Ken could tell a client, “In the first 90 days, we're going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients.” The second one, he says, came about when the repeatable system evolved to the point where he no longer had to tweak the system himself to continue to get targeted outcomes. About six months ago, Ken's agency reached its third milestone, when it was aqui-hired by RevenueZen. RevenueZen, with a traditional focus on lead gen, appointment setting, and LinkedIn, got Ken's agency's assets, his knowledge of inbound technology, his presence on the executive team, and his agency's book of business. Complementary strengths have proved win-win. ReveueZen's clients are typically established professional, mid-market service companies that have good revenues . . . but may or may not be profitable. All but three B2C “outliers” are B2B technology companies, with 60-70% in SaaS (software as a service). Most of these companies have marketing teams, but are not problem- or solution-aware with respect to RevenueZen's methodologies, don't know what kind of solution they need, or don't know the right provider. What do they know? They want results. Ken says it is imperative for the agency to qualify its potential clients through the discovery process – if clients don't understand customer lifetime values /average lead values, they are likely to have unrealistic expectations of the value of conversion or question whether they will get a positive return on spend. Ken will be moderating a HubSpot's Inbound2021 session, “Long Live Forms, All Hail Chatbots: The Epic Debate of Booking Demos.” In answer any participants' subjective blanket assertions, such as a statement that “Chatbots are the future,” Ken will be asking such probing questions as: “For whom are chatbots correct?” What other marketing stack does the company use?” “How will the company measure effectiveness?” The objective is to dig to a deeper level . . . to determine which use cases are appropriate, who they're appropriate for, at what level of business maturity, etc. This year's online HubSpot Inbound conference is scheduled for October 12-14. Ken is intrigued by some of the newer technologies: Lead-qualifying software that captures online prospects' form data, qualifies leads programmatically in real time, filters their information to match rep data, and immediately either notifies the appropriate sales rep or establishes a live video chat. Conversion.AI software that generates scripts based on user inputs and expectations “learned” over time. Alex Boyd (RevenueZen founder and CEO) and Kenneth David Warren Marshall II (a.k.a. Ken Magma Marshall), can be reached on LinkedIn or on the agency's website at: revenuezen.com. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and it is that time of year once again. It is almost time for the Inbound Conference. Much like last year, it will be virtual, but what that means is this is the time of the year where this podcast gets a little bit more salesy, but in a good way. It's just a different flavor of the agency services world that we like to cover. I am joined today by Ken Magma Marshall, CGO and Managing Partner at RevenueZen based in Portland, Oregon, though he himself has newly moved to Brooklyn. Welcome to the podcast, Ken. KEN: Thanks for having me, Rob. Really excited to dive on it. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about RevenueZen and the agency's superpowers, what you're known for, where you succeed well for clients? KEN: There's the 10,000-foot view elevator pitch, which is that we aim to help high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands to generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn. Or in layman's terms, we help our clients get real leads that actually convert. Really, the company itself is the story of RevenueZen before Ken and then my agency. I actually started an agency four and a half years ago, and about six months ago, RevenueZen acquired it. So now, whereas they were focused on lead gen, appointment setting, LinkedIn only, I brought the inbound methodology with me. So now we've got a hybrid and best of both worlds. ROB: Is that maybe also where some of the SEO flavor came in? I would say it's a little bit atypical for HubSpot agencies in the whole ecosystem, lead gen agencies, to know SEO as well as you're articulating. KEN: That's exactly right, and that's why we utilize the terms “demand gen” and “lead gen” very intentionally, because with SEO agencies you get the whole “These are our deliverables and our clicks and our keyword increases.” We're former salespeople. Three of our executives out of four were cold calling back in the day, so we understand how to map that search intent into pipeline, how things are going to go from each perspective that actually leads to those people converting, not just being users and clicks and searches. So full funnel knowledge helps inform the strategy. ROB: I'm going to pull on a thread that you mentioned in there. You mentioned being acquired. What does it look like to be acquired, and how does that happen? KEN: That's a fun conversation. If I were a startup in Palo Alto and I was a kid in college, that might look like somebody buying me for a certain undisclosed amount of money. But for me, it was more about joining a team that was a little bit established. My run rate at my old company I think was around 600,000 ARR. When RevenueZen acquired me, it was basically acqui-hire situation – they get all of my assets, my knowledge, me on the executive team, and all of my book of business. But the strength of it and really the allure for me, or I wouldn't have done it, is that they understood these lead gen methodologies and channels and had these systems that we didn't that strongly complement the inbound engine that I taught myself and learned how to build over the years. It was really that complementary partnership with a slightly mature agency where I could really hone in those growth focuses and new innovation initiatives. Because I'm a mad scientist at the end of the day, Rob. That's what I love to do. [laughs] ROB: Not to project too much of this onto you in particular, but in general, there's a certain amount of confidence and ego that flows into starting a business, starting an agency, and then layer on top of that the degree of confidence and resilience required coming from a sales background. How do you navigate that into – there is a mutual admission of need and benefit. You have to get past the outer defenses to even have the conversation of “Hey, maybe we should get together,” and number two, “How does that look so we can all feel like we have the right seat at the table when we're together?” KEN: Absolutely. My ego, to use an analogy, went into the boxing ring and did not come out on top for the first few fights. I had to sit down with my wife, my friends, family members, and we really chewed on it. I even chewed on it with the CEO of the company. Now I'm the CGO. We lived in the same apartment building. What it came down to was really just that I understood that he has a finance/sales – he worked at a revenue-based software company, very high growth. He has a ground level understanding of what it takes to scale, whereas, like I mentioned, my strength is in customer success and product development. I'm really gangster when it comes to those two things. So I had to look at it and say, he knew that if he could just bolt on these assets that have taken me six years to create, and I knew that with his ability to understand scale and the other two executives taking on those things that I don't do well – I hate this word because it's overused, but we could create some real synergy and grow a lot more quickly. It just came down to that: being able to do what I love and a little bit more stability. ROB: Especially early on, we all want a little bit more stability. Maybe not too much, but definitely more than that early entrepreneurial journey. KEN: Exactly. ROB: Paint a picture, Ken, of what a typical customer looks like, a typical client for RevenueZen. Is it B2B? What's the mix and focus there, and maybe the size as well? KEN: At this point it's all B2B except for three companies. Upwork is one of our clients; Nalgene is one of our clients. But they're the weird B2C outlier as far as consumer goods go, Upwork being this monster that it is. But most of them, 60-70% are B2B SaaS companies. These are technology companies. They have Series A, usually, investment. They've got a marketing team, but the marketing team are not problem- or solution-aware with our methodologies. They just know that they need to turn those levers because their investors or the CEO or whoever is talking to the, VP of Demand Gen or Marketing, and they just want results. They have money to do it, but they typically don't have the knowledge of what kind of solution they need or the right provider. So we can attach ourselves on as the Chief of Digital or an ad hoc CMO and guide them not only in knowledge-gathering, but lay the strategy out and then literally bolt on our team to execute it for them. Really, it's those kind of companies who are more mid-market. They're already established professional service companies, but as far as the SaaS companies, they have a go-to-market somewhat defined; they understand product-market fit. They might not be profitable, but they have good revenues. They really just need somebody to come in, tell them what to do, and have the army to do it for them. ROB: Do they typically have an understanding – you said product-market fit, but they might have a general understanding of customer lifetime value so they can measure you that way? KEN: Yes. Actually, when I'm qualifying them, and same with our CEO, we actually still do all of the sales. At my old company I sold every deal, and now it's just us two closing every deal. But when we ask them about CLV or even their average lead values if they have lead storing and they understand the value of a lead, that's actually done in the discovery process to qualify them as well. Because if they don't understand those values, they'll have unrealistic expectations when we start getting those conversions as to how much they're worth or if it's even going to return on their spend with us. Yeah, that's pretty imperative. ROB: I would imagine once you have provided a lead, that's an MQL (marketing qualified lead). Then there's that sales qualifying that happens after that. Is that typically on the client side? Is there an element of going further down the funnel that you get involved in? Where does that boundary start to happen? KEN: Yeah, we do lean more heavily on inbound these days. I would say it's about a 70/30 split as well. But the furthest we'll get is when we are doing let's say an inbound/outbound hybrid LinkedIn content marketing and outbound service – happy for you to go on the website and check out if you guys want to – the furthest we'll get is setting those appointments with them and then letting them take over. It's part MQL or SQL depending on how they define it, but it's appointment setting as far as how far we go. ROB: Which still can be, with the proper – it sounds like potentially a real blessing for a sales rep. You're hanging out and stuff shows up on your calendar, and it's people who seem interested in buying your software. That's a good way to wake up in the morning. KEN: Right. That's why we love inbound. Not that outbound doesn't have its place, and in fact, for a lot of startups it does in the beginning. There's urgency. But that's why we love it, because these people are coming to you saying, “You've built my trust, you've educated me, I've compared solutions and then learned about your solution, all on your site. All you need to do is not give me a reason to put my credit card down.” ROB: Very interesting. You mentioned a little bit about the merger, but if we go a little bit further back, what led you to start your own business in the first place? And you got it pretty far along. That level of bookings is more than just typically one person in their closet. What led you to get started on the journey? KEN: Not that amazing, but I'm pretty proud of it. For me, I think I'm the cliché entrepreneur without any background in it. Nobody in my family, none of my friends. But I was that kid with the lawnmower, I had lemonade stands. I used to take my neighbors' trash and put it on my parents' lawn and sell it at a yard sale. I always knew I was interested in making money and seeing what I could do, but I didn't really have the background, or I would say some of the mentorship, to know that's what it was called and how to start a company. I went to school thinking that I would be a salesperson. I was personable, I understood psychology to a certain degree. Right around my junior year, I believe, I asked a counselor, “What should I be doing? I don't really like this sales thing” when I saw my first sales job that I could get. She's like, “You seem like one of those kids who should go check out that digital marketing thing.” That really was the spark, when I started to understand if I can reverse-engineer this thing called an algorithm, nobody knows what that is. I asked a bunch of people, I asked business owners – that's actually how I got my first client – and they had no clue. So that was my first lightbulb moment: I could start a business doing this. However, I've always been geared towards being an entrepreneur, and I always knew I would. That's why I quit my last agency after only being there for about two years total between both of them. ROB: As you got into the starting and progressing the business journey, were there any key inflection points? Obviously, the merger itself is a key point of validation. But before that day, there had to have been some key inflection points in the business, some points where it really seemed to be materially different than just rubbing two sticks together, making some phone calls and getting some clients. What were some of those moments in the growth of the business that were memorable? KEN: Obviously, I still have the first dollar I ever made. Still have that first check. That's the big one. That's the pure validation of “Somebody's willing to pay me money for this thing.” But apart from that, I think the first milestone that sticks out was going from freelancer to having a repeatable process that worked and involving another human being. That was the first big thing for me. I was on Upwork – like I said, they're now our client, so it went full circle. But I remember doing these projects, and I'm like, instead of people telling me what they want me to do, like keyword research or a gap analysis, I'll just say “In the first 90 days, we're going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients.” So I had this system that was starting to form. I could give it to another person with my SOPs and then they could do it, so it's now an actual business. That was the first one that was really exciting. The second one, I would say, is when I evolved from doing the work. I had downloaded this repeatable system to a point where I didn't have to actually implement the changes or the recommendations myself for us to still get those desirable outcomes. That required a coach, who was not cheap [laughs], and a lot of hours and mistakes. But we finally got it dialed. Other than the merger, that was one of the most exciting. And then your first six-figure year is always exciting too, as far as validation. ROB: I think people often underestimate the value of what they can do in terms of documenting a process, having people execute on it. The good part is you mostly don't have to think about it. I think the risk after that, however, is that that process gets stale. How do you go about ensuring that a process you've understood and documented can then be also maintained as the landscape changes over 3, 6, 12 months, etc.? KEN: I think I'm going to answer that in two parts. When I was still general managing the other company, I am so obsessed with strategy; I'm a technician, I'm a strategist by trade. I'm not a banker, I'm not a programmer. So it was always easy for me to have that layer of QA and innovation just because I was reading this stuff every day. I remember – shout out to Rand – after one Moz Local, going to a wine bar and having a bottle of wine and getting to chop it up. But I always found that very easy because I loved that stuff and was interested in it. But now that I'm with this bigger organization and there's four executives, our COO might say, “Here's how we can squeeze out this operational efficiency.” The CEO is like, “Here's how we hedge against risk.” I'm sitting here – and I think that's why it's such a blessing to be in my position – as the Chief Growth Officer, all I think about all day long is how we can ink out that efficiency for the team, make our client have less friction but also stay on top of effectiveness and industry trends. So for me, the answer is simple. It's my job, and that hasn't changed at three companies. [laughs] ROB: That's a critical job, for sure. I would be remiss not to mention the reason this is an Inbound episode is because you are, in fact, moderating a session for Inbound. The session you're moderating is “Long Live Forms, All Hail Chatbots: The Epic Debate of Booking Demos.” Inbound is in October this year. I think it's usually Labor Day week, if I'm not mistaken, but things change in a pandemic. Tell us about that session, what you think you're going to talk about, and especially how you're thinking about moderating that session. KEN: I'll talk about the moderation aspect, because it speaks to who I am as a person and my temperament. Whenever folks get into very sensational language or subjective language, I like to systematically remove that and dive into the concrete, the nuance of what they're talking about and why it's effective. For instance, if somebody says “All hail chatbots, chatbots are the future,” I'm not going to give them a response. My first instinct is to give them a question of, for whom are chatbots correct? And what other marketing stack do they use? And how are they going to measure their effectiveness? That's how I'm planning on moderating things, by having these specific questions to get to the bottom of what use cases are each appropriate, who they're appropriate for, at what level of business maturity, etc. I want to make both people frustrated to get the most out of them. [laughs] I haven't talked to them about that, but now they've heard. That's my style of moderation. That's how I talk and that's how I do business. As far as forms versus chatbots, I go back to when I talk to clients who might come in for inbound, and we convince them they need to do an outbound hybrid on LinkedIn. Or they come in for only appointment setting and they want 10 SDRs tomorrow. I'm like, “You're so niche, and there's this clear keyword opportunity that you can own these terms and have a better ROI. Why are you hung up on that?” There's no right or wrong answer. I've actually used chatbots effectively, and I think forms and demos are perfectly appropriate, especially for a self-serve model. So chatbots have their place, forms have their place, but let's dive into the nuances of it to parse that out. That's my philosophy. ROB: There's a certain attention to that at any sort of conference. I know HubSpot goes to pretty good lengths to make Inbound not all about them, but it is to an extent still about them, and they will hop up there and talk about what they're doing, and they'll certainly talk about it in terms of their agencies, their clients, and the customers they're looking to acquire. They are very visionary in terms of looking outwards, but inevitably, they're also going to unveil some new toys, some new shiny objects, and it will be easy for that to be the topic of the next year, the chatbots – you name it, really. KEN: Yep. ROB: What are you hearing from the ecosystem? Is there anything, whether it's on the agenda at Inbound or bubbling up through the product roadmap, and even outside of HubSpot in the broader lead gen space, what do you see coming that's important? Certainly that isn't a shiny object, because the shiny objects are in service of an objective, as you highlight. KEN: While we're on this topic of qualifying leads and once something's in the pipeline, helping sales ops with their objectives and making their lives easier and helping them be more effective – and shout out to Chili Piper. I'm actually very intrigued by these softwares that are, once somebody fills out a form, qualifying them programmatically, and then based on that response, immediately notifying the correct rep. I've even seen softwares that will allow somebody to live video chat right after they've gotten qualified on the form. Those kinds of technologies that remove friction – and again, chatbots can do this, forms can do this; you can integrate both with these other softwares that I'm describing like Chili Piper – those are the things that I'm interested in. Sales ops is, I think – you see these crazy valued companies. I think that's the future of this stuff. Taking the friction from that person who's a user that might be a lead, quickly and programmatically qualifying them, and then diverting them to the correct part of your sales process or person or folks on your sales team and reducing that friction. I think that's where a lot of opportunities get lost. It's the classic somebody taking 72 hours to follow up with a lead that's inbound. Why? And the same thing as sending the templated email. That's also played out. People don't want that. They need a hybrid of both. That's what I'm excited about and what I'm hearing and seeing. ROB: That's really, really interesting. You may know their product a lot, you may know it a little, but when I speak of shiny objects, one of those shiny objects out in the world is AI and machine learning, but it also seems like this area where Chili Piper is playing could perhaps be a legitimate application. Are they looking at the history of the rep, the history of accounts, the history of places where they've been effective? Is that part of the routing of how they're getting the right reps to the right leads? KEN: Yeah, the cool thing is that they plug directly into the CRM. HubSpot, let's say you have a rep assigned to certain accounts based on – native to HubSpot, within HubSpot, let's say if the person comes in and they typed in “SEO” for their focus, or it includes in the form XYZ terms, then they can automatically say, “This person is qualified as a mid-market opportunity who has X, Y, and Z criteria. Give them to the rep based on our different filters that we've created within the CRM.” And then pushing it to the email address of times that are open for that rep in an automated fashion. We're talking about logging into something, back and forth emails, a form for somebody that might not be qualified – all these components are broken down into very seamless automation. That is what I think the uniqueness of their platform is. Those kinds of automations. There's lots of platforms that do one-off of each of those thing, but it's the fact that it's seamless and it directly integrates with the CRM. That's where I think the benefit is. ROB: It's almost a way to see how the things that they've announced over time, the tools that get rolled out over time, how it's accretive and how it starts to come together. Something like scheduling has been in some CRMs for a while. I recently logged into a CRM of one of our clients, and I was in there because they emailed me. I looked it up and they have our number of employees and our revenue. I'm like, man, I don't think I've seen that in someone else's CRM before. How'd they get that? Because we're a vendor. They're not going to go in and enter that data on us. That was entered for them. KEN: Exactly. ROB: You combine that with – you have some rules engines, you have some AI. It all comes together in a pretty meaningful way. KEN: I was going to say, that's so spot on. It's that accumulative knowledge put together in a way that's seamless that's the benefit. As you mentioned, calendar scheduling tools, integrations with CRMs, those have been around for a while. Even certain routing has been around for a while around automation of sending certain things out based on criteria. But the strength is really in the nuances of those experiences, like when somebody fills out a form, prequalifying them based on their responses in real time. How many different form softwares haven't taken advantage of that very simple opportunity that saves the sales folks so much time? Me and Alex, we're still selling. Every 30-minute call that we do is a pretty big part of our day as executives. So if we can, without even thinking about it, take care of that, have them go through and get that messaging out that they need within a really short period of time, we dramatically increase the chance that that lead will close without lifting a finger. ROB: It's really interesting. It's really meaningful. I think something that's also underestimated – in a lot of our processes that we document out, we put a lot of emphasis on humanizing the language of templates. I don't know if anybody's doing some good work around that. That is the hardest thing to do, but I daresay it might be one of the most important things to do: to write templates that don't sound like templates. KEN: Yep. ROB: I need tools for that, I think. KEN: We have lots of SOPs that we've attempted to do, and thank goodness that every software, even Gmail, allows you to do templates that you can drag and drop and place. But I've also been toying around with Conversion.AI to write these scripts based on inputs that we give it, but over time it obviously learns what we're expecting. That has been a bit of a game-changer in terms of templates as far as email follow-ups and responses with prospects. Or even in our SEO work, making sure that we can do optimizations at scale without having to burn out the strategists or charge these companies an ungodly amount of money. I am very fascinated by continuing to tweak and make automation work for us, and machine learning but without losing that component of human that all of us still look for. ROB: Super sensible. Ken, when we zoom back a little bit, across your founding journey, across your merging in with RevenueZen, what are some lessons you have learned on that journey that you might go back in time and tell yourself, if you had a chance to do them differently? KEN: What a question. Something I chew on regularly. I think the first would be that – Alex, our current CEO, my good buddy, has hammered home a lot that you can create a line of best fit, of effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity. I was so focused on the effectiveness, being 99.9% effective, that I forgot about that aspect of “I'm only ever going to be able to help X amount of people, and I actually can't help them that well because I'm personally burnt out from doing too much work.” I think that's a trap that creatives and agencies often get into, which is that we're so heads down on the custom, we forget about the scale and making it efficient enough to come down at a price point that's affordable to a broader market. So that's thing #1. Again, took a coach and a lot of money and a few years to learn that. The second thing I would say is when I go on a discovery call and I set the tone with the prospect, I tell them, “This is to make sure we're a good fit.” Salespeople have been saying that for years. Used car salesmen say that. But we've taken that in as a value of the company. I am so quick to disqualify in our CRM, in the pre-opportunity stage. That just saves headache for the strategists, it increases the lifetime value of our clients with us, and it's just better for our reputation. Good fits, good case studies. So that's the second thing: disqualifying them. I would say the third thing is the benefit of really good partners who complement your skillsets. As a solopreneur in the beginning, I think I had to learn a lot of hard lessons myself and chew on a lot of hard things without the aid of somebody. Whether it's a mentor or a co-founder or a really good book, just being insatiable about learning and getting help from others, external help, is invaluable. You literally cannot calculate the time and headache that it'll save you. ROB: Disqualifying almost seems like a subset of an SOP. What I mean by that is if you have to look at every lead that comes in and you have to think about all of their constraints and you have to say, “This person's in a closet by themselves and they haven't built a product yet, and they have $1,000 a month that they want to spend on inbound; what can we do for them?”, you'll kind of lose your mind trying to fit yourself to that opportunity, versus understanding when to say no, and maybe even sometimes “Here's someone else that would be a good fit for you to work with” and focusing on the things you do know how to solve. It keeps you from overthinking and getting paralyzed by choice, really. KEN: Ain't that the truth. Preach. Part of that, not only will we say this business/person is not a good fit, but what could we give them or how could we use the network effect to create value and have them go give a referral? So we do have templates of like “You're not a good fit, but here's some standard resources and here's a good one of our vendors as far as our partner program that we partner with.” That's exactly right. A good ICP defined, having that defined will save you a ton of headache and make your marketing better. ROB: As we round the corner, Ken, I can't help but highlight – you've mentioned a couple of times working with a coach and paying some real money for it. I know what that's like. How did you go about finding a coach that worked well for you, and to an extent justifying the cost? KEN: I'll start with justifying the cost. For me, I audit my time, and I audited my time in terms of how much dollars it was likely to bring in based on the activities. I started to hit this ceiling. Like, “There are all these operational inefficiencies that are holding me back, and I don't actually know how to solve them. The problem of why this is a bad thing, I have no clue. I guess I could learn about this or go get an MBA, but I'd rather just expedite that by paying somebody.” The ROI for me I knew would come because I knew I had a good system. I trusted in my “product” back then. But as far as knowing who was the right person, I always tell people to look for somebody who's done it multiple times but isn't so far ahead of you that they can no longer relate. I wouldn't want Jeff Bezos as a coach, even though he's clearly taken over the world. So this guy was a former founder three times over, but currently just wanted to give back. I mean, he charged money, but really it wasn't that much compared to the market and his expertise. I did a little bit of research. I got a beer with him. Those two components – he's done it before, I can sit down and have a conversation, and he's not too far ahead of me in my industry in the service business to be checked out and just in it for the money. I think if you look at it from that perspective, it's often worth it. That's what I would say. ROB: That's a great point also. Price is significant, but it's not always an indicator of quality. When I was interviewing coaches, I talked to – might be a wonderful guy, but he was a coach in a box. He literally had a box with a coaching methodology, and I think he was doing a career change. He was actually more expensive than the guy I ended up working with, who coaches execs of SalesLoft kind of legitimacy. SalesLoft probably pays him a lot more in total. But the credibility did not always correlate with price, is my point there. KEN: Hundred percent. ROB: Ken, when people want to catch up with you, connect with you and with RevenueZen, other than online for Inbound in October, where should they go to find you? KEN: You can check out either my or Alex's LinkedIn. Alex Boyd and Kenneth David Warren Marshall II, a.k.a. Ken Magma Marshall, on LinkedIn. RevenueZen, we're building a new website, so if you go to revenuezen.com any time in the next quarter, we'll have a lot of goodies in our Resource Center. That's always a great place to start. I'll say it now and I'll say it until the day we sell this thing or we keep doing it off into the future: I am always geeked to jump on a call with somebody who isn't our ICP to have a strategy conversation. It's not a sales pitch. It's me in real time, fixing stuff on your site and your pipeline and your methodology. I could do this just with my brain because I've been doing it for a while. So it's always good to get in touch, regardless of if you think you have the money or need SEO. I'll give you something to walk away with every time. ROB: That sounds like a YouTube channel. You let Ken give you help for free and you just agree it's going to be on YouTube in real time. KEN: I used to do that. That's how I used to prospect. That's how I got my first few clients. I would do a real-time, off the top of the dome analysis of their site and fix three to four things. I'd give it to the developers, not even the marketing contact, and the developers would be like, “You increased our page speed by like 60%. How did you do that? Aren't you an SEO provider?” I'm like, “Exactly.” [laughs] ROB: Excellent. Thank you, Ken. Hopefully we can meet up in the skin at Inbound some year when it's back in person. I wish you and the RevenueZen team all the best. Thank you for coming on and sharing. KEN: I would love that, Rob, and you're welcome to come to Brooklyn any time for a beer. Cheers. ROB: Brooklyn's awesome. Cheers. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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Great Opportunities in Non-Food Franchising with Jon Ostenson

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2021 28:11

Jon Ostenson is a Consultant, Owner/Investor, and Author specializing in Non-Food Franchising. He draws on his experience as a former Inc. 500 Franchise President and Multi-Brand Franchisee in serving his clients. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. Franchise owners test marketing vehicles in their market, refine the best practices around hiring, and find faster routes so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. 2. Numbers attract people more than the type of work. 3. Much more beyond the brand, you have a proven model, a proven playbook, and oftentimes a coach on the sideline for support. Reach out to Jon for a free consultation to see if non-food franchising is right for you! Zero cost, zero obligation - Jon's Email Sponsors: Helium10: Build your own e-commerce business on Amazon with help from Helium10! Get 50% off your ﬁrst month of a Helium 10 Platinum account at Helium10.com/fire! HubSpot: INBOUND 2021, hosted with love by HubSpot, takes place online October 12-14! Learn more and register now for FREE at Inbound.com!

Great Opportunities in Non-Food Franchising with Jon Ostenson

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2021 28:11

How to Create an Unbroken Business with Michael Unbroken

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 6, 2021 30:45

Michael Unbroken is an entrepreneur, best-selling author, speaker, podcaster, coach, and advocate for adult survivors of childhood trauma. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. Asking for help does not equate to weakness. Asking help from others will help you grow and succeed. 2. Human connection is imperative to build a community. 3. You are not alone. The difference between success and failure in your life is to start asking for help. Get your FREE copy of Michael's #1 Best-Selling Book: Think Unbroken and The Think Unbroken Masterclass - Think Unbroken Sponsors: ZipRecruiter: When you post a job on ZipRecruiter, their matching technology finds qualified candidates and invites them to apply! Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com/fire. HubSpot: INBOUND 2021, hosted with love by HubSpot, takes place online October 12-14! Learn more and register now for FREE at Inbound.com!

How to Create an Unbroken Business with Michael Unbroken

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 6, 2021 30:45

How a USAF Veteran Went From 27k a Year to Multi-7 Figure Companies in 3 Years with Tyler Austin

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 5, 2021 26:50

Tyler Austin is a Husband, Dad, SaaS Founder, Real Estate Investor, and USAF Veteran. He went from a 27K a year job to multi-million dollar companies in a 3 year window. He loves cigars, whiskey, the outdoors, and being with his family. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. Success is a mental state. 2. Stop living your life through the lenses of someone else's eyes. 3. Prosperity has a lot of different faces; it means a lot of other things to different people. As long as you understand what scaling life is about and continue working on it, you will find prosperity. Do the 14-Auto Lead Gen Challenge. Use the code FIRE and get 10% off - REISift Sponsors: ZipRecruiter: When you post a job on ZipRecruiter, their matching technology finds qualified candidates and invites them to apply! Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com/fire. HubSpot: INBOUND 2021, hosted with love by HubSpot, takes place online October 12-14! Learn more and register now for FREE at Inbound.com!

How a USAF Veteran Went From 27k a Year to Multi-7 Figure Companies in 3 Years with Tyler Austin

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 5, 2021 26:50

Why Your Branding Needs to Take a Digital First Approach with Allison Ellsworth

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2021 27:27

Allison Ellsworth is the Co-Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Poppi, the leading prebiotic soda infused with apple cider vinegar for a happy gut. Along with being a full-time mom, Allison has grown her business rapidly. Since its inception in 2015, Poppi has expanded to national retailers and become a best seller on Amazon. Now, Poppi is the #1 fastest growing brand in the SPINS Natural Channel functional beverage category. Prior to creating Poppi, Allison worked as a landman in the oil and gas industry and attended the University of North Texas. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. You can be successful and have a family at the same time. 2. Be strategic and work with the influencers of the influencers. 3. Being authentic is the key. Identify what works for each platform, and once you go viral, you have to continue doing what works. Be Gut Happy, Be Gut Healthy. Drink Poppi - Drink Poppi Sponsors: Helium10: Build your own e-commerce business on Amazon with help from Helium10! Get 50% off your ﬁrst month of a Helium 10 Platinum account at Helium10.com/fire! HubSpot: INBOUND 2021, hosted with love by HubSpot, takes place online October 12-14! Learn more and register now for FREE at Inbound.com!

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Why Your Branding Needs to Take a Digital First Approach with Allison Ellsworth

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 3, 2021 27:27

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Embracing Unconventional Paths

Imagine Talks Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 4, 2021 17:56

Tammy Cho is CEO and founder of BetterBrave, a nonprofit that empowers employees with knowledge and tools for navigating harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. Previously, Tammy co-founded Encore Alert, an AI platform that helps brands identify and act on emerging trends, crises, and influencers in their industry. She started the company as a college freshman at Georgetown University and sold it in 2016 at age 21. Tammy has also been recognized as an NBC Asian America's A to Z Rising Star in 2018, Georgetown Entrepreneur of the Year, Hubspot Inbound's 22 Under 22, and a Power Woman in DC Tech.

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Episode 116 : Hubspot Academy Review | Marketing School

SIFT Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2020 3:54

In this episode I do review of my experience on the Hubspot Academy, what I was able to learn while doing my Inbound Marketing Certification and also whether or not I would recommend it to other marketers.Hubspot Academy is free of charge and offers various courses and certifications that can be achieved once an exam has been passed by the candidate. Hubspot is, however, in no way affiliated or sponsoring this episode so every statement made is from my own raw experience and will only act as a review to their platform.Until next time !

Episode 115 : Inbound Marketing Explained | Inbound Series

SIFT Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2020 13:46

Inbound marketing, quite different from outbound reach, is a marketing methodology where buyer personas are defined and identified by the different departments of an organisation, business e.t.c. and attracted towards the organisation/business e.t.c. instead of businesses reaching out directly to potential customers.The opposite of Inbound, which is outbound is for example running paid Ads on Radio or Television and actively reaching out to the masses in an attempt to create awareness and sell directly to them. The pitfall of outbound reach is the lack of a qualification and verification process of the target reach that fits ideally to the buyer's persona and are highly likely to convert or be interested in our products or services.A good example is an Ad on Radio or Television. A mortgage lender running Ads on Radio and Television to attract people interested in becoming new homeowners, refinance current mortgages e.t.c. reaches a massive audience that is unqualified for their services and products.More information on www.siftgroup.net & SavaDigital.ioBusiness inquiries, Podcast Bookings and Advertisements to augustine@siftgroup.netFollow me on social media @kiamaaugustine, @iamkiamaaugustine & @siftgroupx Did you find this episode insightful ? Yes ! Support the show through sharing, rating & reviewing on your favourite platforms.Until next time !Buzzsprout - Let's get your podcast launched! Start for FREEDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

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Cultivating the Gap between Marketing and Sales

Marketing Strategy Talks w/ Ian Luck

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 12, 2020 33:00

James Kwon is Founder and CEO of Figmints Digital Creative Marketing, a 20-person, full-service, multi-seven-figure digital marketing agency that specializes in accelerating leads to sales. The company utilizes SalesAmp, which James describes as “business development representative as a service.” SalesAmp came under the Figmint's “umbrella” when James and April Williams, now Fitmints President, merged their two companies. (The way these two companies “came together” is described in a short video on Fitmints' website's About page.) Eight years ago, when James discovered that his first chosen career in culinary arts did not provide him with sufficient creative opportunities, he started Figmints with a focus on providing UI/UX (User Interface and User Experience) web services, which he did for number of well-known companies back when few people were doing it. In this interview, James discusses the sales process gap the often occurs because “sales and marketing typically don't like each other” – the marketing department wants the sales team to take leads earlier, while the sales team wants marketing to push leads further along before the “hand off.” In 2018, James was looking for a partner to better fulfill his vision for where he wanted his company to go. The synergy between Figmints HubSpot operations and North Star Marketing's SalesAmp, a marketing process focused on building pipelines for individual salespeople, created a marketing powerhouse that far exceeded the expectations of the two merged companys' leaders. Today, the now-expanded Figmints develops the right content for the exact right audience. As individuals respond (download information, attend webinars, engage with content, open email), the SalesAmp piece takes over with Figments' internal sales team reaching out to prospects on behalf of clients. Over time, Figmints delivers a thought leadership, content marketing, and funnel program that nurtures customers through the client-journey until they are comfortable enough to talk with the client's sales team. Unlike most agencies where generated leads are handed off for follow-up to client sales/ boiler rooms (which may or may not get the message right), Figmints operates as an “educational ambassador,” running the inbound HubSpot process on behalf of its clients' salespeople. Most of the Figmints' clients have long, complex sales cycles. When the questions get too complicated, the client takes over. In his HubSpot Inbound 2020 presentation, “My Cheat Sheet: How to Growth Hack Five New Companies or Offerings This Year” at HubSpot Inbound 2020, James promoted the idea that entrepreneurs should consider starting multiple companies at a time. He lists a number of reasons that this practice makes sense and lays claim to launching close to nine sub-brands, of which four or five are still active. James is a big proponent of systems, optimization, and efficiency for everything from workflows to automated engagement to follow-up processes. He says he uses “several dozen pieces of software that combine together to make my workflow easier.” But, he admits, people are complicated. Early on, the agency experienced high employee turnover. “There is no way to love people efficiently,” he says. Today, employees stick around a lot longer because the agency invests in employee growth and meeting with them for frequent one-on-ones. He highly recommends utilizing Entrepreneurial Operating Systems (EOS), as described in Gino Wickman's book Traction. James is available on his agency's website at: Figmints.com, by email at: james@figmints.com, on Twitter at Twitter.com/figmints, and Facebook. ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by James Kwon, Founder and CEO of Figmints Digital Creative Marketing based in Providence, Rhode Island. Welcome to the podcast, James. JAMES: Thanks so much for having me, Rob. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about Figmints and what is the superpower of Figmints? Where do you excel? JAMES: I like that. Figmints is a 20-person, full service digital marketing firm. Started here about 8 years ago. My personal background – I guess I'll tell you a little bit of the story. I started in UI/UX and design. Actually, I have a degree in culinary, so that was where my creativity journey started. Got to find out that I couldn't be as creative in the kitchen as I'd like to be, and I wasn't that good at it, so I left to do design work. I could be more creative in front of a computer, so I started to do design and became what I call one of the first UI/UX designers because that category really didn't exist when I started. I was Employee #5 at CVS.com, helped them launch that award-winning site at the time. Worked at BEAM Interactive, got to work on some really high profile, awesome sites like Mini Cooper, Virgin Mobile, Deutsche Bank, the list goes on and on. Name drop, name drop. I started the agency because I really enjoyed working with small to medium size firms. Fell in love with marketing somewhere along the lines. I fell in love with business, fell in love with marketing, just this infinite pool. Today, we're really focused on accelerating leads to sales through a program we call SalesAmp. It's like a BDR as a service. What I've learned through the years – I don't like the term serial entrepreneur, but I guess it describes me because we have probably four or five different sub-brands that I've launched. Over the years, actually, it's like nine. But today we're still working on four or five of them. I've had a blast getting to trial things very quickly, test things very quickly, trying to measure the growth very quickly. And we do that for clients as well as ourselves. ROB: Right on. BDR, business development representative – a lot of times this is somebody who's banging the phones, banging emails, possibly even sourcing or scraping leads or has some process feeding into that. How does that thread go from a background in UX and UI to sales assistance? JAMES: Great question. What I love about design is coming up with creative solutions, and when I started the business 8 years ago, I realized that you get to really be infinitely creative in business itself. There are major levels you can pull within business operations, HR, people, but especially, of course, in sales and marketing that was the area that was closest to the world we were already living in, doing websites and branding and brand story. We merged about 2-½ years ago now with another agency. The CEO there is now our president, April Williams. She had developed a system that she called SalesAmp, and we really added a digital layer as they've folded into our agency. That process, we think, is really transformational. We have a lot of great clients. Philips Healthcare is a client of ours. That's probably our biggest. GE ABB is a client of ours. Lots of medium size clients as well. But the whole idea is sales and marketing typically don't like each other. Well, in a lot of businesses, they typically are frustrated at each other because marketing wants sales to take leads earlier, sales wants marketing to push leads further. There's this gap that happens in the middle, and we thought this was a tremendous need. So we actually developed a process to not only develop the thought leadership, the content marketing, the funnel, but also have an inside sales team that reaches out on behalf of the client to hand-hold that prospect all the way through till they feel comfortable having a conversation with the sales team. These larger organizations have felt tremendous benefit from having this service from us because it reduces that frustration. Salespeople are busy; they flat-out just don't want to do it. [laughs] So yeah, we've had a lot of fun putting this together. ROB: That's really interesting, and that makes your journey make sense. If we were doing conferences this year in 2020, you and I might have been speaking face to face at HubSpot's Inbound conference, where you were speaking. We've recorded there the past couple of years, and quite often we've talked to BDR/SDR as a service companies, but they're usually coming more from the perspective of building lists and then banging out calls for those lists. Do I understand that you're actually generating warmer leads and then also pulling those leads through to some point where you hand them off in the sales process? JAMES: Yeah. Not to give away too much of the special sauce, but for the value of this podcast, for the value of your listeners, I'll share with you what we've found to be more impactful is actually running the good old-fashioned HubSpot inbound process specifically for salespeople. We run that process on their behalf – because you're right, a lot of these outbound sales/boiler room type of “I'm going to call 1,000 people a day,” those tend to fail because they don't get the story right. The game is just numbers, “I'm going to call as many people as possible.” But the inbound process is all about connecting the right content, having as much helpful content as possible to that exact right audience. What we're doing is combining both of those worlds. We want to develop that content, do it on behalf of the sales team, and then as people engage, we're reaching out to those individuals. As people download, as people attend the webinars, as people start to engage with that content or even open an email, those are the people we reach out to. And then on the calls, we're actually leading them into more content, bringing them further through that journey. That I think is pretty different than a lot of companies out there that are just a roomful of salespeople reaching out. ROB: That definitely makes sense. Where do you get to the point where you hand that lead off? Are you sometimes able to bring them all the way through to closing sale, or is there typically a point where you're handing them off to an account executive, an AE or something like that? JAMES: Yeah, we're working on a program where we can bring the deal all the way to close. Of course, there's a lot of complexities. Most of the clients we work with have long sales cycles. They're very complex deals. You have to have some industry knowledge to be valuable there, to actually make the close or get people to sign on the dotted line. But what we do is become educational ambassadors. We know enough about the business to be able to guide that individual, and once it becomes complicated or once the questions become a little too complex for us, we'll immediately tee it up for that salesperson at the company. ROB: Got it. I want to pull on one thread you mentioned earlier. You mentioned a point of merging with another agency. Quite often, especially when you get to being more entrepreneurial, I think a combination of let's say ego and logistics and financial concerns can be an obstacle to getting together – JAMES: Just those little things. [laughs] Yeah. ROB: [laughs] Nobody has those problems. How did you come to this point where it just seemed to make sense to team up and pursue a whole that was more than some of its parts? JAMES: I'm going to throw a lot of that to April, who was the CEO of this previous agency and is now our president. There was a lot of humility from the start. We met each other actually at a faith-based Christian CEO roundtable group, and we've known each other for a few years. That story – we like to use the word supernatural. It feels like it was more about the things that were happening, and we were going along for the ride, really, and submitting a little bit to what we felt like was the best way to move forward. You can see that story, and I would highly recommend anybody to check out that full story, on our website, on our About page. I think there's a 4- or 5-minute video that explains the process there. But all the work that was done to start that humble process was really from April, and I was following along. ROB: We will look to get that video into the show notes. It's a great point that so often, some of these roundtables, some of these accountability type groups where you open up a little bit could be a place where you open up enough to figure out how you and someone else can work better together. Makes a ton of sense there. We mentioned Inbound, and at Inbound you gave a talk, and your talk was “My Cheat Sheet: How to Growth Hack Five New Companies or Offerings This Year.” Tell us about that talk and what some of the key takeaways and maybe even key questions were from that. JAMES: That talk came from our merger, I'd say was really the catalyst. It freed me up to dwell and live in – I think my gifting is ideating, looking towards the future, thinking about where we could create new products, new offerings. In the past, we really only ever had time to do half to one product or offering at a time, and we'd slowly test them. I realized that this probably means we're spending too much time trying to develop that offering before we launch it out. Obviously, as a speaker, I wanted the title to be as provocative as possible, so I made the argument that you shouldn't just start one offering or one new company; you should try to start five. It's kind of an arbitrary number. Three, five, ten – you should start as many as you can that warrants – that you think is a good idea. Go and test those MVPs (minimum viable products) out there. Very quickly into that segment, I talked about a few different reasons why you would want to do that. One, 80% of these ideas are going to fail, whether it's a new company or a new offering. So hey, if you start five, maybe one will succeed. It gives you this massive leap ahead. It gives you this opportunity to play in this blue ocean where your competitors may not be thinking smaller, running those MVPs, making sure that you're testing the biggest parts of the idea. It forces you not to spend too much time on it. And then of course, you get some thick skin. After failing many, many, many times, it becomes second nature, and you start to move forward much more quickly. ROB: This may tie together; you mentioned that your company had at one point up to nine offerings, and now there are five. Are there lessons and maybe an example of one of those that was an experiment and one that was put to rest? JAMES: Yeah, there's so many failures in there. [laughs] Happy to talk about it. Very early on, we built a platform for the wedding industry. Early on, when we introed video as a service, we were doing videos for weddings to make ends meet. We quickly knew that this needed to be not part of our brand, so we created a separate brand for that. The wedding industry is an entire universe. For any of your listeners who might be in the wedding industry, it is complex and unique and special, and there's a lot of people that you need to know and a lot of ways that you do business in it that are different than other industries – which I guess you could make the argument is true for every industry. But we quickly realized that we need a champion for this. We need a champion for any of these products that we create or sub-companies we create, and I couldn't be the best champion for it It did fail. We wound up twilighting the offering. There was actually a software component that was added onto it. But it was a lesson learned that the offering was a little too far away from what we do. Today, a lot of our products that we're testing are things that we can actually use ourselves or we can use for our own clients, which makes it a little bit more – the resources make sense to allocate for ourselves. ROB: How do you think about when it's too soon to put an idea to rest or maybe recognize after the fact that it was a little later than you should've turned it off? JAMES: I think it's always later. In hindsight, we should've stopped maybe at the beginning. [laughs] But I think you realize when you run out of money, certainly. I set some ground rules. “Hey, this can't take more than this much time” or “You can't spend more than this many dollars” or “We want to see this many customers come in and this type of feedback.” It's a good example of where everything was going the wrong direction. Our feedback was starting to get worse, it started to slip way behind in the priority, we couldn't devote as much time or dollars to it, and so we made the – I won't even call it a difficult decision. We made the very real decision that we needed to put an official stop to that project and move on. ROB: When you talk about feedback, some people are very numbers-driven and some people are very intuition-driven. Was that assessment of the feedback and the priority more of a gut feeling, or was that a measured consideration? JAMES: I'd love to sound smarter and say it was very measured. [laughs] At the time, that was one of our early ones, and it was a little bit more gut, which means we probably spent more money than we wanted to or needed to. But today we have much more strict measures of when things are going off the rails or when it feels like it's not getting the attention it deserves or we're getting feedback from our clients. I think you need both. You need to have some soft measures, asking people what they think, scale of 1 to 10. You start to create metrics around soft measures, which I'm a fan of. ROB: What's another offering that maybe is a little bit further along that was an experiment, but now looks a little bit more promising? And where did it come from? JAMES: At the end of my talk at Inbound, we created an offering that was born from this process. I give a little story about Tim Ferriss, which I'm sure you've heard of and maybe your listeners have heard of. Tim Ferriss is a prolific startup and entrepreneurial writer. He wrote The 4-Hour Workweek. There's a story about how he wrote the second book, The 4-Hour Body, and the way he arrived at the decision to write that book was really clever. Instead of surveying people or writing a chapter or anything like that, he designed a handful of book jackets and went to a bookstore – if you remember what bookstores were, they were these places people go to buy books. [laughs] This is probably illegal, so I don't recommend this necessarily. He took the books off the shelf and he swapped the jackets with his book jacket and he put it back on the shelf, and he stood back and actually tallied as people stopped, picked up the book, opened the book. He would give them scores – a point for stopping, 2 points for picking up the book, 10 points if you tried to buy the book. Then he arrived at the decision to write 4-Hour Body. And the subtitle of 4-Hour Body is “An uncommon guide to rapid fat loss, incredible sex, and becoming superhuman” – why would you not want to read that book, right? But that process, since we don't have bookstores anymore, or I don't recommend this same sort of process, we've developed a similar system using Facebook advertisements and other advertisements where we create what we call fake ads. They look like real ads, but they point you to a very generic landing page that captures information and lets you know that this is coming out later. This program, we like it a lot. We think many companies would benefit from it, and we've developed a separate offering just to do these validation tests. We call it BentoSpring. Bento like bite-size, spring like launch, so bite-size launch. The term “Bite-Size Launch” was taken, I think, so BentoSpring was our next best name. We're piloting that now. We're getting that off the ground. I think it's definitely still valid. But this is a great example of a product that we could use that we offer to our clients. It's relatively inexpensive, so when we offer it, we say, “Oh, we actually have an offering we call BentoSpring.” It could be its own separate company, but it doesn't need to be its own separate company. We have the offering out there, and if people want to engage with it, they can give us some money and do it. ROB: I can certainly see that sort of thing – from a distance, you can see the tea leaves. Even if you told somebody, “We have a scoring system like Tim Ferriss's. We give points for likes, we give points for comments, we give points for clicks, we give points for form fills” – the actual process of doing it could very easily be something that a client doesn't want to do. JAMES: Sure. They don't know how to do it. They don't know how to do it, they don't have an ad platform set up. Again, this is designed even if you wanted to start a brand new company and you have two or three in your ideation phase. “Gosh, these are all great companies,” or “These are all great things that I could be doing. Which one should we do?” Well, let's go test it. Let's go build out a bento test and test some ads out there. Let's see which ones are easier to set up, which ones can get the most impressions versus will see the most click-throughs. And then you have these prebuilt ads. Once you get that up and going, you can just re-run the ads and point them to real offerings. ROB: Exciting stuff there, James. JAMES: Thanks. ROB: We've talked a bit about your journey along the way. As you reflect on the 8 years since you took the leap and started the business, what are some things you've learned along the way that you might do differently if you were starting over? Maybe some broader lessons on running the show, more than maybe individual offerings. JAMES: One of the biggest lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur – and about myself, so this may not apply to everybody or all of your listeners – but for me, I'm a fan of optimization and efficiency. I love setting up systems. I think that's why I fell in love with marketing. I fell in love with HubSpot because we can create these systems, we can create workflows. You can automate a lot of that engagement and follow-up and process. I use sequences every day. I have probably several dozen pieces of software that combine together to make my workflow easier. But here's what I found out. There is no way to love people efficiently. You cannot do it. Loving people is designed to not be efficient, or relationships are designed to not be efficient. So early on, there was a lot of friction in the business because I would hire employees and they'd stay a year or two, and I'd get frustrated when people get that millennial itch. I had somebody say, “James, I've been here two years. I learned everything I could. I think I'm going to leave and travel the world.” And that guy did really well. But today, we've held our employees a lot longer. We're invested in our employees to see them grow, painstakingly taking time out of the day to set up one-on-ones with every individual, more one-on-ones with the people closest to me in the leadership circle. Those are the things that have been very painful lessons, but such powerful lessons growing the business to where we are now, about 20 employees, multi seven-figure. But that's something I think could be its own book of lessons, per se, for loving people, caring about people, just treasuring this opportunity that I have to make an impact on their lives. ROB: Really helpful. One-on-ones are such a key connector of that. You mentioned days. Are you doing those mostly weekly, or more often or less often? You said some people are a little lighter cadence if they're not as close to you in the organization? Maybe you do more of a touch base on occasion? JAMES: One-on-ones seem like such a simple answer. If I say it, some of your listeners might think, “Of course, I'm going to do one-on-ones.” But you wind up not doing it unless they're really regimented. I recommend highly that – first of all, we run on an operating system called EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating Systems), a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. Once you start to get into peer groups, you'll hear the EOS model over and over and over again. So I highly, highly recommend looking at EOS because it gives you a framework for meetings, a framework for how you do business, how you set it up, how to look at finances, how to look at hiring, core values, etc. It makes the argument that every business runs on an operating system – some on purpose and some not. The EOS model recommends doing one-on-ones at least every other week. I would say as the visionary or the leader of the company, with my integrator, who's April and my number two, she and I meet every week and we have a one-on-one cadence there. Then with the rest of the leadership team, I meet with them at least once a month. I do two or three one-on-ones a week, and the gaps are filled with the rest of the team. Other members of the team might have rotations with me once every 6 months, which I think is fine, but they're doing one-on-ones with their direct reports at least once every other week. ROB: It's such a helpful tool. It's so good for empathy, for relationship, and coupled with process. When we do our one-on-ones, I have a cheat sheet. I take notes. I don't take the best notes on it, but even the simplest things of making sure you jot down the names of their family members and key milestones, those sorts of things – it's process, but it's process that, to your point, helps you love people well and maybe at a little bit better scale than just relying on your brain. JAMES: Totally. 15 minutes. Here's just a few of the questions we like to ask. One, we always start off with that personal touch: “Hey, how's your wife doing? How's your husband doing? How's your boyfriend/girlfriend? How are the things that we last talked about? I heard that you just bought a house. Congratulations. How's that going?” Then we dive quickly into “What's going well? What's not going well? What would you be doing differently if you were in my position? What information can I give you that you might be curious about in the company that you may not have regular visibility into?” This is a key one. I love when we both share, “What can I keep doing, start doing, and stop doing?” This is a really helpful framework. Keep doing is an opportunity to say “Hey, you're doing a great job. Love that you're doing X. Please keep doing that. I notice that you weren't doing Y. Can you start doing N? Also, I noticed this thing. Maybe you should stop doing that.” But the opportunity for the other person to say the same to me – what should I keep doing, start doing, stop doing? – opens it up. And honestly, if we'd had the opportunity to do that earlier on, I think we would've kept employees longer, they would've been happier, and I think we would've been able to see those frustrations or those pain points that there're bottling up internally and made decisions about those and tried to make some shifts around those sooner. It's pretty simple. I think employees just want to be heard. ROB: Absolutely. Much like killing a product offering, it's one of those things you will only realize that you started doing too late. We were talking a little bit before we started recording about taking your office virtual during COVID, so I'd imagine one-on-ones are an easy habit to keep going, but in terms of other habits and systems and things you had going in the name of the culture of the organization and connecting people, how has that changed and what are you doing differently now that you've embraced virtual? JAMES: What a great question. I wear this very proudly, so I'm going to take off the humble hat and say that I think we've been doing really well culturally as a remote agency. We've been practicing going remote once a month for the last 5 or 6 years just because we're very capable of it, and employees like going remote. We actually give all employees a day a week where they can go remote themselves. We were built to transition to remote fairly easily. We use Slack, and we have our virtual meeting rooms and things like that. But I'm very impressed by the way April and the team have risen to the challenge and stayed together culturally. We've always done a Monday morning huddle with the team, and that's continued, but we added a second meeting, a Wednesday morning check-in where we don't do any work talk. Or typically we don't do any work talk. We actually play a game together virtually. This has been really fun. We do online Pictionary, we've played Scattergories, Taboo, Bingo. We told scary stories. It's 30 minutes, 9:30 on Wednesday, and it's just a lot of fun. We make it the team's responsibility, so every team member, we rotate, they bring their game, and then they teach the game and we just play. That kind of culture has just kept us sane, I feel like, and it's kept this rhythm of “Oh, it's easy to keep this process going.” So that's been really helpful. And now, as the restrictions ease up a little bit, we're actually starting to do the opposite where we're trying to meet together more often and do things outside, have barbecues, bonfires, and have drinks together. We did a kayaking trip. Here in Rhode Island, we have the beautiful ocean. We're the Ocean State, so we have beautiful water activities we can do. So, keeping those things fresh has really helped our culture, and I feel like we've done a tremendous job at that. ROB: That's super solid. I think you are pulling towards what I'm seeing emerge also. “The new normal” is overused, but I think historically, many companies, including yours, and mine for that matter, have been default in the office. Not in the office is unique. We're probably moving more towards default remote and sometimes you're going to do something together. That's kind of what you're describing. There's a coworking space here that has an outdoor – they have like 50 picnic tables, and it feels nice to be near people without feeling uncomfortable being near people. I know that's kind of a weird, convoluted thing, but in our reality. I think you're really interestingly there. JAMES: Yeah, totally. There's just new things that we need to consider. Like since we're saving on office snacks, we just started to give our employees a stipend so that they can buy their own snacks or buy remote work setup that they can do. We're shifting some of the dollars that we did spend or we have been spending over to areas that make more sense. Those get-togethers or working together, sometimes we have a Zoom room open where we just aren't talking to each other; we just have it open and see each other's faces while we're working, which is really nice. Or getting together one on one to work together for half a day and just work next to each other. Not for any particular reason or particular meeting, but just to be in the same space, which is I think helpful for your psyche. ROB: Awesome. James, when people want to find you and they want to find Figmints, where should they go to find you? JAMES: Figmints.com. Fig like the fruit, mints like the candy. You can reach out to me, james@figmints.com, or on our website I think we have most handles @figmints, so Twitter.com/figmints, and Facebook. But email is pretty good, website is pretty good. We're not so big you can't get in touch with us. [laughs] ROB: Excellent. James, thank you so much. Maybe someday we'll go back to conferences and hear you speak live. Until then, thank you for joining us here virtually. JAMES: Yeah, Rob. Thank you so much for inviting me. I appreciate it. ROB: Be well. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

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Retention Through Content UX w/ Lou Cimaglia @Liberty Mutual

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 6, 2020 45:04

Recently, I had the pleasure of talking with one of my good buddies Lou Cimaglia. Lou is the Senior Content Strategist at Liberty Mutual and a recent Hubspot Inbound 2020 speaker. In this talk, we dive into how effective content strategy and a superior user experience can be a key driver in customer retention. Because at the end of the day, as Lou puts it, brand loyalty isn't earned by accident...it's the result of sustained and deliberate efforts to communicate with customers over a long period of time. This talk is fascinating and I can't wait for you all to hear it. Don't forget to visit us at marketingstrategy.com and like us on LinkedIn. Without further adieu, let's dive on in.

retention liberty mutual senior content strategist hubspot inbound

Communication, Connection, Consistency, Curation

Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 29, 2020 31:56

Rachel Wilson Thibodeaux is Founder, Brand Strategist, and Professional Speaker at SWAG Strategy Solutions a boutique consultancy that helps clients design unique brands to “better position their offers” and market them at least twice as effectively as they were in the past. Clients include women entrepreneurs, as well as service providers and experts, people Rachel says want to make a big impact and income. Building blocks of what Rachel connotes as “brand curation” include: Asking clients, “What do you most want to be known for?” Identifying the audience, even down to the one person who will most resonate with the client's offering Establishing the most effective way to connect with that individual. Rachel majored in finance and marketing at the University of Houston and spent the first 16 years of her career in financial services. In 2013, she left her “good-paying, good-benefits” six-figure job to chase her entrepreneurial marketing dream. How does someone make that kind of transition? Rachel believes that it important to communicate to your community, the groups to which you belong, what you are doing businesswise, “even if you don't yet have a product or a service out there.” She provides a number of questions that can help build the kind of engagement which can turn into future buy-in. She says that success requires disciplined consistency in doing the hum-drum activities; e.g., making a certain number of phone calls to connect with customers. In this interview, Rachel talks about when and how to reengage humor and the importance of sensitivity to what is going on in terms of the pandemic, social unrest, the fact that it is an election year, and concerns about the economy. When posting to social media, Rachel often posts questions she thinks will “bring a smile to someone's face,” help them escape for a moment what they are going through, and increase “connection.” The most important thing? Know and respect your audience. Rachel had an Ask Me Anything Live session at virtual HubSpot Inbound 2020 where she fielded audience questions about Brand Development, Positioning, and (especially) Social Media Marketing, as well as offering guidance on posting and engagement in the “new normal,” connecting with people, managing COVID impacts, and online responses to the pandemic and the changes it has brought. She also addressed social listening, paying attention to the data available online, your audience feedback (comments, likes), and engagement to identify what works and what doesn't, create better campaigns, and communicate better. Rachel can be reached on LinkedIn at Rachel W. Thibodeaux, Instagram at @rachel.vswagstrategist, and on her company website at swagstrategy.com. She has a Facebook group – Brand, Sell profit – for entrepreneurs/brand-builders/experts. She offers a virtual program for strategic pivoting called “Pivot to Profit,” with a free “sample portion” (one of the five parts) available at: bit.ly/pivot2profitnow. Check it out. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Rachel Wilson Thibodeaux, Founder, Brand Strategist and Professional Speaker at SWAG Strategy Solutions. She's based in Houston, Texas. Welcome to the podcast, Rachel. RACHEL: Thank you so much, Rob. ROB: Why don't you start off by telling us about yourself and about SWAG Strategy Solutions and what gets you going and keeps you going? RACHEL: Oh boy. That can be a dangerous question when you ask a speaker to talk about themselves. But I am in the Houston area. I'm originally from North Texas, from the Dallas/Fort Worth area. College brought me to Houston. I've been here almost ever since. Not quite. I did return home for a few years after college and then came back to Houston around 2008. Even saying that is a little scary because time has really flown by. But I spent about 16 years in corporate America, working mostly in financial services. I was a double finance and marketing major at the University of Houston, so I went in the finance route. Marketing, though, was always a passion of mine. I know “passion” sometimes is an overused word, but that word comes to mind. Throughout my corporate career, I was always still focusing on and doing things on the side that were entrepreneurial and also that allowed me to feed that hunger, if you will, in terms of the whole marketing and brand aspect. I kept getting this pull, this entrepreneur pull, when I was still working in corporate America, and more so the last 2 to 3 years. So in 2013, I left my good-paying, good-benefits-having job, as I've referred to it before, because that's how my mother referred to it as she was asking me, “Are you sure you're leaving that good-paying job?” “Yeah.” [laughs] Since then it has been quite an adventure. My business, SWAG Strategy Solutions, which is a boutique consultancy, has certainly evolved over the last 7 years or so. Now we focus primarily on brand development, and as I like to say, helping clients curate a brand. I use that word more than “build” because I think with curating something, more of a design comes into place. We want to help you design a brand. We want it to be very unique. Sometimes when you build something, it's based on instructions. It's based on a model, almost like a model home. Other homes in the neighborhood tend to be modeled after that home. So; I'd like to think that I'm helping clients curate a brand as well as better position their offers and market better – at least twice as better. We work a lot with women entrepreneurs along with service providers, experts – folks really looking to make big impact and income. ROB: Doubling your effectiveness is certainly a big difference. When we are breaking down brands from the big picture into some of the pieces and parts, what are the components or building blocks of a brand you think about when you're starting to work with a client? RACHEL: First and foremost, I usually ask prospective clients as well as clients – and this is something I've shared when speaking, in blog posts; I think it's such an important question – “What do you most want to be known for?” I emphasize the word “most” because many of us are good at more than one thing. Many of us are multifaceted, multi-passionate, multi-something. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make things more difficult in terms of really creating a brand and niching down and honing in on what you can most be effective at. That is a key question. I think it's important to really get foundational, if you will, and look at how you're most wanting to effect or impact your audience. You also want to get clear on who that audience is because it really should not be “everyone” – although I know, especially with newer entrepreneurs, and sometimes not just new, we tend to think we can help the world. We want to change the world, and we sometimes think of that literally. “I want to help everyone.” But it's important to really zero in on who is that audience, who is that group. It helps to even get it down to thinking of one person who's going to most resonate with what I have to offer, and how do I connect with that person? ROB: That focus, I'm sure having that external perspective from you is helpful in even getting to that understanding because sometimes we don't fully know ourselves. You mentioned a little bit into your origin story, and your last 2 or 3 years in corporate America, you had this longing on the entrepreneurial side. What pushed you over the edge? It sounds like you were thinking about it, but that means you were also thinking about not doing it, and at some point you overcome that tension and you make the leap. What was that process like for you? RACHEL: I had been doing entrepreneurial things almost throughout my career. Not quite throughout, but from different ventures I was involved in. For example, I did some consulting. I helped form a real estate investment group with three of my buddies. That happened when we were in our mid-twenties. We were kind of crazy kids, or somewhat kids, exploring real estate development. The last 2 or 3 years or so, things had started to change at the company where I was and even in my role as well. At the time, I was a relationship manager – which I enjoyed. Even at the time when I left, I still enjoyed it, although I didn't feel quite the same about it. The writing was just on the wall, as it often is in these situations. There had been changes in leadership; the direction of the company and our division in particular was really going in a different direction that I didn't really like. I often tell people, I was not fired, but it was one of those situations where I felt I didn't really have a choice because of some things that happened, what transpired to make me take that leap. Frankly, I had considered leaving a few months before that. I actually left my last job in August of 2013. I seriously considered leaving in May because of another situation. It wasn't the right time. I didn't feel it was the right time. I wasn't totally sure it was the right time when I left, and I tell you, Rob, my eyes were glazed over for about two weeks. I was in a state of “Huh . . . I really did that. I left.” [laughs] I left my six-figure corporate job that at one time, certainly when I started and probably even during the first year or two, I figured I would be there long term. I wasn't convinced necessarily I'd retire there, but I figured I'd be there longer than I was. It just goes to show you how things can happen. There was certainly some fear. I say all the time, everything was certainly not perfect. It wasn't close to being perfect when I actually left. My husband has been in law enforcement most of his career. He had just gotten back into law enforcement at that time, had started a new job. His benefits had not even kicked in. We had savings, but it still wasn't an ideal time. But again, I felt it was time for me. ROB: Congratulations on that. Now if there's anything concerning in the business, you've just got one person to look at, and they're in the mirror, so that's a little bit different. We were originally looking at connecting around HubSpot's Inbound conference, which is a great conference. Happens every year. Normally, past couple of years, we record it live with speakers like yourself, so we always love connecting with HubSpot speakers. You had an Ask Me Anything Live session on brand development, positioning, and social media marketing. What kind of questions did you expect coming into that, and what were some of the themes of what you did hear from the audience? RACHEL: Going in, I figured I would get questions about brands, about branding, certainly about social media. I got more questions, though, about social media, which is kind of interesting since that was the last thing mentioned. But I think it just goes to show you social media continues to be a hot topic, especially among marketers, whether online or traditional marketers. There were several questions about social media. There were a couple of questions as well about how to navigate this “new normal” we're in, how to manage what's going on with COVID, things to do online in light of the pandemic and the changes that has brought about. So yeah, there were some questions along those lines too. ROB: How do you suggest people think about marketing in – I don't even know if there's a new normal. It seems like things just continue to change, and we keep adapting, and you wonder what you can say, what you should say, what you shouldn't say, and what to start doing and what to stop doing. How are you thinking about all this, and what do you have to tell the audience here? RACHEL: One thing certainly is I don't think it's a good idea to ignore everything happening. I've seen that with some brands and marketers. Not many. Frankly, I think most are addressing what's going on – and when I say what's going on, I mean it's more than one thing because we're dealing with a number of things in this very interesting year of 2020. You've got the pandemic, obviously. You have this social unrest going on. It's an election year. There's challenges and certainly concerns about the economy. So, there's a lot going on. I think any really great marketer – and this is part of being connected with and knowing your audience – you have to speak to that. It doesn't mean that you dwell on it all the time, but in your marketing, in your messaging, I think it makes sense to address these things. I have a big sense of humor, sometimes a quirky, sarcastic sense of humor, and I'm big on incorporating humor. I think sometimes it helps, certainly. If you can put a smile on someone's face or help them escape what they may be going through, even if it's for a few minutes, a day or so, that certainly helps. So, I think in terms of posting on social media, for example – and I'm also big on questions. I love posting questions. It could be, of course, related to business and related to brands, or it could be something, again, to put a smile on people's faces. I've asked the question before to parents, “Have you had any brown liquor before noon today? I'm just curious,” because a number of parents I know are really going through it. I think that is really important, and connecting even more. Obviously, connection has become a big thing, or bigger, I would say, over the last few years. I think consumers are wanting to connect more. They're expecting more, or have been, even before this year, expecting more from brands. I think it's really important to engage. Social media is social. I think sometimes people forget about that. They think it's a one-way conversation when it's definitely not. ROB: Hmm, so you're saying that clear liquor before noon is okay? RACHEL: [laughs] Maybe. You might be able to get away with it, Rob. The brown, you've got to be careful. You've got to be careful about that brown liquor. ROB: Yeah. Even on a podcast. It's interesting – even where you went with that, the humor you used there, it's relatable and it acknowledges the moment without engaging in humor at someone's expense. It's kind of humor at our own expense. I was speaking a while back with someone who's involved in marketing at Buffalo Wild Wing, and they said with the pandemic, they basically cut – they engage in humor a lot, but they cut it all. They went transactional and they're killing it in ecommerce now. Their best day used to be the Super Bowl. Now every day is the Super Bowl for them for online ordering, which is fascinating. They really had to overdo and redo their ecommerce systems. But how do we figure out when it's okay to reengage humor, how to reengage humor, how to not do so in a tone-deaf way? RACHEL: I think what you said is key. You don't want to offend people – at least, I try not to offend people. Now, it's possible that could still happen, I suppose, but I don't try to offend people. Again, this is your audience, or typically you're speaking to your audience, so you want to respect your audience. You don't want to be offensive. Now, having said that, I think being bold is different from being offensive. What you believe in, what you stand on, I think there's nothing wrong with communicating that and standing your ground on what you believe. I think you let that be your guide. ROB: Definitely makes sense there. The Inbound crowd in particular can be a little bit more of a business-to-business marketing audience. Quite often, although you get a mix because it's a big, big conference. When it came to social media, what sorts of questions – where do people fall on the spectrum? Was this B2B marketing, “How do you even do this?” Were there questions about emerging channels or channel selection? What were people wondering along the lines of social media? RACHEL: I don't recall there being anything specifically about B2B. The questions had more to do with, to some degree, posting, engagement. That came up. I answered that question in terms of engagement because it was related to – I think that was all the same question, how to engage now, given the environment. I spoke to that in terms of engaging now, giving everything, going on, and connecting with people, and the humor and that kind of thing. There was also a question – and it threw me off a little because I have heard this term, but there's different versions of this term. A question came up about social listening. I have heard more so of social media listening, and then there's another version I'm not remembering right now that's similar to that, although there's a slight difference. So that question came up. Social listening is really about taking data, using the data available to you online. It's using feedback that you get from your audience, whether that's through comments, likes, you paying attention to the comments, the likes that you're getting, different parts of engagement, and using that. There's one thing, collecting that data, and then the other part is what you do with it. You certainly use that data certainly to your benefit. You can use that in helping you create better campaigns, communicate better, paying attention to when you are posting, what works and what doesn't. ROB: That all makes sense, especially within the context of the conference. I do hope that you will be back to share in person next year. I hope we can do that by September of next year, but I guess we will see. RACHEL: Yeah, that would be cool. ROB: Maybe we can meet after noon so that we can choose whichever color of liquor we prefer. [laughs] It's about creativity here. Rachel, when you reflect on your journey, it sounds like you have honed in on some focus areas for SWAG Strategy Solutions. What are some lessons you've learned since jumping off on your own and building and growing the business – lessons you might do differently if you were starting afresh today? RACHEL: Ooh. How much more time do we have, Rob? [laughs] ROB: [laughs] We have as much as you need. RACHEL: You absolutely learn a number of lessons. Or you should, I think, especially in 7 years or so. One lesson certainly that I've learned is how important it is to build or create an audience, a community if you will. I didn't realize how important that was when I first started. When I left my job, I was on social media, I was on a few platforms. At the time I was using LinkedIn somewhat a lot, Facebook – but Facebook completely socially – and Twitter. I am also somewhat – I like to think I'm recovering – somewhat of both an information and a political junkie. So, as you can imagine, I spend a lot of time on Twitter. But again, not as much for business purposes. When I started my business, I figured the skills I had before and that I had utilized in corporate America were transferable. And to a degree, they are. But it really makes a difference when you have a community. That can show up in different ways, whether it's an email list, whether it's a Facebook group, some other group. When you have people who really understand what you're doing in terms of business – and even if you don't yet have a product or a service out there, you're talking about it, you're getting them to buy in even before you put it out there – that turns into, often, your customers, your clients, and folks who can sing your praises and help you get more customers and clients. That is certainly one lesson. Also, consistency. Again, some things you think that you get. “Yeah, I know I need to be consistent.” But I really didn't. Not the way running a business really requires, being really committed to doing certain things – and certain things that are not necessarily sexy, certain things that are not what you jump out of bed in the morning wanting to do, whether it's blogging, whether it's making phone calls and making a certain number of phone calls, whether it's an actual phone call or a text. However, you're reaching out to people, connecting with people, pitching, these are things that really make a difference in a business and help you move it forward. Those, as some people refer to them, revenue-generating activities – that is what you most need to be consistent about. That's something else that I have learned more since starting my business. ROB: That's very consistent. I can see why HubSpot brought you in. Last year they mentioned this flywheel concept. It was a little bit forced, but basically it's a similar thing. They talked about talking to people and building a community and serving them well, and then it turns into business. But then business turns into service. You still have to service those customers well. It turns into word of mouth, it turns into marketing. They had this flywheel effect. I think a challenge many people have here is with consistency. Some people are very, very natural community builders. You watch them, and the moment they decide they're going to have a new business, they're building the community before you even know what the business is, and maybe before they do. For someone who it's not as natural for, how do you think about getting to consistency, getting to the right audience, if maybe you don't know who that audience even needs to be? RACHEL: I am really big on feedback. If that's something that doesn't come quite naturally to you, and certainly if you're not quite sure of what audience or what group you should be connecting to, look around at your own network, even if that's very small. That may be coworkers. That may be subordinates. That may be even friends and family. It could be someone in a Facebook group that you're in. Start asking them questions along the lines of what you want to do, what you're thinking of doing, or if you do have something that you're working on or maybe even you've completed, ask them questions about that product or that idea. And really pay attention to what they say. Also ask them and the people closest to you, like friends and family, how they see you. What is it that they feel comfortable and they feel pretty confident coming to you for? I think those basic questions, that can also be profound, can be underrated. Sometimes I think we also underrate or discount our friends and family, but those are the people closest to us. It's not to say that that's necessarily your target audience, but it's a starting point just to get that feedback. For folks who are not natural, I would say, or it doesn't come as natural to them for building a community, you have to find the way that works for you. It may not work as well for one person to do a podcast or to create a blog. It may work a lot better for them to build an email list, to put something out there of value that they can offer free and folks jump on it because they do find a lot of value in it, and they just communicate through email. It all depends on you. It's not just about what you're comfortable doing. I do think you should enjoy what you're doing, and specifically in terms of building community. But realize it absolutely may require you – probably no “may” – it will require at some point for you to step out of your comfort zone. So, make sure that you're balancing comfort rather than hate. You don't want to do anything you hate, but at the same time, don't rule out certain things because you're not comfortable with it, you're a little fearful or it doesn't come naturally, as you say. That doesn't mean necessarily that you should not be doing that. ROB: That's such a great distinction between the things that you hate versus doing the things you're uncomfortable with. That's a great point. The people that know you well are going to be able to give you good feedback because people you don't know, so often, will tell you that your idea sounds nice because they don't have the relationship to tell you the truth. RACHEL: Yeah. ROB: This is really, really good stuff, Rachel. Tell us, when we want to go out and find and connect with Rachel Wilson Thibodeaux and when we want to see more about SWAG Strategy Solutions, where should we go to connect with you? RACHEL: I hang out a lot on LinkedIn and Instagram. Those are probably my two favorite platforms. I kind of have a love/hate relationship with Facebook, but that's another conversation. You can find me there too. But you can find me on LinkedIn under my name, Rachel W. Thibodeaux. You can find me on Instagram @rachel.vswagstrategist. On Facebook, I do have a group for entrepreneurs, for brand builders, experts if you will – those looking to curate a brand and to do that better and market better. That's called Brand. Sell. Profit. It actually is also the title of my latest book, Brand. Sell. Profit. And then my website, of course. You can find the website at swagstrategy.com. And I'd like to offer your audience a gift, Rob, if I can. ROB: Please do. RACHEL: I've been talking a lot, as many people have, especially people in business, about pivoting and the importance of being able to pivot, especially in this environment. That has probably become a buzzword, so while I think it's really important to pivot, I think there is a way to pivot. I like to think it's better to pivot strategically. So I have a virtual program called Pivot 2 Profit, and I have a portion of that – I'm offering one of the five parts of that that you can check out. There's a video. It's absolutely free, and I talk about a couple of those ways to pivot in a strategic way. You can find that by going to – and this is a shortened link – bit.ly/pivot2profitnow. ROB: Fantastic. We'll work to get that into the show notes. I imagine you have some excellent points there. You pivot, keep one foot planted if you move the other one. If you move both feet at once, it's just dancing. There's some good stuff to find there. We'll get it in the show notes. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the talk at Inbound. I heard they had very, very large audiences for that. RACHEL: Yeah. ROB: I hope they have us back in person next year. I'd love to connect up and record live. RACHEL: Absolutely. Thank you. ROB: Have a great one, Rachel. Be well. RACHEL: You too. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Marketing Over Coffee at INBOUND 2020

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 21, 2020

This is a bonus episode, Chris is presenting at Hubspot INBOUND this week Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: LinkedIn and Trust Insights Hubspot INBOUND is September 22nd and 23rd. grab your $49 Powerhouse Pass with code LargeCoffee at www.inbound.com/register Christopher Penn of Trust Insights and John Wall 5 Applications of Artificial Intelligence […] The post Marketing Over Coffee at INBOUND 2020 appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

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#81 Teil 1/2 "So funktioniert die Hubspot Inbound-Marketing-Maschine" mit Ben Harmanus von Hubspot

Growth Hacking by Hendrik Lennarz

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2020 34:47

Hubspot hat das Inbound-Marketing quasi erfunden. Aber wie skalieren sie die Maschine? Ben Harmanus, Principle Marketing Manager EMEA bei Hubspot, im Podcast über die folgenden Themen: - Wie misst Hubspot Erfolg? - Warum Culture Codes so wichtig sind - Was sind KPIs für Awareness-Marketing? - Wie will Hubspot weiter wachsen? - Wie experimentiert Hubspot? - Wie setzt Hubspot Product-Led-Growth um? .. und viele weitere Themen, direkt für Dich zum Umsetzen! Wie im Podcast angekündigt, findest Du hier die Anmeldelinks für unsere Digitalformate: Kostenloser Gastzugang zur Growth Hacker Masterclass - Freie Termine findest Du auf der Website. https://www.hendriklennarz.com/trainingsformate/masterclass/ Digitales Bootcamp - Tickets und freie Termine findest Du auf der Website. (mit dem Gutschein "PODCAST" gibt´s sogar noch 20% Rabatt)https://www.hendriklennarz.com/trainingsformate/growth-hacking-bootcamps/ Zertifizierung zum Growth Lead 8-Wochen Programm - Tickets und freie Termine findest Du auf der Website. https://www.hendriklennarz.com/trainingsformate/growth-lead-zertifizierung/

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#82 Teil 2/2 "So funktioniert die Hubspot Inbound-Marketing-Maschine" mit Ben Harmanus von Hubspot

Growth Hacking by Hendrik Lennarz

Play Episode Listen Later May 4, 2020 28:14

kpis hubspot funktioniert termine rabatt maschine umsetzen inbound marketing themen wie zertifizierung hubspot inbound

Episode #13: Jana Eggers, Scott Kirsner and Dave Balter discuss Boston vs. Silicon Valley

The Uncovered Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2020 32:04 Transcription Available

Episode Summary: In our final episode we bring together Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics, Scott Kirsner, Boston Globe columnist and CEO of Innovation Leader, and Dave Balter, CEO of Flipside Crypto, to discuss the question on every Boston entrepreneur's mind: to build in Boston or Silicon Valley? This episode is a fun and enjoyable listen where you'll get to hear each guest's opinions and theories.Uncovered in this episode: The biggest differences between the two coasts when it comes to starting a businessScott's take on why so many people who start to build in Boston end up leaving to go out West Strategies for how to keep talented entrepreneurs in Boston The misconception that big companies aren't made in BostonWhy we should stop overthinking things in Boston and “just dance”List of resources mentioned in episode:Articles written by Scott Kirsner: https://muckrack.com/scottkirsner/articlesNara Logics website: https://naralogics.com/Flipside Crypto website: https://flipsidecrypto.com/About Jana Eggers: Jana brings over 25 years of technology and leadership experience to Nara Logics from Intuit, Lycos, American Airlines, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and startups that you've never heard of. Jana is a frequent speaker, writer, and mentor on AI and startups. She is also a marathoner (most recently completing Boston) and an Ironman.About Scott Kirsner: Scott Kirsner has written a weekly column for the Boston Globe since 2000, and before that helped the Globe launch its digital publishing division with Scott Cohen and Frank Hertz, his co-founders at Innovation Leader.Scott has also been a contributing writer for Wired Magazine, Fast Company, Variety, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, and other publications. He is the author of several books on innovation and technology, including “Inventing the Movies,” which explores the challenge of bringing new ideas to a century-old, change-resistant industry: Hollywood.Scott has presented leadership strategies to corporate leaders, technologists and entrepreneurs at Harvard Business School, the MIT R&D Conference, South by Southwest, the Consumer Electronics Show, HubSpot Inbound, Tijuana Inovadora, the Connected Health Symposium, and the NAB Futures Summit. Scott has also appeared on NBC's Today Show, NPR's Science Friday, the Discovery Channel, and WBUR's Radio Boston.About Dave Balter: Dave has been active in the cryptocurrency space for years, and has learned invaluable lessons from not buying during crypto winters and at least one wallet loss.Previously, Dave was the CEO and co-founder of Smarterer, a machine-learning skills assessment company acquired by Pluralsight in 2014. Post-acquisition, Dave was the Head of Transactions at Pluralsight, while also serving as a Board Observer.Before co-founding Smarterer in 2010, Dave founded and was CEO of BzzAgent, a social media marketing company, which was acquired by dunnhumby, a division of Tesco(PLC) in 2011. From 2011 - 2014 Dave sat on the Global Executive Team at dunnhumby, where he led all venture investments and M&A activity.Dave sits on the Board of AdHawk, is an investor and/or advisor to more than 50 startups and is Vice Chairman of Boch Center for the Performing Arts, a nonprofit steward of iconic venues, providing arts, entertainment, cultural, and educational experiences to the greater Boston community.

ceo head movies hollywood ai new york times board entrepreneurship south investing startups nbc silicon valley iron man npr southwest globe today show variety fast company harvard business school boston globe performing arts discovery channel transactions american airlines uncovered vice chairman intuit businessweek inventing consumer electronics show wired magazine eggers mit r wbur pluralsight los alamos national laboratory science friday innovation leader scott cohen lycos board observer hubspot inbound scott kirsner flipside crypto dave balter boch center uncovered podcast smarterer pjc d conference adhawk nara logics bzzagent

You Want Customer Loyalty? KNOW Your Customer!

ideas fall in love solution idea companies managing directors alita customer loyalty know your customer don't fall in love hubspot inbound

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 21, 2019 31:42

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez is Managing Director of MI Academy, which offers customized team training programs for businesses interested in “transformative growth” and increasing leads, sales, and customer loyalty. Alita talked about how she started her company . . . and then, on evaluating what she was doing (consulting), determined she was not making the difference she wanted to make (changing the way companies worked). “Don't Fall in Love with an IDEA,” she warns. “Fall in Love with the SOLUTION – and drive toward that solution. Ideas change all the time.” Yes, the solution has to be “feedback-driven.” Alita believes innovation has to connect with a customer's heart. It's all about “the heart, the mind, the wallet,” she says. Companies have to understand, in depth, who their customers are, before they can roll out an incredible, seamless digital marketing, customer experience – with no “disconnects.” MI Academy starts with a discovery process – asking its clients about 63 questions across different business units – in order to understand a company's business, skill sets, tech stacks, and customers; how it uses data to drive decisions; and how to iteratively improve processes and customer experience within that organization – and then provides customized transformational training focused on improving all of the customer touchpoints in the organization. Alita spoke at Hubspot Inbound 2019 on “The Loyalty Agenda.” She presented a 4-part loyalty program formula based on the philosophy of slowing down (to assess the company, its business, and its market) to speed up (by enabling the company to make better decisions, restructure operations, and change how it listens to and interfaces with its customers). In taking the time to understand their customers and create personalized, seamless experiences, brands pursue customer loyalty and can “carve out brand niches in tough markets." Alita is contributing a chapter on sustainable digital marketing practices to an upcoming book. She believes companies need to innovate internally in order to stay on top of customers' needs. Alita can be found on her company's website at: www.milkit.com.au. Her personal email address is: Alita@milkit.com.au

Build a Winning Sales Playbook

winning plan develop identify general managers b2b determine b2c powerpoint sales strategies storybrand donald miller sales playbook hubspot inbound

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 11, 2019 26:53

Dani Buckley is the General Manager of LeadG2, an 100% remote inbound marketing and sales enablement agency, which focuses on sales results for B2B and B2C companies that have complex, multi-channel sales processes. LeadG2 started in 2011 as sales consulting firm that needed to generate leads for its business. Its first clients were media companies that owned television and radio stations . . . and needed to get advertisers. In the past, B2B sales professionals have tended to have a lone wolf mentality . . . sales didn't “count” unless the salesperson independently discovered and chased down a lead. Dani feels it is important to change that culture, to supplement cold calling and outbound prospecting with inbound and lead gen. Dani defines sales enablement as “whatever you need to do to help your salespeople sell smarter and faster.” She spoke at Hubspot Inbound 2019 on “How to Build a Sales Play in 30 Minutes or Less.” In this Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast, she provides a brief overview of the process of developing a sales play: Develop a strategy by extracting the best knowledge and information from your leadership and your salespeople and from industry best practices and sales best practices Create a simplified process that outlines the five things salespeople need to do to identify quality prospects Identify the technologies and tools salespeople need Determine the content and resources salespeople need Plan the rollout Provide training LeadG2 builds robust customized “thick stack” sales playbooks for its clients, using PowerPoint so that sales managers can easily update the material. LeadG2 recommends that companies store their most up-to-date sales playbook versions where they are easily accessible by the sales team – where they would normally put stuff in the cloud. Dani also references Donald Miller's StoryBrand and the “hero's journey. She emphasizes that, in messaging and in content development, you/your company is not the hero . . . your customer is the hero. LeadG2's parent, the Center for Sales Strategy, is a 36-year-old sales consulting and sales leadership training company. A brand-new sister company, Up Your Culture, focuses on helping companies improve company culture and employee engagement. LeadG2 is on Twitter and Facebook. The company website is: https://leadg2.com. Dani is on Twitter @daniobuckley and LinkedIn.

HubSpot Inbound 2019 - Creating (almost) 100 Ads in 3 Days

The Daily Dubb Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 9, 2019 5:47

At HubSpot Inbound we wanted to see if it was possible to create 100 ads for the community! Dubb (https://dubb.com) Founder Ruben Dua takes us on a tour of the HubSpot Inbound 2019 conference and shares the experience of creating content that is edited in realtime. The story continues on dubb.com. The Daily Dubb is a show sponsored by Dubb (https://dubb.com) - The all-in-one video sales & marketing solution. Grow your brand and drive sales with video! Dubb lets you easily create, host, share, and track videos from your screen, webcam, phone, and studio. It's everything you need to streamline communication, build trust, and drive sales. It's integrated with Gmail, LinkedIn, Slack and more! The Daily Dubb stars Dubb founder, Ruben Dua, and filmmaker, Shannon Leonard. Visit our website: https://dubb.com/yt As a listener of this podcast, get 20% off the Dubb video platform with promo code: DAILYDUBB We have another podcast called Connection Loop, featuring tips and tricks for growing a business and long-form interviews with fascinating people in marketing and beyond: https://dubb.com/cl-podcast Chat with us on social media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dubbapp/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/dubbapp Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dubbapp Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dubb/ Medium: https://medium.com/@rubendua Here are some topics covered in this podcast: content marketing, video marketing, sales funnel optimization, vlogging, business videos, sales funnel optimization, social media marketing The story continues on https://dubb.com

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Leveraging customer intelligence for a better consumer journey, feat. Alex LePage & Ganes Kesari

IBM thinkLeaders

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 28, 2019 27:08

How can brands gather meaningful insights about customer behavior to improve decision making? Can we stitch together these insights across the customer journey? How does a brand have an authentic exchange of value with a consumer? In this episode of IBM thinkLeaders, we are joined by Alex LePage (Senior Product Marketing Director, Marketing Solutions at Neustar) and Ganes Kesari (Co-founder & Head of Analytics at Gramener). We talk to Alex and Ganes about whether a customer can have a seamless journey in an omnichannel world, the power of marketing teaming up with data science for cross-functional expertise, and how to turn a happy customer into a promoter for the brand. We also dig into the recently announced Dashboard act (regarding data monetization) and the fine line between creepy and useful with retargeting. “[I]t's very important that brands look at what do customers value and how do you maintain the trust. Customers don't like people talking about their data behind their backs. So we will have to be conscious as to what a customer knows about, how the data is being used, and maintain the trust element.”-Ganes Kesari, Co-founder & Head of Analytics at Gramener “A data scientist combined with a marketer or a social psychologist--that is the most powerful combination because they need to define what the hypothesis is and what the model is going to be deployed to help us.” -Alex LePage, Senior Product Marketing Director, Marketing Solutions at Neustar Connect with thinkLeaders and our panelists: @IBMthinkLeaders @Neustar @kesaritweets BIOS Alex LePage leads Product Marketing for Neustar. He is responsible for driving the positioning, go-to-market strategy and messaging for Neustar's full Marketing Intelligence Platform, including the MarketShare analytics suite, the Identity Data Management Platform (DMP), and the Customer Intelligence solution. Previously, Mr. LePage held leadership positions in product strategy and product marketing at Rubicon Project and Chango, marketing at Toys R Us, and strategy and client revenue roles at iCrossing/Hearst and Wunderman/Y&R. With more than 20 years of experience, he is a sought-after speaker at the intersection of marketing, data and technology. Mr. LePage received a Master of Business Administration from Yale University and a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University. Ganes Kesari is the co-founder of Gramener, an organization that helps identify insights and convert them into stories. He’s played several startup leadership roles to scale Gramener, with a demonstrated ability to conceive strategy and execute on-the-ground.In his current role as head of Analytics, he has advised 100+ enterprises 1) to build their data science roadmap, 2) to execute projects that apply advanced analytics for business value and 3) to use data stories to drive business decisions. Ganes leads Gramener innovation efforts at AI Labs by experimenting with the latest developments in advanced analytics. Ganes speaks regularly in business and technology events around the world, such as TEDx, O'Reilly Strata, O'Reilly AI Conf, Hubspot Inbound, AnacondaCON. He provides corporate training in Data science and has taught in courses run by institutes like ISB Hyderabad, IIIT, IIM, and NID.

When the Presentation “Platform” is a Stage: Speaking Your Message