Podcasts about hubspot partner

Welcome to Episode 12 of the Belkins Podcast!In this unmissable episode, Peter Caputa, CEO of Databox and the creator of HubSpot's famous partner program - joins host Michael Maximoff for an unfiltered conversation on SaaS growth, leadership, and the changing dynamics of marketing.In this value-packed episode, Peter reveals:Why traditional inbound marketing is delivering diminishing returns- and the hybrid strategies that are reshaping the playbook.How Databox helps businesses compare their performance to others using the largest live data collection in the world.The biggest mistake companies make with their data—and how to actually use it to grow.His unique leadership style as a “peacetime CEO” and why empowering teams with ownership fuels innovation and results.Seasonality secrets in ad spend- how real-time data saved budgets and maximized ROI for key industries.Stay tuned until the end for Peter's predictions on the future of marketing and how combining different strategies can give your business an edge.Whether you're a business leader, marketer, or entrepreneur, this episode is full of practical ideas and strategies you can use right now.Timecodes:0:00 - Intro: Meet Peter Caputa, CEO of Databox2:25: Peter's Approach to Content Creation and Storytelling8:30 - How Databox is Redefining Benchmarking for Businesses12:00- How Agencies Use Databox Benchmarks to Improve Performance15:05 - Using Seasonality Data to Save Ad Spend18:50 - Common Mistakes Companies Make in Their GTM22:25 - Integrating Marketing and Sales for Best Results24:10 - Insights on Full-Cycle AEs vs. SDRs28:53 - Partnerships As a Powerful Tool for Growth33:46 - Real-World Challenges in Selling Data Analytics40:53 - Lessons on Leadership and Delegation48:00 - Tactics to Overcome a High Churn Rate57:45 - Final Thoughts and This or That QuizLet's stay connected:

In this episode, Jack and Jeremy dive into a live teardown of a cold email, dissecting each element from subject lines to call-to-action strategies. They explore the best practices for crafting personalized outreach messages, offer practical tips to improve engagement, and share insights on avoiding common pitfalls in cold email marketing.   Key Topics Discussed: Subject Line Critique The Overused “Noticed” Phrase in Cold Emails Efficiency Metrics Call to Action Structure Reordering Information Data Accuracy and Custom Scraping   Thanks for tuning in! If you're ready to take your cold email game to the next level, check out our course on mastering cold email outreach at course.quickmail.io Struggling with cold outreach? salesbread.com uses personalized messages to turn prospects into qualified leads, saving you time and effort. About the hosts:  Jack Reamer founded SalesBread.com – the lead generation agency that brings B2B companies 1 lead per day by sending ultra-personalized LinkedIn messages and cold emails. Show listeners can book a free, 15-minute lead generation brainstorm session here: https://salesbread.com/contact/ Jeremy Chatelaine founded QuickMail.com – the most performant cold email platform to get replies, thanks to industry-leading features such as Deliverability AI and Advanced Stats. Start your trial today here: https://quickmail.com

Why you should listenLearn the truth behind common misconceptions about cold email and how to overcome them.Discover actionable strategies to increase your cold email open rates and responses.Gain insights from an industry expert with years of experience in cold email marketing.Are you struggling with cold emails that just don't get responses? In this episode, I sit down with Damien Elsing from CLCK Digital to bust three common myths about cold emailing that are holding you back. Damien shares his expertise on what really works in cold email campaigns, how to make your outreach more effective, and how to avoid the traps that lead to low engagement. Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting, this episode will give you actionable insights to improve your cold email game.About Damien ElsingDamien has been a HubSpot Partner for almost ten years, and runs an Australian-based sales and marketing consulting agency. Damien's first business was selling Joomla websites door-to-door to cafes and restaurants. He quickly became interested in other (less strenuous) areas of marketing and sales, in particular, copywriting and messaging. After pivoting to a freelance copywriting business, Damien eventually grew to offer agency services, including HubSpot implementation management and content marketing. In the last couple of years, Damien has also offered B2B lead generation services using the cold email skills he developed to promote his business.Resources and LinksClck.com.auDamien's LinkedIn profileApollo.ioZoominfo.comClayPrevious episode: 558 - Breaking Through the Partner Pack to Stand Out with David PriemerCheck out more episodes of The Paul Higgins ShowPaul Higgins Mentoring YouTube channelTech Consultant's RoadmapJoin our newsletterJoin the Tech CollectiveSuggested resources

In this episode of "Do This, Not That", host Jay Schwedelson interviews Jen Spencer, CEO of SmartBug Media, about the concept of the marketing "flywheel" and how to build company culture with a fully remote team. Listeners can expect to learn what a flywheel model is, why it's important for business growth, and practical tips for implementing it. The discussion also covers best practices for maintaining strong remote work culture.=================================================================Best Moments:(05:02) What is a marketing flywheel and how can it help you?(07:55) Practical example of a flywheel (15:42) Maintaining culture with a 300+ person remote team(20:08) How often do people on stage screw up?=================================================================Guest Bio:Jen Spencer is CEO of SmartBug Media, a digital marketing agency and HubSpot Elite Partner that helps businesses optimize their customer lifecycle. She has 15+ years of experience spanning education, nonprofit marketing, and SaaS companies. Under Jen's leadership, SmartBug Media has received numerous awards and recognitions.=================================================================PARTNER WITH JAY AND GURU Media Hub HERE:www.GuruMediaHub.comPartner with Jay or have Jay on YOUR podcast:www.JaySchwedelson.comJay's Agency:www.OutcomeMedia.com=================================================================MASSIVE thank you to our Sponsor, Marigold!!Marigold is a relationship marketing platform designed to help you acquire new customers and turn them into superfans with their best-in-class loyalty solutions. Don't take my word for it though, American Airlines, Honeybaked Ham, Title Boxing, and Notre Dame University are also customers!Regardless of your size, check out Marigold today to get the solution you need to grow your business!Check out this free content Jay has loved digesting, Marigold's 2024 Global Consumer Trends Index.

Bienvenidos a otro emocionante episodio de GROU: Crecimiento Digital. En el episodio de hoy, Martha Madero nos habla acerca de Hubspot.Ya seas un profesional del marketing experimentado o estés dando tus primeros pasos en el mundo digital, este episodio te proporcionará información valiosa que podrás aplicar de inmediato.No te pierdas esta conversación informativa y entretenida sobre este tema tan importante. ¡Suscríbete ahora y mantente al día con las últimas estrategias para impulsar tu crecimiento en línea!Si te gusta este episodio, no olvides dejarnos tu opinión y compartirlo con tus amigos y colegas. También puedes seguirnos en nuestras redes sociales para obtener actualizaciones y contenido adicional sobre marketing digital.Visita la página para escuchar todos los episodios anteriores: https://podcast.grou.com.mx

Do you want to stand out and grow your manufacturing business? Call Chatter Buzz at +1-321-236-2899 for marketing you can count on to build your future! Find out more at https://www.chatterbuzzmedia.com/manufacturing-marketing-agency Chatter Buzz 1218 East Robinson Street, Orlando, FL 32801, United States Website https://www.chatterbuzzmedia.com Phone +1-321-236-2899 Email prc.pressagency@gmail.com

Episode OverviewThe growth of the HubSpot ecosystem is well documented. It continues to go more upmarket. Jens and the team at Kaksio Labs are at the forefront of this growth. In the interview, Jens covers;How to build three legs to a HubSpot business - Consulting, Product, and Implementation How to build a relationship with HubSpot Pros and Cons of mining a vertical Jens's background Jens is an experienced sales professional and modern growth leader. Proven track record of growing revenues exponentially in a global tech SaaS company. Enjoy working in an open, international, dynamic environment where an entrepreneurial spirit is encouraged and valued. A strong believer in authentic leadership built on trust, honesty, and accountability.Links/Resources462 - Show NotesJens's WebsiteJens's LinkedInCloud Consultants CollectiveScaling BlueprintSendSparkJoin our newsletter Connect With PaulOn LinkedInOn FacebookOn Twitter: @PaulHiggins555On Instagram: @paulhigginsmentoringEmail: Paul@paulhigginsmentoring.com

Is being a Platinum Hubspot Partner a lasting differentiator? It wasn't for this agency. I recently sat down with Carman Pirie, co-founder of Kula Partners to unpack his journey from Platinum Hubspot Partner to a leading agency specializing in the manufacturing sector. In this episode, you'll hear the market forces that provoked them to specialize, why they chose manufacturers as their focus vertical, the details about transitioning from a generalist to a specialist agency, the biggest fear in selecting a vertical focus, how they built early momentum in the new focus vertical of manufacturing, and much more. The resources mentioned in this episode are: - Connect directly with Carman via email: carman@kulapartners.com and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pirie/ - For more business growth and vertical go-to-market tips and advice, subscribe to Corey's newsletter at https://www.coreyquinn.com/newsletter - Podcast website: https://www.coreyquinn.com/podcasts/the-vertical-go-to-market-podcast/ Join us as we discuss healthcare marketing and verticalized agencies as a whole.

Podcast guest Matt Vincent: "Matt Vincent is the CEO of DVA, joining in 2014 to modernise what was a legacy firm. DVA is now proudly, 100% in the cloud, paper-less, fully outsourced, coaching, advising on App's, growing, profitable and a team of high performers. Taking the scars and skills from transforming DVA, Matt coaches and advises other business owners and accountancy firms in strategy, leadership, outsourcing and technology. A creative at his core Matt gets fulfilment from innovating and working with others to do meaningful and purpose driven work. Matt is also a HubSpot Partner. DVA has been using HubSpot since 2017 and the wins and success the team has achieved ever since using the CRM encouraged them to actively promote HubSpot in the accounting industry. Find out more about HubSpot for Accountants in this recorded webinar https://www.resources.dva.co.nz/running-your-firm-with-hubspot-webinar At DVA we strive to achieve our core purpose - Unlocking and Realising Business Potential. This encompasses the work we do for our clients and our team. As a client of DVA we work together to understand your personal goals, business goals, challenges and problems in your business and how we can work together overcome these and build a business that delivers time, money and peace of mind. As a Team member of DVA we work together to understand what makes you tick and your career goals. We use a coaching-based leadership style to empower our team to smash their goals and succeed in their career." ____________________________________________ ►Be Our Next Podcast Guest: https://calendly.com/d/gqt-yd4-m7h ____________________________________________ GUESTS DETAILS: ____________________________________________ ►Website: https://dva.co.nz/ ►Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-vincent-3964b41a/ ___________________________________________

Melanie Bell, the founder of Strategic Piece, works towards helping B2B companies deliver exceptional revenue growth by strategizing and uniting their marketing, sales, and service verticals around a technology-driven customer experience built on the HubSpot platform. The company works on four different modes of engagement – Assess, Advise, Action, and Amplify – according to the client's requirements. Strategic Piece is a gold-tier HubSpot Partner, and for most of the clients, Melanie suggests that as the right software. She is also a believer of fiction reading helping with leadership development, and that is what prompted her to start “Leaders Who Fiction” to help people acquire and develop leadership skills through fiction reading. Listen to this episode to learn more about Melanie and her business ventures that help the business grow using various techniques. Today, you will learn about: Melanie's educational background and career Her transition to entrepreneurship Founding of Strategic Piece Services that the company offers Approaches used by the team The reason behind the start of “Leaders Who Fiction” Advice to female business owners Key Takeaways: B2B companies need strategies to boost customer experience New technology and software are key to serving customers better Working on hindrances key to fuel performance and revenue Fiction reading can help with business development Keep innovating and re-inventing to prevent burnout It is okay not to have everything figured out at once Connect with Melanie Bell https://www.strategicpiece.com/ https://www.leaderswhofiction.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanieabell/

HubSpot's integration ecosystem is so robust, some would say it's the center of gravity in the martech landscape. Why? Integrations & partnerships. HubSpot has played the long game by organically building a tightly integrated platform and tool ecosystem to deliver value for their customers and partners. “Building an ecosystem is hard,” says Scott Brinker, VP of Platform and Ecosystem at Hubspot, “you got to think bigger than just the marketplace.”Listen as Scott and Dan dive deep into the inner workings of HubSpot's partner strategies, and how those strategies have led them to create a dominant martech platform.” Main Takeaways:How good platform partners are the backbone of building a top-tier martech ecosystemWhy plug and play integration is key to business successHow HubSpot attracts and chooses their partnersDan's Top Tools:HubSpotLookerOrg Chart HubJoin us every week as we journey to the bleeding edge of the modern tech stack. You'll hear from real experts on how to nail your strategy, build a revenue machine and take your sales to the next level.

In this, The Faces of Business episode, Nicole Donnelly, Founder, President, Donnelly Marketing Group LLC, discusses how Helping Buyers Make Good Decisions not only helps the buyers improve their judgment and save their time and money but also allows the companies to educate these buyers to grow revenues by leaps and bounds.   Nicole Donnelly is a fourth-generation business owner and a certified HubSpot Partner. Nicole has been helping businesses she worked for and clients grow their brands and profitability using the right sales and marketing for over 15 years.   Check out the Blog post here: Helping Buyers Make Good Decisions   Thanks for taking the time to listen today.   Find Damon Pistulka on LinkedIn talking about life & building businesses you can sell or succeed.    On Twitter as @dpistulka with inspiration and sharing thoughts.    Find out more about Damon when he's not working.  @damonpistulka on Instagram, or Damon Pistulka on Facebook.      More information on building businesses you can sell or succeed and the Exit Your Way method on our website   View our blog page for this episode here.   Email us for more information info@exityourway.com

Welcome to the Woman in Tech Series from the Global Tech Leaders Podcast. Today we are speaking to Jen Spencer CEO at SmartBug Media, HubSpot Partner of The Year. SmartBug Media is a globally award-winning intelligent inbound marketing agency that helps businesses grow revenue by generating leads, engaging accounts and building brand loyalty through inbound marketing, sales enablement, revenue operations, web development, digital strategy, marketing automation, and public relations. We kick off by asking Jen to share her career journey and what has led her to where she is today. “I wanted to be in charge.” Volunteering time. Teacher. Public Relations and Digital Marketing. Tech start-up. Joined as VP of Sales. We then ask Jen what drew her to sales and what makes a rockstar salesperson. Marketing ROI. Buying persona. Extension of marketing. Next, we ask Jen what is she seeing out there with marketing budgets. Pressure. Not a lot of room for experimentation. Technology stacks. The promise that some technology makes. Doing more for less. Audiences are changing. Mapping the journey. Then we ask Jen how they gain new clients at SmartBug Media. “We drink our own champagne.” Intelligent inbound marketing. “We wanna be our own best case study.” 5M to 500M Klaviyo Partner. HubSpot. Salesforce. We ask Jen about being a leading woman in tech and what is her perspective on diversity. Girls in Tech. Volunteers. Woman led. Infinity Groups. Lady Bugs. Woman in Leadership. Then we ask Jen how intentional they are in their process of hiring. How and where. Who you have now is who you are attracting. Removing barriers. Global team. Lastly, we ask Jen what tools or productivity hacks can't she live without. Executive Assistant. Organised email system. Calendar with colour coding. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/gloabl-tech-leaders/message

Peter Caputa tells the story of the agency partner program at HubSpot, how it started, and how the program can be replicated to build scalable success.

Peter Caputa tells the story of the agency partner program at HubSpot, how it started, and how the program can be replicated to build scalable success.

Cloud and SaaS companies have worked with partner models for a long time. What is the best one? Rod Moynihan, director of BAC Partners and an elite HubSpot partner, is here to share his experience with this and some of the biggest brands in the world. In this episode, you will learn why the HubSpot partner model is winning over other cloud partner models, if the sales roles even exist in the future and if partners need to be there for sales. And finally, why services will improve and how you can benefit from it.    Links 396 - Show Notes Rod's LinkedIn Profile BAC Partners Cloud Consultants Collective   Connect With Paul  On LinkedIn On Facebook On Twitter: @PaulHiggins555 On Instagram: @paulhigginsmentoring Email: Paul@paulhigginsmentoring.com   Thank You for Tuning In!

This episode of the Passage to Profit Show features Darrel Evans from Yokel Local and The MindShift Podcast, Ron Richard co-founder of BLD Medical Consulting and Beth Herriman, inventor of the dooloop. Darrell Evans is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and co-founder of Yokel Local Internet Marketing, an Inbound Marketing Agency and Hubspot Partner that helps companies generate revenue, reduce sales cycles, and increase customer lifetime value using inbound marketing. He and his team have helped entrepreneurs and companies to generate over $300M in revenue online since 2011. He’s personally started and/or operated 6 businesses since the age of 20). He’s also the host of The MindShift Podcast and is the founder of the MindShift Business Academy (MBA). His podcast features conversations with game-changing entrepreneurs and business leaders who share real stories and real strategies that will help listeners create real results. As an investor and business growth advisor, Darrell helps clients unlock hidden exponential sales and/or profits, develop systems and processes to scale, remove themselves from the daily operation, or prepare to exit. When he appears on podcasts, he loves sharing the lessons, mistakes, and breakthrough frameworks that have helped him and hundreds of other businesses market profitably, grow sales predictably and build superstar teams. His goal is to help your entrepreneurial audience grab at least one “MindShift” that could catapult them to their next level of success. Read more at: https://www.yokellocal.com and https://www.themindshiftpodcast.com/ Visit the Entrepreneur Presenters for March 20, 2022 at their Websites: Ron Richard is a medical device inventor, the Co-Founder of BLD Medical Consulting and is a Certified Medical Consultant focusing on respiratory, pulmonary and sleep medicine. He has specialized in the medical device, medical diagnostic, and life science market segments with over 25 years. His involvement in owning and operating home care companies, sleep laboratories, manufacturers, and distribution businesses became instrumental in developing and designing several products used in the treatment and diagnosis of chronic health care conditions. Ron is also the author of “Someday is TODAY!: Get your ideas out of your coffee cup and on the market.” His company BLD Medical Consulting offers one-stop medical consulting services including marketing, sales, business development, FDA reviews and submissions, patent and trademark filings, product development and pipelines, reimbursement and coding for CPT, etc. Read more at: https://www.inventingstartstoday.com/ Beth Herriman is the inventor of the dooloop® leash accessory, which allows you to hold multiple bags of dog poop with hands free convenience. No juggling, it's the easiest holder to use. Made in Maine of non-toxic, bio-degradable plastic. Love your walk and leave no trace. When Beth rescued two skittish basset hounds, Bella and Angie, she found out just how quickly a simple walk could turn into a frenzy of tangled leashes and multiple bags of doo. So, she took matters into my own paws and created a hands-free waste bag holder called the dooloop. dooloops are made with flexible, recycled, non-toxic, formerly medical grade plastic. Both the dooloop and its packaging are 100% recyclable and assembled by workers paid a living wage. It comes in seven modern colors to coordinate with any outfit. Read more at: https://thedooloop.com/ Visit

This episode of the Passage to Profit Show features Darrel Evans from Yokel Local and The MindShift Podcast, Ron Richard co-founder of BLD Medical Consulting and Beth Herriman, inventor of the dooloop. Darrell Evans is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and co-founder of Yokel Local Internet Marketing, an Inbound Marketing Agency and Hubspot Partner that helps companies generate revenue, reduce sales cycles, and increase customer lifetime value using inbound marketing. He and his team have helped entrepreneurs and companies to generate over $300M in revenue online since 2011. He’s personally started and/or operated 6 businesses since the age of 20). He’s also the host of The MindShift Podcast and is the founder of the MindShift Business Academy (MBA). His podcast features conversations with game-changing entrepreneurs and business leaders who share real stories and real strategies that will help listeners create real results. As an investor and business growth advisor, Darrell helps clients unlock hidden exponential sales and/or profits, develop systems and processes to scale, remove themselves from the daily operation, or prepare to exit. When he appears on podcasts, he loves sharing the lessons, mistakes, and breakthrough frameworks that have helped him and hundreds of other businesses market profitably, grow sales predictably and build superstar teams. His goal is to help your entrepreneurial audience grab at least one “MindShift” that could catapult them to their next level of success. Read more at: https://www.yokellocal.com and https://www.themindshiftpodcast.com/ Visit the Entrepreneur Presenters for March 20, 2022 at their Websites: Ron Richard is a medical device inventor, the Co-Founder of BLD Medical Consulting and is a Certified Medical Consultant focusing on respiratory, pulmonary and sleep medicine. He has specialized in the medical device, medical diagnostic, and life science market segments with over 25 years. His involvement in owning and operating home care companies, sleep laboratories, manufacturers, and distribution businesses became instrumental in developing and designing several products used in the treatment and diagnosis of chronic health care conditions. Ron is also the author of “Someday is TODAY!: Get your ideas out of your coffee cup and on the market.” His company BLD Medical Consulting offers one-stop medical consulting services including marketing, sales, business development, FDA reviews and submissions, patent and trademark filings, product development and pipelines, reimbursement and coding for CPT, etc. Read more at: https://www.inventingstartstoday.com/ Beth Herriman is the inventor of the dooloop® leash accessory, which allows you to hold multiple bags of dog poop with hands free convenience. No juggling, it's the easiest holder to use. Made in Maine of non-toxic, bio-degradable plastic. Love your walk and leave no trace. When Beth rescued two skittish basset hounds, Bella and Angie, she found out just how quickly a simple walk could turn into a frenzy of tangled leashes and multiple bags of doo. So, she took matters into my own paws and created a hands-free waste bag holder called the dooloop. dooloops are made with flexible, recycled, non-toxic, formerly medical grade plastic. Both the dooloop and its packaging are 100% recyclable and assembled by workers paid a living wage. It comes in seven modern colors to coordinate with any outfit. Read more at: https://thedooloop.com/ Visit

Rikki Lear is the Director of Digital 22, an Elite HubSpot inbound marketing agency. Digital 22 has rolled out HubSpot and inbound marketing with 73 companies to date, helping them reach their goals sooner without the pitfalls. In his role, Rikki oversees the heads of service departments like finance, marketing, and HR.Previously, Rikki was on the Partner Advisory Council for HubSpot and worked in digital marketing for Workwear Express and Optimise Marketing. He holds several certifications from HubSpot, including HubSpot Trainer, Inbound Sales, Growth-Driven Design, and more.In this episode…Are you trying to optimize HubSpot's features for your agency, but keep getting stuck? Wouldn't it be nice if there was a team of experts ready to help?Digital 22 has the inbound marketing expertise you need. The agency's team members specialize in HubSpot features and understand all the best practices for implementing them into your business. With their help, one client had an additional 167 blog views, a 140% increase in offline revenue, and a 174% increase in online revenue. So, how did Digital 22 become the powerhouse agency they are today?In this episode of Agency Journey, Gray MacKenzie is joined by Rikki Lear, the Director of Digital 22, to discuss how he created the largest 100% HubSpot agency in the UK. Rikki talks about Digital 22's bold jump from SEO and PPC agency to HubSpot partner, the agency's decision to start accepting project-based clients, and how his team stays up-to-date with HubSpot features.

During this episode, we talk with Travis Scott, marketing expert and author of Think Differently.  The discussion includes why recruitment marketing is important for companies today and Travis' advice to new authors. Connect with Travis:https://www.linkedin.com/in/travisscott24/https://www.rainierdigital.com/Buy Think Differently:Click HereBio:Travis L. Scott is the author of "Think Differently: How Recruitment Marketing Gets You Noticed Over the Noise."He is the CEO and Principal Consultant at RainierDigital, a HubSpot Partner and inbound marketing consulting firm in the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene area.He regularly contributes to his career-focused blog and podcast called "The Winding Road."He has worked for small companies, startups, and Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft and Comcast.Travis has an MBA in marketing from the University of Colorado (Denver) and a BS in Public Affairs from Indiana University (Bloomington). He lives in Spokane, WA with his wife and two children.You listen and subscribe to his podcast, "The Winding Road" and follow him on Twitter at @509Marketer.Support the show

Pourquoi, quand et comment choisir un HubSpot Partner avec qui travailler. T'as déjà pensé à travailler avec un partenaire HubSpot ? Les partenaires peuvent être le raccourci dont vous avez besoin pour apporter les services HubSpot directement dans votre entreprise. Travailler avec une agence partenaire HubSpot aide les entreprises à bénéficier d'excellents services HubSpot et, au final, à tirer le meilleur parti de votre investissement. Mais, comment trouver le meilleur partenaire HubSpot pour votre entreprise ? Vous savez ce que HubSpot vous réserve, vous savez que HubSpot est quelque chose que vous souhaitez explorer, mais par où commencer ? Dans l'épisode d'aujourd'hui, Justine Gaignard-Parent de Guépard Communications, Louis Chaussé d'Auxilio et Fab Calando vous offrent des conseils impartiaux. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/fabcalando/message

Rose's Tips for Sales Reps and Their Managers/CROs: Don't think like a sales team. Think like a REVENUE team and align all Marketing, Sales, Customer success, as they are all part of the revenue generation and should have the same goal! Try to do fewer operational tasks and keep yourself focused on customer-facing time. Revenue Operations should handle the operational tasks. Try to keep your CRM updated as much as possible. Based on the data and processes you have built, you'll take the most crucial decisions which will impact your revenues. Curious to hear more? Listen to this episode featuring Rose Penhasi.-----------Rose Penhasi is an experienced sales operations and the founder & CEO of ScaleOps - a Sales Operations company & a HubSpot Partner. Passionate about working with startups and high-tech companies, Rose tackles a variety of challenges to build sales funnel for growth and scale. Her career began in sales operations, processes, and strategy. She views sales operations as part of a machine that includes the sales, marketing, customer success, finance, legal, and management teams and relies on CRM systems, metrics, and advanced business intelligence.You can connect with Rose on LinkedIn, and learn about her company at ScaleOps.co-----About SalesLiftJoin our community for more sales tips: www.saleslift.co.ilAlso, we'd love to hear your feedback, feel free to connect with us on LinkedinIlan Ifergan & Alex ShandrovskyQuestions? Email us --> ilan@saleslift.co.il

Quota Crusher Podcast host, Mary Grothe decided to use this platform today for something way bigger than she ever thought she could be a part of. You've seen her in this video, that's been circulating the internet about CrossPurpose. Quotas don't just have to be assigned to for-profit companies and salespeople getting to win their crystals and awards. Non-Profits have quotas, too. And they have goals. Turns out their’s are typically a little bit more meaningful. Today, we welcome two of the amazing people of CrossPurpose, Jason Janz (CEO) and Darin Valdez (graduate) to the show. Jason co-founded CrossPurpose, influenced greatly by spending his childhood and adolescence in poverty. His passion for social entrepreneurship is satisfied through his role as CEO where he builds their staff team, sets the organizational culture, and raises funds. Listen in and be inspired to open the gateway to a new perspective. Donate: https://www.classy.org/campaign/house-of-revenue/c325544 Connect with Us!Mary GrotheJason JanzCrossPurpose

In this episode, we are joined by Jean Ginzburg, Founder and CEO of Ginball Digital Marketing. Digital Marketing has evolved over the last decades so it is important to keep up with the changing trends. The question is: Are you leveraging these social media channels to increase brand awareness and find new customers?.The importance of social media to an organization is more critical than it's ever been because social media is now proven to be the main communication platform. When your brand is out in the public eye, you don't want to waste the opportunity to attract new people, retain people to your brand, increase online presence, and create an emotional connection. You must have experienced social media managers who understand the way people think, act and behave. Connect with Us!Mary GrotheJean Ginzburg

On this episode of 'Inbound & Down,' host Jon Sasala chats with fellow HubSpot Partner and CEO of SmartAcre, David Snyder, about utilizing video throughout your company processes. Read the transcript here. -- Do you have questions about video production? Send them to inbound@moreycreative.com. Show Notes: NYCHUG Vidyard SmartAcre Connect: Facebook Twitter Instagram LinkedIn YouTube Blog See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jay Owen, Founder and CEO at Design Extensions, started building basic websites at age 17. He worked for a number of years as a “solopreneur,” hiring contractors as needed, and, as a company, made as much as six figures. When the economy collapsed in 2008, Jay's business was still doing well. He looked around. People were losing jobs. Things were in crisis. Idea? He'd create a full-time job for somebody. His StoryBrand Certified Agency and HubSpot Goal Partner has been in business and growing for over 20 years. Today, Design Extensions employs about 20 people, a great size because Jay has been able to create scalable systems that don't break with the absence of one person. In the past 5 years, following Mike Michalowicz's book, Clockwork, the premise of which is that there should be no one person in which the company is dependent, Jay has “replaced himself” at every level. The company can now survive, even if Jay is gone for as long as 30 days. Jay says, “A lot of business owners find marketing very confusing and expensive,” and it often does not work. He explains that the agency's job is not to build websites, put pixels on a screen, or write good content for clients. Applying Design Extensions' proven growth strategies to clients' businesses helps them grow – by clarifying their messages and developing and executing effective plans, the agency enables clients to gain attention and acquire customers. The agency plans to add a consultancy arm to provide coaching and strategy direction, to make sure businesses have clear growth plans for both marketing and business fundamentals.  In this interview, Jay recommends a number of books that have been pivotal for his agency. The agency's messaging is built around Donald Miler's “StoryBrand,” as described in his book, Building a StoryBrand. Jay says that most people talk about themselves too much when they should talk about the customer's problem and how the company's solution can help the customer win. The customer needs to be the hero of the story. When Design Extensions changed the message on its homepage  to align with StoryBrand concepts, incoming leads doubled. Telling the one thing that makes a company “special” is rarely all that special. Three unique things can become very special.  Kim Scott's Radical Candor inspired Jay to have the courage to “be exceptionally clear with where improvement needs to happen,” as long as that correction was paired with caring immensely for the individual. Jay believes it is his “responsibility to create a space where people can fail without failing catastrophically.” Little failures will make people stronger. Gino Wickman's Traction provided the framework for the processes, procedures, and systems needed to make his business scalable and long-lasting. His final hiring interview, from Dave Ramsey's EntreLeadership, involves Jay and his wife taking the prospect and spouse to dinner. Jay's book, Building a Business that Lasts (Without Sacrificing Family) is currently available on his website, jayowenlive.com, for the cost of shipping and handling. He has a podcast of the same title available on that website and he is on “all the social media.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Jay Owen, Founder and CEO at Design Extensions based in St. Augustine, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Jay. JAY: Thanks for having me, Rob. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you tell us about Design Extensions and what superpower you all bring to the marketing agency world? JAY: Absolutely. I find that a lot of business owners end up in a situation where marketing is very confusing and expensive. They're not going to waste a lot of time and marketing on money that doesn't work, so what we do is help them clarify their message and then put together the right plan and then execute that plan so they can get attention and acquire customers. We've been doing that for the past 21 years, and we've grown every single year. We love taking those same business growth strategies we've used for ourselves and applying those to other businesses to help them grow. That's our focus. ROB: You've kept the pitch pretty tight. I think that speaks to what you might be able to do for someone else. And 20 years is a while to keep the same business operating, and particularly in the marketing world, where things keep on moving. What are some of the constants that have been true throughout the life o the company, and what are some of the changes you've seen that you've been able to incorporate into your own story? JAY: Gosh, so much has changed over time. When I started this thing, first, I was only 17, so I had no idea what I was doing. I was just building basic websites at the time. If that's all we still did today, we would probably be in pretty big trouble as far as the company goes. Plus, that first year I only made about $5,000 in total revenue, and that wouldn't work these days. [laughs] A lot has changed. This is probably one of the most dynamic industries that exists with regards to the speed of change. When I started this business, AltaVista was one of the leading search engines. Yahoo was the king of the internet. AOL was a monster player still. Now the landscape is totally different. There were no iPhones back then. There were no mobile sites. You couldn't have an application on the web. The idea of having a Software-as-a-Service business online was not a thing. All of that has changed over time, and we've just had to adapt with it. Ultimately, it's rooted in what our mission is. This is what I tell our team all the time. Our job is not to build websites for people. Our job is not to put pixels on the screen. Our job is not even to write good words for them. Our job is to help other people grow their business. Now, that often looks like some of the things that we do, like help people clarify their message so they can have a clean, clear message that actually gets attention. It looks like building websites. It looks like running marketing campaigns. It looks like developing applications. But the root of it all is, are we helping people grow their business, yes or no? If the answer is no, that's not a service we should offer anymore. That's really been the guiding light, that clarity of mission over time. But gosh, I've learned a lot along the way. ROB: Absolutely. Is there maybe a service that you did stop offering with that degree of clarity where you came to a moment and said, “We shouldn't do that anymore”? Is there an example we could look at? JAY: It's funny because there's one specific one that just happened recently. We'd not been offering this service for a while, but my office admin was going through some expenses and cleaning out some company stuff and said, “Hey, do we need this ‘print@designextensions.com' email address anymore?” We're not really doing print work anymore. We used to do a lot of print work back in the day, and print is still needed sometimes; I'm not one of these digital marketing guys that believes all of traditional marketing of print and billboards and radio and TV are useless. They're not useless. They have a place. They're often overpriced, but that's a different situation. But we don't do that at all anymore. We don't print materials for clients; we'll send them out if they need to be. So that's a service that we ended up cutting. It wasn't in the best interest of us or our clients and it doesn't exist anymore for us. ROB: Even though in a moment, it might be the most reliable time to reach somebody with some direct mail. JAY: Yeah, I'm not opposed to direct mail at all. There's plenty of opportunities for these kind of things, like I said. It just didn't align correctly with our vision as a service. But with that said, we might help somebody craft the message that's going to go on their direct mail. For example, one of the biggest problems most people have is they talk about themselves too much. Really what they should do is talk about the problem that their customer is encountering and how their solution is going to help them solve that problem and help the customer win the day. We often want to position ourselves as the hero of the story, and really the customer needs to be the hero of the story. So even with something like direct mail, just changing some of the words that you use on those postcards or flyers or brochures can have a massive impact on the outcome. That's where our focus is more on versus actually producing the deliverable in that case. ROB: You mentioned that “hero of the story” language and framework. That's definitely become more prominent. It's strange, because it's the most timeless of stories, but it's become much more prominent recently. Have you seen an evolution in understanding of how to build a good story over the life of the business? JAY: Yeah. I've always said that everybody's selling something; it's just a matter of what. Our job is to understand that and help tell the story to basically get the customer to buy. But over time, one of the things that's been hugely helpful for us is a framework called StoryBrand by a guy named Donald Miller. He wrote a book called Building a StoryBrand, and we use that framework in our messaging now. It's stuff that we essentially already knew, and they're not totally new ideas. It's just a matter of packaging it together in a way that's so clear that it really, really works. We started using this framework for ourselves, and just by changing our messaging on our homepage, we doubled our incoming leads. When we found that out for ourselves, we thought, “Hold on, this works really well. We should do this for everybody.” So now we're actually a StoryBrand Certified Agency, and that's one of the power cards in our deck, if you will, of things that are really helpful when we're helping a company grow. ROB: It's a big name behind that. I think sometimes when agencies look at that sort of program, they worry that if they affiliate with that instead of maybe cultivating their own secret sauce, they're going to become a commodity. How have you looked at using the StoryBrand to elevate rather than reduce value of what you do? JAY: Great question. I think I have had those same concerns over time, and there certainly are pieces of the puzzle that we go, “Hey, this is how we do it that's exclusive to us.” But I've been in business long enough to know that there's only so many ways that a wheel's going to go around, and sometimes you just need a clear plan on how to get that done. I think a lot of companies, regardless of whether they're a marketing agency or any other type of business, are looking for that one thing that differentiates them. I think that's a mistake because I think it's very rare that one thing differentiates a company. What I do believe is that if you take three unique things and put them together, it becomes very special. For us, for example, three of our uniques would be something like we're a StoryBrand Certified Agency, we're a HubSpot Goal Partner, and we've been in business and grown for over 20 years in a row. If you combine those three things together, there's only about three or four agencies in the entire country that fit into that model. That's where there starts to become a uniqueness. And just because we're tied onto the HubSpot bucket for one thing or tied onto the StoryBrand framework for this thing, I don't think that makes us a commodity at all. I think that it's a combination of knowing how to use those things across multiple areas that actually gives us a lot of strength, and we can take strength from multiple other experts in order to make that happen. ROB: I've heard that referred to sometimes as talent stacking. To be able to take that large Venn diagram with big circles – there's even a decent number of agencies that have been around for 20 years; not a ton, but some – but some of them are still trying to sell you on 15-year-old SEO tactics, and that might not be such a good idea. HubSpot also gives you potentially the differentiation of some of the different levels. Is that something you're conscious of as you're building the business? You're not going to drive a customer to something that's not helpful to them, but some eyes on when you're ready to level up the HubSpot to show that you have been even more successful than some people with HubSpot? JAY: Yeah. The other thing too, though, is I will drop either one of those things if I don't think they're the best for our customers anymore. HubSpot, for example, we were a HubSpot Partner years and years ago, and it just wasn't the right fit for our client base at the time. We ended up dropping it and using other tools that we piecemealed together. Now we've come back to it, and HubSpot's changed a lot over the years too. Now they have a great free entry level product, so we can put lower end clients on it that might not be ready for a very expensive marketing suite where they're paying $1,000+ a month just for their software, but they can enter on the free level and it works really well. Ultimately, for me, we're going to use whatever tools or services we think are the best fit for the client. I always tell my team, I couldn't care less how we did it before; all I care about is what the best way is to do it. We're going to develop what we believe is the best practice across all these different disciplines, and we're going to keep doing it that way until we find a better way. And as soon as we find a better way, we're going to change it. That's how I operate. If anything, I have to temper that a little bit because I am very comfortable with change, and that can be disruptive for a team if you don't give them some stability over time. ROB: It's that balance of both change, but also there's probably an inversion point that you've had to go through in the life of the business. There's one point where in order to grow things beyond yourself, you have to define a process and have somebody follow it. And then there's a limit where you now have people who understand these tools better than you and have to be able to come to you and come to the organization and recommend change and a better way to do that. How do you think about getting that expert feedback from your team back into the agency, now that you're a couple of steps up in scale? JAY: I like how Andy Stanley puts it. He says as organizational authority increases, individual competencies decrease. I think you could also say as an organization's size grows, even if you were the one who did all the things at the beginning, which I was, at some point you're no longer the best anymore. It's funny because it's an interesting transition where – I used to always sell clients back in the day that they got to deal with me the entire time. That was the pitch. The pitch was, “Hey, the great news is you don't have to deal with a sales rep who's going to hand you to an account manager who's going to hand you to a team who's going to do all these things. You can deal with me from beginning to end.” That was a true advantage at the time, in the same manner that now it's a true advantage that you don't get to work with me anymore. [laughs] Because my best and highest gifts are in overarching strategy; they're not in building a website for you. And the proof is in the pudding because the websites we produce today are a thousand times better than anything we produced 5 or 10 or 15 years ago, and I have nothing to do with them anymore. I think that's the big challenge for a lot of entrepreneurs, especially agency owners, I find, because many agency owners started as a professional in the craft. They were the ones who put the pixels on the screen. They were the ones who wrote the words. At some point you have to transition from being the marketer to being a business builder, and those are different things.  ROB: You indeed mentioned that you started as an individual contributor building websites, and then it morphed and evolved. At what point did you realize that maybe this was going to be a company that could employ some other people and was going to be a long-term thing instead of – I think we start off building websites sometimes – it's a thing you can do. When you're 17, you're like, “I'm going to do this for the next 20 years.” JAY: Right. For me, years ago – gosh, I guess I was probably 21 – I'd just gotten married. I got married pretty young. The company I think at that point was making about $25,000 a year. I was waiting tables on the side and also going to school, and my wife was doing the same. I didn't think I could make it work. I didn't think it was going to be a full-time business. I thought it was really a hobby to some extent, just based on the dollars I was able to bring in. I went to work for my uncle in that season because he ran a successful insurance agency. I thought he would fade out, I would fade in, and why not? It was kind of a silver spoon. It seemed like a good idea. He's got a black Mercedes and a house in the mountains and a house towards the beach. “I would like to have that,” so my 21-year-old self said. But I worked for him for 6 months and hated the insurance industry. One day I came home, and I knew I'd married the right woman when I came home, I was kind of upset, and I said, “Babe, I could do this, and I probably could make a lot of money at it, but I think I'm going to hate it my whole life” and she said, “So quit and do what you love.” I remember that season going, “I wonder if I'll ever have enough work to keep myself busy a whole week.” But what I didn't understand at that time was the difference between owning a business and owning a job. What I really owned at the time was a job, not a business. I didn't pay myself very well and I didn't have very good hours, and I had the opposite of what most people want when they start a business, which is time, money, and freedom. I had none of those things. It took time for me to finally get that working as a solopreneur, if you will. I used a lot of contractors eventually and had my own thing. It was working pretty well. I got up to a point where I was making six figures as a company and feeling pretty comfortable, but then the economy collapsed in 2008. I'd used a lot of contactors but never had a full-time employee. I looked around, and people were losing their jobs everywhere and things were in crisis. My business was actually doing pretty good, because it turns out people need marketing in downturns because they need to get attention and acquire customers. I thought, “I think I can make a job for somebody. I think I could create a full-time position and pay somebody as a W-2 employee.” That was a big change for me at that point over using contractors. So, I did. I created a job. I did a really bad job at knowing how to hire or fire or do anything else, but I learned along the way. And now we have a team of about 20, and it's a great size because – I always said I never wanted to be more than 10 people, but I realized at some point a couple of things. In order for me to create scalable systems that didn't break when one person was absent, I had to be a certain size to pull that off, and I also had to be a certain size so that when one person went on vacation, I didn't get two jobs for the week. There were years where I dreaded the summer because I'd have one person go on vacation and I'm like, “Great, now I have two jobs this week” – which is fine; I'm not scared of the work, but it gets exhausting after a while. Now it's very different because we've worked really hard the last 5 years to make sure there's no one person the company is dependent on, including me. We proof tested that about a month or so ago. I took a 30-day RV trip with my family and didn't work the whole time. That's a big barrier of success for me, even more so than anything money can provide. Once you lose money, you can always go get more of it, but once you lose time, you can't get any more. Especially with my kids growing up fast, that was a big deal for me. That's kind of the story of growing it over time. ROB: When's the next trip? JAY: Next year. I plan to take the same amount of time off pretty much every year. I don't know if we'll do an RV trip every year, but I think it's healthy for the business for me to take that amount of time off. The idea actually came originally from a book called Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz. Same guy that wrote Profit First. It's called Clockwork, and he basically says an owner or a founder needs to be able to leave for 30 days and the company keep functioning, because typically most companies go through a full cycle of business in 30 days. It's the only way that you know that you've actually replaced yourself at every level. The company becomes more valuable, number one, but it also protects the team as well, because what happens if I walk out and get hit by a bus? Does the company collapse in 2 weeks because there's no figurehead anymore? If so, I didn't do a very good job of building a business that lasts for them, and ultimately for my family as well. So that's how I think about it. ROB: Excellent. What was the timeline from when you decided to take that trip and maybe when you started telling people, and then when you actually took it? What was that timespan? JAY: I planned the idea of it before the pandemic, first of all. [laughs] Last year I read this book Clockwork, and over time I had been working my way up to being able to take more time off. First of all, I love the work that I do. I don't need to get away from it. But I do. I say I don't need to – a lot of entrepreneurs are like that. We say we love the work that we do. I love to work all the time. That's great, but our brains actually do need physical rest. That's why we often have these bursts of ideas in the shower or while driving or right before we fall asleep or right after we wake up. There's real science behind this stuff. Our brains are able to come up with things that they wouldn't otherwise come up with when we give them the space to do it. So last year I read this book Clockwork and I thought, “All right, I'm doing that. I've done 2 weeks, so now I'm going to take a full month and see how that works.” My plan was to do that around this time of year this year. I actually ended up taking it earlier because of the pandemic, believe it or not. We sold our house right at the beginning of the pandemic; we have a new one that we're building. So, we had about 3 months where we had nowhere to live and I thought, “This is the time. I'm just going to do it now.” I'd like to say there was some kind of grand plan. I had told the team that was my intention this year and I needed them to be thinking about that, because every time I leave, one of the questions – even if it's just for a week – I always tell the team, “If there's anything you get to where you go, ‘We need to wait till Jay gets back before we can do X, Y, or Z or before we can decide this or figure it out or whatever else,' that's a problem. Whatever that is, write that thing down, and then we need to fix that so that it's no longer dependent on me.” I think that mentality has been a huge driver for our growth. What happens if I'm not here? How do we grow the company? It gives everybody else the opportunity both for success and failure, and that's one of the big mistakes I think a lot of leaders make: they don't want their team to fail. But when you think back, how many things did each of us learn from failure? The answer is a lot. I believe it's actually my responsibility to create space where people can fail without failing catastrophically. I don't want people destroying the company, obviously, but some little failures here or there are good for everybody. ROB: That's such a good lesson there. When you talk about mistakes or maybe things you'd do differently or things you've learned from, what are some other things you've learned along the journey of building Design Extensions that you might do differently if you were starting it up today? JAY: Two big things come to mind. The first is however much time you think you need to hire the right person, you probably should quadruple it because it's so important to get the right people in the right seats. When we rush to hire people because we're in some kind of super busy mode or whatever it is and we think we need to fill a seat, I almost always mess that up. Patience in hiring has been a hard one for me because I'm a very fast mover. I'm like, “All right, let's go. You seem like you could figure that out. Let's make it happen.” So I'm very patient in hiring. The other thing for me personally – this is more of a personal weakness – is being willing to give direct and candid feedback early on. Some people don't have a problem with this at all, but I do. Ultimately I've realized that it's because I want people to like me. I want to just be one of the team. I want to be everybody's friend. I want that so bad that at times, I'm willing to not be clear enough when there's problems, and that is a massive mistake. It is not in anybody's best interest. So, I've had to really work hard at that. A book that really helped me with that was Radical Candor by Kim Scott. She talks about this idea that you can care immensely for someone and be exceptionally clear with where improvement needs to happen. Those things are not counterintuitive. But some people fall off one side of the cliff or the other. They're either exceptionally clear, but they don't seem to care about the people at all – and she calls those people “obnoxiously aggressive” – and the other one, which is where I tend to fall off the cliff, is you show that you care deeply but you are not as clear as you need to be when there's problems, and she calls that person “ruinously empathetic.” Which is interesting because when I was younger I wasn't empathetic at all. I had no empathy. I think through almost 20 years of marriage and five children and 20 years of business, you start to develop – you've walked through enough fire that you do have more empathy for people. But the danger is believing that trying to be super kind to them at the expense of truth is going to be helpful for them, and it almost never is. Not for them, for you, or the company. ROB: It's really good to share both sides of that on Radical Candor, because I think some people have heard it and run into somebody who maybe learned too much of the wrong lessons from it. It's always good to go back to the source and process through these things through our own filter. You mentioned this situation where things are really busy and you really need to hire someone, and you're talking about taking longer to make that hire. To do that, how do you manage the onslaught of work in that season while taking the time you need to make the right hire? JAY: I think a lot of it comes down to being able to think far enough ahead. If I need to hire somebody, the chances are I needed to be thinking about that a month ago or 2 months ago. So, taking the time to evaluate what the issues are for the company and plan for that makes a big difference. I think most people can wing it. If you're scrappy enough and smart enough, you can probably wing it to about 10 people and a million dollars in revenue, but after that things start to fall apart really quickly. For us, one of the big things that helped was a book called Traction by Gino Wickman. I know I'm throwing a lot of books out – which ironically, I used to never read because I'm dyslexic. But they're really, really a helpful framework. I am that traditional entrepreneur that really has a problem with process and procedures and systems. I feel like they're a cage for me. I feel like they're very corporate-y – but they're not. They're required in order to build a scalable business that will last. Traction gave us the framework for that, and as it relates to hiring, what happened is because we set these annual goals and we have these quarterly planning meetings, both as a leadership team and as a full team, we can see ahead of time what the issues are, when we're going to need to hire, and plan for that accordingly. Right now, we're working on hiring a new role, and we're just willing to take the time for it. Matter of fact, one of my team members the other day was like, “We could probably cut that last interview to speed things up.” I'm like, “Nope, not doing it. I'm not cutting the last interview.” I even go to the extent – this sounds kind of crazy, but it's actually great – I stole this from Dave Ramsey out of the book EntreLeadership; I will do a spousal interview at the end. It's not what it sounds like. Basically what happens is my wife and I will go out with whoever the team member is and their spouse, assuming they're married, and we'll just have dinner. The idea behind this is be with somebody in an environment that is not a traditional interview, because most people, including probably you and I if we were in that scenario, exaggerate and are moderate liars in interviews because we just instinctively are trying to put on our best self. When you see people out in the real world at dinner or something, they can still put on their best self, but you start to get a picture. I also think it's important to realize that when you're hiring somebody, if their spouse is like a monster, you might be bringing that into the company too, and you've got to be aware of that. ROB: You've mentioned a lot of books. I think there may be one other book you haven't mentioned yet. I do believe you have a book of your own that we should know about. JAY: Yeah, I do have a book. It was one of those things where everybody kept saying, “You should write a book. You should tell all these stories and put them together in one single plan.” I never felt confident enough to do that, but I finally did it. It's called Building a Business That Lasts. My podcast is actually by the same title. The idea is, what does it take to build a business over time? Most businesses fail in the first year. The vast majority do. Many more fail within the first 5 years, and very, very few make it to the 10-year mark. So on the podcast, for example, I interview people that have been in business for 10 years or more, and selfishly, I learn a lot because I get to talk to other business leaders and entrepreneurs and hear their stories. The book is just my story, my framework of how I have made that work, and the subtitle is important to me, too. It's “without sacrificing family,” because I've seen plenty of people along the way that have grown great businesses at the expense of all of the people around them, especially those closest to them. I probably have risked that at points, but I'm doing my darndest to try and stay married to the same woman my whole life and have kids that grow up and are as well-adjusted as they can be in this crazy world. ROB: For sure. That is excellent and noble and worthwhile. Where should we find that book? JAY: You can get a copy by just going to my website, which is jayowenlive.com. There's a button right there that says, “Get Jay's Book.” We actually have a free offer right now; you just cover the cost of shipping and handling and we'll send that book out to you. Also on my website is my podcast and other materials that might be helpful if you're looking to build a business to last. ROB: Excellent. Jay, what's coming up next for you and Design Extensions that we should be looking forward to you hearing about? JAY: Great question. We are adding a new wing onto the company over the next couple of months and into the next few years. We've always been an agency. What I mean by agency is we do the work for you. But what I've found over time, especially in this new economy as people are starting new things, is they might not be able to afford the agency. They might want to be able to do some things themselves. They might even have some team members in-house that can do some of those things, but they need some guidance along the way. They need a guide who has been through it before and knows how to help them make those things happen. We are in the process, in the very early stages right now, of building onto the agency a consultancy. I see those two things overlapping. The idea is essentially for us to be able to provide coaching and strategy around building a business and making sure you have a clear plan, not just for your marketing, but for business fundamentals as a whole. I run a marketing agency, but you can hear just in this conversation we've had how many things we've talked about as it relates to hiring and firing, teambuilding, how to keep yourself sane in the midst of it all. So. we're going to be building a consultancy on top of the agency. Both of those things, though, really feed well into who we are as a company as a whole, which goes back to that mission of helping other people grow their business. ROB: Fantastic. Jay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. We know where people should find your book; where should they find you and your firm when they're looking to find you, online or otherwise? JAY: They can still just go to my website. That's the main place I want people to go after this interview, jayowenlive.com. My agency is linked to on there, the podcast is linked to on there, the book is linked to on there. Depending on who they are and what they need, those are great places to check me out. And obviously, I'm available on all the social media, so wherever you happen to be, LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, I'm out there. If you want to connect, you can always find me in the DMs on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn. ROB: That's excellent. Jay Owen, Founder and CEO of Design Extensions, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been a pleasure.  JAY: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Rob. ROB: It's a pleasure. Be well. 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.

Verzahnung von CRM bis Social Media: Mit dem richtigen Tool und dem richtigen Partner zum Erfolg!In der Welt des zeitgemäßen Marketing sind Komplettstrategien gefragt, keine Insellösungen. Wie Customer-Relationship-Management (CRM) der Ausgangspunkt für eine umfangreiche Marketing- und Sales-Strategie sein kann und wie leicht sie zu implementieren ist, hören Sie in der neuen Podcast-Episode.Gibt es eine Alternative im unübersichtlichen Meer von CRM-Software-Lösungen?Ist modernes Marketing messbar?Wie verzahnt man Marketing und Vertrieb? Und wie werden Social Media richtig eingeflochten?Was kann ein HubSpot-Partner für Sie tun?Diese Fragen beantworten Christian Haberl, Digitalisierungsexperte und CEO von HUMANBRAND, und Christoph Geisser, Partner Manager bei HubSpot. Hören Sie gleich rein!Kontaktmöglichkeiten zu Christoph Geisser und HubSpot:Website  LinkedIn XING Bei Interesse an einer Partnerschaft: https://app.hubspot.com/meetings/cgeisser1Kontaktmöglichkeiten von HUMANBRAND:WebsiteLinkedIn XING Instagram Facebook: HUMANBRAND & HUMANBRAND Media Academy E-Mail: office@humanbrand.at

"Kig på kunden, find ud af, hvordan du støtter dem i hele processen. Hvis ikke du har loyale kunder så churner de, og churn er virkelig noget, der kan ødelægge en forretning”. - Jesper Toft, Partner, Avidly I denne episode interviewer jeg Jesper Toft fra Avidly, en af verdens største HubSpot Partner virksomheder. Vi skal se nærmere på inbound samt hvordan HubSpot kan bruges til at skabe værdifulde og skræddersyede kunderejser. Go' fornøjelse

Peter Caputa is the CEO of Databox. He helps companies grow by implementing sales and marketing excellence. He's worked with 100s of businesses directly as well as helped 100s of agencies and media companies grow by helping their clients achieve predictable, measurable and improvable ROI from the marketing and advertising services they provide.

What's it like being a HubSpot partner? Chris Higgins started his own HubSpot Partner agency called Electric Monk. In this episode we talk to Chris about what it's like being a HubSpot partner and some of the changes we'd love to see HubSpot implement with an open letter to Christopher O'Donnell, the SVP of Product at HubSpot. Not only do we talk about our favourite things about HubSpot and the new features we'd love, but we dive into our thoughts on the Inbound conference and our favourite new tools in the martech space.Support this podcast by buying me a coffee (or 3...) ☕Links referenced in this episode:HubSpotElectric MonkDriftHyperGrowthInboundRight MessageWistiaOne, Ten, One-Hundred

What does a full-time Facebook Ads expert do to get great results for her clients? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, IMPACT's Lead Facebook Ads Strategist Ali Parmelee shares the exact process she uses to develop Facebook ad campaigns and track and measure the performance of ads.  This isn't Facebook ads 101. Ali is sharing advanced tips, in detail, for marketers that understand the basics of Facebook advertising but want to up their game and improve their return on ad spend (ROAS). Listen to the podcast for step-by-step instructions on building Facebook ad campaigns like the pros do. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth and I'm your host and this week my guest is Ali Parmelee who is the Lead Facebook Ads strategist for IMPACT. Welcome Ali. Ali Parmelee (Guest): Thank you very much. Glad to be here. Ali and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: Yeah I'm excited to have you here. It's not often that I get to interview my own colleagues for this podcast so this is kind of a special treat. Why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and about your background? Ali: Sure. So I am newer to the Impact team. I used to be a co-owner of Think Creative group out of Connecticut and we merged into Impact over the summer. So I've been with Impact for about five-ish months and trying to bring all of our Facebook and Inbound methodologies over with us. So my team came over with us and I am focusing on driving Facebook and Instagram ads for Impact now. Kathleen: Yeah the first time that I saw you, met you, heard of you was at a HubSpot Partner day event a few years ago when you were actually up on stage with someone from HubSpot talking about how to do Facebook ads right. I was really impressed by everything you were doing and how deep you were going specifically into Facebook ads. So we were really excited to have you guys be a part of the team because it's given us some capabilities we didn't have before. Ali: Thank you. Thank you. That was fun. That was two years ago. I spoke with Daria and my previous co-founder of Think and it was a great time. I love talking there. Kathleen: Yeah. Well we're gonna pick your brain on Facebook ads here today. So you know you are very specialized in terms of what you work on. And while you, I think you have in the past, you have done broader marketing strategy, you've worked with clients across the range of their different marketing needs but you've gone really deep specifically with Facebook ads. And what I find interesting about that and one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on is that it seems to me like everybody's either doing Facebook ads or talking about doing them these days. It's become kind of ubiquitous which is funny to me because when I first got into Inbound marketing I remember actually HubSpot used to say, "Inbound marketing is about attracting buyers and not spending them with ads," and they were very kind of anti-advertising and that's really changed. It seems like they recognize that ads have an important place in the inbound marketing methodology. But I'd love to hear your take on that. Ali: No, absolutely. I definitely have a varied past were over the years I won't say my age but I've been doing this for quite awhile and I've done everything from writing copy, doing PR, to running full inbound campaigns. My previous company we were HubSpot patterns as well so I used to run social media campaigns and everything. And one of the things that I think has ended itself to me having the successes that I have with Facebook ads is I really think you have to be a strong utility player to do Facebook ads right. Because there's so many different elements with it. Ali: A lot of people think that Facebook ads is boosting of that you're simply just taking an idea and doing a pretty general ad but you have to think about the strategy behind it. It's just as strategic as everything else that you do with inbound marketing. Ali: And that's why why I talk about Facebook ads and doing it the inbound way it is ... to go back to your question here it is something that totally works together with inbound marketing because you don't wanna feel like you are spamming people but you're helping to get it in front of them. Because at this point people's feeds are so over-saturated and flooded you have to make sure that they have the opportunity to see it which they don't get to with how low the normal reach is now anyway. Kathleen: I will say done well they for sure work because I mean I'm a marketer, I know what's happening when I go into Facebook. But there have definitely been times when I have purchased things because I'm like, "Okay I have seen this ad so many times I need to click through and see what it's all about." A great example is I think I'm a devotee now of Aptiv which is an exercise app and it literally was just that it showed up enough in my feed. And I was like, "Alright, darn you Aptiv I'm gonna check it out." Ali: That's funny. Kathleen: It does work, for sure if it's done well. Ali: Absolutely. Absolutely. Kathleen: But it sounds like if I'm hearing you correctly what you're saying, at least in my mind the way I'm seeing this, is it's almost like there's the iceberg and the little bit of the iceberg that you see above the surface is the things people see that is, "Hey do you wanna boost your post?" But that there's this giant iceberg under the water of additional knowledge and expertise and methodology that you can take advantage of to do it really well. Ali: Absolutely. Kathleen: I'd love to have you talk about that a little bit more. So when you work with a client, and somebody comes to you and says, "I wanna do Facebook ads," walk me through what that initial conversation is like from the 50,000 foot kind of strategic view. Ali: Yeah, absolutely. And if I keep talking too much just yell at me because I can talk forever about this, I get so excited. So it's honestly very similar to onboarding and talking to people about inbound marketing. You have to understand the goals. Like I was starting to say before it's not just about saying, "I have this lead generation tool that I want to put out there," or, "I wanna get more sales." We need to understand what the KPI, the key performance indicators, are that we're going after. Are you trying to increase your overall brand awareness? Do you need more unique site visitors? Are you trying to get leads and more email addresses? Are you trying to get sales? Do you have old inventory that you're trying to move? We have to understand what the overall goals are. And then we come up with strategies. Ali: So it's very similar to an inbound method strategy that way. So once we start understanding what your goals are we can start to put together a blueprint of what that means. So we have some clients who in the past have wanted to start blogging. As we all know blogging is fantastic but it's not a silver bullet that happens overnight, we have to get more people coming to the blog. So we have clients where they had been running, they had been posting blogs now weekly multiple times a week for six months, they were not seeing really any traction with it. Through our strategy of not boosting but we call it amplifying because we do it through Facebook ads manager and I'd written a blog that's on Impact's site, we can- Kathleen: We'll link to that in the show notes. Ali: Yeah. So there's a big difference between that because this is where you're making sure that you're using the pixels, you're creating segmented audiences that you're going after for this. And instantly from the first week where we went from not having any amplification going to actually having amplification going for it they went from maybe 50 views to over 800 views for the blog. And that was with a very minimal spend. Ali: That was about $15 a day. So again when we get started we wanna know what the goals are. We want to talk about budgets and timelines for how quickly we want to reach those goals because they all play a factor with each other. Kathleen: So you're having that conversation big picture about goals and timelines and budgets. Is there ever a situation where you say Facebook ads are not right for this? Ali: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. If it is ... so a couple of those scenarios would be I particularly love e-commerce and I focus on e-commerce. If a product their average order value is under $50 you are going to have to have a big budget and do a big volume to make your money back on it. So doesn't mean you can't do it but what I've done in scenarios like that is we look at how can we group or bundle products so it can get the average order value up instead of just saying, "Nope, sorry it won't work for you." So I've talked with say coffee drop shippers where it's $20 for the average order value but if we sell subscriptions for them instead now that makes that a guaranteed three months $60 and it makes more sense for them to do it. So there's ways around that. Ali: So we look at average order value. We also look at are their goals realistic with their budgets. Because I have audited accounts where people say, "It's just not working." I'll go in, I'll look at their targeting and they're targeting four million people at a dollar a day and it's going to take them two years to see any results. So it's also setting realistic expectations with people too. And also for people to know that this is not just ... while you get very quick results it is not a silver bullet, you have to continue to work at it and it's not something that you start and stop. They have to be willing to understanding that this is part of your overall marketing strategy, your digital marketing strategy because you have to stick with it for a minimum of three months to make sure that it's working properly for you because it's a lot of split testing. A lot of theorizing and then going back and tweaking to get it running smoothly. Kathleen: What about on the B to B side? Are there situations when it's not a good fit on that side as well? Ali: You know it can be harder on B to B but not necessarily. There are so many tips and hacks that you can do. If you have a good size email list part of what we'll do is we'll start to audit first and see, "Can we find enough of these people in here," or, "Can we find enough look alikes, is it at least a 200 person seed audience that we can work off of to start trying to build look alike audiences?" You know one of my mentors actually sold an MRI machine through Facebook ads. So you can sell anything. It's a matter of can you get the targeting right which is super critical and can you build a campaign structure the right way to make sure that your messaging gets across. Kathleen: So let's take it a layer deeper and let's talk about targeting. I think it would be really interesting because these things change so quickly. Can you break down what are all the different targeting options and the ways that you can come at this? Ali: Absolutely. So this is something that seems like such a very simple straightforward methodology but it's something that when we go into audit accounts we don't see people who aren't working with tried and true Facebook advertisers that have a similar setup are doing. A lot of times we'll go in and we'll see people think of a campaign because of the naming conventions with Facebook. It's campaign ad set ads. So they think of a campaign as, "Oh I want to promote this one idea, this one concept." But that's not how we approach it. We look at the campaign as the objective that you're able to select from Facebook. So they give you about 10 to 12 objectives you can pick from: brand awareness, traffic, conversions, video views, product catalog sales. And so we will always build our campaign structure by objective. And then where you would normally ... when you go into ad sets that's where we do our targeting. Ali: So for example when you go and look and audit any of the accounts that we're running we really never have more than 10-ish campaigns at once ever going, and that's a lot. It depends on what the ad buys have. There are some campaigns I'm running where I only have three active campaign objectives running right now but we're still spending $40,000 a month. It's just how we structure it. So for ad sets when we get in there ... now this is where you start looking at the different target audiences that you're going after. Ali: So think of this like the buyer's journey where you've got the top of funnel, you've got the middle of funnel, you've got the bottom of funnel. Top of funnel you are only ever going to target lookalike audiences, ice cold people, people who have never heard of your brand, never been touched by your brand, they just know a little bit about the concept and that's how we're targeting them. What we typically will do in there is this is where all lookalike audiences go and this is where interest and behaviors go. Ali: Now a sort of micro-tip on that is we start out by breaking those all down separately, we don't go and take a 100 different behaviors and put them all in, we'll clump similar ones. So for example one beauty client that we have we'll do retail stores, so Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Sephora, places like that will all be in there. But I'm not gonna put those with other interest categories because I wanna see what's working, what's resonating. So we'll make sure that we split those out. Same thing with even the look alike audiences. I may do a look alike audience of the top five percent of time spent on site and that is one ad set. Then I do another ad set which is Facebook engagement for the last 180 days or 90 days and I build that custom audience to make a look alike and that's it, that's who I'm going after. And then I do the same for Instagram. Ali: So we have a set list that we kind of start off with as the lowest hanging fruit and that's always gonna be look alike for top of funnel. Then middle of funnel we take those same custom audiences that we built the look alikes off of and that's who goes in middle of funnel. So now it's not the look alike but it's the actual top five percent of time spent on site, it's the Facebook engagers for 90 days, it's the Instagram engagers for 90 days. It's people who have viewed content but not added to cart. That's all middle of funnel. Ali: And then bottom of funnel that's where we're going back and trying to get people across the finish line. So maybe it's e-commerce and you've added to cart but you haven't purchased. We're gonna keep following you around. Maybe it's an annual timeline download and you've landed on the landing page but you haven't downloaded it. I'm gonna remind you it's still there for you to download. Kathleen: So talk to me more about why at the top of the funnel you're only using look alike audiences? Ali: So top of the funnel typically you're going to use objectives that are cheaper. And so with that we want to make sure that when we're casting the widest net we're not spending the most amount of money. You're gonna pay more for clicks and conversions when you start doing conversion objectives for middle and bottom of funnel. Top of funnel you might be doing video views, you might be doing traffic, brand awareness. You may even still be doing conversions but you're going to have enough things going that you're casting the widest net, we want to make sure that it is truly a cold audience that then you're trying to help refine and build into a more interested audience for you. Kathleen: So you want a cold audience or is there any reason ... you know you talked about it being look alike, is there any reason you wouldn't try to develop a cold audience based off of demographic targeting? Ali: Yes. So we could absolutely do that too. We have some clients who specifically even have states that they target because they're best performing states. So we might say this is our ... Ali: States, so we might say this is our women who are 35 to 65 in Texas, California, wherever. The one thing that I usually will say though is we start with a narrower top of funnel in these different micro niches because Facebook honestly is very good at helping to figure out who the audiences are for you to target. You ... it also takes the emotion out of it because you have your own theories of who you think is right, but let's let Facebook actually build the data for us and then see how can we then hone that down even more. So, for example, we have a newer client right now where we've started with all of the lookalikes and then we went back and added in as a second phase some of the behaviors and interests and more of the demographics because we were able to see, okay, this, these age groups are the core age groups who are engaging. Ali: So let's trim this back to these age groups and now let's add in a layer of these behaviors, and this is a new ad set that we test. Kathleen: And you're, are you learning that from seeing the results of the lookalike audience? Ali: Yes. Kathleen: Okay. Ali: Exactly. Data analysis is a huge part of Facebook ads. You have to understand what you're seeing and reading and then how to react to it. It's not just building these ads and a lot of times you'll see with Facebook, there's a lot of churn because people are great at getting things going, but they're not necessarily great at the longer haul of keeping it going. So the better you are at data analysis, the better ... and you're going to have a, you're ... the better you're going to be able to create results and the longer relationships you're gonna have. Kathleen: Now you begin with the KPIs and the targeting, and then really at some point you need to make decisions about budget. Kathleen: Can you talk me through how you think about budget? You know, because having been in agencies for a long time, I know that the big question everyone says how much did I spend? And usually there's some sort of an it depends answer in there. And then there are people who come and say this is what I'm prepared to spend and it's completely arbitrary and has nothing to do with any kind of logical reasons. So I'm curious how you approach that conversation. Ali: Yeah, absolutely. So as we're going through KPIs, I get a good sense of approximately how much testing we're going to have to do. And so this is something that's really big and important for people to understand. Facebook ads is truly all about testing and so the more budget that you have to be able to test, because the way, as I was saying, I might only have a handful of objectives at the top level, but then when we get to ad sets, each of those ad sets need their own budget. Ali: So say for example, I have a top of funnel conversion. So actually this is a good example, right now for one of our e-commerce clients, we're prepping for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, we're doing a lot of testing in there. And so we have eight ad sets in each of three top of funnel campaigns right now. So that's 24 different ad sets I have to put budget to. And it has to be equal budget so that I can see what's actually performing well with the different audiences and then be able to make proper decisions for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So I have some clients where I can tell from the KPIs that they're more of sort of a dipping the toe in the water starter level of what they're looking to do. The base level that I tell people is you need to feel comfortable spending at least $3,000 a month just on the ad spend, not the implementation or the management or setup, but just on the ad spend alone. Because that gives you enough latitude to be able to scale up, scale down and get faster results. Ali: Certainly, I've had clients who have said, well, I don't know, I'd rather start with 1500. That's fine, but you have to understand that everything is relative. So I'm going to need, if you want to cut the initial budget down to 1500, then where it would normally take me six to eight weeks to establish benchmarks for you, it's now going to take 12 to 16 weeks to do that because we're just prolonging everything. And the budget, the metrics might be slightly different depending on the time of year. Like I would not advise anyone just starting instantly right now because the cost per click is double what it normally is going to be right now. So ... Kathleen: Because of the kind of ... Ali: Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Yep. Kathleen: Yeah, that's interesting. Now, okay. We covered KPIs, we covered targeting, we covered budget. One of the things that I'm hearing you say is that there's a lot of testing you ... there's a lot of data analysis, there's a lot of like watching results. I'd love to learn more about, you know, how much time are you spending in a given week just looking at this stuff? How frequently are you looking at it? Is it daily, is it hourly, is it weekly, what does that cadence look like? And is it dependent upon spend? Ali: It's dependent upon spend and goals. So, I'm in there every single day for all of my clients. And then depending on the budgets and how many, how much testing we're doing. So that example where we have the 24 live top of funnel ad sets right now I'm in there hourly checking to see what's going on and do we need to make changes because we're even testing the same exact copy, same exact image, but square versus vertical. To see because again, from reading the data we are seeing that, this is a crazy statistic, but 90 percent of their purchases are coming from mobile through Facebook and Instagram. Ali: So with that being said, right now we're testing a hack to be able to do a vertical image. It's not something that you can typically just do straight up in Facebook ads. You actually have to create it as a, what we call a dark post. So it looks like it would if it was an organic post on your actual page, but it never hits your page. We just create it and then take it and run it as an ad. But the theory, what this is, the vertical images takes up more space on a phone. So I want to take up as much space as I can and right now those are converting really well for this client. Kathleen: That's interesting. For anyone who doesn't know, can you explain more about the dark post thing? How do you create it? What is it? Ali: Yeah. So basically in ads manager, when you go to create an ad, and I haven't actually even gotten to this part of it. I've explained a little bit of how I set up the campaign structure and then the ad set structure. Ali: But, so the idea is with this, sorry about that. The idea is with this, that what happens is you take the same creative. What we do is we build a master ad set, a master campaign, and then master ad set. So we will never ever turn these ads on in the set. And then we take that one ad and then we drop it into each of the different ad sets. So in those 24 different ad sets that I've been talking about, I'm running the same exact ad in every single one.  Okay. So for creating a dark post, this is something that is never going to actually live on the page itself. It will just be an unpublished post. Which then we turn into an ad. Now we make the master ad campaign that is never turned on, but this is this one ad. So within the master ad campaign we will create this ad that then we take this singular ad and drop it in any ad set that we want. Ali: So the difference with this is is I'm not going, in this example where I said we have 24 different active ad sets top of funnel. I'm not creating 24 ads over and over and over again. I'm taking this one ad that we created once and then I'm dropping it in each of the different ad sets. And here's why this is so important. Have you ever seen those posts or Those ads where it's got thousands of comments and likes and you think to yourself, oh my gosh, this is amazing? These people clearly have a lot of interactions, you're getting ... you might have some negative sentiment, you have positive sentiment. But that all happens because you're taking one post ID, you're creating this ad and you're dropping it over and over. So all of those likes and comments and shares follow it around and are cumulative and instead of having to optimize it 24 separate times. Kathleen: So you're taking the one post, but you say you're putting it in different ad sets. Kathleen: Does that mean that the ad itself across all those ad sets appears identically, but you're targeting is different in each of those cases? Ali: Exactly. So this way I'm able to test does a testimonial ad perform better versus maybe an explanatory ad? Or does a video format versus a single image versus a slide show work better with the same copy? And I take that and the interesting thing is is I have examples where top of funnel I've split and tested single image versus slideshow where it's the same exact copy and it's a draw. It's a 50/50 for one of my clients. However, that same client, middle of funnel, I've tested slideshow versus single image and I now know I would never waste my time or money on a slideshow again because it does not convert middle funnel, only a single image does. But this allows me to be able to see that. Kathleen: Really then it sounds very similar to how we approach AB testing with other things. You know, the rule with any good AB test is you only change one variable. So that's kinda what it sounds like we're talking about here. Ali: Exactly, exactly. Kathleen: Yeah. Interesting. Once you have all of this setup, you then need to proceed with putting together the creative. Ali: Yes. Kathleen: Any takeaways or advice on how to approach that creative so that it's gonna perform well? Ali: Yes. So especially for top of funnel, people don't want to feel like you're spamming them. They don't want to feel like, how did they figure out how to find me? This is an ad. I don't want this. If they start to hide your ads, that counts as negative sentiment. People may not realize this, but the more negative sentiment you get, the worse your optimization is. So it's gonna cost you more. Ali: Facebook will ding you for it. If you continue to get lots of complaints, they'll even shut down your account on you. So you have to be really careful. We call ... we practice what we call ad camouflage. So what this means is, this is how ... you may have heard me talk about doing Facebook ads that are inboundy. You wanna be helpful, you don't want to sound like you are selling, you want it to seem conversational. So this is where we, first of all, Facebook does not allow you to put too much text on your images. We try to actually not put text on our images at all because we want it to feel organic. We'll use hashtags in our body copy because we want it to look like an organic post. We will specifically not select the call to action button that you have the option to pick for Facebook ads, unless we're forced to, it will force you to on videos and slideshows. Ali: But otherwise we will not because we want it to feel as organic as possible. Kathleen: Hm. And with images, I heard you earlier mention normally they need to be horizontal instead of vertical. Ali: Yeah. So for single image ads you're going to do, that's a very horizontal format. Vertical you do in sort of the super duper hack of doing the page post itself. And so that's where you can't even pick a headline, you can't pick a CTA, this, it looks and acts and breathes like a post that you would do normally. It just is dark, it's unpublished. Kathleen: And that's really for mobile. Ali: And that's, yeah, that's what we're finding is working well for mobile where you have a lot of mobile conversions. And then there's also square. So I have some clients where when I start auditing their assets that they're giving me, they may have fantastic artwork that I can pick from but they're all vertical. Ali: So now that we've had this, this one option, if it works for them, that's great, but sometimes it doesn't. So what we do there is we'll crop them down to squares, which then we can use those four slideshows and they're also great for Instagram. Kathleen: Okay. And same for video I would assume? That there are certain times when you want certain formats. Ali: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. So, video and Instagram stories is a whole other beast that we haven't even gotten into. But you're gonna look for more vertical with some of those. Again, it's testing because you might just have your own theory on it and that's what I'm doing right now. I am testing vertical against horizontal for that same client, the beauty client. Kathleen: Why do you think vertical works so well? Is it again the mobile? Ali: Yup. Yeah, I mean and that's why data analysis is so important. You know, not only am I in the accounts every single day, but I am running comprehensive reports every Monday. And then I'm meeting with my clients depending on how engaged we are, anywhere from multiple times a week to every other week to review the analytics together and hear what they have coming up and then make plans together about what makes sense moving forward. Kathleen: Just out of curiosity, would you think that the guidance on vertical versus horizontal video would change if you were targeting a B to B customer? Like are they more likely to be looking at this on a computer, on a laptop or a desktop and therefore would horizontal make more sense for that kind of an audience? Ali: You know what, you would think so, but there's no rhyme or reason with it. So many people use their phones nowadays, even if they're at their desktop. I know I have my phone right next to me and I have it open and I'm scrolling through things. Multitasking, you know, I'm a little different because I'm trying to be targeted by ads so I can see what everyone else is doing. Kathleen: You're the only person who's like, please send me more ads. Ali: Oh Kathleen, I'm not kidding. I have a Chrome plugin that allows me to strip out any organic posts from facebook so I can only see ads. Kathleen: Oh my God, that's just the opposite of everyone else's reality. I love it. Ali: So, you know, but mobile, I mean, it really is for me, even with some of the things that I'm targeted, think about it. Like I have two young kids and you know, as I'm putting them to sleep and I'm sitting there next to them in bed, I'm scrolling through while I'm just waiting for them to fall asleep. And that's why there's, it's so important for all these best practices. You do want to test out vertical. You wanna make sure if you're doing videos for that reason right there alone, that you have captions go like all, all in your video for you. So ... Kathleen: What's the best way to do captions? Ali: So, there are a couple of different services actually that I'm gonna start testing out. Facebook has an automatic translation for captions. It can almost be like a fun drinking game to see how bad they are when they come back. For the most part, it's close enough that it makes it not that bad a job. However, if there's any lengthier ... If there's any lengthier videos, that's when I would absolutely go through a transcription process. If it's three minutes or under, it'll take 15 to 30 minutes to do it. So, it's not that bad. Kathleen: Any particular transcription services that you've used? Ali: Actually I haven't tested it yet. The one that everybody in my community keeps talking about is called Rev.com. Kathleen: That's what I use to transcribe my show. Ali: Oh. Kathleen: It's great. It's quick, and it's very reasonably priced. And it's pretty accurate. Ali: Good to know. That's good to know. Kathleen: Two thumbs up on Rev for me. Ali: Good to know. Thank you. Kathleen: Yeah. Great. So, the other thing that you do that's very interesting, and you kind of talked about it already. But, I wanna just circle back to it, is do you have a very particular way that you organize everything on the back end? Ali: Yes. Kathleen: Can you address that a little bit? Ali: So, in terms of that, so I started to talk about how we will do top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel. And, we, again it sounds very basic. But, keep ... so one tip I can say is keep your naming conventions the same. So, that it's really easy to scan through. Because as you keep managing clients for a long time or managing your own campaigns, you need to be able to quickly go and see what is what and where it is. So ... Kathleen: Especially if there's multiple people jumping into your account. Ali: Exactly. So, we'll always do a naming convention of what phase of the funnel it is. And, then we'll say what objective it is. So, it'll be like TOF-Conversions, TOF-Traffic, TOF-Videos. Kathleen: TOF meaning, top of funnel. Ali: Top of funnel. Exactly. And, so we keep a very, very streamlined way of doing that. And, then we follow the same naming conventions as you keep going down to access. So, it'll be LLA-Look Like Audience. And it will be FB-90. So for us that means Lookalikes of Facebook engagers for 90 days. And, so come up with your own system that is going to make sense and try to stick with it as much as possible. Kathleen: Great. This is so interesting. So, I'm curious to know. Do you have any good tales of like using all these systems that you have? What kind of an impact has that had for the accounts that you do Facebook ads for? What are the terms that people expect to see? Ali: So, again, everybody is different. And, that's part of the goal setting too, is understanding what your profit margin is, what your cost should be, what your normal threshold is. Here's actually another tip that I would say, is also look at those goals for the different levels of the funnel as well. Because while you might have a blended cost per sale across for acquisition, you're going to pay more top of funnel. Or, you need to look and see what that actually is. Is it because now you're retargeting. You're able to spend less, because you're targeting such a micro niche of who you're going after. So, when I'm setting up all my weekly reports, I actually have it so that I'm looking at what my sales are, my cost for acquisition, the average order value for top, and then for middle, and then for bottom. So, that I know am I on target? Or, am I not on target with this? Kathleen: Yeah. Ali: So, that's really important.  Okay so one example, like I was saying is a college advisor that we have worked with now for many years. And, she is fantastic. She shares so much good information. She is the epitome of what an inbound marketer should be because of all the great information she shares. So, she has this one piece of content that she gives away for free. It's the annual timeline calendar. So, this is something that tells you for each month of the year, here are all the things that you need to have on your radar for everything from standardized tests to essays to getting any recommendations and referrals and visiting colleges. Kathleen: I could've used that. I have three kids who've now gone through that process, and it would've been nice to have that. Ali: She is amazing. Well, clearly I didn't target you. But ... so, anyway, what this is, is she does a full process with this. So, this is actually a great kind of multi-channel example too. Because we do the inbound marketing for her. My team does that. So, we do everything from having a landing page where they can go to get to get this. So, we've built that out for them. We do emails that go out to the database. Because this is refreshed information, she refreshes it every six months, it's something that people want to re-download and re-engage with. So, she already has a great following for that. Ali: Then, we do an organic social presence for her with it. And, then with the ads, now I'm amplifying everything that we're doing. So, this is something where just looking back at August and the metrics. So, we launched it August 1st, and all of a sudden we jumped up for them because of doing ads and doing very, very strong presence, I can tell you looking at this we had ... 3,821 people who downloaded it in August. Kathleen: Wow. Ali: Of those, 2,486 of them came from paid social. Kathleen: Hm. Ali: This is because we did not just say this is a campaign. This is a gated piece of content that we wanna put out there. We used our strategy where we did top of funnel. And, so we shared information about blogs that were relevant to not knowing what you need to be doing. And, then we also took ... she does Facebook Lives every single month. And, so we took her Facebook Lives and we turned those into ads. And, so then we retarget anyone who's watched at least 25% of the video to then be hit with the middle of funnel ad. And, that middle of funnel ad is the offer to download this annual timeline. Ali: Then, if you've hit the page to download the annual timeline, but you didn't actually download it, we hit you to remind you there's still time to download it. So, that's at bottom of funnel to try to convert and get them across the line. Kathleen: Got it. Now, when you look at the ad efficacy and ROI, in terms of metrics, what are looking most closely at? Is is cost per click? Is it cost per acquisition? Is there some other metric? What are the KPIs that are most important there for you? Ali: So, it depends on the different stages of the funnel, and again back to what the KPIs are that we set. But, I'm always going to be looking at a few different key areas. So, again, if it's legion versus eCommerce, for eCommerce I'm looking at returns on ad spend. The purchase conversion value, the budget. How much of the budget is being spent that we've set? How many purchases? I'm also looking at link clicks. It's really important to look at outbound link clicks and the CTR. So, the click through rate, CTR, is something that you always want to be a bare minimum of 1%. If it's under 1%, this is where we have a CRO problem. And, you have to start working backwards to say I'm getting a lot of activity on the ad. But, I'm not getting enough people who are clicking through. Or, they're bouncing. They're not happy. They're not staying there. Ali: And so you have to start then becoming a sleuth in terms of what's going on, on the site as well. So, I'm looking at those, as I mentioned, link clicks. And, relevance is also another one. So, relevance, you can get up to a 10 score. So, this client, the college advisor. She ... we do the blog amplification for her. She has such a very strong presence through her ads campaign and her inbound marketing that I don't have a single ad that's running for her that's under an eight relevance. She's just phenomenal. Because we've honed the targeting so much. If you start to see that your relevance is three, four, something's wrong. You have to either tweak that ad set or kill it. Kathleen: And, relevance is a score that Facebook gives to you? Ali: Yes. So, this is ... that's determined ... there's a couple of different things that go into it. But, I like to look at how many link clicks are you getting? Are you getting shares? Are you getting comments? Is it positive sentiment? Negative sentiment? All of that goes into the relevance. Kathleen: Wow. It's fascinating how much goes into this, because you know, going back to what we first talked about in the beginning. It's so easy to just think, oh yeah. I'm gonna boost my post for $50.00 and just see what happens. Sure, I'm sure you can get some results there, but it really is such a science. Ali: Absolutely. Kathleen: No wonder people hire Facebook ads experts, because it's a lot. Ali: It really is. It is. And, that's why even sometimes people say, well don't you wanna learn other channels? And, yes. I'm interested in learning other channels. But, this changes all the time. There's so much that you need to stay on top of that I have all I can to just keep working on clients and keep myself learning as well. Kathleen: You are plenty busy. Ali: Yes. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Now there's two questions I always ask my guests. And I'm gonna do a twist on one of them with you. I always ask, the first question is, company or individual. Who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? But, you're so deep in the Facebook ad space, I'm gonna amend that to be, company or individual. Who do you think is killing it with Facebook ads right now? Ali: So, I am very privileged to have a great community. It's a very similar community to the inbound community as well where we all support each other. We have our own Facebook groups that we participate in. We share the hacks and tips and tricks. So, there are a handful. I particularly love a few people. Scott Seward and Dee, they are Right Hook, and they're out of Australia. And, they are just wonderful. They're great with eCommerce. I love my mentors. I've learned from Kat Howell, who I would not know anything if it weren't for Kat Howell. Ali: And, then honestly, a lot of just my peers in the group. They're wonderful. I work with them often, and we all have little bits of golden nuggets, I call them, that we share with each other, that helps. Because, like I said, some things do change. And, so we are constantly posting. But, there's a really strong community out there. Kat Howell by far, has changed the way I approach Facebook ads. Kathleen: Oh great. Now I think I know the answer to this, because I think you just said it. But, I'm gonna just double check anyway. With things changing so quickly, how do you stay up to date? Is it primarily through this group of ... community of practice if you will? Ali: Absolutely. So, there's a couple of great groups out there. The Facebook ad hacks. So, Kat Howell has a couple of different varieties. I'm part of her mastermind group, and I could not imagine not being part of it. You can go through, she even has really great simple programs, Facebook ads that convert. I've gone through a lot of the different programs, but now I have this community. There's other good communities out there too. So, actually, Scott and Dee, they started their own eCommerce heavyweights Facebook group. That's another great one to be a part of. Ali: Oh God. There's some other really strong podcasts that are out there too. I can even help ... I'll grab a couple and give them to you if you wanna post them. Kathleen: That would be great. I'm always on the hunt for more podcasts to listen to. I'm a total podcast junkie, which is probably why I have a podcast. Fantastic. Well, I'll definitely include links to all of that in the show notes. But, if somebody is interested in learning more about this wants to ask you a question, wants to reach out to you, what is the best way for them to find you online? Ali: They can find me on Facebook. I pretty much will become friends with everybody, because that's what I do. I'm on LinkedIn as well. They can go through, I have some articles that are posted on the impact blog as well on Facebook ads. So, read through those as well. And, you can email me too. Kathleen: Great. All right. Well, thank you so much, Ali. This has been super interesting. I mean, I still feel like my head spins every time we get to this level of depth of Facebook ads. But, every time I talk to you, I learn so much more. And, I'm sure that everybody listening feels the same. It's really interesting. Ali: Well, thank you for having me. I know I can go on and on. So, apologies if I rambled too much. Kathleen: No. Don't apologize. It was great. Ali: Wonderful. Kathleen: And, if you're listening, and you liked what you heard, I would very much appreciate it if you would give the podcast a review. I know I say this every week, but it really does make a difference. So, if you go onto Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on and leave a review that would be much appreciated. And, if you know somebody doing kick ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to interview them. Kathleen: That's it for this week. Thank you again for listening.

In this episode of Inbound Agency Journey, Gray interviews Charles McKay from Synx about 

The HubnSpoke podcast team of Zaahn Johnson and Adam Steinhardt talk about Five Hidden Keys to HubSpot Success. How do you ensure HubSpot is successful for your business? We take the SMART acronym and turn it on its head to get a new perspective on how to make HubSpot and inbound marketing work for your business. S = Sales Training M = Management Buy In A = Application R = Remove the Haters T = Time, give it time If you are not sure what HubSpot is, you can discover a demonstration movie here. S = Sales Training Sales Training is critical. There is no magic wand in HubSpot. Sales people are the ultimate determinate of your success. Sales training is critical. HubSpot will get your more leads, but your business will only grow if you sales people recognise and act on those leads. The HubSpot sales and marketing platform, when deployed correctly, will deliver more leads to your sales team. To maximise your HubSpot investment, your sales team will need to be able to convert. How much is HubSpot? It is a sizable investment, leading many people to question whether it's worth it. "Is HubSpot worth the money? Will HubSpot work?" The fact is, a well-supported HubSpot portal will generate more leads. But is your sales force able to convert them? As a sales leader, are you lost in the marketing technology age? Marketing tech and predictive data only work for your sales team if you know how to use it. Your team needs to be on the cutting edge of marketing technology. HubSpot gives you the tools to fire up your ageing sales skills. Sales and marketing have changed in the last decade. It's now the not-so-golden-age of Seller Beware. The Buyer now has all the power, and they are not about to give it back. It is strongly recommended that your business has HubSpot training, or works on retainer with a HubSpot Partner, like The Kingdom. M = Management Has your company management team bought into the inbound marketing process? Executive management needs to fully support and understand the process inbound marketing and digital marketing. That means allocating the time, resources, and budget to allow your marketing team or HubSpot partner to develop the portal. A company who spends 6 months and a couple thousand on their HubSpot portal won't see the value, because they never invested fully in HubSpot or gave it the opportunity to succeed. A = Application The more determined your organisation is to succeed, the better inbound marketing will work for you. Great HubSpot and inbound marketing happens when the entire organisation is brought on board and the marketing and sales team work together to get their customer's questions answered and their site fine-tuned into a lead-generating sales funnel. R = Remove the haters HubSpot deployment means change management. This can intimidate some employees that are entrenched in their old ways. Communication and extra training is needed to inspire them. Failing to do this results in a destructive force that can ruin your best intentions from the inside. Removing these naysayers from the HubSpot implementation and its oversight is absolutely critical to success. For haters that can't be sent on their way, try adapting your language and approach to get their buy-in. T = Time. HubSpot Needs Time Inbound marketing needs time. The HubSpot feature set is robust and extensive. It takes time to master the tools. It takes time to create your website content. It takes time for content marketing to gain traction with Google Search Engines. B2B marketers say the #1 benefit of marketing automation is the ability to generate more and better leads. (Pepper Global, 2014) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)   HubSpot is not like traditional media. It takes time to gain momentum. Time is one of the fundamental difference between digital media and traditional media. Many people ask what is better digital or traditional? Find out the answer here. Many people ask "What does HubSpot do?" It creates leads by being a more capable platform for your website and digital marketing activities. In this episode, we discuss the new HubSpot integrations that have just been released. We speak about the Enthusem integration with HubSpot and hot off the Google Alerts list, Instapage. Instapage is an interesting way to create custom landing pages, quickly. Want to learn more? Discover these popular blog articles: How To Get Content Marketing Happening In Your Business How An Inbound Marketing Stategy Can Make A Beautiful Website 5 Free Sales Resources To Fire Up Your Sales Team

In this episode of Inbound Sales Journey, Ryan and Gray talk about the decision to join the HubSpot VAR program. It is a big commitment and an investment not to be taken lightly. Enjoy!

Episode 006: Join Alex and David for a conversation with HubSpot Partner, BabelQuest, to discuss their methodology for aligning their agency's inbound sales and marketing into a holistic, self-supporting business engine.

Calvin Pryor is showing all the signs of a flamboyant rookie showing off his money and cars on social media. Should he tone it down as he hasn't taken a snap with the Jets. Sponsored by: StoneyCreekCreative.com - Hubspot Partner

Marcus Sheridan from the Sales Lion joins me today. Marcus is a highly successful business owner and speaker. His highly energetic personality is paired with amazing insight into business marketing. Listen in as he gives you some amazing tips and advice. His energy is infectious and by the end of the interview you will be ready to start implementing his advice today!   About Marcus Marcus started a swimming pool company, River Pools and Spas  in 2001. The pool company grew to be one of the largest of its kind in the world (due to inbound marketing efforts and their incredibly popular swimming pool blog). After huge success teaching other pool professionals how to embrace inbound marketing, Marcus has become a very successful HubSpot Partner, training inbound marketers and companies everywhere how to find success. With an incredibly entertaining and educational style, Sheridan has become a highly sought after speaker for many marketing and business conferences globally. He is also the author of the blog, The Sales Lion, one of the best marketing, business, and life-success blogs on the internet.   Show Highlights Ø  What makes a great website Ø  The importance of teaching your clients Ø  Joining you sales and marketing teams Ø  How to rule with content marketing 70% of buying decisions happen before the customer even makes contact with your company. That number is still growing and will continue to grow. This puts an ever growing importance on marketing. Marcus explains what you need to be doing to capitalize on this growing trend.   Want to know more about Marcus? The Sales Lion Mad Marketing Podcast River Pools and Spas Marcus1@thesaleslion.com Twitter: @thesaleslion   Feedback   Have any suggestions for future shows? Have questions or topic you would like us to do an episode on? If so, please leave a comment. If you enjoyed the podcast would you please take a moment to leave a review and rating on iTunes or Stitcher. Every review means we can reach out to more people.  iTunes:  Franchise Euphoria Podcast   Tune in on Stitcher!