Podcasts about hubspotters

Join us as we explore the most complex challenges and hear how we grew HubSpot to a $2B company with more than 180,000 customers globally. Led by your Host Kat Warboys, you'll hear from HubSpotters who are experts in their field like our Vice President of Marketing, Vice President of International and Chief People Officer! They'll candidly share their best inside tips and tricks like how HubSpot thinks about content creation to attract and engage new audiences, how we uncovered new channels for lead generation, how we pioneered our inbound methodology, how we built an award winning culture and more! Whether you're a startup or a scale up, a marketer or the CEO, you'll learn from our triumphs (and missteps) that can be applied to help you grow better. 

This episode is brought to you by Inbound Back Office.You see, ever since discovering the Big Orange Sprocket in 2012, HubSpot's annual INBOUND event has played host to some of the most powerful, super impactful memories I've had in my life. A couple cool gals from the Philippines bringing me a gift of an orange ukulele keychain. Another dope guy brought me a prayer charm.And of course, having real-life, intimately human conversations while sitting in front of a food truck with my man, Moby, who's joining as one of the guests today. It's all about the #memories.

This episode is brought to you by Inbound Back Office.Even though we've had a conversation already on this podcast about HubSpot reporting not too long ago — which you should 100% check out if you haven't already — we're back at it again. This time with special guest, HubSpot Inbound Professor Jorie Munroe, because this topic is so stinkin' important.You see, one of the things that makes HubSpot so freakin' powerful extends far beyond the marketing, sales, and service automation tools it puts at your fingertips. Because it doesn't matter how many workflows, campaigns, blogs, email sequences, deals, or tickets you create within HubSpot.

This episode is brought to you by Inbound Back Office.Yes, this is the title, and we're sticking to it. Let's boogie, HubSpotters.Now, you might be sitting there, scratching your head, thinking to yourself:"Wait a second — last I checked, it's MAY, and INBOUND isn't until September. Do we really need to be talking about INBOUND this early?"Yes. Yes, we freakin' do.You see, right now, thousands of HubSpotters scattered around the world (including us and likely you!) are slowly, but surely, watching all of the exciting announcements roll out about #INBOUND23. For example, just a few days ago, HubSpot shared some really exciting main stage speakers we'll be seeing this year ...... including Reese Witherspoon, Derek Jeter, Andrew Huberman, and Morgan Debaun.As a result, we're hearing a lot of chatter and questions roll from the HubHeroes community ... How do I convince my boss to send me to INBOUND? Is INBOUND worth it to send my employees anymore? I don't want to just survive INBOUND, how do I actually make the most of it? What are the best places to get coffee or grab a bite to eat? Is it true when they say the magic happens in the hallways at INBOUND? What does that even mean? And that's why we're here, IN MAY, on the mic telling you to throw out all of the INBOUND "Survival Guides" as you look ahead to September.

This episode is brought to you by Inbound Back Office.Ahhhh, social media. We love it, we hate it, we hate to love it, and we love to hate it. Still, it doesn't matter if you consider it absolutely essential or a necessary evil — or maybe you're somewhere in between, but the algorithms totally get you down — social media is an essential component of your inbound strategy. 

One sunny September morning in 2018, thousands of inbounders and HubSpotters were gathered in Boston watching HubSpot cofounder Brian Halligan's keynote, which revealed something wildly new that none of us were expecting ... ... the HubSpot Flywheel, which is how HubSpot visualizes what's possible for an organization, in terms of their ability to "grow better," when everyone in your organization is aligned around delivering a fantastic customer experience.It was quite a moment because, up until the great reveal, inbound marketers were (for the most part) worshipping at the altar of the inbound marketing funnel:But HubSpot was now challenging us to set that funnel aside:Images courtesy of HubSpotNow, we've talked quite a bit about the HubSpot Flywheel before in previous HubHeroes episodes, as we conducted deep dives into different segments — attracting customers with great content, what engagement actually looks like, and breaking down who really owns customer delight.But we've never gotten our hands dirty and talked about what the HubSpot Flywheel is because, truth be told, it's a messy topic once you start unpacking it.For example, some folks thing the funnel is a nice idea, but what was actually wrong with the funnel? Did it really need to be replaced? Is the inbound marketing funnel dead like so many say? Others struggle with the funnel because they think it sounds great, but don't quite get how to unpack it for their organization. How do you align everyone so seamlessly? How do you track performance around the entire flywheel?And that's exactly why we knew we had to talk about it this week. There's too much confusion, and it's time to end it once and for all. Does this episode get heated and passionate? Absolutely:Do all of us agree with each other? No, we don't. However, I think this conversation is really going to help you and your teams understand what the HubSpot Flywheel really is and isn't, and what changes you need to make your mindset (and your team alignment) to see success in 2023. Here's what we cover in this episode ... Why did we need the Flywheel and what problems does it solve? Is the original inbound marketing funnel actually dead? Is the HubSpot Flywheel actually for everyone? Why do marketers continue to ruin absolutely everything we touch? What would it feel like to have the audacity of a tone deaf sales guy who can't read a room? Why is it so important to understand where you have force and friction within your organization? What happens when Devyn takes us to Inbound Marketing Church and preaches straight fire? Buckle up, everybody! You have no idea what's in store for you in this episode.YOUR ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODEAt the end of the day, whether you subscribe to the Flyweel or the funnel, you must accept that two things are true: Gone are the days when your teams (marketing, sales, service) can play around in their own little silos. The way you grow effectively as an organization is together; the more you're in silos, the harder that will be.  Your customers always matter, even and especially after they officially become a customer. Don't stop caring about the humans you serve just because you won the sale. The journey is only beginning for them ... and for you. Or, put another way, in order to better attract, engage, and delight the humans you seek, you need to make sure the humans inside your own house are aligned first. You can't do one without the other.

Oscar Trimboli: The sophisticated and paradoxical power of deciding if and when to listen. G'day, It's Oscar, and today we have a question from a Deep Listening Ambassador in Japan. Shaney: Hi Oscar. This is Shaney from Tsukuba Ibaraki, Japan, and my question is about listening as a leader. Do you have any suggestions about how to continue to listen deeply as a leader when you tend to receive comments, suggestions, and ideas from so many people all day every day. It can be quite surprising for people who are new to leadership positions to realize just how much time leaders spend listening to people and how tiring it can be when the fourth or the eighth person in a day asks you if you have a minute and then launches into a rant or a criticism or a suggestion of how to improve something. Listening is so very important to leadership, but it can also be really, really hard to listen to comments and suggestions all day long, especially because you feel a personal obligation to fix the problems that people bring to you.   Oscar Trimboli: Thanks, Shaney. This is a wonderful paradoxical and universal question independent of organization, culture, location, or country. My favorite kind of question, if you like Shaney, have a question about listening in the workplace, email  podcast@oscartrimboli.com This question, it's a question about choice and timing. It could be about when to listen and when NOT to listen. It's also a question about attention and your listening batteries. When it comes to your listening batteries throughout the day, you need to check and notice what's your battery level right now is a green, yellow, red. You need to check what color your listening battery is before you start listening. Something I learned from James Clear in episode 67, advice is often context dependent. Shaney, I'm going to avoid giving you advice here as James points out questions can help you navigate beyond the context. Let's listen to how James explained it.   James Clear: And one of the women that as a reader of mine and I talked to as I was working on the book, she lost a lot of weight, and she had this really great question that she carried around with her. Questions are often more useful than advice in the sense that advice is very context dependent. It's like, "Oh, it works in this situation, but what if you find yourself in a different situation now it doesn't apply as much." And the question that she carried around with her was what would a healthy person do? And so she could go from context to context and sort of have that question to reinforce the identity. That's actually in many ways, more useful than having a good workout program or a good diet plan because that you can only do once. But no matter where you're at, you can ask what would a healthy person do?   Oscar Trimboli: Shaney, I'll share with you four types of questions, four categories of questions for groups of questions that have helped my other clients. It's important to understand that the question you are asked is very, very common and it's amplified when you're in a leadership role. The categories of the four questions are what, when, how, and who. Let's start with WHAT. What would make this a good conversation? What would make this a great conversation? What would make this an effective conversation? What do you want from this conversation? In the book, how to listen, we cover off the use of this question throughout the book, creating a listening compass for you and the other participants. It's a great way to hack the conversation to make it much shorter for you and for them. The reason we want to ask a WHAT question right up front is you want to understand the context for them and for you, because shortly I'm going to invite you to make a choice about when you should think about answering this question, Shaney. So let's move to WHEN Here's a group of questions to think about. When is the best time to discuss this with you? When is the best time for us to discuss it? And finally, although I'd love to discuss it right now and listen to you, I don't think I can effectively listen to what you want to achieve in this conversation. Can we discuss this at another time? Professor Cal Newport is very particular about the value he places on his time. And rather than dealing with each individual and their specific question, request feedback experiment, he encourages each of his students or peers to attend a regular weekly meeting. In that meeting, everybody can bring their request or their question along. He does this for three very specific reasons. 1. he has a defined time and more importantly, a defined process for dealing with these random rants, as you call them, Shaney, or the feedback or any of the other issues he's dealing with. He's placing them in space, time, and context where he can arrive with his listening batteries fully charged. 2. he creates the environment where others can participate. Others can listen to the range of questions that Professor Newport is asked, as well as listening to the way he thinks about answering these questions. 3. he thinks about his time being multiplied in a group context with many of the participants either self-solving when hearing others' answers, resolving their question with other participants, helping them in doing so. Newport is building a culture of mutual support. He's making himself independent of the process, and ultimately Newport explains how he would approach thinking about the issue rather than his recommendation to the other person or group about how to solve the issue. Shaney, one of the things I invite you to think about is if you feel like you need to fix, give them a simple framework to think it through rather than giving them an answer. In adopting this approach, Newport creates a sustainable listening process ensuring his listening batteries are fully charged before arriving at this regular meeting, whether it's face to face or virtual. Shaney, back in episode 61, when I discussed this issue with Professor Stefan Van der Stigchel from Utrecht University, he's written multiple books on the importance of attention. He reflected on his more direct approach when students or peers approached him with a question.   Stefan Van der Stigchel: People come into my room when I'm on my work quite often to ask me questions or to talk about a certain experiment. And of course, when you're in your working environment, they're things are not always positive, right? What I've tried to learn is that communicate to, if people enter my room to say, this is not the right moment. I cannot listen to you. My mind is not open, my working memory is full, I'm worrying about something. And I've started to realize that people actually appreciate that if you say it in the past, there are too many occasions in which I was claiming to be listening and they ask me questions and I just noticed my mind is somewhere else. My mind wandering about the meeting before, and then I simply have to admit that I have no idea what they're talking about. And that's quite embarrassing and it's frustrating what I've learned from my peers that there are people who can acknowledge that they can acknowledge if somebody walks into the room, ask them a scientific question, please, not now. It's good to have a culture and in a work environment when you can admit that although I might be looking at you right now, I am honestly not listening. And this is not due to you. You're very interesting and you're probably a very interesting question. But what's happening to me right now is that my mind is wandering, and I'm not ready to receive your information. Again, my environment, people have to learn that's a possibility and that they can come back at a later time, but it's not something personal. Previously what happened to me is that I was sort of almost afraid to tell the other person because I was afraid that they were going to take it personally, right? That you are not interesting to me. And I try to make sure that it's not about them, but it's simply that the current situation is for some reason not appropriate.   Oscar Trimboli: Shaney, when thinking about the WHEN of listening, the most generous thing, the most sustainable outcome for you, and the person asking the question, the rant, the person wanting to bounce something off you. The most generous thing I think you can do is NOT listen. When you're listening, batteries are drained when they're moving from yellow to red or from red to black. It doesn't help them, you or the organization you lead by listening, transactionally, listening superficially, bouncing between level one and maybe level two, listening for symptoms rather than moving between level two, three and four and listening for systemic implications. Listening is a skill, it's a practice, it's a process and ultimately a way to impact systemic change in a sustainable way for the organization you'd lead. As I mentioned earlier on, Shaney, the question you pose is a universal leadership issue. It's a common question my clients ask me. This is an interview with Katie Burke, who is the leader of people and culture at HubSpot, an organization where she's responsible for 6,000 employees globally. In this interview with Shane Metcalf, Chief People Officer for 15Five an employee engagement software company from June 21, it was called Reviving the Art of Listening with HubSpot's Katie Burke. Listen carefully as Katie describes how she manages her energy to make a bigger impact with her listening. Notice how she conserves her listening batteries and shares the difficult and draining parts of listening with other leaders and members of her team.   Katie Burke: In my own journey on this front, I think a few things that have really worked for me, I got some really tough feedback my first few years as CPO that I was distracted and I was, and it was because I was trying to be everywhere at once and be all things to all people. And so the biggest tack for listening that I know is I say NO to almost everything, including I don't get a ton of energy from doing one-on-one coffee chats with people. I've just learned over the years. I feel like I'm saying the same thing over and over again. And also just I got emotionally worn down. It was just tiring. And so I don't do our new hire welcome as a group anymore because it just felt a little tiring. And then I don't do a ton of coffee chats both internally and externally. And the reason I don't do that is not because I don't enjoy doing that occasionally, it was because it was starting to really interfere with my ability to listen and be a great leader for my team. Great listening actually starts with being intentional around what you say no to. So you can be present for the people in your org and be the best leader possible when you're there.   Shane Metcalf: It's so interesting around our own energy management, our own state is going to dictate are we able to listen? Especially HR is often the punching bag in an organization because HR people, we are the recipient of so much feedback, positive and negative, humans get flooded with emotion. When we're in a fight or flight state, there's a physiological change that happens in our ears and we actually stop listening. What I'm hearing from you is you needed to set boundaries and create the experience for you to do work that energizes you so that you could actually listen.   Katie Burke: I personally think there should be much more discussion for CHROs, for HR business partners, for anyone who bears the emotional breadth of an organization, of talking about how I think people talk a lot about self-care and break and rest. Those are all great, but don't get to the core fix. And I think what I had to learn is I have to actually just be really disciplined around my schedule because it creates space for me to do the things that I know make me a better listener. And for me, that's getting outside once a day, getting my run in the morning. I'm a much better person, leader, manager, you name it. If I get outside and get a workout in. And then the other thing is just being intentional around what gives you energy and being honest about that. I grew up very much a people pleaser. It was a really hard habit for me to break, and I don't think people love that. It's my habit. I've had to get really comfortable with the fact that it is the only thing that allows me to keep listening, to HubSpotters and being a good leader for my team.   Shane Metcalf: It's a worthwhile process for all of us to check in. Am I actually in a state where I can listen? Because I've gone through this, I've gone through periods where I'm like, I don't want to hear any more feedback. I'm sick of it. People just complain. We're never going to make people happy. I'm in the pretty negative state and then I have no receptivity to actually listen to what my people are saying and anything they say will probably be viewed through that lens of I don't want to hear it.   Katie Burke: Agreed. I've also just had to say no. There are times when I think taking a meeting does you want to listen to someone. If you're not, there is actually a bad use of both of your time. And so one of the things I've said to some people is. Hey, I'm actually not in a great spot to really have the conversation I think we need to have, and so I need to wait until tomorrow. I need to wait until I'm in a better spot or I think someone on my team is better suited to have this conversation given that they can really understand and empathize where you are because I think when people are in an acute state, they need someone to listen to them a 100%. I need to be honest if you're not there. The other thing is just that's where I come back to you're not going to make everyone happy. I used to hold myself to a really high bar. I wanted to think that everyone who, if we had a tough meeting to listen to people that everyone would leave saying like, "Wow, our people operations team is great." What I've started doing is now leaving those meetings where the goal is just to make people feel heard, not to make them feel better, just to make them feel heard. That takes some of the pressure off because the other thing is I'm a bias for action person. I tend to lean into how do we solve things? It takes the pressure off to solve it because my only job there is to be present to what they're feeling.   Oscar Trimboli: Shaney, the most impactful, sustainable, and generous listening could be when you choose NOT to listen in that moment, reacting and trying to fight the urge to fix, kind of showing up like the shrewd listening villa from our listening quiz, becoming conscious that your ego wants to fix, solve, and answer. It's great in the moment, but it doesn't drive systemic change. Create a phrase that works for you. The four A's at this point, ask, acknowledge, assess, and agree. Ask what would make this a good conversation or outcome? Acknowledge their point and issue or even question, or problem Assess when is the most effective time for a sustainable, impactful discussion? Agree, when or who to meet with to progress it. Shaney, we've covered the what and when. I just want to quickly talk to you about how and who. These additional categories of questions are really useful when the conversation happens. First, let's talk about HOW. How would you like to discuss it? How will we allocate our time exploring the past and the future? How long have you been thinking about this? How will we know if we've made progress? Let's move on to the WHO Who else noticed this issue originally? Who else does it impact? and Who needs to be involved in discussing or resolving it? Shaney, to make this very practical, very pragmatic, and actionable for you. My go-to question for the random rant, the curious question, or the feisty feedback, What would make this a good conversation for you? They will either tell you they want to have a rant with no outcome, or they may request you to be their thinking partner, or more likely than not, they'll try and put the problem-solving monkey back on your back. At this point, Shaney, notice the pattern in their questions three or more of the same kinds of questions. You're probably dealing with a systemic issue, and I speculate you probably can't solve it alone, or at least in the pair that are discussing the problem. Define an allocated time on a regular basis for you to triage all of these kinds of discussions into one context where your listening batteries are fully charged. As Katie mentioned, sometimes people just want you to hear them out rather than fix, especially when you don't have the listening batteries available to listen and fix in the moment. Finally, every conversation doesn't and can't be a process of deep listening. You can't always deeply listen. You need to be flexible and adjust accordingly in the situation. Sometimes just being present and allowing them to be heard will be enough. This makes your listening light and easy and it doesn't drain your listening batteries. A quick reminder, your role as a listener is not to comprehend everything the speaker says. It's your role to help the speaker better understand what and how they're thinking about an issue and ultimately help them to understand what they mean and where they want to progress. Shaney, thanks for the brilliant question. G'day. It's Oscar. This podcast episode is an experiment in a few parts and one of the things that's happened in between the time Shaney sent me the question, I recorded the responses that I sent it back to her in draft format to ask her for a few reflections. I gave her four questions to ponder. Shaney listened to what I sent her and shared it with her team, and I've asked her to reflect on four questions. Also, in between that time I have been completely flat on my back with a virus for seven days, so my voice is probably sounding a little different. What you'll hear next is Shaney reflecting back on the questions I posed to her. Let me know what was most helpful in what I've explored.   Shaney: I don't need to fix, solve, or answer anything when I'm listening to people. I just need to make sure that people are heard. When I played it for my team, they really reacted positively to the concept of a listening battery and also to the idea that not every conversation can or should be a process of deep listening.   Oscar Trimboli: Which one of these will you experiment with? Which one will be easy for you to implement? and What will be sustainable in the context in which you leave?   Shaney: I will definitely be trying to remember not to go into conversations with the intent to solve anything. This will be very hard for me as I have a lifetime habit of doing just that. I think that this is very important and as a leader, I really need to try to help the people that I'm talking to find ways to solve their own problems instead of trying to solve them for them. People take more ownership of decisions and outcomes when they come to their own conclusions, so I'd like to learn more about how I can suppress my urge to fix things. I need to do a better job of listening to ensure that my colleagues are heard and that they're supported in finding solutions that work for themselves in their own context rather than just me giving advice to them that may or may not work because I may or may not have fully accounted for the context that they're working in. In my team, we talked about how saying no can be quite difficult in our context as one of our goals is to be approachable and available to the students, parents, and staff members at our school. We talked about how we can conserve our batteries by acknowledging the person and their query and actively deciding whether or not this is the best time to have the conversation. We think that can work well with students and parents, but we're still not sure how to say no in a compassionate way that doesn't make our colleagues feel like they're being ignored or rebuffed when they approach us to talk about something that may be, for example, personal or professional. The when is difficult for us. It's pretty difficult for some of my colleagues to have control over when their conversations happen with their colleagues. They can set appointments for students and parents, but conversations with colleagues happen all the time. Two of the colleagues that were in the meeting with me have an office that is in a rather public area, so people walk by and talk to them all the time, and that can be really tiring and they can often get involved in conversations about both professional topics and personal topics, and they mentioned that it can be tiring to switch back and forth between the professional and the personal conversations. We decided as a team that we might experiment with having a set time in our meetings where our colleagues can bring up the professional issues that have come up through the week. This could be one way to say, not now kindly, at least when the issue is professional, by acknowledging the issue and saying, let's talk about it at the next meeting. What would be easy to implement? It would be relatively easy to implement the idea of having a pre-conversation with the person we're speaking with to determine what would make the conversation a success. It could even happen during or after the conversation, or it could be something that we try to remember to ask ourselves as we enter into various conversations throughout the day, And finally, what would be sustainable in the context that we lead? In my context, it's sustainable for me to become more conscious of how my ego is reacting to whatever is being said and to remember to have an awareness of both the state of my listening batteries and that I can choose not to listen deeply at that moment if that is the more considerate and humane response because my batteries are particularly low at that moment. Oscar, I can't believe you made an entire podcast for me and my question. I loved every second of it. I sincerely feel that all of it was useful and productive. You really listened to my question. You heard it and you understood the heart behind the words.   Oscar Trimboli: If you like Shaney, have a question about listening in the workplace or you'd like me to pose a few questions or reflections or framework rather than just answering your question, podcast@oscartrimboli.com. And if you don't have a question yet, you learn something from the question Shaney posed today and possibly hers or her team's reflection, email me podcast@oscartrimboli.com Let me know what was useful in this episode, the format, the interaction, the questions rather than the answers, and what possibly is transferable and useful into your workplace. I'm Oscar Trimboli and along with the Deep Listening Ambassadors, we're on a quest to create a 100 million Deep Listeners in the workplace and you've given us the greatest gift of all. You've listened to us. Thanks for listening. Shaney : Hi Oscar, it's taken a while, but over the past couple of days, I've been able to catch myself in conversations and work on directing my listening The first step -- self-awareness is so hard, but so crucial as you can't take any other steps until you're actually aware that you're in a situation where you need to test out your new conscious listening paradigm. In at least three conversations over the past two days, I've been able to get to that level of self-awareness that allows me to pause and remind myself not to try to solve any problems for anyone else, and instead try to ask myself what would make this conversation a success. This is revolutionary, the whole flavor of conversations changes. I'm able to relax and actually listen to the person if I don't have to feel the pressure of solving anything. Conversations are also shorter because people feel heard more quickly and are okay with moving on, so I'm ever so grateful to you and your podcast for opening up my eyes to this whole new world.

In this episode of the HubHeroes podcast, we launch the conversation by talking about "starting with (Your) why". We chat about goals, KPIs, leadership, and what all that means when starting with the HubSpot software and the Inbound strategy.TRANSCRIPT OF THE SHOW:George B. Thomas (01:10):All right. Hub Heroes. That's right. We are here and we are ready. I'm super excited to be here on what we might call launch day of the league of extraordinary inbound superheroes. The future is bright my friends, the future is bright. Why you might ask? Because we're here to help you do inbound. HubSpot, content sales, heck you name it better, or at least not alone. Now first, before we jump into the good stuff, the conversation of the day, what do I mean by "we"? Well, I'm not alone on this fantastic journey. I have two other superheroes by my side. So let's meet them first. First up Devyn Bellamy. Devyn, you didn't know this was coming, but why don't you let the Hub Heroes listeners know a little bit about you, who you are, what you do, and maybe some information that we might find shocking or unique?Devyn Bellamy (02:02):No, I didn't know that it was coming. And I also didn't know that that intro was coming. I'm not cool enough to be brought in by any of that, but glad to be here. For those of you guys who don't know me, my name is Devyn Bellamy. I work at HubSpot. I work in partner enablement. I deal with partners, solutions partners who basically help customers grow better. Before that I was in the partner program myself, I've done onboarding, I've done strategy, I've built out who knows how many portals built HubSpot, CMS websites, tons of fun. And let's see a fun fact about me. I used to teach Kung Fu. That's an interesting tidbit.George B. Thomas (02:43):There we go. All right, next up, joining us for the high-flying adventure is Mr. Max Cohen. Max why don't you let the hub hero listeners know a little bit about you, who you are, and what you do. Man, this one scares me even giving you this opportunity, but a little tidbit of information that we might find shocking or unique.Max Cohen (03:05):Hey everybody, my name is Max Cohen. I am currently a Solutions or Senior Solutions engineer. I just got a promotion over at HubSpot. I've been at HubSpot for around six, going on six and a half-ish years right now. Did a lot of stuff from customer onboarding to learning and development as a product trainer. And now I'm on our sales team and it's super fun because I get to have really awesome conversations with customers and reps about HubSpot and the possibilities and all that fun stuff.Max Cohen (03:33):And I also just create a lot of content around inbound, marketing, sales, HubSpot, things like that. You could find me on TikTok if you haven't already. Maybe not a lot of people in the LinkedIn and like HubSpot universe may not know about me that my life outside of like HubSpot and inbound beyond being a dad of two wonderful daughters is I've played and coached competitive paintball since I was 15 years old. That's like another big half of me that like, I don't really talk too much about on LinkedIn. Because I don't really think people care too much about it. That's kind of the other side of me. And now that the pandemic is finally, hopefully over, I'll be getting back into a little bit of that instead of just sitting behind this desk all the time.George B. Thomas (04:14):Oh, we might have to get some video clips of that. Here's the thing, listeners, I want you to know hopefully you heard all of the years of experience years with HubSpot, and the nerdiness that is coming through. By the way, I'm George B. Thomas. I have been doing inbound in HubSpot since 2012. I've been training, doing onboarding, implementing, well, listen, my office is orange. My mic is orange, on any given day, I'm wearing orange to say that I love HubSpot and the people that use HubSpot is probably an understatement. By the way, the weird thing about me is I love peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. So you can chew on that one for a little.Devyn Bellamy (04:53):How long have you been pregnant?George B. Thomas (04:56):Oh wow. There's probably a joke there, but we'll move on. Because listeners you may have stumbled onto this podcast. You may have clicked on the link in the socials, but did you know that you have your very own Hall of Justice? That's right. You can head over to thehubheroes.com at any point to catch up on future or historical episodes, depending on where in the timeline you are listening to this hero episode.George B. Thomas (05:21):Also over at thehubheroes.com, you'll be able to join the League of Heroes, suggest an episode, and even see all the podcast apps and listening locations we're broadcasting to. So head over to thehubheroes.com and get what you need. One last thing we need to mention for you the community before we get into the topic of starting with why you need to know this. You, my friends, have a special hero signal at your fingertips. Kind of like the bat signal, anywhere on the socials at any point in time, you can use the hashtag, #hubheropodcast and we're going to come running. All right, here we go. Let's get into the good stuff and start the conversation starting with why turning humans into heroes, Devyn, Max, where do you guys want to start with this conversation on starting with why.Max Cohen (06:13):A lot of this kind of stems from why we wanted to get together and like do this podcast in the first place? Because the one thing that I think really kind of ties all of us together is in one way, shape or form, we were all HubSpot trainers or our HubSpot trainers, and still in some capacity HubSpot trainers, however, you want to shake that out. The most common question that I've gotten is, "All right, we have HubSpot, where do we begin?" Or we're starting to do inbound marketing. We're starting to do inbound sales. We're starting to do inbound in general. Where do we begin? And I think when we were talking about this a while ago and kind of coming up with like our first topics and ideas for this show, we called this episode starting with why, I think, for like a reason for me and Devyn and George, I want to hear like your takes on this too.Max Cohen (06:59):Five years ago, while HubSpot was kind of turning into a CRM or morphing into a CRM and it was still mostly a marketing tool, I think it was a little more obvious the answer of why are you getting started with HubSpot? And that was really to do inbound marketing. This is back when like inbound was just marketing. We didn't think of it as this more like an amorphous larger sort of business, an all-encompassing business strategy that is now inbound.Max Cohen (07:24):So I think a while ago, the starting with why the conversation was probably a little bit more narrow. But now that inbound is a strategy, HubSpot as a product does a lot more than just focus on marketing. Whenever you're getting started with any of it, ask yourself, why. Why are we getting into the idea of doing inbound? Why are we using a tool like HubSpot is the most important question you have to answer because HubSpot is a giant blank canvas.Max Cohen (07:50):Inbound could do many different things for you. It can touch a lot of places in your business. But for me when it comes down to starting with the mind, it's like, why are you getting into either deploying the strategy or using this tool? Because from there that's where you can start to think about like, "Hey, what are our first moves? What are our first steps? What are the things we want to think about when it comes to reporting? What are the problems we want to be able to solve for our business?" All that. And like, that's just kind of the question that I'll like turn around on. I'm curious before we dive too deep into it Devyn, what have those conversations looked like for you in the past? What have you told people in terms of like where to begin, things like that?Devyn Bellamy (08:26):The thing that I always explain, you put it great. It's a big blank canvas. It's a tool. And it can do so many things, but the question is what do you need it to do? And that's the biggest thing that you need to identify first. The first step to using HubSpot is not even opening HubSpot. It's you don't even log into your portal. What you need to do is identify a strategy that you want to do. Well, first you need to identify a goal, identify an objective that comes from identifying problems. So I'm going backward here. You start with the problem. Then you create a goal and then you figure out how you're going to get to that goal. And then you take HubSpot, bend it to your will, and then use that to accomplish your goal.Devyn Bellamy (09:23):For instance, if your goal is more leads, we'll start with a very simple one, using your website to get more leads. All right, great. Now you want to think about how you're attracting the content that you're going to put in. Because HubSpot is a tool, not a magic wand. You can't just turn it on. And then all of a sudden, "Oh my goodness, I'm being inundated with people who want to talk to me." That's not how it works. What you got to do is you have to come up with the content ideas and strategies, compelling something. That makes people want to interact with you. That makes people think that "You know what, this person's amazing."Devyn Bellamy (10:07):And then what you do is you use that to create a path that people can then convert. There's a technical term. We like to call it the conversion path. That's what you want to use. And that's just like the marketing aspect. And then you talk about CRM and sales and how you can get that interdepartmental cooperation and kumbaya alignment and all that fun stuff. That's why you start with a why. How can I use HubSpot better? No. How can you attract people better? How can you be awesome out there? And then how can the tool work for you?George B. Thomas (10:42):And I want to jump in here because I think there's so much good happening in this conversation. And I want to even go like a step before this. And I really want to take a moment to empower the listeners who might be listening to this before they even get HubSpot, or they just got HubSpot, and empower them from the Lord Lack of knowledge of why the crap, somebody just bought this tool and said, now use it and said good luck.George B. Thomas (11:09):Because what I want to empower them with is the ability to say the question you should be asking the people that are in the C-suite, the people who purchased the tool that looked at you and said, "You are the implementer." You should turn and say, why? What are we trying to achieve? Just like Devyn and Max said, what is the problem? What are the hurdles? What are the goals? What is the roadmap? What can I actually line out and look at the future, and gain a vision for where I'm trying to go.George B. Thomas (11:37):Because then another piece of what you gentlemen said, bend it to your will, mold it. I want everybody to be educated on the fact that HubSpot is not "Paint by Numbers". It's a box of Play Dough. You can literally pull it out and mold it with things like custom objects, custom properties, and views that you can actually make dependent upon how your team needs to use them. And it's not just this out-of-the-box, SAS, silver bullet software. "We're winning. We paid thousands of dollars and now we're like, make it rain." No.Max Cohen (12:16):We turned on the lead faucet!George B. Thomas (12:18):Yeah, no. We turned on the lead [inaudible 00:12:18]. No, it literally is this thing of we've got this tool. We have to build a roadmap. We have to customize it to our needs and it all does come back to why. Now with that understanding and empowering and educating these folks on this, my question is what are. And again, we may start with marketing. We may start with sales. We may talk about service. We might just talk about rev ops, which talks about all of them. What are these foundational elements or items that you historically have seen as trainers around inbound and HubSpot that you're like buy all that is holy, get this in place? Or think of this thing.Max Cohen (12:53):The funny part that I think a lot of people don't even consider is like, no matter what part if we were to kind of like take the basic parts of the inbound strategy, attract engaged delight, let's look at the big three parts of the methodology. Depending on how your business, your organization, whatever you are, depending on how you're doing and where the biggest pain points are in that whole cycle, you might be starting at different places.Max Cohen (13:16):What a lot of people don't think about is like, okay, what do we do if we get really, really good at that one piece of the puzzle? What sort of like downstream problems does that cause? So for example someone could be thinking like, all right, we're thinking about like a track here. Let's turn on the content machine. Let's get really smart at thinking about who our buyer personas are. Let's get really smart about generating demand with content. And let's think about what people are actually searching for online when they have certain problems and-George B. Thomas (13:44):Preach it, brother. Preach it.Max Cohen (13:46):Let's pretend you get really, really good at just attracting people, and maybe you're setting up some conversion paths. I know there are plenty of people today that believe in completely un-gating everything. And I think within inbound, there's even an argument for that too, but that's neither here nor there. Let's say you go and you're just collecting a whole bunch of leads because you created a lot of great content. It's like, cool. Now what? Are you just going to send them over to sales? You're creating all these people that are coming and they want to gather all your content, but you don't have any sort of plan of taking them from someone who's just built up enough trust in you and giving you their information. And like now what you're just going to send them over to sales? Because you didn't really think about what was going to happen in the in-between.Max Cohen (14:23):You didn't really think about how you were going to begin to like engage them. Or the marketing to sales handoff or anything like that. There's always going to be some sort of physics involved if you do really good at this, what is that going to mean downstream? If your sales team becomes extremely efficient. Maybe you get the sales hub and they start being able to communicate with a much higher volume of people at a much faster rate. And they're having a lot of great conversations and because they're not spending a bunch of time on administrative BS, maybe that means they're closing more customers and they're creating a lot more customers. That's awesome. But if you don't have like the customer service or the customer support infrastructure in place behind that, well then that's going to get really ugly really quick.Max Cohen (15:06):All your new customers are going to go back to your salespeople. Because you don't have a CX org in place in order to be able to help them when those people have questions or you don't have something like a knowledge base, that's going to help people self serve. Not only do you got to say like, "Hey, but this is also what we want to do to get started." You also need to like, think a little bit about, it's like, "Hey, let's say this goes well." What's the downstream physics of that mean for us? And do we have the ability to like an answer or solve those problems as they come up? And I'm not saying think 3, 4, 5, 7 steps ahead. But just say like, "Hey, here's our first initiative. If we do well, what does that mean?" And maybe there aren't any problems.George B. Thomas (15:45):Maybe there are six or seven steps ahead, but at least two. And Devyn, I'm going to kick it over to you here in a hot second. But I want to unpack something that hit my brain in HubSpot, like in life, best-case scenario, worst-case scenario. Have a backup plan for both of those. Because sometimes your best-case scenario, if it's too much of best is all of a sudden, a lot of friction or force in the wrong direction. By the way, the reason I kicked in here real quick is I want the listeners to know. And you two to know that I've gone over to our massive library of ideas for episodes, and we added inbound physics, as well as I, added this one Max, because of something you said to gates or not to gate, that is the question. That'll be a future episode. So back to the conversation at hand, Devyn, what are your thoughts on kind of what Max is unpacking and the direction that we're going?Devyn Bellamy (16:36):I think one of the biggest friction points that people are going to... Not going to the... Every day people deal with when implementing any system is an unwillingness to change. And that's either from an organizational standpoint or from just an individual standpoint. It could be something you're willing to do. One of the biggest mistakes that I've seen people make is let's say they've been working with MailChimp for years and then they get handed HubSpot. What they try and do is make HubSpot work like MailChimp. And it's like, don't do that. Stop it. Or when we talk about the sales process, what we do is we do all of this cool stuff. And then we export everything to spreadsheets for the sale... Don't do that. What you have to be willing to do is to adopt an entirely new process, an entirely new way of doing things.Devyn Bellamy (17:39):And I'm not just talking about going from a stick shift to automatic. I'm talking about going from bus to boat, sailboat. It's a completely different experience. And you're going to find that it requires a different set of skills and a different mindset in order to accomplish what it is that you're trying to accomplish.Devyn Bellamy (17:58):But the second thing, you not only need to have a C-suite buy-in. You need to have everything come from the top down. If you're an individual contributor or even a mid-level manager, you are not going to be able to initiate the change required in order to be successful with your new tools, because you can't tell one of your coworkers, "Hey, you have to do this thing now."Devyn Bellamy (18:23):Because they're going to tell you a certain number of expletives that may or may not result in them getting reported to HR. But if it comes from the top down that, "Hey, this is what we're using. This is the process that this person's created and we're going to do." If you can give feedback on it on whether or not you see issues with it. Great. But if you just want to have a total complaint fest, go, go ahead and do that self-channel in slack where you can just talk, because we're not here for that. That's not conducive to growth.George B. Thomas (18:55):Yeah. I'm not down with that party brother.Devyn Bellamy (18:57):Yeah. But the biggest thing is that in all of these things when we talk about the why, is that you have to understand that if you were awesome already, you wouldn't be doing this. You wouldn't be implementing the new tools if you were already dope at generating leads or you were already getting a whole bunch of sales through the pipeline and being able to accurately forecast what you need to do. If you were able to completely service everyone that comes in. If your website can tell you about who's seeing what and when and how interested they are, if you are already doing all of that stuff, you wouldn't need this.George B. Thomas (19:32):Yeah. And Max, at some point, we're going to need you to create your evil laugh, as a sound that we can use in the podcast. Because here's the thing, I feel like Lord Lack struck again. Devyn, in that first section you were literally talking about the lack of innovation and the lack of change. The ability to somehow when it's the worst-case scenario be stuck in who you are and what you've been doing for the last five years, knowing that it's not working, which by the way is insanity.George B. Thomas (20:01):The other thing is too, that I want to unpack that second part and where my brain went. And what I heard is that yes, it has to come from the top-down, but I'm going to give you a little super-secret tip. You can be a leader without being a leader. Meaning you might be the person in the middle and you've been told to implement HubSpot.George B. Thomas (20:22):You can lead the leaders in what you need them to say to the people around you, below you, whatever. So it does come to the top, even though, think of it a little bit, not in a bad way as the [inaudible 00:20:36] of getting the buy-in, getting the verbiage, getting the things that you need to be successful, for your team to be successful. So don't get hung up on this, "Well, I'm just this." As soon as you hear yourself say just no, just nothing. You can be a leader, even though you might not be a leader. Where else does your mind go on this topic of starting with why, when it comes to inbound and HubSpot and all that good stuff.Max Cohen (21:00):I wanted to kind of like hop on that thread Devyn that you were talking about getting the buy-in from leadership to be able to make big changes like this because let's not bullshit around it. Going from a company that's doing completely outbound everything. Buying paid media and TV shows or commercials or ads in the newspaper or billboards and sending out physical mail and just cold calling everybody until all your sales reps burn out. Saying, "Hey, we're going to stop doing all those things that we've been doing for so long. And we're going to try this whole inbound thing."Max Cohen (21:35):I mean that's a very tricky conversation. If that initiative isn't coming from the top. But let's say you're a marketer. You're someone in sales and you realize that the current tactics are causing problems or stunting growth, or just making it really difficult for you to grow the business in the way that you want to.Max Cohen (21:53):How do you approach that conversation with those folks who are able to make those decisions? And I think the whole idea around like, starting with why is kind of pertinent here because you can start by saying like, why are the way we do things right now not working? Or why is the way we're doing things right now, not working? And kind of be able to call that out. I think that is either really easy or not so easy to kind of like identity in your organization. If you haven't educated yourself in the other ways of doing things. And when I'm saying the other ways of doing things, I'm talking more about inbound and demand generation and really leading with content and things like that versus what your company may have already been doing for so long.Max Cohen (22:35):And I think that could be a pretty daunting task for that marketer that's seen the light or that salesperson that's seen the light, being like, "Oh, these leads are kind of crappy or cold calling people all day kind of sucks. Or these people don't really come to me thinking that we can solve a problem already. It's really hard."Max Cohen (22:51):I guess what would be your advice for that person, who's trying to drive that change management in terms of like getting themselves educated so they can either pitch the idea of change or get people on board with it before you even think about it... Because at the end of the day, it's not about buying a piece of software. It's not about buying HubSpot. It's about deciding that you're going to change the way that your marketing sales and service organization operates. How would you coach someone who's kind of feeling a little bit intimidated by a task like that? Like where would you tell them to start?George B. Thomas (23:26):First of all, I'm just jumping in here real quick, and then I'm going to kick it back to you Devyn for a second. But I have to say if when you purchase HubSpot, it doesn't change your ecosystem or destroy your echo chamber then you are probably not going to be headed in the right direction.Max Cohen (23:43):True.George B. Thomas (23:43):And if I could wave a magic inbound wand over everybody, I would make certifications and HubSpot Academy education mandatory. Either one on one, but even better as a group. Every Friday at 12:00 bring your fricking lunch. We're going to do this one hour of training because you need to know the methodology, the religion, then let's go amen of why the freak we're using this expensive... Oh, I'm sorry, HubSpot is not an expensive, but a very valuable tool and not just let it lay there on the shelf. So education is the key. It is the life chamber. It is the thing that will breathe oxygen into new ideas, new strategies, new things that you want to push forward as a company, I'll stop. Get off my soap box. Devyn, what are your thoughts?Devyn Bellamy (24:37):Well, I'm going to hop right back on my change management soap box, buddy. Here's the thing, getting people to do a thing that they are uncomfortable with. Getting people to get out of their comfort zone is annoying and it sucks. One of the things that are worked for me is getting someone else to come in, like an outsider, a consultant. And having them set the change because like the Christian says, Jesus wasn't even accepted at home. Why would you expect that you would be?Devyn Bellamy (25:05):The thing is that if you bring in someone else to work on it and to document and implement, and keyword document as a part of implementing this change, people can go back and refer to it. Then that helps. Even if you're the expert, even if you are the absolute go-getter, boss hog, when it comes to HubSpot, the fact that they will respect an outside before they respect yours, sometimes that's the case.Devyn Bellamy (25:33):But the other thing is just setting the expectation that everything is changing. Normally I'm all about parallel testing and gradual transition, but this is like changing from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right side of the road. You can't gradually change that. That's just something that one day, this is what we're going to switch over to, and this is how it's going to happen.Devyn Bellamy (26:00):And we're going to migrate all this data from the old thing to the new thing. And this is what it's going to do. If you can't handle that, regardless of how much of a rockstar you are within the organization, if you can't handle, there are going to be consequences and repercussions. And so you can lead with the carrot, but there's got to be some stick behind it. This is why I talk about getting buy-in from management and C-suite and then George hit it right on the head with managing up.Devyn Bellamy (26:29):You have to empower leadership to enable these changes because they don't know what they're doing. That's what they hired you for. If you can make these changes, it would be great. But the other cool thing about the systems is that you can set up and automate and then give a demonstration on why this is so cool and why this is going to make their lives so much easier and get them excited about the new change. Point out, "Hey, here's why you suck right now. And here's how you can stop sucking." And people will be excited about not sucking anymore, even if it means that they have to learn something new or do something different.George B. Thomas (27:07):Yeah. I love this. Max, I'm going to kick it back to you here in a second, but the idea... There are two things running through my head. This last point that you just made about the only way that where you can go is knowing where you're at and if where you're at is suck and what you want is a success. You have to know those two points to move forward.George B. Thomas (27:27):The other thing is, I want everybody to know, that this is why I am so excited about this podcast because ladies and gentlemen, I want you to realize we just had a Jesus reference, and a Dukes of hazard reference in the same clip from my man, Devyn Bellamy. It was the boss hog. And it's hard to be a prophet in your own town. I'm just super excited. Max, let's continue down this journey of why. Now for me, where I start to go is like, should we share why we got excited about inbound? Why do we decide to make it part of our lives, and why do we decide to train and implement it? Or if you want to take another direction, we totally can do that too.Max Cohen (28:11):What got me super excited about inbound, man, I'm like really trying to kind of go back and think about my experience as a sales rep at Apple, before I came here. We want to know how we got leads. When I was working at the Apple store as a business sales rep? When people came into the store to buy something. Could be a personal item, could be anything. If on their receipt, we saw that they had a business email, we would then try to reach out to them and call them. And that was excruciating.Max Cohen (28:42):And though the wild thing that I noticed was when we would do workshops, where we would actually talk about educated topics around how to use Apple products in your business, we would one get people showing up that actually cared. And then two show people that we knew what we were talking about and we could be trusted advisors.Max Cohen (29:04):And all of the leads I got from those ended up turning into great relationships. Who would've thought? And that kind of like proved to me how important it is to build trust with your marketing or whatever emotion you go through to capture leads, generate demand, and get interested. I know those are different things, but they're also very closely related.Max Cohen (29:23):I think that the big thing too, is just I hated cold calling so much. I just thought cold calling was just a weird thing to do. At the end of the day, if you think about the physics of what's happening there, it's you calling someone up, not because you care about their wellbeing or helping them, you just want to sell something. And that just didn't sit well with me. Do you know what I mean? I always thought there has to be a better way of generating folks who are interested in talking to salespeople in a way that doesn't totally suck.Max Cohen (29:54):And to me when I finally started learning about what inbound really was, and that was really only when I started working at HubSpot, I had gotten inbound certified when I was in college. And that's when I first heard about inbound. But the way that I understood it at the beginning was that, oh, it's just how you use social media, which I was completely wrong about. But what I really like understood is, hey, content's what drives everything. It's all about building trust through the content you produce and really doing all the legwork to build trust and generate demand for your product before someone even talks to a sales rep. That to me just felt like a much more human, wholesome way of marketing. Because even if people aren't buying stuff from you, you're still putting like good out there into the universe because there are plenty of people that can take your advice.Max Cohen (30:39):Things, you talk about the content you create and go out and solve the problems that they have on their own. And that's awesome if you do that, it's tactically awesome for a number of different reasons, which I'm sure we'll kind of dive into more depth as we kind of continue this series. That's what got me super stoked about it. Is that you could do marketing in a way that had a good benefit, not only for your customer but also for your other internal customers your sales reps, and stuff. You could send people to them that was actually excited to talk to them. Or actually wanted to talk to them or already had a certain amount of trust going into that relationship. And I've been a sales rep and a non-inbound situation. And no one likes that. That's kind of what got me jazzed up about it at the beginning.Devyn Bellamy (31:18):For me, long story short, it helped me make a lot of people's money and it in turn made me a lot of money. For me what happened was I discovered HubSpot by accident. I was doing a website redesign for the company I was working for and entry-level marketer, even though I have way above entry-level skills, having no degree in coming off of over a decade in radio, people are going to treat you like you don't know what you're talking about. And I didn't sound intelligent at all. When I talked about marketing, I would just try and explain concepts that I had reversed engineered from these multibillion-dollar organizations like McDonald's. I wouldn't have given me money. What ended up happening is the CEO asked me to create the website and I asked him what websites he likes.Devyn Bellamy (32:09):He's like, "HubSpot has a really cool-looking website." I'm like, all right. And I went and checked out websites and I'm like, wow, that is cool. But then I started looking at the content. I'm like, wow, that is cool. And then I got the inbound certification and got invited to a Grow With HubSpot event in Philly and met James Stone, who is still to this day one of my favorite HubSpotters. I really fell in love with the people first.Devyn Bellamy (32:35):And then they actually... He and Andrew Fargnoli actually helped me create a marketing deck that explained financially why we suck and why we could be better in marketing. And it worked. And so not only was I able to speak intelligently, thanks to HubSpot Academy, but I was able to get C-suite buy-in thanks to these awesome hub spotters. And then not only that, but I was able to follow through and knock it out of the park.Devyn Bellamy (33:03):With their help, I was able to set KPIs and identify our goals could be. And then we knocked them out of the park in the first quarter, just off of an ebook campaign because it was killer content. My favorite thing was getting promoted past my boss and becoming his boss just off of using HubSpot effectively. And working on the system after identifying the goals, it was magical. That was like six years ago, almost seven years ago. And I've kind of been writing the HubSpot, orange rocket ever since. And it's been amazing as HubSpot's grown, as the sales tools launched, as the business model has completely changed and the hubs have completely changed, I've grown with it now. My life is pretty dope. I get to buy talking Deadpool heads and stuff like that.George B. Thomas (33:59):I love it. And here's the thing earlier I got really excited about education and you'll see why I get excited about education. Why it really is a passion point. Why I believe I'll be a HubSpot trainer until the day I die is because education is key. And honestly, I tell people, I think HubSpot found me, I didn't find HubSpot. And in 2012 HubSpot Academy did this thing called the world's largest webinar. Our social media guy, small agency, four people, Madison, Ohio. Our social media guy comes running in, he says, "Hey, there's this company called HubSpot. They're doing this thing called the world's largest webinar." We're like, "Ooh, what?" He's like, "I think we should watch it." So we go out to the conference table, we got it on the big screen TV. We're watching the webinar and we hear, I believe it was Mark Kilens at this point, say, "We're going to give away 10 free tickets to the top 5% of tweeters."George B. Thomas (34:52):And John, our social media guy, his fingers are on fire. We're just tearing it up. Zach and I are just sitting back like okay, let's check this out. Long story short, we win two tickets. Zach and I go to Boston for the first time. I hear Gary Vaynerchuk speak. By the way, ladies and gentlemen, before this, I was a designer-developer, six-pack and a pizza come in and a website comes out the other side. Don't talk to me, leave me alone.George B. Thomas (35:18):2012, I go, "I want to be a marketer when I grow up." And I'm like, I know nothing about marketing. We come back September 2012, we get HubSpot for the agency. I start attending webinars. I get one certification. One becomes three, three becomes six, six becomes 12, 12 becomes 21, and 21 becomes 38. HubSpot Academy certification is literally multiple, probably college degrees based on HubSpot Academy education.George B. Thomas (35:47):It ends up enabling me to get a job in the sales line, which then enables me to become a professional speaker, which then enables me to onboard companies that if you asked me in 2012, will you ever talk to employees of these types of companies? I'd be like, no. But I've been able to do that because of education. And this is why when I said a while ago, I would make education mandatory because if you can learn what you don't know to implement what you need, your future will be bright.George B. Thomas (36:16):I need you to rewind that part of the podcast because there's a key to life and a key to hub spot and a key to inbound in that last 15 seconds. Now here, I'm going to tie it all together. The reason I fell in love, why with this whole journey was because in 2012 HubSpot was preaching don't call me a customer. I'm a human. The reason why your company has HubSpot, the reason, the way that you should focus on your why. The reason, why you should go past your hurdles and head towards your aspirations is because of the humans that you are serving. The humans that you are helping pass their hurdles with the content and the strategy and the sales that yes at the end of the day ends up being revenue. But in reality, was life-changing to those people around you.Devyn Bellamy (37:10):Yeah. What he said, all of that. That's the thing I think HubSpot Academy is one of the most game-changing things people can bring into their lives. It's constantly expanding. I mean, even beyond the certifications, the gems that are in just the straight courses. If you just take the time, I remember I spent a week. It was like over the course of a week or two weeks, I got every HubSpot certification that became available.Devyn Bellamy (37:39):And I came out of the other side of that, a completely different marketer. When I would go to inbound every year and I would go to the breakout session. I literally just did a speaking engagement at a conference in Wisconsin. Shout out to everybody at Experience Inbound. I did a breakout on email deliverability and everything that I spoke about, everything I said, I either learned through HubSpot academy or I picked it up from different years of going to inbound. It's like people you said, I never... Five, or six years ago I never would've imagined giving a talk to professionals about email deliverability. Being the guy on the stage, talking about email deliverability. And just having that... I went to college for a music education. This is not at all how I pictured my life being. And if you do nothing else, get on academy.hubspot.com.Max Cohen (38:40):If this is the last episode of the podcast you listen to. The next thing you should do is just spend your time at HubSpot Academy. And here's the other thing I think we hear a lot lately just with how everything is crazy with the economy and crazy with the job market, all this stuff, you hear a lot of people talking about the idea of like breaking into tech. I think there's also this concept of like breaking into the HubSpot universe. HubSpot Academy, which by the way is free, for anyone listening to this that isn't familiar with HubSpot academy yet all of this educational content, lessons, tracks, courses, and certifications are free. Free, free, free, free, free.Devyn Bellamy (39:15):Free. All the way free.George B. Thomas (39:17):Did you say they're free?Max Cohen (39:19):They're free.George B. Thomas (39:20):They're free right?Max Cohen (39:21):They don't cost currency. They're free. What's wild is sure, you work at your company. You want to learn more about inbound. It's not just a HubSpot product. Yes, you can go in there and you can get certified on the product. But the majority of the stuff in there is all about strategy, which is product agnostic. Let's say you want to break into the HubSpot universe. That's a great way to get started. But then something to keep in mind. This is great. If you want to work at a company that's using HubSpot or just deploying inbound. If you want to work at a HubSpot partner or agency or some kind of company like that. Because there is lots of folks in there that are helping HubSpot customers, deploying HubSpot, running inbound marketing campaigns, managing their entire portal and their whole setup, and everything.Max Cohen (40:09):And hey, maybe also you could be a freelancer. You could start your own agency or you could even come work for a HubSpot one day like Devyn's doing now as well. And he started with HubSpot Academy. There is this massive ecosystem and universe surrounding this whole HubSpot thing for folks who are looking for a career change, and you don't need to go back to college to do this. You don't need to go to college if you haven't gone to college before to do this.Max Cohen (40:39):All of the education that you need to break into this wonderful community, massive universe. And there's this whole idea of the rise of the HubSpot admin now. That's becoming a thing. It's all just kind of sitting there right in front of you with this HubSpot Academy. So like don't sleep on that. Go check that out. Because if you're listening to this podcast, because maybe you just got put in charge of this HubSpot thing, or you just bought HubSpot recently and you're realizing maybe it's a little bit more difficult than I anticipated Academy is the greatest place for you to start.Max Cohen (41:11):I promise you if you're looking at HubSpot right now and you're looking up at the navigation and you're just like, "Wow, that's a lot of words. That's a lot of tools. That's a lot of stuff." If you just go get your inbound certification, all of it will start to make sense. The thing that a lot of people don't put together, especially folks that are evaluating HubSpot for the first time, or new to the community, new to the product or the strategy, whatever, is that there are two things. There's an inbound strategy. And then there is the HubSpot product.Devyn Bellamy (41:43):Yes.Max Cohen (41:42):The HubSpot product is built to deploy the inbound strategy. You could do the inbound strategy without HubSpot. Is it a pain in the butt because it involves tons of different tools and cobbling together a whole bunch of systems in order to do it? Yes, it's a pain in the butt, but that's what HubSpot solves. But again, every single part of HubSpot and how it's all built together to be one piece of software that does all of this stuff, it's all meant to kind of support this inbound methodology, flywheel, attract, engage, and delight, whatever you want to call it. It's built to support that inbound strategy, the two work best together.Devyn Bellamy (42:14):The last thing, just to tie together this whole episode is the hardest thing about using HubSpot or any tool for that matter is the strategy. The hardest thing about any of it is the content, the strategy is the why.Max Cohen (42:32):Yep.Devyn Bellamy (42:32):If you can figure out a why and then create a plan to solve those problems. That you are diving into at that point, the HubSpot user interface becomes extremely simple. Because there are so many different moving parts to HubSpot you might not ever use. There are a lot of tools in HubSpot that are available that may not be applicable to the goal that you're trying to solve. And that's okay. Everything within it is exceedingly powerful. The tools that you are going to use, even if you just use a fraction of the Hub that you got in order to accomplish the goal that you've set, you're going to see remarkable benefits.Devyn Bellamy (43:21):And I'm not just saying that because I bleed orange. I'm saying that because it's made me a lot of money over the years doing that. Being able to know the strategy the way I do, being able to be a strategist, being able to come up with a plan for success, all across the organizations, not just in marketing. That is what allows me to look at HubSpot and say, "Okay, I'm going to take this tool. I'm going to take this tool. I'm going to take this tool, and take this tool. I'm going to put together all of this and do something dope." And then people are going to look at it. I'm going to regenerate reports. The C-suite's going to love me. And then I'm going to get a pay raise.George B. Thomas (43:58):Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, the one thing I'm going to say to end this episode, whether it be HubSpot Academy, whether it be listening to future episodes of this podcast in your mind, simply put this. 1% better each and every day. Don't get overwhelmed by the massive wall, but enjoy the journey along though way. 

The global pandemic that has stretched into its third year has seen not just a boom in digital sales but has ushered with it a change in how modern sellers can attract and engage with modern buyers. Traditional “spray and pray” methods that once worked, no longer have the same success rate, which has forced sales leaders to employ a new set of selling techniques. What exactly will work in 2022 for prospecting and building sales pipeline is the main topic of discussion I had with sales genius, Dan Tyre, in this episode of the Modern Selling Podcast. Dan Tyre, Director at HubSpot is one of the leading inbound marketing and sales experts on the planet. As a member of the original team in May of 2007, Dan has led the recruiting, training, and growth of HubSpot's sales team with vigor. Before HubSpot, Dan worked at four other startups of note: Businessland, as Area Director; ALI Technologies, as Founder & CEO; CelebraTech, as Co-Founder and VP of Sales; and Groove Networks, as Regional Manager. At HubSpot, Dan has pioneered the concept of alignment between sales and marketing known as "Smarketing," a core tenet of inbound marketing now followed by thousands of companies around the world. He's been instrumental in the creation and growth of several sales teams that are now thriving hives of activity at HubSpot. Dan continues to inspire and teach HubSpotters as a sales trainer, as a creator of the HubSpot Leadership program, as a blogger on the HubSpot blog. Dan's infectious high energy, especially when he talks about ‘marketing' is why I am so excited to welcome him as a guest on the Modern Selling Podcast. Download the full episode and get a taste of Dan's genius as he discusses the top sales strategies to use in 2022 to crush prospecting and better convert leads into loyal customers. How has Sales changed since 2020? I've seen a rapid evolution, here at Vengreso, with more and more companies seeking out our digital sales training courses such as Modern Sales Mastery for Teams. However, I wanted to hear Dan's insights and better understand the shifts he's seen happening and what he anticipates to come next in the world of sales. Dan shares, “I've read that over 1M sales jobs will disappear in the next 18 months. With the Great Resignation, the way that companies do business will have to change. Sales are no exception to this either. So, it's a must now than ever before to know how to be a better salesperson in 2022.” With my own sales teams, I've placed a heavy emphasis on making our sales calls, even if they are through Zoom, as interactive and engaging as possible. Modern buyers are much more sophisticated and skeptical than before, so finding ways to connect digitally with leads is critical to the success of the modern seller. Dan agrees, “Today we have to contend with the empowered buyer. This is someone who has done their research before they ever talk to a salesperson. They're going to know more about the basics of what they're looking to buy than they've ever had before and salespeople have to be ready to field in-depth questions.” Listen in to the conversation to hear what free sales resources Dan suggests that sales leaders have their teams complete to be successful in 2022. How to Win with Inbound Sales When it comes to finding data-driven ways to improve the sales process, Dan is the leading expert on what works and what will work well into the future. So, I asked him to share his expertise and insights on how sales teams can master the inbound sales process. Dan's unique six characteristics of a winning sales process is something we all should study and look to implement as soon as possible: Treat people like human beings. According to Dan, the emphasis has to be on connecting with your prospect, instead of looking to pitch them to buy. Build rapport, to establish trust first and foremost. Look to help, not sell. As I always say, selling is the art of helping – and Dan agrees. As sales professionals, we have to look to provide a solution as opposed to selling a product or service. Focus beats bandwidth. Traditionally, sales teams would take a ‘spray and pray' approach – going after volume in leads, instead of the quality of leads. Dan suggests honing in on one particular buyer persona and mastering selling to them first. Solve a problem. As with #2, when sales teams can offer solutions to their customers' problems, then they'll get much farther in their sales outreach attempts. Customer experience is the only sustainable advantage. Dan explains that the average company has 47 competitors in the marketplace. So chances are very good that someone offers the exact same service or product that you do. The difference for leads often comes down to the customer experience.  Manage sales data. This is where the role of Revenue Operations is so important. To learn more about this and AI-driven sales enablement, check out my podcast with Howard Brown. Dan provides a host of other tips and strategies you won't want to miss. Tune into the full episode to hear his sales advice and what you should be doing now to stand out in your sales conversations. Strategies for Prospecting in 2022 While we were on the discussion of what's likely to work in the future, I wanted Dan to share his perspective on prospecting. I know at Vengreso, over the past four years when we surveyed sales professionals, prospecting has continually been ranked as the hardest part of the sales cycle. In fact, out of 1,295 sales reps polled in November 2021, 69% of them said that prospecting was the most time-consuming step. So, I was curious to hear Dan's advice based on his 40+ years of sales experience. The guidance he shared is very similar to what I teach our new sales reps in their onboarding training. Dan suggests that when prospecting, especially during cold calling to: Always stand up and smile – this helps you bring high energy and engagement to the call. Thank the prospect for answering the phone – how often are we thanked for picking up the phone? Dan says that this alone is a game-changer for sales reps. Introduce yourself and pause to hear their response – prospecting is your first chance to have a conversation with the hopes of building a relationship with your lead. There's no better way to do this than to give your prospect plenty of opportunities to speak (without you launching into a full-blown sales pitch). Be sure to download this episode of the Modern Selling Podcast to learn more about the Sales Flywheel and why it can be a key differentiator for your sales teams in 2022.

The pandemic challenged us to rethink how we work, specifically how we communicate. With a surplus of messages across a variety of tools, it can feel impossible to be productive. Hear from two HubSpotters on how they leverage their communication strategies to maximize their productivity in a hybrid world.

Grow for Good™ introduces listeners to business leaders who have grown their companies by doing good things. Today's featured guest is CEO + Co-Founder of HubSpot, Brian Halligan. HubSpot is unique in many ways. Not only is it an accomplished marketing, sales and service platform, but it boasts a culture that its employees (affectionally dubbed HubSpotters) value immensely—in fact, they value it enough to have voted it the #1 Best Place to Work in 2020 by Glassdoor. And not only are they the Best Place to Work, but Halligan is regularly voted among the Glassdoor Top 100 CEOs by employees. Halligan joins us on this episode to break down how HubSpot has created and maintained a healthy culture of putting employees first, a considerable accomplishment considering years of growth and scale. You can find Brian Halligan on Twitter and LinkedIn. -- If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe, share with your friends and rate and review on Apple Podcasts and Podchaser. If you have any questions or suggestion for future guests, send an email to growforgood@moreycreative.com. Find Morey Creative Studios on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Subscribe to our blog here.     See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

As Solutions Partners, there are several HubSpotters that we don't get to interact with very often, direct reps being one. HubSpot direct reps are the salespeople for HubSpot, and they sell to businesses leveraging HubSpot that don't need/want an agency. There are instances of overlap between the Solutions Partner and the direct rep, and we've always been curious as to what that entails, and how as a Solutions Partner, we can better utilize direct reps. After all, we're all playing on the same team. Caitlin Rose, Small Business direct rep, and David Bernstein, Mid-market direct rep, join us to provide a look into the role of the direct rep—from heir training, sales processes, dialogue with customers and how that all fits into their relationships with Solutions Partners. You can find Caitlin Rose on LinkedIn, and her celebrity dog Wyatt on Instagram. You can find David Bernstein on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe, share with your friends and rate and review on Apple Podcasts and Podchaser. If you have a question or suggestion for future episodes, send an email to inbound@moreycreative.com. Don't forget to subscribe to the 'Inbound & Down' Question of the Day for a daily email containing a multiple-choice question on topics such as Inbound, SEO, design, agency life, and more! Subscribe to News Beat wherever you get your podcasts to be notified when future episodes drop. This episode is sponsored by HubSearch. Learn more online at hubsearch.com/podcast

Allyship is a verb, not a noun. Listen as three passionate HubSpotters discuss the definition of allyship and the impact it has on inclusive workplaces. Like Rome, allyship isn’t built in a day, but there are actions we can all take to start making progress now.

It's finally time for #INBOUND19 and we are getting all kinds of fired up. But first, we've got some great chatbot updates, and some certified HubSpot dopeness.

We're riding the high of IMPACT Live 2019 this week, but mostly because of all the stories shared around how people are growing their businesses and creating incredible cultures. We can't wait for you to hear!

  HubnSpoke team of Adam Steinhardt and Zaahn Johnson embark on a new mission in this edition, to drill down deep into the features of HubSpot and begin to address some of those under-utilised and misunderstood aspects of HubSpot, a powerful cloud-based sales and marketing platform. HubSpot’s diverse set of software tools can mean that even the most experienced Hubspotter can at times feel overwhelmed. Recent tools revealed as part of Inbound 2016 have added even more power across the sales, marketing and CRM, allowing you to maximise the effectiveness of inbound methodology in new and dynamic ways. Are you getting the most out of the full breadth of HubSpot features? We begin our examination with a common confusion amongst Hubspotters in the marketing and sales funnel: A Closer Look At The Lifecycle Stages Tool This is both an underrated and misunderstood feature of HubSpot, discoverable in both the Sales and Marketing dashboards in Contact Properties. It is also one of the most important features, as it really is the driver of HubSpot’s true power. Unsure why? Let us explain. At its core, HubSpot is about creating websites that generate leads for your business. Using the inbound methodology, people will discover your website, learn about your business, begin to trust you as a source of information and then become a lead for you to do business with. There are two sorts of leads in the HubSpot sales funnel: Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) and Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL). SQL are those entered into the system by your sales staff. They have done the work, they have created the interest and will hopefully be able to nurture this lead into a customer through their direct contact with them.

Welcome to Episode 12 of HubnSpoke. The podcast for HubSpotters and Sales and marketing people wanting to have a laugh whilst learning  Adam Steinhardt and Zaahn Johnson discuss the why having trust in your inbound marketing strategy is so important. As a specialist inbound marketing agency and HubSpot Platinum Partner we often see impatience to get results get in the way of tried and tested inbound strategies. What is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is the process of creating content for your website that guides your prospect down the sales funnel. Unlike pay per click, which creates a charge every time, inbound marketing takes patience as you build up your search engine profile using white hat SEO techniques. In this episode of HubnSpoke, we discuss the benefits of setting your strategy and then pursuing it. The benefits of bloggingare substantial, but, to be a successful content marketer you need to persist. What do we love about HubSpot this week? Zaahn talks about how much she is enjoying the new HubSpot Dashboard. It's one of the great benefits of the HubSpot Automated Sales and Marketing software in that it is always updating and improving. Adam likes the progression of the Blog Composer Tool, a great benefit for writing copyand lead generation ideas. Marketing managers and content curators will love this feature in the future. Talking about what we would like to change, we focus on much The Kingdom SEO team would love to have categories for managing the search engine keywords. The Kingdom Team Talk Inbound 2016. Excitement is growing, as the schedules get locked down, and the suitcases come out of the garage for the huge event in Boston for all HubSpotters, Sales Professionals and Inbound Marketing Experts. See Adam Steinhardt talk at #Inbound16 at 4:15pm Wednesday November 9th.  

HubnSpoke Episode 10 - How to Use Social Media - Stage 4 of 4 - Delight. Adam Steinhardt and Zaahn Johnson discuss how to use social media to delight your customers. Episode 10 of HubnSpoke is the final part of the 4 part series on how to use social media to bring leads down your sales funnel. HubSpotters, we discuss our favourite features on HubSpot. This week we talk about keywords and the sales CRM pipeline tool. The Kingdom HubSpot experts also discuss the changes they would make if they were in charge of HubSpot. If you are a HubSpotter or sales and marketing professional wanting to get more out of HubSpot, inbound marketing, then HubnSpoke is the podcast for you. If you would like to learn more about HubSpot, check out the features movie here.

How can HubSpot's platforms help your business and your customers? Should you be inbound fit to be a successful marketer? Landing Pages Zaahn has been loving watching how landing pages work. Landing pages are definitely under-rated on a social platform and should be used more. The ability to share it and have it as an option for social media is great for more conversion. Landing pages have so much versatility. If your business is hiring, one great tip is to use a landing page as a careers page. Hiring on your own website is a great idea as it's cost effective and gives you the option to push it out on social media. You're able to organically grow your contact’s email database as the decay rate is usually 20% per year. You will need to boost it up frequently to ensure it doesn’t disintegrate. Social media definitely gets conversions, so these components are equally important. Progressive Polling Tool Progressive polling is designed with the customer in mind. HubSpot’s progressive polling tool allows you to see the form at the back of customer’s portals. It’s there to avoid the annoyance of having to repeatedly fill in forms and submit your details. It remembers your information, and instead of asking you the same information, it will ask you something perhaps you haven’t submitted an answer for yet. Traditionally, we would set up a landing page with a first and last name and an email address. Next time you came back, the prompt might be for your Twitter. The time after that, the question may be asking what your main social media platform was. Lead Nurturing Lead nurturing works really well as you can grow the amount of information you collect from people, as they build their trust with your business and website. The more they trust, the more information they give. There is no need to rush at the beginning to harvest the data as you can rely on the future you receive it. Ideally, when creating landing pages you want to ask the bare minimum to avoid creating a barrier. You must question what will be done with the information you’re gathering from your customers? Do you need to know every detail? There needs to be a purpose. What are you trying to achieve? What are your goals? Ask yourself if you would fill it in if you were in their position? Have empathy with the customer’s experience. Would you like a personal HubSpot demo? Sign up for a free 30 minute personal webinar.   Sales by HubSpot App The Sales by HubSpot app on (App Store, Google Play) is used to watch people clicking through your website. Available for HubSpot users through the HubSpot App in the iTunes store. Even if you only use HubSpot free Sales CRM, you can download the app to keep track of your customers.   "Seeing who has interacted with that landing page will help you understand which pages are working and which aren't."   It’s almost like watching live inbound marketing working before your eyes. Particularly if you’re using the HubSpot sales pro-tool that allows you to view the users clicking on your website as they click links. If you are after some extra learning, HubSpot has a HubCast which is their podcast made for HubSpotters.  If I Were in Charge of HubSpot, I Would Change... Zaahn would like to be able to bring in the image from a social media link, rather than the preview link. When posting on social media, she would like to bring in that image from that page rather than the preview link. A blog header image visually looks better than a link. Adam would allow a picture off the HubSpot software on his phone to go straight to the contact’s timeline. Effectively, photograph our sales notes and important documents to go straight into the timeline. Imagine pulling out your phone and going to your contact card, taking a photo and receiving your result. Being Inbound Fit - Inbound 2016 The Inbound 2016 conference, which Adam Steinhardt and Zaahn Johnson will be attending on 8th November 2016, has 14,500 people attending. If you are also attending, Adam is on the sales track on Wednesday November 9th at 4:15pm. Zaahn’s most looking forward to seeing multiple speakers from Inbound Marketing World such as Marcus Sheridan and George B Thomas. They are full of passion and will be speaking individually this year too. Adam's looking forward to seeing Beth Dunn. Last year she covered a hard topic on how to successfully create editorial style guidelines, and how to set up your writing style. Brian Fanzo will also be there, and he was very into Snapchat last year at Social Media Marketing Week. He gave the audience some tips and tricks on how to make Snapchat work for your business. He once spent over 20 hours out the front of a Superbowl doing non-stop periscope show on Facebook Live. Nikki Sharp works in the HubSpot marketing department and will also be there. She will soon be heading to Singapore with the HubSpot marketing team at their office   #Inbound16 Do you have ideas for a new topic you would like us to podcast? Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn, or simply email us. Learn more: Common Content Mistakes What is Lead Nurturing? 5 HubSpot Features You Can't Live Without