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Inbound Marketing Strategy: How to Align Sales and Marketing Teams

Hubspot User Group Meeting Meeting March 2018 - London HUG

 


Note
: You can download the slides from this presentation here.

This is a transcript of the talk given by Dan Tyre from HubSpot at the HubSpot User Group Meeting in March 2018 in London.

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So super excited to be here. Thank you very much, Clwyd.

Smarketing: Sales & Marketing Alignment

This is going to be awesome, I love coming to London: I'm here a couple of times a year, two or four times a year and I'm very excited to be at the HubSpot user group today to talk about building a sales and marketing revenue team. I'm talking about 'smarketing'. Say it: smarketing. Boom. That's it.

Emily Victoria said: 'They'll never say smarketing'. Clwyd said: 'No, no, no...'. I say smarketing and a I know you will, because you just did. It's March, how are you feeling about like the end of the year? How many people are ahead? Raise your hand if your ahead, raise your hand.

I need a statistician for the group... Anybody like studied statistics or economics university? Anybody? No? Anybody take like an Algebra class in secondary school? No? Somebody's got it. You're a kind of analytic Pete,? You do numbers. Raise your hand if you're ahead for the year. We got a week to go. You should know what percentage, Pete? 8%? Wow, you do know statistics! That's pretty good.

How many people are about flat where they should be? What do you got? 2%? And how many people are behind? All right, you got to get, Pete, what's the number there?

If you didn't raise your hand you are behind. So let's play, that's like 80? So there's one or two things: you can watch my presentation or you can leave and try to finish the year strong.

Creating a revenue engine

I'm super excited to talk about how smarketing creates a revenue engine. How many marketers in the group? Raise your hand. Raise your hand high so Pete can see. Alright, Pete, what's the deal?

How many salespeople? That's great. I need a number. 28? Oh Pete, I love it.

How many executives? How many people? So there's like 10%, maybe 12% there. So there's a good mix? It's always interesting: salespeople sit on one side, marketing people sit on the other side.

Dan-Tyre-One-Mission

So this is me with the only tool that I know how to use, that's a saw for some of you folks. I support an organisation called the One Mission, it's a community development organisation, twice a year I go either to El Salvador, Nicaragua or Mexico. This company gets 10 people from United States and about 20 people from a Mexican nationals and we go and we spend three days to build a house.

Anybody ever built a house before? It's not the kind of houses you live in, it's 600 square feet, it doesn't have plumbing, it doesn't have electricity. We pick up person who earns their house, person who has no education, usually has several dependence, right? That doesn't have a place to like live. They live under a boat or under a tarp. We spend three days building the house and we hand the keys to that person who's earned the house. And it's a random act of kindness. It's incredibly refreshing to the soul.

I start this all the time my presentations with explaining a little bit about One Mission, you can get them 1mission.org if you're interested in. And I show a picture of my beautiful wife, I've been married for 29 years and she's telling me that the floor of the new houses aren't flat enough so that I have to use another tool - which I don't really know the name of - to make sure it's flatter. So that's pretty cool. I love to be in London.

Dan Tyre British Jokes

I'm super excited to try out some new jokes, Victoria and Emily thought they were hugely funny, so if they're not funny you can have a discussion with them, as I come over here to the United States, I can't use all my US jokes, right? I googled 'British humour'. What are the attributes of British humour?

  • Sarcasm
  • Irony
  • Self-depreciation
  • Deadpan delivery
Do I have them all right?  Exactly, so I'm officially funny, you guys are going to laugh, right? It's like a win win for me!

All right, well I got some of that right, Ian. We were talking about that at dinner last night, Ian was going to give me a picture of a elephant poop. And he's going to talk about why elephant poop is important. Ian, is that in your presentation? Where is Ian? Oh, it can be. Yeah. Great. Perfect. Greatest city in the world. 

The thing about Dan Tyre is I got this big energy. It's kind of annoying if it's before 6:00 in the morning, but it's like caffeination. So if you're pregnant and can't drink coffee, I'm the next best thing. It's like I'm always on, I wake up like this, I vibrate at a different level. It's kind of weird, Brian Sexton knows. It's just the way I am. And I've got only stories. Things happen to me, I'm the luckiest guy in the world. Thinks happened to me, they just don't have another folks.

Dan-Tyre

I am at the University of Ohio, I put this up: silence. Nothing. Right there were 400 people in the audience, no one giggles, laughs or whatever. I'm a pretty hard-headed guy, I'm going to stick it out, I am not going to move, I didn't even have a podium to guard me. And I'm just saying: 'All right, audience, you either laugh or I'm not moving on!' And of course I went after like 4 minutes. It was agonising. Well, really wasn't agonising for me because I had the clicker, but it was agonising for them.

Finally one lady in the front row started laughing, then everybody started laughing, so boom! So I thought that would work in London. How about this, Mayan? Mayan apocalypse? Ian, is that funny? Kind of? Very good! He is my litmus test.

So the story behind this one is I'm a big time speaker now, right? I'm in Costa Rica. Anybody been to Costa Rica? Right. Costa Rica was the first time that I had a translator, so I'm thinking: 'Wow, I hit the big time, right? I got a translator'. So I'm over here on the side and my translator sitting on the little stool, whatever I say, my translator says in Spanish.

So I go Myan, Myan apocalypse: same response. Nothing. I go: 'Consolo, say it again'. He's like: 'No'. I know, it's a funny line! I go: 'You got to say it'. He's like: 'No'. I'm like: 'Why?' He goes: 'There are no alpacas in Costa Rica'. They all think it's like a fat goat and you got to admit, right, it is not. I mean, it's a funny looking kind of thing, but I thought that was a good job.

Dan-Tyre-HubspotHow about this one? That's pretty humorous? I was told that that it's insensitive. I was giving a presentation in Las Vegas, people said: 'That's horrible, how can you put that up?' I go: 'I think that's funny!' I know Lorenzo likes it. Yes.

Dan Tyre: Sales Director, HubSpot

All right, so my name is Dan Tyre, connect with me on all forms of social media.

Dan-Tyre-contacts

I'm kind of an interesting guy, I'm a very, very lucky guy. I've been married to my beautiful wife, Amy, for 29 years, so I've got two beautiful kids. I'm a kind of a quirky guy: I live in a purple house, I've got a blind dog by the name of Katy Perry... I don't know, if you ever want to make people smile, get a dog and renamed her or him Katy Perry. I'm a fist bumper. I fist bump. I don't shake hands.  You guys know that. Lorenzo, you know that. It's not a Germaphobe thing, there's a long story for that, I don't have time for that today.

Connect with me on LinkedIn, I know like half the people in the world. Connect with me on Twitter. How many people are on Twitter? Statistician? Come on, come on, raise your hands again. I'm going to say a little more. You can't see the people in the back row? All the way back. I'm going to say about 50%. It's interesting about Twitter: I've been on Twitter for a while, I'm not sure it has the impact that it has before, but connect with me there.

Connect with me on Instagram if you want to see pictures of my food, that's pretty cool. Any Snappers here? Anybody use Snapchat? A couple? That was just funny story there. Victoria, you're a Snapchatter? Yes. Alright. DTyre1.

The Millennial generation

I'm having breakfast with a millennial. And who's the millennial in the audience? Any millennials? Okay. 20%, Pete? 10? They don't get up before 9:00 in the morning. I know, I know, they wouldn't show up to a presentation. They should be here. It's important kind of stuff.

The millennials are important demographic. I mean, is that right? Edwin, you're not a millennial, are you? Yes. Boom. All right. I love millennials. I have a blog article called The Fallacy of the Lazy Millennials. We built HubSpot on millennials.

In fact, my buddy Brian Sexton falls into the millennial category, I think. And Brian, stand up for a second. Brian is from HubSpot, he's over here. And any question that you have on HubSpot, fine. Brian, you'll be around until the end? Yep. Brian is happy to field any questions that you have. Thank you, Brian. How old do you think Brian is? Stand up again. I don't need a statistician for this. There was a heated discussion last night. I did win the pool and I had 2 conversations about how old Brian is. So just yell it out. How old do you think? Who said 28? The first... Is that right, Brian? Right. Unbelievable. Are you like a sister? Are you related? Okay, very good.

The HubSpot orange ping pong ball

I have one prize: an orange ping pong ball. Does anybody know where this orange ping pong ball came for? All right, that's funny. When we hit 15,000 customers - I think it was in 2015 - we took 15,000 ping pong balls and we throw them all off the fourth floor of our headquarters in Cambridge. I've been standing there and it was kind of interesting to see 15,000 ping pong balls come by, but I picked up a handful and I hand them out to my public presentations. So, Bradley, can you run that back to the lady right there and she gets the ping pong ball? Boom.

He looks much younger than 28 or late at night sometimes they look so much older than 28. I don't know why people are so interested in your age, Bran, it is very interesting. 

HubSpot SWAG

You have more swag? Oh Baby, look at that. Do you guys like hoodies? Oh, very good. Alright, you cosy up, right? You got to cosy up to Clwyd, Clwyd's got all the swag.

One other thing on the ping pong ball: I only brought one with me, so you're going to have to pass that around. We used that as the like the only prize. So you, I mean enjoy it while you have it because you might have to pass it like three rows ahead of you.

So I'm the luckiest guy in the world, you'll see that I look exactly the same in the picture as I am today, I wear the same thing all the time. I was just interviewed by INC. magazine and one of the things they tell is entrepreneurs is always be branded.

So I am always wearing HubSpot t-shirt. I'm wearing the exact same jeans. I'm 59 years old and I'm never going to buy anything else from here on out for the rest of my life will be, I don't need to buy anything. I am the cheapest guy in North America.

We were talking last night, maybe cheapest guy in the western hemisphere. We're not quite sure. But this is the way I look. You'll see me in airports like this all the time.

I'm employee number six and HubSpot, how many people know HubSpot? All right, that's almost 100%. How many people are HubSpot customers? I'm going to say 80%. How many people are HubSpot partners?

Stand up if your HubSpot partner. Stand up. Come on, Bradley. Stand up. Come on, come on. Come on. Any questions that you have on HubSpot, you asked one of these people. They're in it every day. We live and die by our partners. They are great, great competitive advantage for that. I'm going to ask you to stand up a couple of different times, so get used to it. All right. Very good. Thank you.

The Importance of Marketing and Sales Alignment

I'm employee number six and HubSpot, I actually cold called for HubSpot... don't tell anybody! It was amazing in 2007 and I've got some stories about how it's evolved over the last 11 years.

I've done five startups since 1983. My first one went to a billion and a half dollars, IPO and secondary in 1981. Who was born in 1981? Like 3%. I know, I know... you weren't born in 1981? You must have been born in 1981. No? Ramsey, you were born in 1981? All right. Two old guys in the room and I love it. All right. My second startup was an agency I started on my dining room, grew up to $25,000,000, sold it to a Phoenix based company - that's why I'm now based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

"My third company went bankrupt, taught me business planning and humility"

It was very instructional in the growth of me personally as well as my business acumen.

My fourth startup got bought out by Microsoft, that's where I met Brian Halligan.

When Microsoft brought out Groove networks he went to MIT, met Dharmesh. I worked for Microsoft for a year and in 2006 he called me and said: 'I'm starting this company in Cambridge and I want you to join'. And I lived 2,600 miles away, I go: 'Wow, that's going to be a long commute. I don't see that. I don't think I can do it'. He goes: 'Ask your wife', which was smart, because I did.

I go: 'Amy, can I be in Boston 4 weeks out of the month?' She goes: 'No'. She didn't even smile. She's like: 'No'. I go: 'How about 3 weeks of the month? She goes: 'No'. I got two kids, right? 8 and a 12 at the time. I go: 'How about 2 weeks out of the month?' She goes: 'No'. I go: 'How about 1 week out of the month?' She goes: 'Maybe'.

So for 11 years I commuted to Cambridge, it takes four hours from Scottsdale. And over the last 11 years I've been a very, very proud HubSpotter. I bleed orange, I love the Inbound philosophy methodology.

Today I'm a mentor to about 30 folks everywhere from CEOs to teenagers in the Bronx. I'm an adviser to about 20 companies. I'm a big time blogger. Anybody ever read any of my stuff? We don't need the statistician, I don't have one! Oh baby, I'll show you some of my blogs, I published once a week on the HubSpot Sales blog.

I'm an authority on selling. My background through my business career has been a good general manager, but typically a emphasis on Sales. I speak 60 times a year on behalf of HubSpot and I do some motivational stuff, right? I'm an author of this year, I spent 2017 writing a book with my coauthor Todd Hockenberry (it's available on Amazon, it's available on Barnes & Noble, we'll ship that April 24th).

We'll talk a little bit about that. I'm an angel investor in 20 companies. I'm a Sales coach, that's how I met Clwyd - who is a great lion. Emma and Adam are back there, great lions. Pete is a great lion. The program we have they called 'The Lion Program', named by Steve Vaughan.

"My guiding principle is I'm trying to do the most good that I can for the universe"

I didn't tell you this story last night, but I clipped that from my 23-year-old son, Ely.

When Ely was 9 years old, I was holding his hand, we were walking to the circus or something and he looked up to me and he said: 'Dad, I think I'm smarter than you are'.  And we both knew he was right. I know, I know. He's super smart.

He was admitted to the University of Chicago. He went there for a year and a half, he took a semester off and I got the call and he wasn't going back to university and so I got all my statistics and I was all set to have the dad talk and I was like sitting down and saying: 'All right, this is not in your best interest. You have to finish school' and that kind of stuff.

We go back and forth for two hours, and at the end he looks at me, and he goes: 'Dad, all I want to do is the most good I can for the universe'. And as a dad, what do you say when your kid says that? Like you got nothing. With tears streaming down my eyes I go: 'That's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard, go forward'. Fully supporting him. I'm stealing that line.  And I say: 'I'm going to show that to millions of people' and he's like: 'All right, knock yourself out'.

And so I do, that is my mission.

"I love helping people and the reason why I love the HubSpot is all about helping people"

The change in buyer behaviour

The reason why I love mixing up with our partners and the marketing people in the audience is that you guys understand that there's a huge change in buyer behavior.

We're going to talk a little bit about it today, how you leverage that change in buyer behavior.

  • We're going to talk a little bit about the differences between Sales and Marketing
  •  We're going to talk a little bit about how you have to align to create a revenue engine
  • We are going to explain some of the problems that marketing folks typically have with salespeople

The difference between marketers and sales people

I see a lot of laughs over there. I know, I know. You either need a baseball bat or you need to see this like presentation, because it's hard. When we started in 2007, marketers loved Inbound. Marketers just get it, they're like: 'We don't want to flog people all the time, we don't want to buy list, went on spam people, we're going to send junk mail. We want to help people'. 

Salespeople were a little bit more suspect. There's a huge difference, we'll talk about this between marketers and salespeople.

"We'll explain from a marketing perspective how you can align with salespeople"

When is the future? Or actually, does that sound like a good agenda? Is that what you want to hear? Alright, then we have got Ian. How much time are you going to speak today? 20 minutes, right? You want more than 20 minutes?  You can have as long as you like. I love it. As long as you align it with Inbound and HubSpot, no problem.

And this is a Ian's elephant? Which if you look up Ian and pictures of Vietnam on Google images, you'll see he's all over the world with this elephant. Archie, right? Very good. He's got a Twitter account? Okay marketers, that's what I'm telling you: if you don't have a Twitter account and Archie, the stuffed plush elephant has one, that says something.

"Sales and Marketing alignment is critically important, this Smarketing thing"

baby lifting large weight Who invented smarketing?

By the way, I invented that term in 2007, I was getting drunk with our first CMO, Mike Volpi, and we were talking a little bit about the fact that for the first four months of HubSpot I cold called.

I would like pick up the phone and call everybody in my Rolodex and then we started getting these Inbound leads. And it was transformational:

"From a Sales perspective, Inbound leads change everything"

We were talking a little bit about the kind of the impact that we have in regard to a salesperson's life and I go: 'We need to create more of these Inbound leads'.

He goes: 'Dan, it's not that easy. We have to create content!'

And I'm like: 'We'll create it'.

And he goes: 'It's not that easy, unique and good content takes a professional writer'.

I'm like: 'We'll find a professional writer'.

He goes: 'I can find a writer, but I don't have headcount'.

I go: 'All right, I'll give you a Sales headcount'.

And he like stops. And he looks at me, he goes: 'You would give me Sales headcount for market', when I'm like: 'Yep'. I go:

"It's not Sales, it's not Marketing, it's Smarketing. It's all mixed together"

And you'll see today some of the things that salespeople do are right out of the marketing playbook. Some things that marketing do are right out of the Sales playbook.

"Unless you're practising this alignment, you can't grow the way you should"

Dan Tyre's suit bag & the future of travel luggage

So when is the future? Now, right? People used to say 2020. They used to say 2025. Now, why? Anybody have good examples of why we live in the future?

Does anybody remember suit bag? What's a suit bag? Ian, can you pick up my suit bag right there? Does anybody in the audience have a suit bag? They were all over Britain in 1975.  Very good. I like that. Do you have one of you? Did you ever have one? You must have had one. 

So, anybody in the audience still have a suit bag? Do the rest of you guys use rolly luggage? Like roll your luggage behind you? You're so old-fashioned.

There's something called travel robotics. Today you can have your luggage, follow you around like a dog. You load it on a iPhone App, and you walked through the airport... my buddy Sean has it, you walk to the airport, his luggage follows him. But I don't know how he gets through an elevator.

I'm sitting in the airport and I'm like: 'All right, there's no place to plug in'. You know, everybody's cave men around the plugs all over the airport. You can't find a plug.

And he goes: 'Just plug in'. I'm like: 'There's no plugs'. He goes: 'No, no, no, plug into my luggage'.  And he pulls back the thing and there are three USB ports and he's got a power supply in his luggage that follows him around like a dog.

That's the future. I'm talking to my nephew and all his Twitter goes: '@coffee, @coffee, @coffee'. I'm like: 'What's that?' And he's like: 'Oh, that's how I always start my coffee pot in the morning'. From bed he tweets his coffee pot, so he starts called tweet a pot, right? Check it out. We live in the future.

I was just in Las Vegas and they had something called Foldamatic. Anybody hear Foldamatic? It will fold your laundry like it's in a retail store. It has 218 robotic arms. And you put it in this little hole, right? It's a thousand dollars. It's definitely worth it. And now boom, the folding laundry, As a man, I can definitively say that folding laundry has escaped me for 59 years. There's just no way I can do it.

What we're talking about is reading people's minds. Anybody ever think that Google can read your mind? I know, I know they have something called the Akinator. Has anybody ever heard of the Akinator? It's in the Google home kind of thing. It was written up by my friend Amanda on the HubSpot marketing blog. You walk into this booth, you think of like a movie star or something and they asked you questions and they can determine what you're thinking about. Insane. With like weird accuracy according to Amanda.

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Is it easier or harder to run a business in 2018?

3 challenges we face nowadays

And so today is the future, there are some ramifications to that. 

Is it easier or harder to run a business in 2018? How many people think it's easier? All right. 1%, 2%. How many people think it's harder, right? Everybody else? Why is it harder? Anybody want to shout out? Why? Why is it harder? The bureaucracy? Good example. Let me give you three more.

Reason number 1 - More choices

This is the environment today. Everybody sells everything. There's all this noise out there.

"It's really difficult to differentiate between the professionals and people who just go into business"

Everybody sells everything. Pharmacies, so like beer or like people who tow cars are selling life insurance. And there's all this mishmash of stuff where every place you move there's all of these different stimuli that you have to respond to.

"We have more choice than ever before, but it's harder to make a choice"

It's anxiety prone and you don't know where to tether to really understand what you want to solve.

Reason number 2 - Short attention span

This is your customer. Your customer is exasperated. They're pissed off.

"They expect that you're going to know all about them, even if you've never talked to him before"

A great story about this is I fly into Phoenix Sky Harbor, it's like 2:00 in the morning. So I'm getting my Uber cab and the guys picking me up on a Lexus. I don't drive a Lexus. So late model Lexus. He's going to be here in four minutes. This is 2:00am in the morning, a guy's going to pick me up. I bet he has like two bottles of water and breath mints and let me listen to any radio station I want. And four minutes, three minutes, two minutes and then disaster strikes.

He takes a wrong turn.

Oh my goodness. He's 90 seconds late. That's me, I'm like: 'You're 90 seconds late'.

The guy goes: 'I'm sorry Mr. Tyre. I took a wrong turn'.

And I'm like: 'Really? You took a wrong turn?'

And then I'm thinking: 'Oh my goodness, kind of an ass am I?' The guys is bringing me home! It's crazy. What's the attention span of a goldfish? It's 9 seconds. How about the UK consumer? Yeah, I know it's less, 8 seconds.

They want to know exactly. First of all, they want you to know that I'm there. You got to respond quickly.

Reason number 3 - High expectations

They have very high expectations. If you don't meet those expectations, they'll just move onto the next one.

I think it's based on our phones. If I download an App, I expect that it'll download immediately. Even if I'm on bad Wifi, I expect that I can open it and I'm productive in like the first 30 seconds or I'm like: 'This sucks!' I'm moving onto the next one and that has permeated through our entire life, in B2B and in B2C. 

Everybody has those expectations. So you've got to play into that. 

Is there more or less competition in 2018? More? How much more?

So the statistics... I'm going to give like free gifts - like free gifts? I know you like swag, right? I know, like ping pong balls, but at the end we'll give you some free gifts, specifically for marketing people to bring to the Sales organisation.

"You want to make salespeople smile, you come bearing gifts"

HubSpot research

HubSpot research is one of the gifts, just Google HubSpot research (Mimi Ang is the person who runs it). There are tons of statistics and the statistics that I pulled for this presentation is that in the old days - in 2016, just two years ago you had 6-8 competitors, today an average of 20 competitors. Why is that? It's insane. It's because we're startup nation, everywhere across the world it's easier than ever before to start a business.

A growth strategy

When I started my second company, I raised $400,000 and $275,000 of it went to a servers, Dell and Microsoft, so I can provide email to my employees. Like 75% back.

Then in 1993 starting a company was a big deal, today anybody can start a company.

My Buddy Mat Sherman said, I go: 'Man, how much did it cost you to start a company public?'

He goes: '$50. The state of Arizona just rips you off'. And so it's amazing. You can start a company for nothing, so everybody does, everybody's got a side hustle.

It's easier than ever to start a company, you got free apps. You're just in business. The challenge now is scaling the company, scaling the company requires a level of expertise and understanding of how to deal with all that changes and it requires what we call a growth strategy.

A big mistake to avoid: Cold calling

So that's what we're going to talk about today. Any other questions on like the different landscape, right? When I'm maintaining, I guess the story that I have here is in 2007 when I was calling people, they would always ask me 2 questions.

What is inbound marketing?

They would say: what is Inbound and how to explain it, right?

"Inbound is a very human approach of taking total strangers that have never heard of you and converting them over to a table-pounding advocates"

Who quite possibly form these really strong customer relationships. And there's a difference between Inbound and Outbound.

Anybody still cold calling in the audience? Right. All right, very nice. Thanks for letting me know. I'm going to strongly suggest that you warm calling, the statistics say that:

"Cold calling converts at about 1.6% to 2%"

So when you call a hundred people, you get about two percent.

"Inbound converts between 9% to11%"

So there's a significant increase in the ethics and the use.

When people tell me they cold call

"I can't think of any other activity in business where if you wasted 98% of your time, effort and money, then you continue to do it"

I'm going to maintain that you got - first of all, thanks for being honest -, but you probably warm call and I'm going to, in the second part of the presentation today, talk a little bit about how all your Sales organization can engage in a very professional, respectful, effective way. That's what a Pete included, we've been talking about for a while. 

How many people love cold calling in the audience? One guy, up two guys? And you like making the calls?  So wait a second, hold on a second. Roll that back. Hold on a second. You love having other people cold call!

Now, let me ask you a question: do you like receiving cold calls? You find it funny... Is that a British thing? Ah, very good. Most people don't.

And so the problem with cold calling: number 1, is that it sucks if you're cold calling. And I can tell you, having done lots of years of cold calling, it is really, really hard.

In the old days, you got a yellow pages to call. Now, are there yellow pages in the UK? They still print them? When was the last time anybody saw - you might have to give up your ping pong ball for this - a yellow pages? They used to call it golden pages? No, yellow pages, I'm not sure. Okay. Sometimes you see them in your grandmother's house. Has anybody used them right now? Of course not.

Maybe you give them to your cold callers, but it's not funny calling people who don't want to hear from you.

  • Number 1, they don't pick up their phone
  • Number 2, you're not doing your brand any favours
  • Number 3, that is not the right way to do it

In the old days, you didn't have a choice, that's the way you engaged, today you have a choice. And not only I have the statistics to back it up, but we have the general understanding that it's a evil.

The inbound revolution

In 2017, it breaks down into 4 major areas and it talks all about the Inbound revolution and it does talk about the efficacy of cold calling. Now, I can't tell you specifically efficiency of cold calling in Guatemala, but I would be surprised if it's over the industry average.

The world's leader in studying this type of approach is a woman by the name of Trish Bertuzzi, who runs The Bridge Group. And the last statistics that I've seen are the 1.6% to 2%, I think it was 2016 numbers. But it also is common sense: because we're in 2018, it's a little bit riskier now.

Because if you cold call me, I will never buy from you, ever.

And if anybody in a general discussion says: 'Brings up your company', I will never buy from you. And that's just because I'm that consumer and everybody in this audience is the exact same way.

We just have this attitude now because there are so many options that if you treat me like a total stranger and if you would never do that face to face, but you send me a spam email or you call and talk about you, not only I'm not going to listen, I'm going to be offended. The option is always yours.

"The whole idea of Inbound is that you treat people like human beings"

You would never do it face to face. We want to treat people with a human approach that makes it easier for us to help them.

The way? I got a slide on this. The way to win in 2018 is to help people. It's selling + helping = shelping. Say 'shelping'. Good. I told you, Clwyd, smarketing, shelping work with this audience. 

What is 'Smarketing'?

marketing-vs-sales

The difference between sales and marketing

Does anybody know what this slide means? This is Sales and Marketing over the last 38 years. I know Sales and Marketing historically has been so different. Sales is male dominated. In Sales we want to go kill the competition, we want to crush everybody, want to close a deal. And marketing people just want to help.

Sales traditionally has been male, Marketing female, and a Marketing has always been a built in excuse for Sales. Over the last 20 years. If you want it to grow your business, you hired somebody like me and I would come in and I would hire field salespeople. And I was always the king, I got all the budget, I got anything I want and Marketing was always in the doghouse.

Marketing would create the brand and then you would create leads. And either you didn't create enough leads, in which case I would complain, whine and say: 'It's Marketing's fault'. Or you created too many leads of low value and I'd would complain and say: 'It's Marketing's fault'.  And that's the way it was.

In my board level work, the vice president marketing would come up and they would give their presentation once a year, we'd say 'all right, last year we gave you a million to invest. What was the return on investment?'

And what would they always do? They look right at their shoes. They're like: 'Ah, it's kind of hard. We can't really show the correlation, it's really difficult, it's bifurcated, we have a long sales process'.

And as a board director, I'm thinking: 'All right, how can I cut that million to 800,000?' There's no way, that is an expense.

Is marketing an expense?

When you wanted to scale, you invested in Sales, you hired more salespeople. In the old days, the reason why sales got all the money is because marketing only got 5%.

They handed the lead to salespeople, who then called on the customer (by the way, they're qualified on the connect call, which we never do anymore), they said: 'Are you interested? Are you the decision maker?' If anybody asks you 'are you the decision maker?' in 2018, you hang up the phone!

It's insane, but that's what we did: we qualified, then we gave a product demo, then we answered objection, then we move them into the closing sequence.

We did 95% of the work, so we got 90-95% of the glory of the budget. And that is the way you grew businesses. That is no longer the case. Today, it's smarketing, it's all together.

most-trusted-profession-research

What is the most trusted profession?

Anybody know the most trusted profession in EMEA? Guess: doctors? Who said doctors? Edwin? No, but good. Engineer? Top 10 I think. Lawyers? Pretty sure I get it. Very good. I love it. I love it. I love it. Anybody other guesses? You're going to have to give up your ping pong ball.

Who said firemen? Alright, you gotta hand you're ping pong ball to this gentleman. What's your name? Terrick? This lady is going to hand you the ping pong ball. You could throw it or you can just hand it to Terrick. Very good. How did you know it was firefighter? Have you seen this slide before? That's very good. You're very intuitive. I like that.

Where is Marketing on this slide? Oh, where is Sales on this slide? Emily's like: 'Oh, this is going to be bad'. It's a build slide. That's how Terrick got is a ping pong ball.

Oh baby. You don't need British humour to know that, that is not good.

Salespeople: 1%.

"The barista that you give $4 to get your latte in the morning has more trust than a marketer"

Why are marketers not trusted?

Marketers find something and they just flogged the crap out of it. You send me stuff. Salespeople are a little bit better, behind like Bernie Madoff and Boris Johnson. I know, I know. It's crazy, but that's where they are.

How do you guys feel about that? That is not good. You want to change that.

"In 2018, you don't buy from people unless you trust them"

This is statistics that we've garnered from the 2017 Inbound marketing study that says we need to do a different way. And everybody has a choice. I'm never going to tell you what to do. All I'm going to do is give you the data and the facts and the data and the facts say that if you in fact want to sell something in 2018, then you have to practice this process.

Inbound-marketing-task

The thing is  Marketing and Sales are different. Marketing now sends out emails for salespeople. Any marketing people in the audience do that now? Stand Up. Yes, raise your hand, raise your hand higher. Yeah. So 30% of you guys, you're sending out emails for the salespeople? That's great.

There's no typos in them, hopefully!  You're sending them current information? How many times have you seen proposals or salespeople say: 'No, no, no, I'm going to create my own proposal'? And you're like: 'Oh, face plant, I can't believe it". People spend like 12 hours putting together this 'interesting document' that is supposed to give the best visibility to your organisations.

"You cannot live unless the HubSpot smarketing machine feed you like a baby goat"

Marketing books meetings: how many marketers book meeting for yourself, Pete? Bryan Sexton, you cannot live unless the HubSpot smarketing machine feed you like a baby goat. That's what we need to do. That's how it works.

Smarketing meetings

We actually have something called the smarketing meeting: Sales and Marketing alignment is a big thing at HubSpot. And then Marketing is building email templates for reps. So that we can study that information so that we can provide it.

inbound-sales-tasks

Persona research & demographics

Then Sales is doing persona research. How many people know personas in the audience? Alright, nearly everybody. Great. Personas is a relatively new term. When I first came to HubSpot, I had never heard of personas, it used to be demographics.

In the old days you look at everybody the same, you looked into like categories. Now we're smart enough to realise that it's really about the emotional attachment and the trust that you build with folks. So:

"Salespeople need to understand the buyer personas"

Then salespeople have to educate prospects. No more qualifying on the connect call, now you have to be helpful: It's shelping.

So what salespeople do is actually educate people just like Marketing did, and then finally sending content to nurture prospects.

"In 2018, because it's harder to get people to focus, you have to manage a wider funnel"

So the challenge of your Sales organisation is it's harder to sell than it's ever been before, unless you're automating the low content work and that they have a huge competitive advantage.

"Marketing + Sales = Growth"

sales-and-marketing-alignement

Marketing + Sales is growth, and we have all the statistics to prove it:

"Companies that align Marketing and Sales grow 20% more quickly"

There is Aberdeen, there's Gartner, there's tons of HubSpot research. This Marketing and Sales it's an archaic delineation, that's a holdover from the 20th century. And the new companies, the companies that embraced Sales and Marketing alignment are the ones that win. My coauthor Todd Hockenberry says something brilliant, he says:

"Every company wants to grow, but not everybody wants to change"

So the reason you're here is to learn the techniques of understanding how to bring everybody else with you. If you've invested in Inbound, if you believe that treating human beings like human beings building trust, putting faith in the buyer's in control is the right way to do it. Then you have to practice smarketing, I will tell you how to do.

The Inbound methodology

The inbound methodology

How many people are familiar with this slide? All right, about half, so I'm going to spend five minutes on this slide because it's very useful to you.

This is an updated slide to the Inbound methodology. If you Google 'HubSpot Inbound Methodology', you will find this slide and I'm just going to walk through the way Inbound works today, right? The foundation of Inbound is that there's a fundamental change in buyer behaviour.

Anybody remember like how you bought something in 2004? I had somebody at University of Ohio said: 'Yeah, I asked my parents'. That's not what I'm looking for.

In 2004 you like went to a retail store. Anybody remember magazines before they were on the iPad? You went through a magazine, sometimes you went to a trade show, but you couldn't buy it unless you talk to the salesperson.

Back in those days, the salespeople had all the information. If you want to know if it came in purple, if for fit in the back of your truck, if you could carry it up your stairs, all of that, the salesperson was the only person who had that information.

How do you do it now before you make a purchase? What do you do? You research it, how do you research it? You research it online. Does anybody... Why are you doing it? Why do you read the reviews? See what people are saying? The statistics from HubSpot research say:

"93% of people who are doing a B2C search or a B2B search start with an online search or social media query"

I'm thinking what the other 6.5% did? How could you ever buy something without googling? And now why do you guys googling? Why? Why do you look at the reviews? 

  • Number one, it's a crm free for all time
  • Number two, you get all the information
  • Number three, you get 2,375,416 pieces of information that could be valuable
And you want to keep control of that Sales process. At what percentage of the Sales process do you actually want to talk to a salesperson? Anybody in the audience? Zero. Who said some zero? Yeah. Yeah. Not a sales guy. I know. I know. We call that self service. You like going all the way through and do it in yourself. 

Exactly. And you got access to everything. You have Google, you have social media, you have all of these people who've done it before, you have these reviews, you have everything you need. Why do you need a salesperson? Because the salesperson is just going to qualify you and close. Hopefully in 2018 salesperson's going to do something quite different.

The buyer has all the control

We're going to talk a little bit about that today, but the buyer has all the control: because you have all the information, because all you have access to all this information. The statistics say that:

"People don't really want to talk to a salesperson until they're 65% to 85% of the way through the sales process"

In some industries, it's 99%, in some industries it's all the way to the end, right? They never want to talk to a salesperson. The statistics say that 57%... you say no? No question, no question. So in my book, I talk about buying a half a million dollar laser.

And I talk about the president of this company who walks up to the president of the laser company and says: 'I want an MX 1473'.

And he goes: 'How do you know about that?'

And he goes: 'I did my research online'.

He goes: 'I have three options. You're either going to sell it to me at this price'.

This a half a million dollar laser. This is the president of the company and they haven't announced the product yet.

And he says: 'You're going to sell to me at this price or I'm going to go to the opposition'. Welcome to 2018.

And so salespeople are still important. Salespeople just morph. In the old days we did 95% of the stuff, now we do 20-25%. It's still important. You still establish that relationship. It's still crucial.

"But if Marketing doesn't do their job right, you're not going to close that deal"

Most people want to do 65% to 85% of the research online just like Ian. Because they want to be in control, they want to find everything, and then they want specific things from their salespeople. And I'm going to tell you the specific things that they want.

Some people say: 'Well, that's not really the way it is in my industry'.

And there are some differences. But in most cases, if you don't help leads at the beginning, you're not going to build trust with that customer. And if you don't build trust with that customer, you don't have a shot. So in the old days, you hired a vice president of Sales to go out and charge the hill, today you hire one of the marketing people in this room.

It's a great time to be a marketer

It's a great time to be a marketer, because if you can bring the leads to the yard, that provides a huge competitive advantage. If you can get people, first of all, define you, that's the attract. And to do that is different in 2018.

Talked to Brian, HubSpot partner - stand up again. Or one of these people about pillar pages and topic clusters. How many people are familiar with pillar pages and topic clusters? I'm going to say 30%.

This 'attract' is critically important because... I do a lot of board level work. I talk with CEOs, I talk with board level people.

I go: 'Do you know where you stand against your competitors online?'.

And they're like: 'No'.

I go: 'I do. You want to know where you stand?'

And then like: 'Yes'.

And in the HubSpot product, the marketing product, there's something called the competitors tab - and Brian can show you how to put in your competitors, they're always interested in seeing that and their Alexa rank, how they're doing on social media, their marketing grade.

And then I do: 'Do you know where you stand on certain keyword?'

And they're like: 'No'.

I go: 'Would you like to know that?'

And they're like: 'Yes'. And there's a fiduciary responsibility to get found online.

The importance of being found on Google (SEO & Search Engine Optimisation)

When I'm trying to create a sense of urgency, I will tell a board of directors:

'What happens if people can't find your website and they find somebody else's?'

They're like: 'We don't get the leads".

I go: 'But what happens?'

They're like: 'But we don't get the leads'.

I go: 'Where do the leads go?'

And what am I looking for? What's the answer to that question? Where do the leads go if they don't find you?

Your direct competitor, right? Just let that thinking for a while.

All the CEOs that are new to inbound or like: 'Oh damn, that's not good'. Right? I never met somebody who said: 'No, I don't want to get found for people who are typing in something into Google search that are looking for my stuff'.

There's a fiduciary responsibility. This is 2018, right? We've been doing this for 11 years. You can say: 'That's not the way it works in my industry', but number 1, you'd likely be wrong, and number 2, I can prove it right now.

Salespeople are still critically important, right? But I got all the data. I got all the facts. I got 45,000 bank customers? I have millions of people are practising Inbound.

This is 2018. You don't jump on this bandwagon and if you guys can't convince your senior team to jump on this band, you got a problem!

Attracting new customers

So the first thing you got to do is attract. The way? How many bloggers are here? I'm gonna say half. Okay. Blogging is super easy. For the salespeople in the audience, blogging is just talking, right? If you can talk, you can blog.

Marketers, if you want your salespeople create content, don't ask them to blog, ask them to talk. They liked to talk? And just sit there when recorded on your phone or just write stuff down and everything that they say redundantly to everybody, that talk is a great blog article. 

And if you need help and learning how to write blogs - I think in blog articles now, right after 10 years of HubSpot, I think in blog articles, there's a great article called 74 Blog Article Titles, just write that down, or google that, or just send Brian or myself an email and we'll send you the blog article and it just start with the title:

  • 'The 3 Things to Remember When You're Buying a Elephant Push toy'
  • 'The 5 Things I wish I Knew Before I went on a Gorilla Conservation Tour'
  • 'The 4 Things About Whatever'.

And like, once you have the title that it's easy.

"Salespeople have to contribute to the content"

Once you attract people to your website, then those conversions become critically important.

Anybody knows the average conversion of somebody the first time they come to your website? Guess. Who wants Terrick's Ping Pong Ball? Yes ma'am. 2%? Give the ping pong ball back to that lady. That is awesome.

What's your name? Annette Johnson? You are the ping pong ball champion. They ever must be a UK record for that, that is impressive. 2%. So 98% of the people come to your website they need to understand what you do. The most important thing on your website is not a 'Contact us' page.

How many people have a 'Contact us' page on your website? All right? You're all doing it wrong. That's old school.

You need to have a call to action that say 'A 25 or a 20 or a 15 minutes consultation with whatever expertise that you do'. That's the way we do it.

"'Contact Us' is about you, no one wants to contact you. They want you to help them"

And you have to figure out - last time, HubSpot partner stand up again, last time HubSpot partners, come on, come on. These guys will tell you all about calls to action. Thank you very much. They'll tell you how to optimise call to action.

The more people drop their contact information on your website, the more you're building trust. You're a website has got to be your best salesperson. The good news is you don't have to pay them, you have to feed them, they never sleep. Your website has to be the central opportunity for those conversions. Once people drop their contact information, you have an opportunity to nurture the relationship. This says 'Close', but I usually refer to it as 'Starting the relationship'.

"In the old days we closed the deal, then you never see the salesperson after that, today you start a relationship"

And you only start relationships with people you can do a good job.

In the old days, if I screwed up, if I sold somebody that wasn't like a good fit, you'd like call my boss and you complained to him and then he'd call me into the office and he'd say: 'Dan, don't do that again'. And I'm like: 'Oh yeah, I shouldn't have done that'. Walk out and do it again. That's what we did in 1970s-1980s.

Today, what happens if you're an unsatisfied customer, what do you do?

You're on social media. You're like: 'I'm never doing business with that guy again, both personally as well as professionally'. You see in the United States there are all the cell phone companies and all the cable companies, where people are complaining because they're on hold all the time and they're like tie you up for all day.

You can't do that anymore. There's a significant impact. The difference in 2018 to 2016 is the customer experience and you've got to move toward. So you're looking for strangers move to visitors, move to leads, move to customers, move to promoters, that is the Inbound philosophy.

The inbound philosophy

"Inbound works 8 times better than outbound"

We can prove it. This is the way people want to buy. They want you, number 1, to know who you are. Number 2, they want you to know where you are in the sales process. If you've been to the website 37 times, the salesperson needs to know that, the salesperson needs to know what you like and what you don't like, which emails you're opening and what you're not opening, and this is shared between sales and marketing.

That is the smarketing kind of thing. 

inbound-marketing-is-helping

The reason I spend a little bit of time on this is this should be in your next marketing or sales presentation. This is the future and the future is now. If you're not practising Inbound, you run the risk of alienating your customers.

"Inbound: the foundation is helping people"

I was just in New York, a 500-person presentation, it was a grow with HubSpot kind of thing, and they're like: 'No, no, no, no, no. We don't want to help our customers'.

And I'm like: 'What? I'm the guy who wants to do the most good for the universe'. I go: 'You don't want to help your customers'.

They go: 'No, that's not the way we do it. We want to sell to our customers'. I'm like: 'All right, well, you got two choices:

  • you can help them just because it's a good thing to do, or
  • you can help them because you want to earn your business,
But the only way you get their business in 2018 is you got to help'.

He goes:'No, that's not what we want to do'. And this is like a kind of interactive presentation, so I got no choice, I didn't want to embarrass them, but I go:

'Audience, how do you feel about that?'

'Booooh' Like 104 guys.

He was like standing up arguing and then he was like sitting down very slowly.

I'm going: 'They're actually doing you a favour, because this is the way everybody feels. This is the way it work's.

How to Align Marketing and Sales

I'm just getting the meat of the slides.  I'm going to spend five minutes on this.

3 things that you have to do to have the Sales and Marketing alignment.

Number 1: You have to set sales goals

The first is you have to set goals. The second is you have to have a service level agreement, and the third is you have to negotiate this hand-off.

company-goals

So the goal setting is: 'What do we want?'. And this a shared kind of thing.

I was talking to Emily, I'm going: 'Emily, do you know the goal of your company? '

And she says: 'Oh, I think so'.

But you need to know the quota of your vice president of Sales or chief revenue officer, and then you need to know the individual quota of all your Salespeople. That is super important.

"Data gives you power"

Number 2: An SLA Service Level Agreement

Tells you how much do we want

How many people in the audience have an SLA? Only about 10%. 

This is super important because it will be new to salespeople. Salespeople are usually a little grumpy. Have you noticed that? Salespeople a little grumpy.

It's because they got a target on their back.

If they don't work, if they don't produce, they're fired. So that gives you a little bit of a thick skin, but it also gives you kind of an attitude where you're going to run like crazy, so you want continue your employment. 

Number 3: Lead quality and hand-off

And the third thing that you got to figure out as the lead quality and hand-off, how many people are familiar with MQLs? About half.

It's Marketing Qualified Leads.

Everybody know SQLs?

Sales Qualified Leads.

Anybody knows PQLs? Oh, okay lady, you get to keep your ping pong ball.

It's Product Qualified Leads, right? Very, very good. And let's go walk through this.

setting-goals

What is an M spot?

The first is... anybody's familiar with an M spot? An M spot is a HubSpot thing, Brian sees it all the time. We wrote about it in the book 'The Inbound Organization'.

An M spot is one page. I'm going to strongly recommend that you build an M spot for either your company (if you're the CEO or for your Sales organisation (if you're in Sales) or for your marketing department.

We start with a company M spot, and moved down to divisional M spots, each one page that shows the mission, the strategy, the plays, the targets, and the omissions. And there's a whole chapter on this in the book about this.

how-to-set-company-goals

The company mission

As an example, 'build the fastest growing athletic sock company in North America' right there, that's the mission, that's what we want to do. Everybody knows Simon Sinek's 'Finding your why'?

We talk about the importance of understanding what your company mission is in 2018. It's very important to define why you're doing it. It's not good enough to say, well, our mission is to grow. You want to be very, very specific of what your mission is so you can recruit the right people.

Your company strategy

Your strategy is who you're going to service, and how. Your plays are the specific things that you're going to do to get there.

Your targets are how you're going to be measured and your omissions are the things that you've considered that you're not going to do.

The beauty of this is this on one page, the beauty of this is everybody in your organisation should see this and understand, the beauty of this as you can utilise it for Sales and Marketing so there's good interaction between the two, and salespeople and sales executives should know and understand what marketing's goals are and vice versa.

The service level agreement (SLA)

service-level-agreement

"The Service Level Agreement is what marketing is going to deliver for a pre-determined amount of demand"

That is leads MQLs, SQLs. Everybody wants the more higher quality leads, that takes years to build. The HubSpot marketing agencies can show you how to do it.

But what all the vice president of sales or vice president of sales want are people who are going to buy now. And you can get those, but it's only going to be 1% or 2%, like the lady in the back said, maybe 3% if you're really, really good.

"In 2018 salespeople have to call a prospect 4 times"

And it takes a little bit of time to do it, the bottom part of this is how sales works the demand, and in 2018 salespeople have to call a prospect 4 times. They have to email somebody 4 times. And the third email should be a video email.

Using video in sales and marketing

How many people are using video email? A handful. Okay. What do you use, Soapbox or Vidyard or Loom? So, all of those companies have free products that you can use.

Anybody ever receive a video email? That's it. Yes. So all of those three - Vidyard, Loom and Soapbox - all plays right in the email.

If you have to click a link and it goes to someplace else, you won't do it. Because you don't know if it's coming from Russia or China or wherever. Yes, I know, I know. If you see a little picture and you see Clwyd in the picture right now of a sudden he's smiling, he sold in the little stuffed elephant or something like that and he likes looks human. That is like right out of Harry Potter?

It's amazing? And Pluto is going to say: 'Now I've got 90 seconds. You can't take more than 90 seconds. And what you want to do is you're trying to be human. When you're trying to get that across that much better than a cold call, right? It's like 30 times better than a cold call.

"The conversion for a video email is between 24% and 30%"

Based on the HubSpot research. My bold prediction is you'll be getting three of them a day starting in October, because everybody's going to jump on this bandwagon, it's just too effective not to be there.

But the thing for salespeople is that there's lots of agencies here in London who would create tons of leads, but the salespeople would screw it up. The reason why you have to have the smarketing alignment is if Marketing does all this great stuff to nurture the leads, be human, provide this content through the top of the funnel stuff and then a salesperson calls up and like ruins it. Boom. All that money gone away.

So the salespeople then have to professionally pursue. So when a salesperson has to do is have to call four times, email four times, the third email is a video email: you'll never get me on the first email.

I am backed up 600 emails and it's only 10:30 in the morning. If you send the second email and it says second email, I'm like: 'Oh yeah, that lady sent me an email'.

If it says: 'Ask for my voicemail', I go: 'Yeah. Yeah. That's the lady you left me the voicemail'. I rarely returned my voicemails.

I'll look at them like maybe an October. They're all there, right? I got 156 of them. I'll try to get to them. I got the best intentions, but it's just the way it works.

And your salespeople have to align with that SLA.

"They have to agree to call 4 times or email 4 times or it's not worth it."

What we see is sometimes people will call once/email once and say: 'Oh, the leads suck'. That's not good. You have to professionally pursue in a way that it works.

Those creation of the OPPs, and then you need to study all of the process, in some industries sometimes you have to call six times, sometimes you have to email six times, but the HubSpot research study says that after 4 times and 4 emails - by the way, the fourth email is 'should I stay or should I go?'.

And that gets over 50% of the responses and it's because you're trying to play into the ability for people to understand.
The Service Level Agreement (SLA) between marketing & saleshow-to-calculate-service-level-agreement

How to calculate your SLA

So you have to calculate your Service Level Agreement. To do that, you figure out what your total goal is. Then, how much new revenue you want to create?

And so you say:

  • This is the amount of revenue you want to create
  • This is the number of customers you need

"Marketing now has a quota"

Now, what I'm saying is marketing now has a quota. You're going to go to your vice president of sales and say: 'I want some of your quotas'. The guy who's gonna look at you, he's going to say:' Why?'

'I'm going to help you hit your quota'

How much do you want me to take?

Because I will turn SQLs into this revenue and in exchange this is what I need.

  • This is the number of customers I need
  • This is the approximate close rate
  • These are the total leads that I need to create
You're essentially going to create a plan where you're going to say: 'All right, this is what I'm going to deliver'.

service-level-agreement-example

So for an example, if you want a million dollars in annual revenue, you want 40% of that revenue from MQLs; the average deal size is a thousand, the average lead to customer close is 10%. 

Now you have the algorithm, now you have the information that you need to go ahead and do it. And then final piece in this segment, we'll come back after Ian's presentation, is the hand-off. 

Handing leads over to the sales team

"You have to decide when you're going to give the leads to the salespeople"

In HubSpot world we don't give leads to Brian until they've come back to the website at least three times.

Some people, because they need more leads, will give their salespeople the leads the first time they come to the website and we're okay with that. You just have to be very cordial when you engage, when you pick up the phone, you say: 'This is Dan from HubSpot' or 'This is Pete from Hubspot', or 'This is Clwyd from Whitehat'.

You tell your salespeople if they're calling, I want them to stand up, I want them to smile. I want them to be friendly. I want them to be human. And then they're going to ask 2 important questions.

Number 1: 'How are you doing today?'

They're going to ask, can you do that in the UK? Somebody told me you can't do that. I don't know. Clwyd, what do you think? It depends. All right, you guys... Victoria gave me the frown, so I'm thinking maybe that's a little bit aggressive for this audience.

Number 2: 'Can I ask what were you looking for help with?'

Remember they've come to the website and converting. Is that okay within your... Okay. Everybody's agree with that, so maybe skip the first question and go: 'What were you looking for help with?' Now that's transformation. That is a very human thing. Rarely will people decline that out. You're just following up professionally.

How quickly should I follow up a new lead?

Anybody know how quickly you have to follow up? 10 minutes? What's your name? Ellen. Very good. It's actually 5 minutes to if you don't follow up with them, 5 minutes, the percentage of close decreases by 90%.

That's in the state of Inbound, 2017. It's a Kellogg study. And it is amazing. That's why if you don't have lead notifications, which we'll talk about in the second part, you will never sell anything. That hand-off is important. We talk about 2 things.

lead-qualify

Number 1 is fit, number 2 is intent. Fit is what page they go to. So if you don't know which page people go to, you don't know if he/her is a kind of a good fit customer. And intent is what they mean by that page.

At HubSpot, we grade all of our leads and Brian knows if this is a highly ready to leave or a low ready to leave. For Sales and Marketing alignment, the more information you give to a salesperson, the better.

If you're using the growth stack, our free CRM software will tell salespeople which leads to call first. That is a huge hairball for most folks, because they're so disorganised, they don't know what the priority they should call and the HubSpot software will do that for them. 

sales-qualified-leads

So the thing is to measure the funnel and set expectations about who works and what part.

"Marketing in 2018 is less like pictures and stories and more about data and facts"

What you want to do is avoid overlap in the communication, you want to be very clear in the hand-off, when Marketing owns it and when Sales owns it. When Marketing sends an email for Brian Sexton, it comes from Brian Sexton, even it has his on picture on it, it is great, you will not know that is not Brian Sexton.

If you're doing it on a high level, even when you cycle into the website you'll see a chat-bot and you'll see Brian Sexton's face on, and if Brian face converts a higher percentage that a female face or something like that, then you will use Brian more often.

And if we know the IP address and we know you are covered by a territory that Brian covers, boom! We'll provide the human interaction in that chat-bot. Was that too quick? Was that good? Scale 1 to 10, how did I do? I only did half of my presentation. The jokes on the second half are much much better.

Download Lead Guide

Why Inbound Marketing Is the Future

Marketing part two

I did say they were going to be funny jokes and the second part. You guys ready for some more British humour? No, I can go through these slides.

marketing-and-sales-revenue-team

More Dan Tyre Jokes

How about this one? I don't want to get technical or anything, but according to chemistry, alcohol is a solution. Alcohol, because no great story started something with someone eating a salad.

About that one. Actually there's a funny story with this one. There's a funny story with everyone. I only drank in five foreign countries: I don't drink in United States, I don't drink in the UK. I only drink in five foreign countries. It's a long story. The official sunblock of Ireland. Where's Bryan Sexton? Anybody yet? Brian? I know, I know. Is that funny? Alright. And here's some Clwyd humour for the mathematicians in our thing. I know. I know, I know. Alright.

Always be closing is dead. How to always be helping

dan-tyre-blog

I mentioned I'm a blogger. In 2015 I wrote this blog article, Always Be Closing Is Dead. How to Always Be Helping in 2015. I sold for HubSpot 2 times, first time for 12 months when I first started, second time in 2015. And when I went back into the funnel to directly sign up a customer, I realised there was a huge change in the early days, right?

Monitor the sales process

Sales people, we're in control in 2015. It was very clear that the customer was in control and what I wanted to do is monitor my sales process and improve my sales process. So he's very evident that I would give control to the salespeople. So I would call them up. I would track people down for calls, for emails. We didn't have video email back then, but I would professionally pursue them.

I would pick up the phone, I'd say: 'This is Dan from HubSpot', maybe like: 'What? Who?' Because I speak a little quickly and I'd laugh like cackle: 'Ahahah...  this is Dan from HubSpot'. And they would say: 'Oh, HubSpot'.

About half people would understand, half people say: 'Who? what?', and I'd say: 'How are you doing today?' And they'd be: 'Okay, I'm doing okay'. And then I would say: 'What were you looking for help with?' And this whole process of helping people to earn their trust was a very much in the mainstream and is exactly what works today.

The inbound organization

A couple of the comments in the break, some people have difficulties explaining to your senior management that this is the way to go. How many people are in that boat? So that's the reason I wrote the book. The Inbound organisation helps you understand how to convince your senior managers that this is the future.

Everybody wants to grow. Not Everybody wants to change.

"Practising Inbound is a competitive advantage"

I tell CEO's of organisations, if you have more than 10 people in your sales organisation, you go back this afternoon, you can wait till tomorrow if you'd like. You take the 2 least performing reps, you fire them, you take that money, you can give them to marketing. Because if you're not producing content, if you are not optimising your website to bring the leads to the yard, there's no way.

The greatest salesperson in the world cannot overcome that disadvantage. I tell marketers, if you're not practising Inbound Marketing and your senior management doesn't want to, you ask them 2 things. Ellen and I were talking about this.

Number 1: it's not easy

It takes time for them to understand that Inbound is a philosophy. To practice Inbound, you need to be Inbound, and they have to understand that's a option of helping people as a competitive advantage.

Who was telling me about their company? It was Taisy, Taisy was saying: 'No, they want to do what they've done for the last 30 years and they can. That's their prerogative as senior managers'. The problem with that is that it doesn't give you any advantage.

And what everybody in this room is obsessively looking for is either a competitive advantage or what I find is an unfair advantage. Everybody wants an unfair advantage. Inbound to a certain extent provides that.

"If you lean into helping people, we have the proof that you will build trust"

At the very last you'll be on the short list when they make a customer selection. I tell marketers, if your senior managers aren't getting it, quit and go find somebody who is practising Inbound because this is the future.

It's a great time to be a marking agency today

The reason why it's a great time to be a marketer today - or a marketing agency - is because marketing is now scalable.

"Marketing is now scaleable"

You guys know that it's hard to find developers in the UK, right? And developers have these escalating salaries because they write the code once you use it, multiple times.

Today, a good piece of content is just like code right? This blog article is driven over 2,000 HubSpot customers. It's one of the top 70 blog articles on all of the HubSpot blog. And it says: 'Always be helping in 2015'. If you see today, it was updated to 2016, 2017 to that, you'll see it for the next 18 years. Because it still applies. I tell salespeople: 'If you're not getting Inbound, leads quit'.

Because the calling like saying the same thing 100 times a day, it doesn't work in 2018. We have the statistics. If you get Inbound leads, now it's completely different.

Now you're talking to people who are saying: 'Oh yeah, I remember I downloaded that piece of information that's very, very important'.  And this is the basis for the marketing approach. It's no longer up to us.

The marketplace has spoken and unless people are going to go back and not use social media or search as the front part, as actually the front 65% to 85% of their sales process, then you have to lean into this.

Talking with senior management about inbound marketing and sales

One other thing in keeping with my vision of trying to do the most good for the universe. Sometimes I'll go talk with your senior management team. I have no problem picking up the phone and doing a Zoom meeting - everybody use Zoom in the audience? Yep. Everybody likes Zoom. Zoom is great. Great audio, great video. They can see me, they can see the gray hair. If I have to put on a tie, just coach me and I'm happy to come like dress like them and explaining over the last 40 years. There's a huge difference in the last 10.

What do you think is the percentage of people ? I'll throw out a t-shirt on this, so concentrate. The percentage of people who are practising Inbound marketing in the UK? 2%. Anybody else? Anybody else? This is like the price is right? You guys have the prices right here? It's up to you, but you can't go over. All right. Anybody else?

Hold on a second, I'm confused... Who said 10%? Alright, give that gentleman a t-shirt. It's actually 12%. They're not all using HubSpot.

"12% of people in the UK practice inbound marketing"

It's not everybody who's using HubSpot. But the whole idea now moving forward is what we call the code funnel. So when I get to the free gifts, I'm giving you all free stuff that you can bring back to your sales organisation, that will distinctly and effectively increase their productivity.

company-goals

All right, so the 3 things we talked about in the first part of the presentation is goal setting, SLA and Lead Quality and hand-off.

Revenue Goal Setting

Goal setting is important because when you leave this room, I want you to go back to your senior managers, I want you to say: 'What is our goal for generating revenue in 2018?'

Or if we're just finished with the year in the new year, you want to understand where you're going to finish that. You want to understand if you're up down or flat. And then you want to know the goal for next year Everybody should have a goal.

If they don't have a goal, then you create one. And that goal is a revenue goal and it's also a percentage increase goal.

Then you backtrack to understand how many net new customers you need.

There's two ways to get customers

Number 1: Upsell current customers

We call that client engagement. In today's world, all businesses are at risk. Does everybody have good fit customers that they have great relationships with their love? Yeah. Everybody has those.

That is your key competitive advantage against the best transactional companies in the world. The Walmarts, the Amazons, those guys are awesome at transactional kind of stuff.

What smaller businesses are really good at understanding that people, that human kind of stuff, that Inbound kind of stuff, your competitive advantages, creating these personal relationships. So that people will do business with you even you're a little bit more expensive if you can do that, that human type of focus.

Just think if you have three of those great relationships, what would happen if you add 15? That means you can fire some of the marginal customers. That means you can lean into those customers. And so we were talking a little bit with Isabel about how you approach this. With the goal setting, what you want to do is you want to pick a particular niche. So this is very hard for many entrepreneurs.

"The riches are in the niches"

You guys ever heard that? I know. It's a good one, isn't it? I like that.

I know there is a difference in the last two years. It used to be you could sell to everybody. In the first 30 years we sold to everybody, because you could sell to everyone.

In 2018 you can't, unless you're targeted a very specific demographic and persona, right? If you're selling to Clwyd and you want to sell to marketing agencies in London with at least five employees that are focused on life science, that want to grow 50% a year.

When you say that to Clwyd, all of a sudden Clwyd is thinking in his frontal lobes: 'Yeah, that's me' in his brain he's gone: 'Oh my goodness, this is a person who understands who I am!'. And so it's not about you. It's about understanding that niche and that exasperation customer that I had in slide 2 or 3, right to focus on that very small niche.

If you can dominate that niche with a stronger market share, it's easier for you to build that industry knowledge, it's easier for you to share that. It's easier for you to have the common vocabulary.

Identify & connect

So the goal setting has to be very, very specific on the type of companies that you have. In the sales process we call that identify and connect. There are 2 parts to the prospect and we used to call a prospect. The first is identify the right good fit customers, and the second is connect with them effective. So when you do your goal setting, you're going to understand specifically the type of customers you're going to bring on.

service-level-agreement

Service Level Agreement SLA

And then the SLA. Once again, a SLA is both in Marketing and Sales.

Your marketing folks have to deliver a certain number of leads, a certain number of MQLS, a certain number of SQLS. If you don't know what that is, you start with the number of the revenue, they often increased back into the number of customers, and then you segment.

Typically your SQLs are going to be about 2% of the total lead generation. Your MQLs are going to be 8% to 12 percent and everything else is going to be elite. 

And you're responsible for delivering that, either on a monthly and a quarterly basis, and you're judged with dashboards every single day.

You can do it in the HubSpot CRM, you can do it in Salesforce, you can do it in Zoho, just set up the dashboards so you understand where you are against your lead goal.

"The harder part is getting to get salespeople to follow up and to ensure that they're calling in the right metrics."

Salespeople definitely experienced and having a quota. They all understand that they have to hit their quota. They're less excited about calling a lead four times because they'll say what you said: 'I've already called that lead'.

Sometimes they don't know what to say or they're not having the right approach. So when I call somebody and they're saying: 'I'm just calling for educational information, I downloaded the eBook but I haven't read it yet. I'm just early in the process'.

I go: 'Great. My name is Dan, I'm here to help'.

  • What can I do to help?
  • Can I explain to you what's in the ebook?
  • Can I show you a little video?
  • Do you want follow up information?

And when you're ready to move to the next step, I'm ready to be there. You have complete control. That freaks them out. They're like: 'What do you mean I have complete control?' I go: 'I am interested in only helping you when you're ready to help, I want to rise like a genie from the keyboard. Exactly when you're ready to go. And I don't want to bother you other than that because you're busy with life'.

So to do that you need a little cooperation, and the cooperation... what you're going to bring to the Sales organisation is a couple of things. First of all, everybody needs what we call lead intelligence.

"Everybody needs lead intelligence" 

Lead Intelligence

Anybody know lead intelligence in the audience? Okay, very good. What's lead intelligence? That's very good. That's their buyer persona. We drill that all the way down to the individual, so I need to know is it Tanya? Wow. Yeah, I remember the Arkansas thing. I don't know how I got Tanya in my brain, but Adrian, very good.

You have to bring that down to the individual person. I need to know that you're from Arkansas and have been in London for 15 years. I need to know that you've come back to the website five times. You're a nice person and you might not be overt, but if I know you've come back to the website 47 times, looked at these things, avoided these things, open these emails, watch this video, but just for the first 30 seconds, now I'm empowered.

I can say: 'Adrian, I see that you opened this email. I see you ignore this email. It seems like you're at this part of the process and I can immediately tailor my approach to exactly what you want'.

That is huge because that's exactly what you want. If I don't have that right, I'm at a huge disadvantage. Only 2% of people in UK have that lead intelligence on all the leads.

If you're using the HubSpot free CRM in the UK, you got it, it goes right into the content. You don't have to do anything. You have all of that lead intelligence. If you're using Salesforce, many times you can get that if you're using the HubSpot marketing software as well, but let lead intelligence changes everything.

"lead intelligence changes everything"

Lead notifications

The second thing is the lead notifications. How many people know lead notifications? Okay, so lead notifications. Great, because no one answers their phone anymore, I'm sure you've seen that.

Although the voicemails that pop up, there is only one time when you'll answer the phone and that is if you're on my website looking at the pricing page and the phone rings and you're like: 'Oh my God!' That's not too creepy is it.

Then people say, well, it's a little creepy. I know, I know you gotta like work a little bit, but I'm telling you it's a funny line. And people is like: 'Yes, it is a little creepy, but I'm on your pricing page and I have this question'.

Those lead notifications, I think we were talking about when people open their emails or when they're back on the website. If you don't have that information, how are you going to sell? I don't want to talk to you, Victoria, unless you're interested in talking to me because all I'll do is annoy you.

But if you're like talking and on my website and looking at a blog article, I need to know that you're looking at that blog article. I need to know what the blog article is all about and I need to call you within 5 minutes.

"If you don't have lead notifications, you cannot sell in 2018"

You can. It's just like putting duct tape over your mouth. It is really, really hard.

The HubSpot meeting tool

The 3rd  thing is the meetings tool, and anybody use the meetings tool here? Okay. So if you don't use the meetings tool, the meeting tool alleviates the juvenile process of sending an email around saying:

  • 'Can you meet on Tuesday?
  • Can you meet on Thursday?
  • Can you meet on Friday morning?'
  • 'No, I'm out that day'.
You know what I'm talking about? I saw you snarling the teeth. You're like: 'I hate that!'. And then somebody cycles in on Friday and says: 'Oh, I was on vacation this week. I can't do next Tuesday'. And you start the whole stupid process all over again.

You feel like you're in high school. The meeting's tool. I sent it to you and it allows you to pick the time that I'm available. It'll only show my available times. If you have multiple people, you can only show the available time for multiple people.

Number 1: The customer gets to decide

The customer gets the cycle in. You're giving the customer control There's a couple of great benefits to that. Anybody see the benefit of giving the customer the ability to set the time they want to meet with you? Shout it out, earn a t-shirt.

What's the benefit of something like a meeting the customer gets complete control? You think they'll blow out that meeting and they set the meeting if they ever blow out that meeting?

Like: 'Oh my God, I set that meeting with that lady that I didn't show up, that's horrible!' 

  • Number 2, you're giving them control
  • Number 3, the efficiency
  • Number 4,  in the meeting still they see a picture of you

I'm all about the humanness. I don't want her to think of Dan, the salesperson or executive. I want them to think Dan, the human being. It's kind of what Ian was saying, and you should have a little gorilla on your meetings tool. And the ability to start that conversation, of being helpful by not having to do old kind of stuff is super important. That's the teamwork kind of stuff. 

How to Do Marketing and Sales Alignment in 2018

So now I want to talk about the process, because we know it's hard of getting your Sales team - or sometimes your marketing team locked in. And it starts with buy-in, communication and enablement.

buy-in-communication-enablement

And how many people will think it will be hard for you to get your Sales team to practice marketing? So it is.

Most of you guys are well on your way of doing it. Some people think it's hard. So just that you understand, this is the graphic I was saying, there's still a difference in communication.

sales-reps-work1

So when you say: 'Please send this eBook around to your prospects', what are your salespeople think? 'If you have any complaints about this eBook, please let me know'. 

That's what they're hearing. I know, I know. Edwin, you're like a typical marketer. So you understand what that means.

sales-reps-work

Number 1, 'Please work all your leads by Friday'. They're like: 'All right, take a look at some of these leads next time I get bored'. That's what they're thinking right there. Just in a different plane. Venus and Mars.

sales-reps-work2

'This is an internal only piece of collateral'. What does that mean? 'You can send it. Just don't get caught'. Exactly. I know, I know. They're just coming from a different thing.

How to get marketing buy-in

So you need to get what we call marketing buy-in. That is at the individual rep level.

"They need to understand that your job is to help them close more deals"

"Your job is to understand what their quota is"

How many deals they have to close either every month or every quarter or every year, and that you own a piece of that.

marketing-buy-in

Smarketing Buy-In

So it goes with the organisational goals to start. And then the individual goals, every salesperson in this room should carry a quota. If they don't carry a quota, it's really hard to forecast most organisations.

They need to understand what you expect of them and vice versa: if you're delivering them leads, then you need a little help. There's a couple of ways that they can help.

Sales people can help you create content

They can just sit there and talk that content. The things that they say all the time is annoying to them and it's very helpful for you because that's your next five or 10 or 20 blog articles.

They need to understand that the new way of selling is the followup that I've talked about only helping. What that means for a sales person is that you have to manage a wire funnel, because the customer or prospect is now in control.

It used to be: 'We could push them through this actual funnel'. And now it's not a funnel anymore. It's like a hairball.

Guys know what a hairball is? We have any cat people here. How do you describe Edwin? How do you describe a hairball? Yeah, it's like a ball of hair. It's like all twisted and it's kind of stuff. And what happens? I know I couldn't find a English like alternative. So I went with the hairball thing. It worked. Alright, you guys got it?

People start and stop, start and stop, start and stop. Why do they do that in 2018? It's much different. Part of it is the attention span, but part of its session is the way our life is.

Your boss walks in and says: 'Get this done!' Walks in seven minutes later, he said: 'Forget about that, get this done!' And you're like: 'What? I just talked to this guy, Edward, I just was asking about demand generation'. And that's the way the whole world works.

So they're super interested for five minutes and then they move on. That's why:

"When they're on the website, you have 5 minutes to call"

Because they're thinking about that. They're thinking about it right now and in 7 minutes that are going to move onto the next thing. If you can call them and say: 'I am your resource, I am the person to help'.

Active listening skills for salespeople

Does anybody know the single most important attribute in a salesperson in 2018? guess? Yes ma'am. Empathy is in the top four. Very good. It's not number one.

Who said listening skills? And when you've already won like half the swag we got. So what's your name? Do you want a t-shirt? Okay. Clwyd. Listening skills.

How do you know that? Are you an introvert? Introverts typically make better salespeople in 2018 because of what we call active listening skills.  And the number one thing, it's amazing, isn't it? How much does it cost to listen? How much product knowledge do you need to have to listen.

What are the deep training programs that you need to go through so that you can listen? And listening is hard for me, I have to press the mute button all the time. I got a little lion that I squeezed all the time because I didn't want sentence seconds. I didn't want to fill, I just like to talk.

So I pushed the mute button all the time. It doesn't say 'mute' anymore, just says 'm'. I like push it so often.

But listening is super important, because if I'm talking all the time, I don't have an opportunity to figure out what you want. It used to be that you would connect and qualify on the connect call. I would ask:

  • "Are you going to buy in the next 30 days?
  • And who besides yourself is the decision maker?
  • And tell me where you are in the process now',

I just call and say: 'What can I do to help?' And the next stage: 'If you're interested in kind of moving through, used to be a product demo today'. It's a discovery call.

The discovery call

How many people practice a discovery call? Is the second part of the process.

"The discovery call is all about them asking questions about what they need and then practising active listening"

If you want to greatly increase your closing skills, you have to teach your sales organisation how to listen.

There's lots of HubSpot active listening blog articles that we're happy to afford to you because it's a real skill. It's

  1. Not talking. That's either easier or harder depending on who you are
  2. Recapping what people are saying
  3. Explaining and listening, like regurgitating back to them what they have told you.

So you want to understand in the marketing, by and between sales and marketing, what is expected of each person. You want to understand what the timeline is about.

When I say call four times, I don't mean in four hours.

  • You call or email, then you wait 48 hours
  • You call or email again, then you wait a 48 or 36 hours
  • Then, the last time, you wait another 48 hours

"So that's 4 attempts in 10 or 12 days"

Depending on if there is a weekend. And that is the professional outreach that your salespeople have to have, and you have to explain it to them. We no longer use scripts.

When I started my sales career, we started with scripts. Now you have sales playbooks.

A sales playbook

"A Playbook is a description of the persona, a description of what they want and it's a description of how a typical conversation would go"

No salesperson wants to be told exactly what to do. They want to be given a kind of idea of how they would use their own individuality and personality to get that point across. So what the timeline look like, how fast lead should be worked.

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)

Do you know the SQL (Sales Qualified Leads)? They have to be called within 5 minutes within HubSpot. Sometimes people will call 10 times that first day, but there'll only leave one voicemail.

They'll call within 5 minutes, but they'll continue to track, because SQL is when they say 'Do you want a sales consultation?' That is a very strong call to action.

That means somebody wants to talk with somebody in the closing sequence, and those have a very high closing rate for a HubSpot. And how will we communicate between sales and marketing throughout this?

Typically, if it's done, the information is automatically going into the CRM and you're using the same code stream. It's very, very valuable.

Salespeople are typically horrible at the inputting information. They have the best of intentions, right? But they get busy.

Every sales person wants to improve their productivity. To do that, you need a modern CRM that:

  • Automatically logs the call
  • Automatically has the lead intelligence
  • Automatically has the ability to set meetings
  • Automatically has lead notifications

If you don't have that, you're at a competitive disadvantage. And then you have to decide what success looks like.

In most cases, success means meeting your quota, on an individual level as well as a company level. Alright, any questions on this smarketing buy-in?

Sometimes when you're starting to migrate your Sales and Marketing alignment to show Marketing, you'll pick three salespeople. If it's really hard, pick the three millennial salespeople that you have the best shot of explaining this to.

We do top down and bottom up, but we always pick three people to start and if they're the right type of people who are willing to lean into the technology and learn this stuff, they'll usually outperform legacy salesperson.

Internal Communication: How to Apply the Inbound Perspective to Your Company

The second thing is communication.

communication-marketing

My friend JB Nicholson helped me with this slide. She's responsible for marketing communications at HubSpot. She sends out emails there, sometimes one-off sends. She also sends a weekly digest and she sends video updates.

That's what they look like. That's internal communications for HubSpot. That is awesome. It looks like it's external communications.

"HubSpot spend as much time on the internal communications as we do on the external communications"

Smarketing meetings

Then we hold smarketing meetings, all Sales and Marketing come together on a regular basis because you have to create that situation where people can speak openly about what's happening, what is it, then the managers meet on a weekly basis to discuss whether we're ahead or behind plan and then there's team meetings where we discuss the specific tactics of how we're going to accomplish that.

How many people are familiar with a Wiki? How many people have a Wiki?  So about 30%. Wiki is very important because we post all of our statistics all company wide.

"Part of being Inbound a is total transparency"

If our marketing department is behind, first of all, everybody knows about it, but second of all we're very kind of overt about trying to fix that. And so we have a Slack channel and an internal Wiki as a way of making sure that there's immediate communication so that people can work through that.

sales-playbook

This is a build slide that JB put together. This is a corporate Sales playbook. This is what the marketing organisation that HubSpot uses to enable salespeople have what they're supposed to do.

This is available to everyone that has key resources.

  • It has views within the CRM
  • It has a prospecting playbooks
  • It has an outline
  • It has all of the information
This is a really professional document that they've spent a ton of time on because the marketing component is very important, but will provide this to you as a template if you need it, so that you can duplicate that with your organisations as well.

sales-enablement

Sales enablement

And then finally around sales enablement. All right, you want to do 3 things. Number 1, grab their attention. Salespeople are not process oriented. They're very ad-hoc. Attention Span. There is like 2 or 3 seconds. And so they're off on their own, they're agreeing to something and then they're gone. So getting their attention is important.

Then making it easy to understand. You gotta feed them like a baby goat, and it's not that they're stupid, it's just they're thinking a lot of stuff. They're trying to do a lot of different things, so the easier make it better. And then you help them with prioritisation. You tell them this is super important. 

Show respect for the prospect and use Humour

I think you have to be very respectful and I try to be humorous. Which is, I can tell in the first 20 seconds if somebody isn't interested in communicating and I will say: "Aug! It doesn't sound like you're expecting my call'. 

But you're always going to be human. And you're there to help. Most human beings when you say 'I'm here to help' are going to elicit a response with: 'Okay'. And some people don't want help. You're like: 'Okay, I'm going to send you an email if you ever need my help, let me know'.

The only shot you have, though, is helping them when they're ready to be helped. That's why lead notifications are so important.

The first time you have that conversation, if you don't know their background, sometimes if it spends years when we were talking about banking software, some of these sales cycles are three years, they need you to know what they did in 2016.

Because if you go down the same road that they did two years ago, they're ticked off and it's your fault. You have to know that kind of stuff. That's just why it's harder to do it in 2018 and then it'll be super interesting to see another competitive advantage if you have that information. It is.

There'll be this huge differentiation between people who are doing it the old way, which is calling ad-hoc, saying the same thing to everybody else in essentially a one size fits all. It just doesn't work in 2018.

The Growth Playbook For Your Company

align-sales-marketing

All right, so your next steps when you go back today or tomorrow, align Sales and Marketing and the company goals.

"Marketers need to know what your company goals are and what your amount of quota you're going to take"

You have to define responsibilities across the funnel. So this is what we're going to do.

  • This is how many leads, MQL, SQLS we're going to create
  • This is how many times you were going to call that will create
    • this number of conversations
    • this number of opportunities
    • this number of proposals and
    • this number of customers that will create
    • this amount of revenue.
And then finally you have to communicate like a marketer internally to your organisation. Pretty easy? Still kind a hard. It's easy to put on a slide. You got to go in and talk to the people who are kind of mean and grumpy and saying: 'No, no, no, no. There's a new way of doing things'.

the-growth-playbook

This is the growth playbook

HubSpot is all about helping you grow better and it's finding the right customers, it's engaging in a human way. It's nurturing the hand-off of Sales and Marketing. It's starting the relationship.

"We don't really close deals anymore. We start a relationship"

Then it's the delight process

There's lots of HubSpot products. All of them started free that help you support this process.

the-growth-playbook2

HubSpot Service Hub

Also the HubSpot Customer Service Hub, which is the customer service component of the growth stack is available as starting in May and any of the HubSpot partners will help you with that. Alright, so these are the free gifts that I want you to bring back to your Sales organisation.

hubspot-tools

AI (artificial intelligence) for sales teams

The first thing I want you to ask them is... Has anybody sales organisations using artificial intelligence or machine learning? You can take out your cell phone right now. You can grab your Facebook messenger, you can get the GrowthBot in either Facebook Messenger or Slack.

What the growth bot will do is give your Sales team the ability to use artificial intelligence by asking certain questions that are delivered automatically. It's a Sales and Marketing bot, that will tell you

  • who's buying certain keywords
  • who's using certain software,
  • help you identify certain users in certain geographic territories
  • and of course, it's free

Number 2, if anybody needs a free CRM, the HubSpot CRM comes free. It'll always be free. And we have the HubSpot Sales free, which I will give you lead notifications, lead intelligence, and a meetings tool.

If you move to a paid product, I think it's $40 or $50 a month, the HubSpot Sales starter. But everybody can start at no charge to understand and get that competitive advantage.

HubSpot Academy

And then there's something called HubSpot Academy. Is anybody familiar with HubSpot Academy? Does anybody have a certification for HubSpot Academy? 

So there are now 84 hours and 16 certifications. And so you can go in, it's free. You can give them to your Sales organisation. There's one called Inbound sales. And that will teach them all the things that I talked about today. It will take them 2 hours to watch. And then when they get the Inbound certification, when they take the class, they should put the Inbound certification on their LinkedIn.

Social selling is super important in 2018 and it helps. 

The inbound organisation

dan-tyre-book-inbound-organization

This is the book that I wrote a in 2017 available in April 24th 2018. It will help you explain to senior management how to build your own company, how to practice Inbound or how marketing alignment is important, how to lean into your customer experience.

There are four books from Hubspot coming out in April 24th

Inbound PR

Inbound PR by Iliyana Stareva

If you're a PR person, Inbound PR by Illyana Stareva, it is an awesome way of learning how to leverage Inbound for PR

 

Inbound content management

inbound content management Justin ChampionInbound Content Management by Justin Champion, a Hubspot trainer and talks about how Inbound content marketing works.

 

 

Inbound Selling

inbound selling by Brian SignorelliBrian Signorelli has Inbound Selling. It's a book you can hand to your vice president of Sales of how to practice Inbound through the Sales process.

 

 

Brian Halligan, last year named the ninth rank highest CEO, super proud of that.

Any Grateful Dead fans in the audience? No, nobody. Anybody know who the Grateful Dead is? So, Brian is all about big impact and a Jerry Garcia, the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, they sold his guitar for 1.6/1.9 million dollars.

I'm reading that in Rolling Stone. I go: 'Who's stupid enough to pay 1.9 million dollars for a guitar?' It turns out it was Brian Halligan, right? And he took that money. It was doubled and he gave it all to the Southern Poverty Law Center to a fight hatred. Which is huge impact. I put it all in my presentation. Make me so proud. It's unbelievable.

HubSpot Diversity

hubspot-diversity-data-2

In addition, HubSpot today is all about inclusion and diversity, right? In 2006, we made a commitment to publicly post our diversity statistics. As the kind of company that wants to help. We have to lead, the reason we give you free stuff, we come on the road, we talk with you, we are all in to do anything that we can is because we're trying to change the world.

And so 2016 diversity statistics were okay. In 2017 HubSpot is now one of the top five tech companies in North America for gender equality. We have 3 women on our board of directors. Over 46% of our managers are women. And diversity and socioeconomic diversity continues to grow.

inbound event

If you like this kind of stuff, how many people been to Inbound? Clwyd, I know, Pete. Yep. What's Inbound like? Great. What's a Inbound like? Yeah, that 20,000 people all like this. All nice people, incredible speakers. Incredibly inspiring. And there's a discount if you get your tickets before May 15th. All right.

dan-tyre-contact

So you can connect with me at any point. You can email me. I've got a little bit limited bandwidth, but I guarantee I'll get back to you. What was my small ask? I was supposed to ask, to make sure that everybody fills out the survey there. 

 Well, thank you very much on behalf of HubSpot, HubSpot partners and our ecosystem community. Thanks for coming out today. It was thrilled to be here. Clwyd, thank you for putting it all together.

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