Note: You can download the slides from this presentation here.
This is a transcript of the talk given by Ed Fry at Hull.io at the HubSpot User Group Meeting in December 2017.
HubSpot group it's good to get to know each other a little bit more. How many people know, I was supposed to be sort of fifty yet and we will grow to hundreds, so we talk a bit about that next. Everyone has an HubSpot account, right? Hands up if you're on HubSpot right now. Right. Hands up if you have been on it for a year. Two years? Three years? Five years? OK, so look around the room for where the interested people are. What I want to share today is some of the cool stuff we'd be doing with HubSpot customers and how. But just kind of set some context to share a little bit how I ended up in the kind of HubSpot ecosystem, the HubSpot world.
This is me with Dharmesh Shah and Rand Fishkin - Dharmesh who founded HubSpot - a little while back about 2013. They were like: 'We need to create this community for marketers like yesterday, but everywhere online'. And so they founded a site called inbound.org: has anyone heard of it? Okay, cool. So I did my job, which was to manage this community early on, it was most growing venture backed. Both Rand and Dharmesh were pretty busy, so they hired me aged 18 to sort of look off the community: 'Its 500 bucks a month for your time, it's 12,000 dollars to last and indefinitely go fly'. And over the course of 4 years we grew that community from around 500 of people when I joined to 265.000 people HubSpot acquired it formally in about late 2013-14. That's really how it fell into the hubs ecosystem and using HubSpot and using that within the community. But so what?
That didn't actually mean anything as a community, as our metrics, our metrics all cared about engagement, about content. So:
How did you get those people who sign up to take action to contribute? Just to share some numbers which are behind this kind of engagement model, every discussion that we seeded at the community each week we'd expect about 2.7 more members to be doing something, contributing more content. And with that we've got to drive every single one of those about 4 more weekly active users.
Now, this is the key metric we were chasing after, people who were actively engaged in the platform. So we needed an increasing number of contributions. But the thing about this community is like: 'Look around, everyone's different. Yes, we might all be using HubSpot and yes, we might all be trying to chase this methodology about building better businesses within Inbound marketing and Inbound methodology. But all these people were different.
So how can we increase contributions across that?' So, increasing engagement is really about supporting this fit, like: 'Who are the best people to answer a question, to comment on an article and their intent (like their willingness to contribute)?'
And the reason why I want to start with community is it ties exactly on towards what we're doing when we're building a business:
So we are going to come back to this chart a lot because it gives us a canvas to work, a canvas for think about how we can quantify leads and build a better qualified lead.
So qualified lead set up here in upright. And they don't really look like these in the top left, like someone signs up for your products but they haven't really done much, and maybe there is a small team of small start-up and not a big company like HubSpot.
So what? Your newsletter subscribers. Maybe all you've got is their email address or maybe - just maybe - you've gone back and bought a cold email list, turned spam people again. Maybe that's a really good fit list but it's cold, it's not up there and it's upright. So the Inbound that we're trying to do is nurture everyone, everyone just whoever they are, just push them over to the right hand side. It doesn't work. As So Dharmesh has a foreword - what he calls a 'strategic plan' - a forward mantra:
And whatever it is and whatever he's worked on, he's always boiled down to this principle: how can we do fewer things better. So who are these right people or how do we engage them? Who are the best fit people for whatever that conversation was, whatever that thing we were trying to drive engage with.
As someone wants to share really briefly, it's that scalable, repeatable outreach playbook we use at inbound.org and what it means for you and your marketing funnel.
So a big part of our engagement was around Q&A, around questions, so we'd find something like this, something which someone had posted, something that was needing and answer but that was answerable.
I tidy this up a bit - like the problem with User Generated Content is sometimes a bit messy - and then leave a comment. No one wants to arrive first and leave that first thing like arriving an active party.
And that it has been HubSpot. So we had all our contacts, all our members inside HubSpot, building that unified profile rights inside of HubSpot, and we set up an email:
'How long it takes to create your best content? Write a little plain text personally email. Hopefully you can read this in the back. But this is curious to see if you could help out with this thread. Mike from Pittsburgh bla bla bla. I've left a comment and appreciate if you could share with us yours. Thanks'. That's it, nice and simple. Then hop into my pre-built set of segments.
You see things here like skills, job titles, interests, things around page views etc. and we select some of these pre-built segments since you're right a job title writer etc. You need to reference back to things that people are. Prepare these lists, these pre-built outreach lists, right inside HubSpot.
So over here you can't see this, that's outreach EMEA, outreach America's, time zone been very important to us - human questions being answered the same day, preferably within that same morning - and we suppress people who'd already had e-mails, suppressed people who had outreach in the past ten days and suppressed Gmail contacts. When you're sending out personally like this, just a small thing is you don't be necessarily emailing people you really know, or, if you do, you want to change how you say. So suppressing those and send.
I'd just rather than doing that one by one Gmail, I've just sent 400 emails and right away I've had about 29 opens and a couple of figures come back an hour later. I've got 53 people through and about 10 comments.
So this is the kind of outreach playbook we could repeat all day every day. And it was awesome. With these kind of outreach emails, with this kind of engagement.
You'd probably not guess how that particular e-mail that we sent did that... but it was sending to Dublin members inviting them to an event called 'Learning about Dublin', where the subject line was literally just 'Pub question mark': everyone opened it, free event, people signed up. I know you shouldn't stereotype, but in that case you did. But what this meant? It's quite quickly:
I think it's sharing the slides afterwards so I put in links. We can go and see the full story and sort of how you can repeat that, especially some of the lessons from scaling personal email (like where you're trying to replicate email, quizzes and pretty hilarious and all good results). You definitely check that out.
But bring that through the rest of the funnel, your numbers are four times better than a newsletter. Everyone gets newsletters. So what? But I'm reaching out to you, ask you to do something really specific.
The importance of the mid funnel
So then I saw Hull and I moved to Hull, because it makes this all possible, makes this all accessible to a marketer. And what I want to share today is some of the stories about how we can integrate this together. Earlier we heard about HubSpot Connect and building that unified profile inside of HubSpot, so that you - as sales manager, as a marketing manager - have access to all the state of your campaigns, your Lead Qualification for whatever you want to do. You need access to that as a marketer, but so often that data sits in different places like analytics tools, like in ads tools, like in enrichment tools etc. And this is a really important part of what we want to do.
Working around this kind of data, working around these possibilities, we're working with companies like these, who are using HubSpot (like Drift, Mention, Appcues) to build a better qualified lead.
That will weigh through to sales and the whole customers lifecycle by building a better qualified lead, by having that full data on each lead, customer, visitor etc.
So the point which I really want to make: you are already doing great Inbound marketing at the the top of the funnel. Everyone's talked about it, everyone's talking about great content, everyone's talking about building search, social etc. But that's not the only part of an Inbound strategy.
So often we capture that email and then we just relentlessly nurture, and there is no better than where marketing was beforehand. It's just spam. So what I want to tell you today is how to win across the whole funnel by building a better qualified lead.
So previously the story was something like this: marketing captures a lead, they sign up a newsletter and whatever; marketing qualifies the lead - maybe there's has some nurturing, there's some score which takes over; they send it through to sales and sales (whether it's in HubSpot CRM or sales force or whatever the disconnect is) they actually call them up, disqualify them and that's the end.
How can we fix this story? How do we stop this happening again and again and again? Well, the answer is right where you're not looking and I've pinched it before: the top of the funnel has the big vanity metrics, everyone likes to talk about business, everyone likes to talk about this big vanity metrics. The bottom of the funnel has the money, like sales guys are answerable to money, you can't argue with that. The middle of the funnel is not so sexy, like: who really cares about the hundreds of people you've nurtured that month?
No one like this - these are just a couple of snippets from something I saw that day when I built this. It's just not interesting, but it's secretly awesome.
This is where us as marketers have so much control and so much power of the whole customer lifecycle.
The top of the funnel is scalable, you can drive all the traffic through Google, maybe ads, maybe whatever referral network. How do you want get traffic being lacks data on each lead? You don't really know that much about them.
Suddenly the bottom of the funnel we have plenty of data, like a sales guys inside the CRM are gonna have so much on each lead, on each person they need to talk to, maybe down to their favorite coffee. But you're limited by one to one interaction. It's not scalable, only the mid funnel has the data and ability to scale and this is why was really really awesome, because you can personalize and automate messaging at scale.
Personalized and automate messaging at scale is how you get these high results. So may think about personalization, at Hull we use a five part personalization framework for this. And the first rule, the Golden Rule: who you talk to comes before what you say.
It's really who are they? What do they care about? How can you match that message up for that? And the Golden Rule is where HubSpot excels. You've got all your smart lists and static lists - that is data baked at the HubSpot perfect -, I mean you've got the content, whether you're sending out (like a landing page, an email or whatever). You have the ability to dynamically update that content too: this is where HubSpot is really really good. And they realize this is a way back in 2011.
Again check out this link. So Brian Halligan detailed about how they shifted from focusing on these type of funnel products, these vanity metrics, to the middle of funnel products. Because this is why they're seeing the biggest results and the best retention amongst cohorts. This is a very interesting link, check it out later. But why can't you do this already? Why is this still a problem? We've been talking about methodology for coming up on 11 years-12 years now, so it's really a data problem.
It's not that we don't want to do this kind of stuff, this really personal empathetic marketing throughout the funnel, it's that we don't have the data in the right place.
I'll tell you about Oz Content, a HubSpot User we are working with.
They sell software to help people ideate around what content they need and they are piling up about a thousand leads a month: people sign up to newsletters, different offers etc. and they have about 15000 leads in total. But despite all that the Inbound funnel was not fully working. They had just a trickle through to sales at the end of it and here's the problem.
Most of the leads thought out just like this, like ed@hull.io, like I have. So what they wanted to do is fill in the blanks and this is where they turn enrichment providers and come in.
So to take that e-mail address and return all these values - what is my name, what is my job title, what company I work for, how many Twitter followers I have - told me about more about that company. Filling that profile, filling the blanks.
Every new lead that will come in, will come into Hull, Hull also has a unified customer profile but extends beyond just our sales marketers, and it extends to everything.
They'll be looking for things like tag, someone on HubSpot is a good use case with them, with 50+ employees: they want to talk to a marketer, maybe a VP (exact level so they have a buyer) and they want to talk to people in the US.
So now these segments: who to talk to - remember the Golden Rule. They could build these precise segments and match with precise content.
Now they have to be experts from the field of content ideation. They then put on really niche, really specific webinars for these small really targeted audiences.
This is Inbound methodology. So you talked a bit about founding fit and nurturing across there.
How to grow Intent
What about intent? Appcues is a company based in Boston. Hubspot is a customer of them. When you see the interstitials, the Hubspot products, recommending you to try different things, that's how keeps working there.
You should call them because they have done it and having that inside HubSpot CRM.
They also had a question about Slack earlier, this pin through to HubSpot is a pin through Slack, so the Hull team have real time notifications on when a new account came qualified, which is also a different kind of motivator. Previously a lot of this can be quite on the dark, when you don't have this unified set of data, when you don't have everything visible. But even in HubSpot only certain people have access to Sales. So having that complete view across the company when all this is taking through.
"You can burn out leads by doing too much".
But another scalable channel, another platform can do this stuff within ads.
How many people in the room are familiar with Facebook custom audiences? OK, so for those who aren't yet familiar, this is an idea of an ad audience, built off an email list, a telephone number, or another identify which Facebook has.
"Imagine your HubSpot list inside of Facebook and then Facebook matching that up with the right Facebook Id".
So now you can really precisely target your ads and what you can then do is update those ads like you would a HubSpot smart list in real time. So we had an account do it, he's bringing 1700 leads (about 3,50 dollars each, all in).
So:
What did you have that inside of HubSpot? How can you use any creative interesting ways?
So to sort of recap:
It says the kind of playbooks which you can grab this with. So that's how to build a better qualified lead.