This is the transcript for episode 2 of HubShots.
Ian: Hi everyone, welcome to Hub Shots episode 2. I am Ian and Craig how are you?
Craig: I am well Ian, how was your weekend? Big weekend for you.
Ian: Yes Craig it was a big weekend, I was at Bathurst for the Bathurst 1000, also known as the super cheap Bathurst 1000. It was a great weekend, I’ve watched it as a kid and it was really great to be there in person. Bit surreal at times but it gave be a different perspective on things and I really enjoyed that. And as I was there I was actually thinking, motor racing has changed and people require information and we are in the information business and managing information, and extrapolating things from information will make us better. And I thought one thing that’s really interesting on the V8 touring cars, they were testing this little LED number that was on the side of the cars and it basically gave the impression that the car was running in circles. Panorama being a big circuit lots of cars around, pit stops, people crashing, people not getting in the right order, so as you’re around the mountain people are like oh this is fantastic can we have this on the v8 super cars tomorrow. And I thought that’s a great way so people are now testing to see more information people require so I would say that that’s going to make its way to the V8 super cars. But again they’re trying something new and they are giving people information at the right time and that’s what inbound is all about, giving the right information at the right time to the right person so that they can fulfil their need.
Craig: I love it, perfectly said, well done.
Ian: Let’s do this inbound talk of the week and one thing I wanted to highlight was one thing I really loved was Seth Gurden and I know some people say, I was talking and he was telling me, You know what I didn’t get any action out of it but what I like about Seth is that he challenges thinking. And what I really like about what he was talking about is that we often wait for people to tell us to do something or to take a particular action. He said it’s time for us to take responsibility because we are the guys on the spot so let’s not wait for somebody from sales or somebody from the business for something to happen, to say hey let’s try this out. Where ever you are in your business and if you are in the marketing role or you’re in sales and you want to try something out don’t be afraid to test and don’t be afraid to fail because you know what? Its just a path to learning to get to the place where we need to get to. So that’s my little thought for the week.
Craig: I really liked Seth, I have to say I can be mixed in my response to him but I agree I was motivated to his session and I do like that idea of testing stuff. You might be wrong but we’ll chat about that a little bit later when I talk about the challenge of the week that I’ve been having with a client. In terms of inbound I also, and speaking of big notes, because Dharmesh one of the cofounders of HubSpot Brian Halligan and Brian gave the key note at inbound and one of the little take aways that I really liked about it was his thoughts after wards on how he prepared for the key note. I don’t know, I thought it was very good it was rapid fire a lot of power points. Are you a fan of power points by the way? Lots of slides.
Ian: Well Craig I think it has its place and I think what I like about power point is if you make it very visual, give people, and some of us are auditory so that’s a visual and am quite visual so if I am looking at something and its visual and it’s a great picture that conveys a message I definitely get attracted to that. So I think it definitely has its place and when you talk about the fast there was definitely a lot of slides, yes there was because he was trying to get a lot of information across very quickly and having the right pictures to go with it really made a big difference.
Craig: I agree, I actually really liked it, I’m actually a fan of power point myself. I know a lot of people say its terrible and if you have to resort to power point that means you can’t present I disagree with that. But what I really liked about Dharmesh’s write up and what he did is he posted on inbound.org with some of his tips for presenting and keep in mind he presented to 14,000 people and that’s a pretty big audience which is not insignificant. And he gave a whole bunch of tips on how he prepares how he practices and how they tweek it, and they kind of test it with groups. In particular how he prepares for a presentation that has many slides literally hundreds of slides. So that’s really useful post and we will link to that in the show notes for the episode. Right at the end its really nice he’s got a little anecdote about how he was walking on and there was a bit of a technical glitch and that would be every presenter’s nightmare I guess, just how he dealt with that. So yeah that was my little inbound thought for the week.
Ian: Excellent now let’s move on to the HubSpot product of the week. This week I want to talk about sidekick for business.
Craig: I’ve been looking forward to hearing about this, how’s it been going?
Ian: It’s been going great I still got more things to implement but let me start by saying its worth trying out and there’s no contract on it so if you need to sign up and try it out give it a go. One of the best features I have about side kick for business is the whole part of documenting it. So what you do is you can actually upload a document that you’re sending to someone and you can attach it. And what it does is its uploading it to HubSpot and what happens is that it puts a tracking pixel in every page, and then when you send it when people click on it you can actually track and see how many times they’ve viewed it and which page they’ve viewed at what time and how long they spent. So let’s say you’ve got a great pdf with great information that you want to send out and you could even do this as a test. You send it out to people who you think would suit this and you basically tell them, could you please tell me what you like about this. Then you can basically work out what page they’re spending time on and correlate that to (a) maybe they didn’t understand it or (b) it was great information they’re actually getting a lot out of it, so you can use it to see what parts of the pdf are really important.
Craig: You know I can imagine if I could use that with a proposal, I’d love to see the used case and someone is just opening it and they be like click right down to the pricing page, okay how long did they spend on the proposal pricing and then if they did then go back through the proposal and on the other pages that would be good insight as to how keen they are. Or if they just closed down the document straight away you kind of know, okay we’ve got trouble ahead.
Ian: Let’s do a test and come back with the results.
Craig: I’d love to see that
Ian: So that’s one feature, the next one that i haven’t tested but is available to me and I really love the sound of it is being able to record your conversations straight into the crm. So this is where you invoke the call from the crm so you obviously have your headphones connected to the computer like a skype call in essence, it will record it and then store that audio file in the crm so if you need to play it back and you need to understand what’s going on you want to give someone to listen to so they can learn from it I think it’s a great way. And there’s 100 minutes included in each month to do that so I would definitely recommend that’s a great one. And then the next thing that was a new feature that was announced at inbound was sequences. This is where you can actually have a sequence and you can basically go hands off. It’s a bit more complicated so what I’ll do is we’ll talk about it in the next episode that’s something that’s another great help so I’ll try and implement one and give you an example so you can use it along for your business.
Craig: Is it fair to say that sequences are kind of like mini workflows within sidekick?
Ian: I think that’s fair to say and I really want to obviously knuckle down on it because am trying to implement it for our business too so I want to test it out with people I know so I can make sure it really works.
Craig: I am really looking forward to that because all the examples I’ve seen or heard from others have really been just demos. It looks great in demos but am really keen to hear how it actually works out in the wild for you I am looking forward to that.
Ian: Another great feature which is templates. One thing that I’ve started doing is to try to standardize the process the great tip I picked at inbound from somebody who was talking about sidekick was putting your cells call templates into sidekick. So basically everybody is on the same page and they have the same conversation that you can have and you can refine that conversation. But one thing they said, very important is right in front of that template in the name is like do not send so people will actually send it to someone. Which is another great tip.
Craig: So can I check if I understand this. You’ve got your email open in front of you and you’re about to call a prospect. So you open up an email and you use a template which basically has got what you’re going to speak about in the call so you just put it as an email template with your obviously do not send so it’s just there to guide you so you don’t have to leave your email client. Is that basically the process?
Ian: That is basically the process so you don’t have to leave the email and you’ve obviously got the crm there so its definitely a great way to keep everything in one place. I guess the next thing, Craig is if you’re going to send a follow up you can have that follow up as a template as well. So if you have that conversation then go okay I need to send them a follow up let me send that follow up. And the template is actually available in the HubSpot crm also you don’t have to use the email client but its available there as well.
Craig: Well speaking of email and HubSpot there’s a new feature, this could be a HubSpot feature of the week. A new email signature personalization tokens I don’t know if you‘ve had a chance to look at this but it’s a really nice feature. It does require you to have your hubspot crm enabled, you might not even be using HubSpot you might be using sales force but you still have to have it enabled in your portal and when you do that it actually enables a new tab on users profile for their signature so this could be your sales team users or other marketing users. They fill out their signature section in the profile and then when you’re preparing emails to be sent from HubSpot you can insert a personalization token for the signature of the HubSpot owner. So where you would normally insert a personalization piece in the email for the extra contact’s name at the top of an email at the end you can use the contact’s HubSpot owner to then put in the signature for that. I don’t know it could be the account manager or something like that. It’s a really nice way to personalize emails that contacts receive and I really like that. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, I’ve just enabled it in an internal workflow for some modifications it looks pretty promising and I will tell you how that goes in future episodes.
Ian: Fantastic Craig, now let’s go to our opinion and am actually going to talk about the HubSpot connect and this was announced in inbound so previously connections were happening through Zipia and HubSpot have now got native connections, they’ve worked with a lot of people that use apps that they know that their customers are using and then they’re building this out. So there’re some really great ones in here and there’re some they say are native in (13:17 unclear) so sales force being one that’s native and wistia so if you’re using videos on your website and I would be encouraging you to do that, is another one and go to webinar is another great one. But one I did want to talk about is zendesk. Zendesk is a customer support took which integrates through HubSpot connect into HubSpot and it basically automatically syncs all the contacts. Now why that’s great is that you get to see what’s going on in HubSpot with your contact and where your contact is and the different methods you might be talking to them. And one thing that I have just realized has been released lately is Zopim which is a live chat and that actually is something that people often use to talk to their customers on their website and that actually now automatically syncs Hubspot contacts right in while they’re going through the chat
Craig: This zopim how do you spell that
Ian: Z O P I M. Zopim was a stand alone business and was bought by zendesk a year or two ago but its great and we use it for a lot of our customers and this is one of those things you can test it out. Zopim is not expensive you can test it out maybe spend $50 for the month and test it out, try it. I convinced a customer to do that and most of them have made sales that week using Zopim to talk to customers on their website. A great tool gives you insight, you can see what pages people are browsing there on the site and where they start the chat from so I definitely encourage it because I think that you can actually speed up that sales process and understand what people are asking straight from your website.
Craig: Very nice I think the key point that I like that you’re making there is that whole 360 degree view of a context. Every interaction that they are having with you company whether its through a chat client, or it’s a customer support piece, or it’s a video interaction all coming through into the activity on HubSpot makes it very powerful to view what a contact is doing. And also those activities can also be fed into things like a lead scoring rule and things like that. So it does make the whole platform very powerful.
Ian: Yap so I think one thing is go and have a look at the page which we’ll share with you and see what can be integrated and maybe you need to rethink about some of the tools that you’re using in your business that will help you and give you that more of a view and I think that’s really important.
Craig: Okay nice, now am going to move on to our challenge of the week and this is me this week. Last week it was you talking about the challenge of having a public holiday in the week this one am changing gears. I don’t know if you have this one Ian but I’ve got some clients that are really against facebook and facebook advertising and they’re adamant that they’ll never use it and this is actually my challenge for the week. The reason it’s a challenge is because we are really getting very good results from facebook advertising for some clients and so I was talking to a client this morning and saying I wanted to test it and they are really pushing back against it. They are not on facebook themselves don’t have an account or profile or anything and so they’re kind of in that boat about facebook for their business as well so they’re against any kind of facebook. I found this a challenge because they’re engaging us to help grow leads and grow their business and yet they’re saying no you can’t use this channel because I have a gut feeling that it’s not going to work for whatever reason and my point is let’s just test it. that’s kind of my challenge and I will tell you we’ve kind of agreed to get over it and tis all to do with mind share of different platforms and different channels and google has done quite a good job of getting mindshare with just about every business owner. Any business we go to and we’ve had words I’ve never had an objection is it the same with you? Do you find that with your clients?
Ian: Craig I can say the same, do get objections from people. So again like you’re experiencing we have to overcome that barrier I think sometimes its objections because people especially business owners I think they understand what that is, had some experience maybe they’ve tried it out and I often get the response of I would never click on those links at the top because I know they’re ads. I have tested this with clients and I go like well there’re people that only use those ads to run their whole business which again is dangerous but in saying that it would not be a billion dollar plus industry if this wasn’t happening. So again we need to weigh up all the facts here and work out what’s the truth so again we shouldn’t be afraid to test and I would definitely say in certain industries it won’t work quite as well and maybe you need to find a different angle. Maybe the ads that people are writing aren’t working so don’t give up once. Again it’s like sales, not three conversations but maybe the average is about 7-9 conversations before you can actually get through that door, but you could give up really easily. So I think that’s really a key point to what you’re talking about.
Craig: I think that’s right. What we’ve done in this case is, because thing is that one is a lot less particular example of a client that am talking about. They’ve had words, I’ve had words they actually really like linkedin. They are actually in a manufacturing business and they say linkedin is very much where their customers are and they’re probably right they will be a key part there. So we’re basically going down to the linkedin sponsored posts and going through that process and then we’re going to say okay that process we went through sponsoring posts? We’re actually going to go through a similar test on facebook book just to check it. Because once they’ve been into linked in and they’ve gotten comfortable with the interface the campaign dashboard and all that sort of thing we’ll then talk about setting up a similar test on facebook. So anyway that’s my challenge of the week and we’ll see how it goes in the coming weeks.
Ian: Okay Craig, so I think there was something really interesting that came out this week which was the state of inbound report now. It’s kind of very interesting they put it in a kind of marketing and sales so I realized that as I was downloading it says you can download the sales part or the marketing part or all of them. And I think this is a real reflection of what’s happening in our industry and what’s happening around the world when it comes to sales and the marketing part and how integrated these two are becoming. I think this week we’re going to focus on the marketing part and am going to let you fire away and tell me what you’ve learnt about the marketing part from the state of inbound report.
Craig: Yeah thanks Ian. It’s just been released stateofinbound.com you can go there and download it. It’s quite a substantial document on both sales and marketing combined its about 100 pages or maybe 80 pages, the marketing is around 47 pages. I’ll just highlight a few things that I found interesting just to explain what the inbound report is. HubSpot surveys thousands of people around the world that are involved in marketing and sales within their businesses and agencies for a percentage of the respondents, and there was about 4000 plus the 4000 that responded this year just getting insights on their companies and their processes what they’re doing those kind of things. And so they went through the data and put together some interesting trends. Here’s a few key things when it comes to priorities for marketing, we’re just talking about marketing at this stage the highest priority is not surprisingly increasing leads and conversions. What is surprising is that people aren’t really focused on reducing the cost of conversions. I think this is really interesting because it would seem to me that, okay we want to increase leads of course but reducing the cost of acquisition I would have thought would be a big focus because just going back to our earlier discussion about (22:33 unclear) and other page channels I know when we’re doing ad words it’s all about reducing the cost of acquisition am sure it’s the same in your agency as well. When you’re trying to get the best result from the spend you really are focused on reducing acquisition costs so I thought that was a really interesting trend that came out of the state of inbound report in terms of priorities. The other key thing that came out is the big problems that marketers have and one of the biggest problems that they struggle with is proving how or why and actually the larger the company the more that this is sighted as being a problem and of course why is it so important? It’s because proving how or why gets you more budgets. So if you can actually prove what you’re doing is effective you’ll get a bigger budget next year so that’s of course why people want to focus on it. The fact that it’s a very big problem leads to how they solve these kinds of problems and that’s all from where marketing automation systems, of course HubSpots key planning, whey the can provide the end to end reporting that’s a key part of proving how or why, and why these kinds of platforms are so important to marketers.
Ian: So Craig I think there, this is important is that, that’s why we talk about this HubSpot connect because these are all these other channels that people are talking to businesses on like live chat, like Zendesk, like watching a video to help themselves, like on a webinar and these are different data points. So again if we can integrate all these data points and have this single point of reporting in HubSpot it definitely helps improve the ROI or prove the ROI to people who need to know the numbers.
Craig: Exactly. Well look there’s a ton of other things that we can pull out of state of inbound report and maybe we will mention a few each week. Next week we’re going to look at the sales report as well. That’s enough today for this week on that topic, you can downloading at stateofinbound.com/check that one out
Ian: Okay so Craig I think for community recommendation we’re going to give a shout to indbound.org. Now I know this is a growing and thriving community and I think it’s really important, I’ve been a part of it for a little while, am very poor at contributing but it’s something that I want to see. I really get some really great information and can see there’re some great people on there we need to share and expand our knowledge. What have you found Craig in terms of that community and being a part of it?
Craig: So unlike you am a bit of a lurker than a contributor but I would say that the signal to nose ratio is quite high. The fact that it’s not the blind leading the blind like some community forums tend to end up is its actually high quality and things like even the point I mentioned at the start about Dharmesh outlining some of his tips for presenting that’s not uncommon to see people like Dharmesh and other key industry people contributing on the indbound.org forums. Getting in there the comments are really good, these are quality people providing value. So I would definitely recommend it. I think it’s growing we’re actually seeing now that HubSpot is moving over its customer forums there as well so when you’re in HubSpot and you see a new product notification, let me give you a tutorial on how to use a new feature. It actually links over to inbound.org for further discussion which further adds value to those kinds of things. So check it out, inbound.org.
Ian: I’ll add to that Craig I think one of the big things that they were talking about, and I’ve noticed on inbound.org, is that it’s a great place you can find people to do what you want to do. So if you are a marketing manager or business owner, it’s another great place or resource where you can go and put up an ad and actually find people that can understand. How this works instead of starting from scratch and educating people, which at times you’re going to have to do. But it’s a great community of people and its grown massively they were inbound and they really had a big push really spurred on the community to share what they were learning and I think that’s the great part. It’s the whole community because we all can’t know everything and if all know enough people we can all get done what we need to get done.
Craig: Yeah exactly
Ian: Well Craig I think it’s been fun today and there’s still so much to go in the state of inbound, I think we could be talking about that for a long time but I really love that you’ve given us some great points I think we’re going to do some next week. I think next week we’re going to do a bit of sales and marketing from the state of inbound and we look forward to hearing from you all next week. Thanks for joining us.
Craig: Thanks Ian catch you next time.
Hey there thanks for listening to this episode of HubShots. For show notes, HubSpot news and tips please visit us at HubShots.com.
