Why Change Selling Blog

December 2013 marked the end of our 5th year as HubSpot customers and 4th year as HubSpot partners.  

You can read prior reviews here:
HubSpot Review Year 1
HubSpot Review Year 2
HubSpot Review Year 3 
HubSpot Review Year 4

I realize now that we were very early adopters of an important new paradigm in marketing and one from which there is no turning back, once the journey is begun.
 
2013 marked the year that inbound marketing “crossed-the-chasm” from the realm of the early adopter into the early majority in the cycle of adoption of discontinuous technology.
 
HubSpot, in 2008 had a few hundred customers and the product compared to today was crude and limited in function.

It was basic and unsophisticated, but perfectly functional for content creation and inbound marketing as it was then.  

Today HubSpot is a company of more than 400 employees, 10,000+ customers and more than 1000 partners. The product is unrecognizable from its early beginnings and leads the industry in functionality and usability.
 
In short, the product is a complete integrated tool-set for inbound marketing, which if used in conjunction with the HubSpot methodology will produce predictable and measurable results, a high ROI and a content legacy that will produce traffic and leads for years to come. 

There are no short-cuts to inbound marketing success. The product and the methodology works as advertised. The results are tangible, progress is visible – or otherwise.  

The chart shows our traffic and leads and sources for the past 5 years.

In May 2013, I began a marketing consulting with a sales and marketing messaging alignment project WittyParrot, an exciting new Bay Area technology company. You can download my new eBook Sales and Marketing Alignment, Content Capture and Reuse which is a result of that engagement on their new website; one of the first on the new Enterprise Hubspot COS, which went live in late October.

Most of my effort is now going into WittyParrot in the role of VP Marketing, which explains the drop in traffic on Admarco.

The first 100 days with WittyParrot have been astonishing and I will write about that in a different article.

Responsive Sales Enablement 

The Inbound Marketing model pioneered by HubSpot has been proven by nearly 10,000 companies to efficiently lower the cost of acquiring new customers. The next logical steps in this evolution, articulated by HubSpot CTO and co-founder Dharmesh Shah at the recent #Inbound13 event in Boston, are Inbound Sales and Inbound Service.

The idea of flipping the sales model of calling cold, or even warm prospect lists on its head, to real-time engagement, while or within a few minutes of prospects visiting your Website or opening your email is a smart approach to facilitating buyers who start their journey as an inbound lead.  

Think about it, would you rather be contacted by a vendor salesperson to ask if you need help, two days after your visit to their Website, when you are in the middle of something else - or within 10 minutes of being on their Website? 
I would rather get that call while it’s still fresh in my mind… whether I decide to take action or not.