Why Change Selling Blog

Hubspot’s Inbound13 in Boston from 19-22 Oct. was the 4 ^th and best HubSpot User group and partner event I have attended and a milestone event for HubSpot.  

With 5300+ confirmed attendees, more than 1300 partners and outstanding keynotes, HubSpot made a very strong impression that they have arrived as a corporation to be reckoned with.

Beyond Inbound Marketing

Co-founder, Dharmesh Shah indicated a broader future for HubSpot beyond the traditional Inbound Marketing theme. The customer HubSpot seeks to serve wants inbound everything, not just Inbound Marketing and they want to be delighted with the experience of interacting with your company. While this wasn't a product announcement, Inbound Marketing, Inbound Sales and Inbound Customer Support make up the new  end-to-end, human-focused experience.... watch this space.

The HubSpot Methodology

HubSpot’s progress in the past 12 months

Co-founder Brian Halligan reviewed the achievments for the prior year.

• R&D investment up 58% YOY,
• 300 major product enhancements including custom lead-scoring, email A/B testing, iPhone and Android Apps, Social Publisher, Custom Reporting App. Product quality better, UI better
• Doubled investment in support. Av. support wait time 1 minute.
• 600 HubSpot employees
• 2 acquisitions in Chime and PrepWork  for IP and people for bottom of funnel developments
• 10,000 customers in just 6 years – and Brian still calls HubSpot a start-up.

Major product announcements:

• New Content Optimization System (code for CMS), this is the first of a new wave of CMS’ that will offer contextual personalization based on buying cycle maturity and responsive design to optimally render on any device.
• Social Inbox, a very powerful way to pull the needles out of the social media hay and to give context to the communication.
• Signals, a product incubated inside HubSpot that runs independent of HubSpot, to provide near real-time alerting. Signals is a freemium product that enables users to be notified when the email is opened, when a link is clicked, or when a lead or customer visits your Website. You can download Signals and start using it in a minute or two and prove its value.

Social Inbox

Context is a core theme for Hubspot's offering; today’s social media apps are all hay and no needles. Very early adopters of social media tools, reimagined how they work to match the modern buying experience.

• Easy to use, Brian demoed it. Listening for HubSpot on Twitter, lines next to pictures indicate context, prospect, lead, customer
• Create a stream – Who do you want to listen to? – Reuse lists in Contacts app.
• What do you want to listen for? “Inbound marketing” or “HubSpot”
• How would you like to be notified? Email, email digest, login to app?
• Awesome new social media stream, - orange stripes are leads… drill in and get additional context, who is rep, what contact record looks like. Get context, forward tweet to rep (who has context) to respond.
• Runs on iPhone.. Droid in a few months.
• Social Inbox created on top of Contacts - contacts is core to all HubSpot new apps.
• Set up list of leads per rep, keywords mentioned, get alert!

The Content Optimization System

Wildly competitive content management industry… no context. Then and Now.
Visitors keep getting the same experience regardless of #visits or status. Applies to 99.99% of Websites.

• Websites can't tell difference from complete stranger or customer or where you came from iPhone or computer (13% of HubSpot visitors from Mobile)
• Re-imagined for modern buying experience, optimized for where they are in buying cycle and what device they come from.
• CMS turns your brochure into a Website, COS turns your Website into your best sales rep
• Helps marketers accomplish the mission of thinking about the visitor as a human.
• Conversion rates much better for COS vs. static CMS - others in the market will follow HubSpot's lead.
• Demoed personalized landing page with context to give 3 different experiences for first time visitor, lead, customer.
• Demonstrated responsive design and difference between mobile and desktop versions of blog
• Complaints from designers in past with difficulty of designing on old CMS – (agreed)
• New COS, designers will love it,
• Context creates the inbound experience.

  Signals

• Big gap in sales technology available and what’s needed.
• Most technology built in 1990’s – how to enable reps to have context when context wasn’t even an afterthought in designing those tools .
• Dramatic power shift in sales - salespeople are now facilitators in the buyers journey, little control.
• Sales process – a problem for sales - lack context and ability to keep up - in sync.
• Signals was developed as Startup inside a HubSpot. HubSpot bought 2 companies this year to infuse context into sales.
• Signals lives inside other apps. HubSpots’ existing technology for lead revisits can take 20-30 minutes to deliver lead revisit notification into a browser. Signals does it in a minute. (Works in Outlook on Windows, not on Mac, works in SFDC and Gmail) Rep gets notified when the email is opened, notified when link is clicked, notified when a lead or customer visits the Website. When a salesperson picks up phone to call a prospect, know so much, more context, then ever.
• Don’t need anything to make it work, go to getsignals.com. Call to Action: Get sales and service set up on Signals. Basic version for email $0, SFDC and HubSpot $10/mo. 

HubSpot Partner Program Highlights

Exciting changes for Hubspot partners building on the success of the existing partner program that leads to 18% higher customer retention.

• HubSpot partner strategists will work with Partners to help move prospects through the buying process.
• Content to help generate leads has been expanded and enhanced for easier partner co-branding to drive more inbound lead conversions.
• Co-marketing with HubSpot and editorial support for partner featured articles on HubSpot main blog and social media to increase reach. 
• Shared landing pages on HubSpot main Website for registered leads to leverage HubSpot content and landing pages for nurturing for middle and bottom of funnel prospects. 
• Automatic lead registration connectors for HubSpot leads and synchronization with HubSpot to enable tighter collaboration for partners who install the software.