I am writing to you from a breakout session in which I am hearing all about enterprise company marketing, and if you know us as an agency, you'll know this is our game. Or at least, we have worked to make it our game for the last several years and are successfully working with some major companies all over the world. Well... we are about to throw you a curveball, we are officially back in the business of small business. In a BIG way.
Accessible tools... FINALLY
Basically, the story is that agencies like us have been out of reach for small business for a long time. And in fact, we tried to do small business. The software cost of HubSpot combined with the cost of using an agency proved a mountain too high for a lot of companies that we could really help. The thing is, we don't just build websites and tweet on social media.. beautification of our communications efforts is important, but in short, it just isn't enough.
We look at your business as a whole and consider your goals (not ours, YOURS) and we work to find ways to enable your growth with a very aggressive and forward strategy associated with your sales and marketing. That is right SALES and MARKETING... or as we affectionately refer to it, smarketing.
HubSpot has announced a series of tools that are going to help us take you to the next level. People come to us because they want to grow for a number of reasons (profit, personnel growth, succession plans) and it can feel really hard to grasp spending a lot on a team like ours to get you there. Trust us, we get that. It is an objection we hear with regularity, but on the flip side, the companies that take the jump are growing and they often reminisce about their objections and note how far off base they were with those sentiments. It is about to be a no-brainer, as in, the cost has dropped and our ability to support you is greater. than. ever.
LeadIn will work with CMS's far and wide, it is amazing how simple it is to gain the lead intelligence you've always been looking for, but unable to get your hands on. We have actually been using LeadIn for a while with limited sophistication because we had never tied it into anything else. Our clients weren't really seeing the value there, and we didn't know how to communicate to them the power of this data. It is easy when it is HubSpot and we are doing a million other things with the information, but we have been working on ways to show smaller companies this power. And we've done it. We are going to be announcing our sales enablement services in the short term, and LeadIn is going to be a fundamental component of this. You are going to have more information on your customers than ever before... amazing.
Sales enablement is not a buzzword, it isn't a piece of the puzzle that is brand new and was never needed before, and it isn't revolutionary. So knowing that, why aren't you focused on it? The fact of the matter is, you probably don't realize you need to and you likely are unaware that your most successful competitors are focused on this without even knowing it. Signals lets you know how effective your communication is and then gives you the power to take things even further by being the sales mind reader you've always wished that you were. I use Signals for sales with Hughes & Co., and I have my best clients using this tool to empower their individual sales and the sales of their teams. This is a must have in the sales arsenal of every forward thinking, successful company. If you preach consultative sales and you aren't using tools like this yet, you should be.
You need a Client Relationship Manager, it is 2015 and that is a complete non-negotiable. Smart business is having your finger on the pulse of your operations, and without that you are either fooling yourself, fearful of the truth or not in control. None of those are qualities of a great leader. Here is how I use the HubSpot CRM to make my team stronger, more efficient and better at service delivery.
Prospect Tracking - I can see who is a prospect, automagically populated information about their company, any interactions they've had with my website or any of my other digital properties, my communications history with them, etc. I have it all, in one place and it has scaled with my business. When we were billing $100,000 a year, this tools was phenomenal. We have grown exponentially, it is still phenomenal.
Deal Tracking - I know where each deal is in the company, I can see it in three separate formats and I can grade my performance as a sales person. Powerful stuff. It can be so easy to slough this stuff off as "I have it in my email" or "I have a folder on my desk for them". But none of that actually works in a way that is intuitive and forces your hand to be on the ball. This CRM has dramatically impacted my ability to conduct sales in a very strategic way. I don't have a Step 1 through 10 process, I have a tool that helps me be flexible and adaptive to the needs of each client.
Client Tracking - Custom alerts, fields, and reminders keep me on the ball with the customers I have. The best client is the one you already have, it is the least expensive client to have (and if it isn't, see ya!) and being attentive to their needs, matters. The old sales playbook of an anniversary card or a congrats on your daughters graduation still plays large in making meaningful connections with the PEOPLE at a company. Still do this, it is important.
There are millions of other things that this tool helps me with every day. I would love to show you around. The last time I threw out that offer we ended up making a webinar to walk through the full HubSpot platform... I think it might be cool for me to do that for these three products and how I plan to implement them with our small business client base (which has typically been sourced and serviced through AllieHughes.ca).
Thanks for taking the time, I'll keep in touch with you all as other great developments take foot around here! Back to #inbound15!