As part of our Video Blog Series, we crowbar 30 minutes into the diaries of our Woven colleagues to pick their brains on a topic they are an expert in.
This week, our Chief Growth Officer, Si Muddell, chats to our Head of Digital Strategy, Daniel Swepson, about HubSpot. As a HubSpot Gold Partner, we’ve got a wealth of experience in onboarding clients, providing training, delivering campaigns and helping clients make the most out of the software.
In this third episode, Daniel gives us a comprehensive overview of what HubSpot offers:
Video Transcript
Si Muddell:
Okay. Hi, guys. Welcome to another episode in our recently launched blog videos-type episodes. By way of introduction, if you don’t know me already, I’m Si, the chief growth officer at Woven. And the other guy on the call…
Daniel Swepson:
I’m Daniel. I’m head of digital strategy at Woven.
Si Muddell:
Really excited to have Daniel doing this today. Daniel has a lot of knowledge about a lot of things. And one of those things that we’re going to talk about today, not in unbelievable depth, because it’s a massive subject, to be honest, and there’s a hell of a lot to talk about. We’ll probably end up doing a series of episodes on this in itself. But today, we’re going to talk about HubSpot, a bit about inbound marketing. And we’re going to focus a little bit about what those things are, how it can benefit your business, and then a few of the specific tools within HubSpot that we’re going to double down on and focus on them, and let you know more information about. So, Daniel, thanks for joining us. And in essence, can you summarise what actually is HubSpot?
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah. So I mean, a lot of the clients and stuff that we work with ask that question. There’s quite a lot of people out there that have heard of HubSpot, in one sense or another, and they’re not really fully aware of exactly what it is. HubSpot describes itself as a growth stack piece of software. So the idea in that is that there’s various packages and tools that you can buy, or you can add on at any time. So you can start off using it in one area of the business, and then later on, further down the line, you can purchase another element of the tool.
Daniel Swepson:
But essentially, it’s a marketing, sales and customer service management and automation software tool, that all works centrally from one CRM. So the CRM bit is actually free, that’s HubSpot Light, to give you various bits of kit and various bits of functionality for free. Because they’re aware that some businesses want to take it step-by-step in implementing that. So they give you a starter package for free. And then the idea is, that then really quickly you see the value that that brings. And then you can then sort out investment and you can implement it in other areas. It all works from this one central CRM. So the idea is that all of your marketing team, your sales team, and your after sales teams all have access to the same customer data, that’s all stored in the same place.
Si Muddell:
Great. And I guess in summary, how can that help businesses? And I guess, how have you seen that help businesses?
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah, so one of the big things that HubSpot are really big on pushing is this idea of unifying sales and marketing teams more. So they refer to it as smarketing, that’s a very American term. It doesn’t really work, people aren’t really that quick to adopt it over here. But the idea is that your marketing team can see all of the results that sales are getting. They can see the leads that marketing have generated. They can see how many of those have converted through to be sales or sales qualified leads, and vice versa.
Daniel Swepson:
So when sales guys are interacting with leads that have come from marketing, they can see exactly all the marketing emails that that customer has seen and engaged with. They can see if that customer has visited the website, what pages they’ve visited on that website. You can even attribute leads through to ads. So if you plug in your social ad accounts and your Google Ad accounts, you can actually track a lead or a customer right the way back through to where they originated from. So that might be one particular ad that you ran on LinkedIn, or it might be one particular keyword that you were targeting on Google.
Daniel Swepson:
It’s all about each department sharing the knowledge that they have. One of the really quick tactics that’s quite simple to implement, that HubSpot talk about is, if you’re a salesperson and you are picking up the phone to contact a lead, you can see they received this marketing email and they engaged with it, and they read this piece of content. So I know that when I speak to them on the phone, if I can reference that piece of content, or I can tailor my sales pitch around that particular product or that item, that I know that that customer is interested in, then that’s obviously going to improve my sales pitch with that person.
Si Muddell:
And I think that’s, obviously we’ve worked on quite a few projects, haven’t we? And you’ve led those projects around onboarding our clients onto HubSpot. And I think one thing that really has blown my mind with HubSpot, and I’ve worked with quite a few CRMs in terms of Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and a whole bunch of others. And whilst they can be really powerful, they often come at a massive price, frankly. And the level of customisation is often difficult and expensive. And particularly with the sort of, I guess, the nuances in any business, in terms of how they have the data set up and what their processes are, often the reality of an installment of a CRM is massively under par what the sale and the aspiration was for that.
Si Muddell:
And I guess when I started at Woven in February and I obviously heard that the Woven are a HubSpot gold partner, it really made me delve into wanting to understand more about HubSpot specifically. And we can talk about HubSpot Academy and all that kind of stuff. But, again, did blow my mind in that sense was how genuinely easy and simple it is to use HubSpot as an operator, as a marketeer or a sales person. And it feels like to me, in my novice-type experience of it, not only the usability of it is well thought out, but it’s the visibility of the data within it. Like you say, it’s being able to activate relevant targets in content really, really simply, by people that aren’t tech heavy, they’re not tech experts. And is that kind of fair to say that?
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, from a user point of view, obviously one of the tasks that we do as part of the onboarding processes is training. So when you’ve got a sales team that are going to be coming on board and using HubSpot as part of their day-to-day role, it sounds like a massive challenge and it is a big challenge if you’ve got teams of 50, 60 people, to try and train those people and get them essentially working in a totally different way. But that’s the initial challenge, and then really quickly, when you actually start to show these people around the tool, they’re like, “Oh, it’s really easy to use. Oh, it’s really simple. It’s really obvious.” If I want to do something, typically in HubSpot, there’s a big orange button somewhere on the screen that enables me to do it.
Daniel Swepson:
And even just going forward, so when we do onboarding and we implement things and we do all these workshops and we plan out the whole kind of comms journey. And we train all these people and get all the sales teams using it every day. It doesn’t just stop there. So the other thing, and I’ve just been doing this actually this morning. With a form for example, typically with a website and a CMS form, you have to go to a developer, you have to get this form changed, or get a button moved, or the color of a button or something changed. With HubSpot, anyone really could go in and do that in HubSpot. It’s so simple and it’s so safe as well.
Daniel Swepson:
All the different views of permissions and stuff that you have, I’ve worked with teams of salespeople before, and they’ve said, “Oh, I’m a bit worried that I might break it, or I might delete everything.” And the response to that is, “Well, you have been set up as a user so that it’s physically impossible for you to do that. So play with it, explore it, click on things, get lost in an area that you’re not massively comfortable in and figure out how that works or what that does.” But all the results and the tracking that we get as the partner agency, we then can really quickly see, well actually there’s this certain data field here on this form on this page that isn’t a required field and no one is filling it in. So actually, let’s quickly change that and let’s try and capture another piece of valuable information and see if that will then enable us to get more information out with the contacts.
Si Muddell:
And what HubSpot seem to, or one of the many things that they seem to have done very well, is that they aren’t just, and then nor do they market themselves as, a growth platform. They really have done an amazing job of positioning themselves as a philosophy in terms of inbound marketing. And I know that they talk a lot about their flywheel. I think Brian Halligan, the CEO, it’s well worth watching his YouTube keynote speak from Inbound. I think it was in 2018, really interesting. And they talk a lot about frictionless sales and they talk a lot about all the stuff that you may or may not do in marketing, like the buyer journey and moving people from a stranger through to a promoter and that’s a flywheel.
Si Muddell:
What they’re saying there is that you want to get people into your funnel and you want to attract those people and you want to convert them. And you want to engage with those people, but you also want to delight them so much that they then, like a flywheel, come back and they then become advocates and promoters for attracting new customers and so on and so forth. And so what my question is there, I suppose, is what is inbound marketing? Because I know that obviously HubSpot have aligned themselves very much on that inbound marketing philosophy. So can you talk us through what that is?
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah. So, when I first started using HubSpot, which was probably about six years ago, it was a CRM, it was the marketing hub, it was the sales hub. And everything was all about this funnel, like you just said. And that really is the inbound funnel. So it’s using content and it’s using lead gen tools and tactics to essentially draw your customer through a sales process. So when it comes to content, we talk a lot about creating useful and valuable content that fits at different stages of the buyer journey.
Daniel Swepson:
So if you, for example, are interested in buying a yacht, for example, you may not have much of a brand affinity to any brand. You may just think, “I want a yacht.” You go away, you do some research, you might engage with one piece of content from a particular yacht brand and think, “Oh yeah, this is interesting.” Then you might sign up to their newsletter and then you get more content. And the more you engage with the content, the more the content becomes relevant to further down the purchasing process.
Daniel Swepson:
And that really is what the inbound funnel is all about. You’ve got your your awareness, you’ve got social, you’ve got SEO and all that kind of stuff at the top. And then SEO plays a part all the way through. So your searches, the content that you’re searching, or the question, the long tail searches that you put in Google are obviously going to change, depending on how much awareness you have of a brand or a product. And things like e-newsletters and downloadable guides or brochures, or even things like booking appointments with a sales consultant, obviously that’s really quite far down the funnel. But really the funnel is about having content and adding value at different stages to guide the user through to eventually then making a purchase.
Si Muddell:
I think on our site, we talk about it, don’t we? And say, “It’s the honey, not the bee.”
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah.
Si Muddell:
The pulling, not the pushing. I think we’ve all grown up in an era of a shit-ton of advertising being pushed at us, “You must like this brand.” And really it was the brands, back in the day, that had the most amount of above the line sort of budget that you’d you’d have an affinity with, or not. But like you say in that example, that there are absolutely different stages of the buyer journey on there. And if I’m just starting out, I don’t know what the solution is. In fact, I might not even know what the problem is. But as we move through that and we do some research and we’re looking at more content, we then start moving into now I’m comparing brand X with Brand Y. And actually now I’m at a point where I want to make a decision.
Si Muddell:
I guess what my question was as well is, if I’m a marketeer, what am I going to get out of the HubSpot sort of marketing hub? How would it benefit me in my role as a marketeer?
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah. I mean, there are some obvious and quite tactical benefits. So, you’ve got things like the email automation and the list segmentation. The ease of use of things like creating forms, using calendars and appointment booking and that kind of stuff. You’ve also got stuff like the chat bot as well. It’s got a really quite quick to set up chat bot functionality. So relatively quickly, you can either have live chat enabled on your site. So if you’ve got sales consultants or customer service advisors who are online, people can chat to them via the chat bot on the website. Or you can have FAQ style chat bots. So again, making it easier for people to find that content. They may have come to your site because they know about your brand, but actually, if they have a specific question and you’ve got a piece of content that answers that question, you can use the chat bot to help the user navigate that.
Daniel Swepson:
And even things like landing pages as well. So if you’re doing a specific campaign focus, if you’re a B2B business and you’ve got a specific product launch or you’ve got an event happening or something like that. Really quickly, without the need for a developer, you can create a really simple, clean looking landing page with data capture forms on there. If you’re running webinars, there’s integrations with things like Zoom and GoToWebinar, all that kind of stuff. So essentially then you can capture all of your needs, they’re automatically coming into HubSpot.
Daniel Swepson:
The HubSpot tracking across your site will automatically capture any form submissions. So that is within an hour, if you implement that tracking, you can be capturing all your leads automatically in HubSpot and then tracking them from then onwards. So tracking the pages that they visit, the content that they engage with. But then really that’s the obvious ones. But actually from experience, once you’ve got them set up and that’s implemented and running, then comes the exciting bit. Which is all the reporting and the metrics and being able to attribute leads generated to a specific message or a specific piece of content.
Daniel Swepson:
Being able to see, in one tool essentially, information that you might get from LinkedIn Insights, Facebook Ads, Google analytics, and Moz for example. You will be able to find all of that really top level information in one dashboard in HubSpot. So you can really quickly see what’s working and what’s not working and then make a strategic decision and implement something to maximize the results that you’re getting.
Si Muddell:
And then, moving across. So, you’ve got the leads, the marketeers have nurtured them, I’m guessing, into a marketing-qualified lead, into a sales-qualified lead. How then would sales teams pick up on that and use the sales hub to advance that sale?
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah. So that handoff process in itself is automated. And you can set all the different parameters for that automation. So some of the clients that we’ve worked with before, it’s been quite a manual process of a marketing manager or someone in the marketing team saying, “Oh yeah, this guy seems pretty interested. Here’s his email address or phone number, why don’t you give him a ring?” HubSpot can automate that. And we can set all the different definitions of that. So that in itself, for some people, saves a ton of man hours.
Daniel Swepson:
And then you’ve got things like sequences. So, whereas with the marketing emails, we automate those and they can be triggered by someone submitting a form, or you can go in and do an ad-hoc weekly newsletter if that’s what you want to do. The same then can apply for a sales person or a sales consultant. So they can create a series of written emails that look as if they are written by them, they’re not designed with big header images and all that kind of stuff. And you can drop people into that sequence.
Daniel Swepson:
So if you have a meeting or you meet someone at an event, when you get back to your computer, or even actually on the app on your phone, you can add that lead that you’ve just met at an event and add them into a sequence. And HubSpot will then automatically send them some follow-up emails. And you can write all of those yourself, they can be totally bespoke. And you can even test those as well. So you can do A and B testing and say if I test a subject heading or test a tone of voice. If I’m really chatty and friendly, does that work better than being a bit more professional?
Daniel Swepson:
And then you’ve got things like the deals and the forecasting and the deals pipelines. So you can have multiple pipelines, you can create a product library if your business has 20 products. And you can create deals and automate that as well so HubSpot can remind you, “This deal has been sitting at this deal stage for a week and you’ve not contacted the person.” And it can prompt salespeople. And it enables sales consultants and sales teams to concentrate on the hottest leads. And you’ve got lead scoring in there as well. And you can automate that lead scoring as well. So we can set it up in HubSpot so that if a lead is hot and they are visiting your website, for example, the sales consultant gets an immediate notification from HubSpot and they can pick up the phone and say, “Can I give you a hand? What is it that you’re looking for?” And all the reporting that comes with that as well.
Si Muddell:
I mean, for everyone’s benefit, as a HubSpot gold partner, we do practice what we preach and we do use HubSpot for our marketing and sales areas of the business. And it works incredibly well. And I think one of the key things for bigger businesses with bigger sales teams is, like you say, it’s the customization ability of reporting. So you can see, what is our pipeline or what is our pipelines, if you have multiple deals. From our benefit, or from our side of things, we have existing business, we have new business. And various different people work on, or within, those deals boards. But if you had multiple sales people or multiple sales teams, you can then have a view on this salesperson versus this salesperson. And how much did they close and how much is in their pipeline. And I think that’s massively, massively powerful, right?
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah, yeah. And all of that can loop back to the marketing activity as well. So, I’ve been having a conversation with a client recently and what we were finding was that we were getting a lot of leads, they were getting stuck at a certain lifecycle stage. So we all jumped on a quick half an hour call and we reviewed the parameters that we’d set up. And we basically were able to see really quickly why loads of leads were getting stuck at a certain stage. And we could tweak the way that the automation and things like that had been set up. And then that then allowed those leads to start flowing through to the sales team. So the sales team can really easily see, “Hang on a minute, there’s a bit of an issue here.” They have a chat with marketing and come up with a solution. Within a day, the change can be implemented and then that problem then is fixed.
Si Muddell:
And then one of the final sort of hub that I’m less familiar with, I can talk about it, but I don’t know loads about it is the service hub. Talk through that a little bit?
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah. So the service hub is interesting actually, because what you were talking about earlier when you were talking about the introduction of this flywheel, that really coincided with the launch of the service hope. And really, that stems into this idea of once you’ve worked really hard to get a customer, they’re going to be your easiest next customer. And if they’re not, then let’s get them to get you a few more customers as well.
Daniel Swepson:
So the service hub has two sides to it. One of those sides is obviously people raising issues or complaints and managing that process. So it’s a really streamlined, clean way [inaudible 00:23:25] being able to log issues with the products that they might have. And a customer service person will be able to pick that up. Because it’s all linked to the one CRM, the customer service person actually can see the whole journey of that customer. So they can see all of the marketing things that they’ve engaged with and see who was their sales consultant? How long did it take for them to become a customer? What did they buy? All of the different full spec of that.
Daniel Swepson:
So that’s really one side of it. And then the other side of it then is about getting those customers, once they become customers, automating things like product reviews or friends and family discount and campaigns that you might run. And also then remarketing back to them. So one of the clients that we work with, we do quite a clever campaign where if you purchase a product, we know that the lifespan of that product is about 60 days. So if you haven’t repurchased within 70 days, then we know, then you will receive a 10% off voucher, for example. And stuff like that.
Si Muddell:
It’s really powerful, isn’t it? And it is that flywheel. One of the other things I was going to ask you, and we don’t need to get massively specific because it’s quite complicated. But is HubSpot’s ability to integrate, and I know that they have an open API and they have a marketplace. And just in your experience, there are businesses that we work with, our clients, that they want to use HubSpot. But they also have a legacy system perhaps, that they, for all sorts of reasons, are not willing to just yank out of the business. So how in your experience, how does that and how can that work? And how can they work together?
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah. So typically if it’s a well-known piece of kit that you want to integrate HubSpot with, an integration will exist already. And that’s you almost download that as an app. It’s off the shelf, it’s from the marketplace. A lot of them are built and owned by HubSpot, but also a lot of them are built and owned by HubSpot dev agencies. Most of them are free. Some of them, you might have to buy it. If it’s a bit more of a niche piece of software that you want to integrate with, there may not be an existing integration but you then can build one, like you said, because they’ve got this open API. So with things like Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, stuff like that, it will integrate. It even integrates with MailChimp. So if you’ve got a sales team that wants to use a HubSpot, but the marketing team is still pretty hung up on MailChimp, we can connect those two together and get them working together.
Daniel Swepson:
One of the newer more exciting, what I think is more exciting anyway, areas for integration is actually with Shopify. Traditionally, you could say that HubSpot has been quite B to B focused. They’re really moving very heavily into this B to C world. And so there are Shopify integrations that exist. There’s also a dedicated Shopify team at HubSpot that basically have this really lose, really strong relationship with Shopify. And a lot of the updates that have come out recently with HubSpot, and that are in the pipeline, are Shopify related. There’s a whole series of webinars as well. There’s a guy called Jack who works at HubSpot, who is the Shopify specialist. So if you Google Jack, Shopify, HubSpot, you’ll probably find loads of blog posts and content from him. But really, yeah, they’re definitely moving more into this e-com, B to C, world with Shopify. The partnership between HubSpot and Shopify is becoming increasingly close.
Si Muddell:
That actually leads us to perhaps the final point, actually. In terms of the amount of content, useful relevant content, there is for you and I, and clients, to absorb and digest, it’s incredible, isn’t it? And they actually specify that through an onboarding process, like internal teams, they go through the HubSpot Academy and they get creditations. And you can do it on all sorts of things, can’t you? Inbound marketing, inbound sales, et cetera. Can you chat a little bit about the HubSpot Academy?
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah. So we did the HubSpot Academy, I’ve done the HubSpot Academy. To be a partner agency, you have to have X amount of people in the business that have X amount of qualifications, I guess. Anyone can go and do them. You don’t have to be a HubSpot customer, they’re free for everyone to go and do. And they range from theory to in practice. So, learning all about inbound or learning all about smarketing, how to implement things in HubSpot. How to get set up, the first things that you need to do when you create an account. There are also ones around implementations. So, if you’re the HubSpot product owner in your business, there’s a whole ream of training courses about how you can sell it in as a tool and a concept, internally. But then also how to facilitate getting your marketing, sales and customer service teams to work closely together and to work together on implementing HubSpot as a project.
Daniel Swepson:
I think that’s even one for IT as well, about how to keep IT in the loop. And essentially, they’re instructional videos on how to run those meetings. And then every one of them has a little test at the end. So some of the tests are just multiple choice questions, ticking boxes. Some of the tests are the practical ones where you have to go into HubSpot and build an email, or go into HubSpot and import a list of contacts and create a workflow, for example.
Daniel Swepson:
The knowledge hubs are the other side of that. So they’re like the tests and the certificates, and when you pass, they give you this little button that you can click and it will automatically add it to your LinkedIn that you passed this qualification. But the other area of that is, the knowledge hub. So, if you have any question about HubSpot, the chances are if you Google, “How do you…” and your question, there will be at least five articles on the HubSpot website that tell you how to do that thing.
Si Muddell:
It’s incredible. I mean, they really do practice what they preach, right?
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah, definitely. And maybe I shouldn’t say this, I’m going to say it. I use that knowledge hub all the time. I know a lot about HubSpot, I’ve used it for a long time. But I don’t know everything about HubSpot. And my tactic is if there’s a question or someone has a question, or I’m trying to do something and I can’t quite figure out how to get it to work properly, I will just go and Google, “How do you do this?” And nine times out of 10, I will find an answer. I will find an article that’s step-by-step with screen grabs. If not, there’s a help button.
Daniel Swepson:
So there’s a massive purple help button in the bottom and that will either connect you in live chat and you can chat to someone who works at HubSpot. You can request that they give you a call back, or you can send them an email and they’ll respond via email. Their support is 24/7 because it’s a massive global company. But it’s ridiculous, there’s been a few times where I’ve asked them a question and they’ve just taken over my screen and then just said “You need to do this, this and this.” And they’ve fixed it for me and helped me.
Si Muddell:
It astonishes me as well, how accessible the content authors and actually the executive team are. And I’m not suggesting to everyone listening to this or watching this, that you go and email Brian Halligan, the CEO. But, we have messaged him before and he has messaged back. And these guys, their jobs are curating content for the Academy, for the knowledge hub, you can ask them a question and more often than not, they will come back as them. And it is them. And they’ll help. And it’s a really positive sort of growth attitude, I think, to have. A great mindset to have. And I think that that rubs off, doesn’t it? In their business and their brand, and their growth themselves. It’s a good model to have.
Daniel Swepson:
Yeah. And that even carries through to things like features and different functionalities. So typically, a lot of people might think, “Oh, they’re a massive business.” If little old me over here in wherever you are is thinking, “Oh, wouldn’t it be good if it did this, they’re never going to listen to me.” The chances are, if you send that request or you give that feedback to HubSpot you, your name goes onto a list of a whole bunch of other people that have asked for the same thing. And if a lot of people have asked for it within a year, it probably will happen. I have seen that happen.
Daniel Swepson:
I’ve had conversations with HubSpot and said, “Oh, it’d be really good for this client. They’ve asked if it could do this, this and this.” And their response has been, “That is actually in our roadmap for the next 12 months. In the meantime, though, you can do X, Y, and Z, and that will help you achieve what it is that you’re trying to achieve. But that particular feature, we are looking at doing and implementing. And then 12 months later, there it is. And I’m like, “Oh, great. Even better”
Si Muddell:
Great. Well look, so we’ve been chatting for about just over half an hour, I think. And hopefully it’s been interesting. Obviously, as you can hear, and as you can see, Daniel’s a real expert in this subject. So from our point of view from you haven’t used HubSpot before, and you’re thinking of using HubSpot or a tool that helps the efficiencies between sales, marketing and potentially after sales as well. Or you are using something or you are using HubSpot and you want to improve what you’re already doing and you’re considering how to do that. You’re considering, “How else can I spend my marketing budget? Not just on paid, but I’m thinking about inbound. I’m thinking about driving people to the site. How can I do that? How might I do that?” Well, we’re here, we’re always happy to chat. So we’ll put a contact details in the webpage where this will be hosted. And thanks, Daniel, that was really interesting.
Daniel Swepson:
No worries. Cool. And yeah, if anyone has any questions or wants to chat in a bit more detail about a particular area, then message me on LinkedIn and drop me an email, whichever.
Si Muddell:
Cool.
Daniel Swepson:
Cool.
Si Muddell:
Cheers.
Daniel Swepson:
Cheers. Bye.
Interested in learning more about HubSpot? We’d love to hear from you.