How To Use Hubspot for Sales And Marketing

Are you guys seeing the blue screen? It's this new school episode 10. Yep all right. Excellent and then let me do one thing here. Pull this out. I think we're going to migrate off of fuse and move to Zoom. And I think the interface there is a little bit nicer, but with something that I'm doing, oh, there's Ben burns. Something I'm doing now is I'm going to be exporting this document, this video to YouTube, and I'll be sharing the links. It just takes a really long time for it to process to download, and I have a limit as to how many I can do per day. And then uploading it takes forever because these are ginormous files. So bear with me. I have two episodes up now and it'll be under a private YouTube channel that you can only access through a link. Ok? I just ask that you guys don't share the link and you don't download the content and distribute it. The reason why I've used fuse in the past is mostly because it's very difficult to watch. It's even more difficult to share. You have to use all sorts of technology and it's just a pain in the butt. So the idea is we get on these calls every single week. We talk very openly and sometimes review very personal things about our finances, maybe our partners or even our clients. So I just want to be considerate of and thoughtful about how we handle this information. I trust you guys. So let's do that. OK all right. So for some of you guys, this is your first time on the call. I want to welcome you every first and third Wednesday. We do a call and those are structured calls around a curriculum. I'm not going to get into that today, but today, in alternating weeks, we'll have a guest co-host and today's guest co-host will be Shawn Henry, and he's going to take you guys through how he uses a CRM. HubSpot and how he sells, I think, social. What is that called social media and social engagement, inbound marketing, inbound marketing, inbound marketing? Thank you, marketing. So I don't know anything about this, so I'm super excited. And then the first Monday of every month, we'll do a call at 5:00 PM and that'll be super informal. It's just to say Hello. And to answer any questions, do the new people. And that way, you guys won't feel maybe as intimidated to participate to the success of this group. I think participation. So I know it's a chunk of your time, but I think this is time well spent. Anyways, this week, we're doing the CRM, HubSpot. I'm going to change this. I'm going to add in what the heck? In bound marketing. All right. On, I got your name right. Yes, you do. All right. So now I'm going to be taking notes, I'm going to turn this back over. Let me see how to promote you. I do I do that promote. OK, you've been promoted now. OK you have control. Yeah, let me figure this out. Yeah, I can guide you through it. If you want to share anything, there's a button in the middle of the screen. At the bottom, it looks like a little screen with a plus sign. OK, you click on that. It'll give us some options. We can share an app, you can share the whole screen, whatever suits your fancy that way. But do you guys see right now? Black screen, Black screen, I see your baby. All right, that's not the screen I want to share. So let me see if I can switch this really quick. And while you're doing this, I'm going to say Hi to some new people here. How do you pronounce your name? Is alan? Can you pronounce it for me, johnny? Johnny? excellent. Hi, Johnny, how are you? I'm not bad. How are you? Good, good. Good to see you. Thanks and Stephanie, you've been on before, right? Or is the first time I've seen you've been on? Yeah but you see now you see my son again, I see your story of a deal. All right, good. The full screen, right? Not the interview. It looks like it's full screen, there's a little Black border around it, but I think people got mad. OK, I'm getting little notifications about my internet connection. So if it starts breaking up while I'm talking, just feel free to interrupt me. OK, I'm going to mute myself now. Ok? and Chris, is there a way for me to see if anybody's putting anything in the chat pane while I'm presenting? Or is that all go away? You should be able. There's a little. Sorry, guys. All right. I found it. Found it. OK all right, so let me dive through, you know, as Chris mentioned, I'm going to walk you through our sales process and how we're using the HubSpot CRM. But you know, thinking about this before the call, I realize that in order to thoroughly explain how we use the CRM and how we manage our sales process, I also have to tell you a bit about our marketing process as well. And we do embrace an inbound marketing methodology and inbound sales methodology throughout the entire funnel. That's largely because those are the services that we offer to our clients. So we like to practice what we preach. But you know, if you guys have questions along the way, if something's not really connecting or is more interesting to you, you want me to dive a little deeper. Just speak up and interrupt anybody on this call currently using HubSpot. Or have you used HubSpot in the past? Or potentially something similar. Yeah, we're using it. OK well, if anybody has their own experiences that they want to share or you approach something slightly different, feel free to chime in and share your experiences. There are a couple of people using it, Sean. I believe Ben burns is using it. I think Al Martinez was using it, but then switched to a different program. I think there's just a handful of people. Cool Yeah. I mean, reality is there's probably a lot of different tools that you can use to do a lot of the things I'm going to walk through. HubSpot seems to be the best fit for our purposes. But you could certainly take a similar approach, even by just stitching together various plugins and solutions. But we'll talk mostly about HubSpot. If you have questions on how you could apply this using a different tool, just ping me afterwards. So to, you know, really dive in a little bit deeper about inbound to give you a little bit more context. We have to kind of take a step back and think about how things have changed over the past 10 or so years. And there's obviously been a huge shift in the way that people are researching making decisions around major purchases. And the reality is that we've lost some level of control. People are people are far more informed than they ever were before. By the time they were reaching out to you and a lot of their opinions are heavily shaped by the time you're having that conversation, they think they know what they want. And that's what a set a bit of a disadvantage. They've also gotten quite a bit more ways to filter out the noise. So we all have spam filters. It's harder to get into somebody's inbox than it. Maybe it was a few years ago. You know, there's the do not call list, but then even if you get an unsolicited call, chances are you're not going to be picking up the phone. So there's been a huge shift and as a result, the old ways of doing things it tried. The untested tactics aren't as effective as they once were. A lot of direct mail never even gets opened. It ends up right in the trash can before it even gets in the house. You know, even emails. If you are sending out a batch of blast email to a list of 100,000 people, only a tiny percentage of those people are likely to open that email because they get too much noise. They're tired of it and they're tuning it out. So, you know, again, the power has shifted. We don't have as much control over the conversation as we used to. At the same time, buyers are being overwhelmed with messages coming at them from every angle you could think of. And as I mentioned, they've gotten very effective at tuning those things out, spam filters are very aggressive. You know, there's lots of ways to block callers to your cell phone, so it's tough to cut through. Personally, if I get an unsolicited phone call, maybe I'll entertain them for a second or two, but I can't think of a single time. I've actually made a purchase when somebody called me out of the blue. There's actually a lot of research out there that says people are as far as 57 up the upwards. I think of 75% of the way through the process before they ever engaged with a vendor. You know, that's true for agencies as well. So the opportunity for us is how can we cut through that noise, engage with prospects much earlier in the process. So that you have an upper hand by the time they're at the point where the way to speak to somebody? And that's where inbound comes in. So nice way to think about inbound is to contrast it against what it isn't, you know, the traditional means would be cold calling, sending out those blast emails, which are largely considered spam today, those interruptive pop up ads that you see all over the internet and are starting to make a bit of a comeback. Those are very marketer centric tactics. Whereas on the inbound side, we're creating content that's pulling people into us where answering the problems that they have, where helping them with their research process. So that we're pulling them into us, it's a much more customer centric approach. Does that make sense? Many questions so far. Can you guys still hear me? You're doing great, man. Cool good. All right. Sometimes silence makes you nervous. I know, I know. I know the feeling. Know how it goes, dude. I'll be your wingman here. All right, cool. So to combine it, all inbound helps you get found. It helps you get found in the places your prospects are doing. Most of the research on social media, social networks, most importantly, search engines. Chris, your content is all over YouTube. That's how I actually found the school in the first place. So by putting out helpful content and getting that content distributed online, customers are more likely to discover you and you're going to increase your odds that you could help them through that research process much earlier. This may be a little bit, too one on one for a lot of you, but I think it is important to quickly talk about search and how that works because search is so central to the inbound marketing methodology. People use search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo. YouTube, which is the second largest search engine in the world throughout their entire research process at the awareness stage, the consideration stage where they're narrowing down a list of options at the decision stage where they're finally making their decision. So the examples that you see here up on the screen, this is actually some. It comes from project I was working on the other week where I was working with the private school and we were talking about how searches used when people are considering taking their kids out of the public school system and moving them into potentially a private or an Independent School. And these are just some examples of real searches that people are doing, and you could see how somebody has gone down the path towards the conclusion of I need to put my kids into an Independent School. And then narrowing down their short list of options at the awareness stage, they're thinking about what is this pain that I'm experiencing today? Why am I unhappy with my child's current education that leads them to the conclusion that maybe a public school isn't the best thing for them, and they should be considering a private school, so they start to research the benefits of private schools. They search for the best independent schools in their area. And you can actually see over in that search box. These are common searches that people are doing. Google actually feeds you that information. If you start to type in a word, you'll see a drop down of similar related searches that's driven by actual search volume. So it's a great way to identify these questions once they've identified that they should be going to private school and now they start being very specific about. The vendors or the solutions that they're considering, so this is where you start to see more branded searches, so if somebody is researching blind, they might be looking for a blind case, studies, blind reviews, information about Chris, do you know? So it gets much more specific as you progress. A lot of agencies, a lot of companies are very, very good at creating content and optimizing for the decision stage. They're lousy at optimizing at the earlier stages. Certainly the consideration stage, but even worse, when you go all the way up to the awareness stage. So an opportunity for us is to really think about what are these questions, how does that align to the journey and what content do I need to create to reach people at those key steps? Does this make sense? Yes, it is cool. Pulling it all back together, so if you've identified those questions and you've created useful, helpful content, you've put it out there in a way that's optimized for search engines. You're going to get found, people are going to come to your website, they're going to research your solution, you're going to help them through that journey in the process. You're also learning a little bit more about your prospects. And laughing at the comments in the chat box, you're not supposed to read those. I know it's designed to mess you up and so don't do it. No, that's cool. But you know, as you're putting content out there, you're seeing how people are reacting to it. You are starting to learn more and more about the people that you're trying to reach. So when you first get started, it's really your best guess. You think what people are looking for. But then as you know, you're working more deals, you're building up your base of clients, you're learning much more detail about what's triggering their search in the first place. What problems are trying to solve the criteria that they're using to make a decision? So over time, you're going to get much more refined and you can create a much more contextualized experience. This is where you're going to want to start to personalize your website or personalize from your email outreach. So it's a process that occurs over time. Now, to kind of put this into action, I'm a very quickly walk through how we might put together a marketing plan for ourselves. Again, we use the inbound marketing methodology, which you see up there on the screen. Actually, that's the Inbound Sales methodology that I'll speak to in a moment. But before we could think about a marketing plan, we have to first make sure that we have a clear definition of what we're trying to achieve. So what are our goals for the year? How much revenue do we intend on pulling in? How does that translate into the number of clients that we need to track the number of leads that we need to generate and so on? So we have this concept of a integrated sales and marketing funnel. You know, at the top, it's the awareness stage is where you're pulling prospects into your website. At the bottom, it's when you're actually closing the leads into customers at the top. It's typically marketing responsibility. So let's say you have a team of five or six. You may have one person who's solely dedicated toward your marketing efforts, and maybe you're the person who's responsible for sales at the bottom. It becomes sales responsibility. If you're a smaller organization like myself, you may be handling both aspects of this. But as you grow, it's really important that you have clear definitions around each one of these stages. At the middle, where a lead is handed off to the salesperson, you know, that's a shared responsibility, and this is where it becomes really critical that you do have this clear definition, especially as you start to grow. As somebody progresses through your funnel, the way that you're going to track them, you're going to often refer to them as a contact, that basically means that their unique person, they have a first name, last name and an email address. So it doesn't matter what system you're using, even if you're just doing this in Excel. That person is going to be a contact. The problem with this is that doesn't really define where somebody is in their journey and how far along in their sales process they've progressed. For us, if somebody comes to the website, they're anonymous. We don't know who they are or it's just a new social connection that I've just reached out to. I would consider them a prospect. They are potentially a fit, but we still don't know much about them. We don't know if they have the need, and they're probably just anonymously browsing our website. Once they submit a form, we've identified who they are. They become a lead in our system. So now we know a little bit more about them. We have an email address. We could start to profile them and see if they're fit. When they get to the point where they actually want to talk to us, so this is where that 57 plus through their decision making process and they're ready to get on the phone and talk to us or we think they've done enough on our website to imply that they're at that stage. We'll consider them a marketing qualified lead or an MGCL, so it's a way for us to distinguish those who are hot, active leads from those who are just kind of casually browsing and become an actively at some point down the road. Once that person has been manually reviewed and we're certain there is a fit and they're not just downloading resources, they actually look like they may have a real need. That's where we will qualify them as a sales qualified lead. So again, it's just one step further in the process. At that point, we'll usually set up a meeting. We'll get on the phone with them and we'll qualify them further. If there does seem to be a good fit and make sense to continue the process, they become an opportunity in our CRM. You create an opportunity typically when there's an active deal. And then, of course, at the end of the day, we want to move somebody towards becoming a customer. So that would be the final stage in the process. These are clearly defined buckets that are in our CRM, which I'll actually show you in a minute. But it's really important that we have these stages because now we need to be able to go back and say, well, in order to get x number of customers, how many marketing qualified leads do we need? many leads do we have? What's the amount of time to carry somebody from the lead to an MQL to an opportunity to a customer? Somebody just said in the chat, marketing, sales plus marketing. That's exactly right. And they do cover this in detail in a corset. I'll send you guys a link on later. Diving a little bit deeper into that marketing qualified lead, so this is going to be unique to each of you. But typically it's going to be a combination of things. It's going to be their overall profile fit. So do they work in an industry that you serve? Do they have a job title that reflects they may have the authority or could potentially connect you to somebody who is in a position of authority? Or are they large enough to afford you? Those are all things that I would look at for fit. The other thing I would look at is their level of interest. So did they come to your website, go to your contact page and just submit the form? Or did they read through 20 of your blog posts? Download some content offers. Welcome back to your website 10 or 15 times before they reached out that second person who's highly engaged. They're more informed. They've clearly been researching things. They're probably going to be a better fit, more interested lead than somebody who just came to the website who is potentially just shopping around for quotes. There's at the low end of that, there's going to be people who aren't to say they don't fit the job title you typically work with or they fall outside of your industry. So you don't want to invest a lot of time with those people, they're going to fall to the back of the list. This is really a good idea to document this. We actually have a matrix that we use to evaluate all leads. So I could hire somebody tomorrow, and in a matter of minutes, they're going to know exactly whether or not somebody would be a good fit for us. It's a pretty easy thing for them to pick up on. Hey, and kind of jump in here. Please do. I wanted to ask the group, maybe take a moment here just to get engagement going. I know that when people call, it's a creative person. Our tendency is like they called. They're interested is a good fit. There isn't really an objective criteria as to who's a really good fit. I'd like to just ask the group now whoever wants to unmute themselves. What? criteria do you use to determine if a client is a good fit for your agency or firm? I'll take a swing at it. Thanks, Ben. So definitely budget, budget, budget. That's one of the first things that I didn't get into and make sure that they can afford our services. OK and if you see that middle line in that four quadrant grid there, what's that middle line for you? If you don't mind sharing, like what's that budget threshold where you're like, maybe I should, maybe I shouldn't. So our minimum engagement right now is 20,000. Uh-huh and so that's what I use as a baseline. Now that can be over the course of a year, so it depends on what kind of services that they're interested in. But that's what I use is my kind of like middle line. Right? lance, did you want to say something? I did you guys hear me? Yes, we can. So I do a minimum. By the way, this is my CTO. He came in from Russia. He used to be here for the week. Yeah so we have two different minimum engagements for web. It's $10,000 apps. It's 22,000. And the reason that is because we actually figured out the exact time it takes to do an average app. We extrapolate that and figured out exactly how many hours it takes to do a website with like only a couple of revisions. So if a customer does a lot of revisions, then we start losing money. If it's like a 10,000 other website. So so far, we've been hearing about price. I would love to hear say, maybe somebody like Rocco talk about maybe there's what is that called cause based organizations. If they're doing something, even though they have the money, maybe it's not a good culture fit for you or something like that. So you have to unmute yourself. Yeah hi, guys. Hey Hi. Yeah, I guess. Sorry I just jumped in some kind of getting caught up with this. So in terms of you're saying, this is it's a qualified lead when they just call you out of the blue. I'm just asking, what criteria do you use personally in determining if a client's a good fit for you? Yeah well, like Ben mentioned, definitely I try to qualify them in terms of what budget they have and if they have, like, no idea, it's kind of a red flag that they're either really green or that they're just trying to squeeze as much out of you. But yeah, in terms of for us, definitely, if it's like I remember one time we got it was really random somebody who had like they like, sold chicken or something really random. Yeah, I was like a chicken farm or a feed farm or something like that. And and, you know, we focus on purpose based companies and brands. And I personally am like aspiring vegan. So I just had to find a nice way to say, I think maybe I just said that we could take any take on any more work at the time or something like that, and I refer them to somebody else. So it's definitely if it's not in line with who you've defined your serving or I mean, in our case, it's not like we only work with purpose driven brands. We work with brands who are not. That's not their focus, but I don't cross that line into somebody who's selling something that I don't believe in. I'm happy to refer them or to get them, or I'll sit there and have a 30 minute conversation and give them recommendations on who they can reach out to or what they can do. I'll take another crack at it. Do it all right, so I also kind of look at, you know, who we're working with. And you know what their personality is and stuff like that. But on the other side of things is, you know, does the company that we that, you know, is looking at hiring us? Do they fit within our moral bounds too? I'm not going to be working for a cigarette company. I'm not going to be doing anything for no offense, but those kind of things I definitely look at. So that kind of falls in that fit category as well. And then a good way to gauge interest is, you know, figuring out their timeline. Somebody that says, you know, I'd like to start next week or next month is going to be a much quicker clothes than somebody that's like we can start, you know, maybe in December or maybe next year or something like that. Or, you know, if they have a definitive timeline, it's a lot easier to gauge interest. Perfect I think we'll turn it back over to Sean. Thanks good stuff, guys. I'm not going to spend a lot of time here but actually have a tool that I'll share with you guys after the fact. Before you start to dive into marketing and, you know, generating leads a few other things that you want to make sure that you do. You've defined what a good fit for you is. You've defined what marketing qualified lead would look like. You've mapped out your sales process. Now you need to go and actually do the math and say, well, in order for us to meet our goals, what are those thresholds that we need to meet? And that's it's a pretty easy equation. We built a tool for the process because it's something that we do with all of our prospects before we'll actually consider working with them to make sure it actually makes sense for us to partner up. So I've included a link here, but I'll send it over to you guys. But do the math, come up with a plan, identify targets for your funnel at each stage of the funnel before you actually dive into execution. So you know what you're working against and you can measure your progress. So let me skip ahead a few slides just for time purposes. So let's assume I've now identified the number of leads that I need to generate. I know how many people I need to speak with, how many people I need to meet with, how many deals they need to move through my pipeline to meet my goals. Now I'm going to go and I'm going to build out a marketing plan in order to reach those number of leads. I'm not willing to assume that all of my leads are going to come from inbound marketing, so I've also built up a sales plan. How am I going to source my own leads through my one to one conversations through my networking, through public speaking, things like that? So that's a totally separate set of targets that I'll touch on a little bit. But on the marketing side, let's assume I want to source 10 deals in order to get those 10 deals I have to get, I don't know, 300 leads within the next year. In order to get 300 leads, I have to get 20,000 people to my website, just random numbers that I'm picking up. I'll use those benchmarks to map out my content plan, my marketing plan, my advertising budget and so on, which I think was touched on in an earlier call as well. So the inbound marketing methodology, this is the framework that we use for our marketing efforts. At the beginning, you're attracting strangers to your website. They're becoming visitors. They're now anonymously browsing, consuming your content, they're reading a blog post, they're looking at your services page, your potential, your case studies. But they're anonymous. You're only you're only potentially converting. Maybe 1% of those people, the other 99% are just leaving right away. How you hook them, you create content, offers some of you call them lead magnets and you put that behind a form. So you build out a dedicated landing page for that content offer. They have to submit a form to get it. Now they're a lead in your system, you could start to nurture them via email and you're moving them through that funnel to the point where they're sales ready. And then you're carrying them through the sales process. HubSpot is the tool that we use for this. Again, there are the tools that could help you with this, but it has a lot of the key features and functions that you would need to build up these different assets. There's actually several different types of solutions that we use the HubSpot offers. There's the marketing platform. This is what most people know HubSpot for. This has been around for several years. Then there's the sales product. The sales product consists of two separate things. There's the CRM, which is 100% free and really powerful. And then there's a sales add on that you can either use a free version or for the pro version, which is 50 bucks a month. I'm going to quickly walk through some of these things with you guys, and if you have specific questions about either tools would be happy to connect with you afterwards. Let me skip ahead a little bit. And give you a quick example of what that plan might look like, so let's assume again, I've identified my target of leads that I want to generate, and I've created a content offer that's going to hook that anonymous visitor and turn them into a lead. So potentially my prospect was thinking to themselves, you know, I've tried blogging before, but it's just not producing results. I'm not getting the traffic I expected. We're not getting any leads. You know, maybe I need to improve my SEO efforts so they go to Google and they do a search and they say, how do I build SEO into my blog editorial process? We wrote a blog post that happens to rank number one for that specific term. They click through, they look at that blog post, it guides them through a process in detail. And in that process, we tell them that in order to create SEO optimize blog posts, you first have to identify who you're trying to reach. We call them by your personas. So if I'm going to create an editorial calendar of blog posts that are going to perform really well in search results, I first need to create persona profiles, so we share a template for that allows them to do that. That template is only something you can access if you submit a form. You give us your, your last name, your email address. So now that anonymous visitors been identified, they're a lead and we start to nurture them with somebody trying to chime in or. You know. We've got to move some of these right here. Yeah the better. I think they took care of it. Cool OK, go ahead. So this is an example of one blog post, a good framework to work with is to start with the content offers. So what is an awareness stage content offer that's going to hook somebody when they're at the earliest stage in their process? Once I've got them into my system, what is a consideration stage author that's going to help them narrow down their list of solutions? Hopefully, like a solution that you sell, then you have to have a decision stage offer. That's going to be things like case studies, things that's talking about your specific agency, your specific services, giving some social proof that you can actually do what you promise. Once you've created that content. Now you have to pull people into your website, and this is where I think a lot of people struggle coming up with those list of blog topics or finding the time to do it. So a cool system that we like to use, and I know quite a few other people do this as well, is once you've created that content offer. So you know, Chris, for you, that could be something to the US process. You could basically take that whole series that you guys did on YouTube and turn that into some downloadable PDF. Once you've created that e-book or guide, whatever it is, you basically look at that outline. There's typically an opening. There might be section one, section two, section three, section 4. It kind of reads like a book and a table of contents. Just take each one of those sections. And branch them out into a more detailed blog post. So with a single content offer, you've now generated somewhere between 12 to 15 blog posts that you could put out there potentially get found in search engines or social media. They pull people in and they enter your funnel. Does that make sense? Yeah yeah, I have a question. How deep do you go into the buyer personas? You mentioned it, but I didn't. Yeah, I can try to pull up an example for you, but I think it's very similar to the things that you've been covering on the previous calls. Yes, but we're not only looking at it through the lens of how they're going to interact with, say, our website or application where thinking of it more, as you know, what are their broader business goals, what triggers them to start seeking a solution or some kind of change? What are the questions that they're asking throughout each stage of that process? Where besides your website, are they going to get that information? So it's very, very similar, I think, to the customer profiles or whatever where you want to use for it. But it's very specific to their journey and how they're evaluating and making decisions because this becomes the primary way that we build up our roadmap for content, identify topics that we should create content for. Perfect to answer your question. It does. Cool is anybody using personas for this purpose? I know some of the HubSpot people in here. Would you add anything to that? Our our personas are kind of like a merge between the two. I've drawn a lot of the HubSpot into the customer journeys that we do. And then I do the personas like Chris and Jose have taught. I find that, you know, it's a lot deeper on the school side when it comes to a persona, you dig a lot deeper into the person, which is valuable. And then the journey. I like having a couple of extra steps in there. So I think for us, the level of depth that will go into with the persona is really going to depend on their budget and how much time they're willing to commit to that up front. Obviously, the deeper you go, the better the results are going to be up front. Typically facilitated way with the client. That is what we recommend if budget. So we do do a paid discovery process is very similar to core, but kind of building up what we call the inbound game plan. And ideally, that is a facilitated on site discussion usually takes about a half day and we start to identify these types of things. We create draft personas on the fly and start to build that content plan. It's usually a mix of folks who are on the sales and marketing side. The salespeople in the room are usually the ones who know, like things like what questions people are asking. They're they're dealing with that on a daily basis. So what do you charge? Sean minimum 5,000. And if it's going to be more than one persona, basically the more complex it gets, the higher the pricing. Lance has to answer your question, where on pro currently and I'll speak to some of those add-ons and so on a little bit. Um, after when you're doing discovery with a client. How many marketing campaigns are you discussing with them that you're going to produce initially? Sure so it's very persona centric, so we'll usually encourage them to prioritize that profile who they're going to have the best chances of being successful with. So that's going to be the one who's usually been their best customer. They know them the best. They have a lot of experience with them. But then there's usually a secondary or a third persona that they, you know, maybe it's a new market that they're trying to tap into, or maybe this person is sort of an influencer to their primary persona. If budget allows will build those up all up front, and we'll plan on executing a lot of that in parallel. Usually, though, we'll start with one kind of get the framework, show some quick wins and then as time progresses, we can expand and target more. Persona, you're doing one marketing campaign or would you do multiple marketing campaigns initially for each year? So ideally. I want to make sure I answer this question. If I don't answer this question the way you know, in the way that you were hoping to let me know, but we actually kind of break this into two things. First, we build what we refer to as the inbound funnel, and that's the automated piece. So once we have a lead, we know which persona somebody is. They are put into this track that carries them from the awareness stage to the consideration stage, the decision stage using a sequence of automated email and personalized content on the website. That is the funnel piece. At the top of that, we will do what we call an inbound campaign that's very similar to what you see on the screen right now, where we'll have an awareness stage offer and a series of closely related blog posts, social media promotion and potentially some paid promotion that is attracting that persona to us. The funnel itself doesn't change that frequently, so that's going to be an always on, always running thing. We may update that or refresh it on maybe an annual basis, but the inbound campaigns at the top where we're pulling people in, that's something that is it's usually going to be planned out over a 90 day period, but we break it into monthly, weekly milestones. And, you know, we can't be running multiple inbound campaigns at the same time. So you may have one targeting persona, a one targeting persona, be one targeting persona. See, they identify which one they are when they download that initial content offer. So that's a best describe to me field. So I am a marketing manager or I'm a stylist professional, something like that to be super generic to that answer your question, you're not really. Yeah, I did. Cool now the best case scenario is that this is a home run. You're getting all this organic traffic. People are sharing things left and right. Reality is that takes a very long time before it starts to occur. You're usually not seeing any results until it's been like six, nine months of consistent activity. So to kind of get things going, we'll usually recommend a little bit of paid promotion, at least early on. So you could take some of that great content you've produced and you could amplify it through paid Facebook posts through promoted tweets. You can also promote your YouTube videos. So we'll use a variety of channels to kind of get that in front of as many people as possible within our budget. And then as the organic channels such as organic search or organic social traffic starts to grow, we could start to scale some of that back. That makes sense. Cool, so this is getting somebody to your website and turning them into a lead. I will quickly dive in and show you guys what that looks like in HubSpot. So bear with me for just a moment. So, Sean, while where you're pulling that up, can you tell us what's the biggest success and maybe a failure that you've had using this? Yeah so yeah, sure. So, you know, a lot of content you put out there is going to be a dog. You know, you may think you wrote something brilliant and then five people read it and it just disappears. So you have to accept the fact that not everything is going to be home run, but then something you do right that you didn't expect to be very successful ends up being a big lead generator. So I'll actually pull up a quick example. I had a call coming up a few months ago and I tried to think, well, what could potentially be a hook to open up the conversation with some others in the organization to carry it forward? So I just made something up on the call and I said, oh, we actually offer free Google Analytics review, which we didn't. So within a few minutes, I went into HubSpot. I built a landing page for a free Google Analytics quality review, and I sent them to a link to that form after the call. They submitted it, and within a few weeks, we had a paid discovery project. Now they've just bumped that up to an annual retainer. So something I put out there in just a few minutes very quickly turned into at least $40000, and it'll probably grow over time. I then promoted that landing page using like, I think, $300 worth of advertising, and I generated several other qualified leads and made quite a bit more money. So my total investment was maybe $300 in paid advertising and two hours of time and it's, you know, pulled in a ton of cash. You just don't know when that's going to happen, you know, so that's the trick. All right. Let me find this. I'll show you, where do you advertise sean? I do very little advertising. So, you know, if it's a very targeted search, I may do, I may do a little bit of AdWords. Never more than 203 $100 budget for something like that, or if I have a really high performing content offer, I may promote that via Facebook. But again, very limited amount of spend. The majority of our leaves do come through search engines or from referrals. Asia and I got a quick question about AdWords. Yeah, go for it. So I've done some AdWords in the past and I've always had my AdWords like ads themselves shot down because it was taking them to like a page that had an opt in like it was against their policy. How do you get around that? So you can't send something to content that requires they. They log in first. You can send them to a landing page that first promotes what it is. You're trying to get somebody to builds up that value and then says if you want to proceed, you then have to opt in. So I don't know if that was the way you approached it or if you were driving them specifically just to a form with no information. So there would have to be some like long tail like content like actual copy about whatever they're searching for. And then at the bottom, like I thought it was like the form couldn't be visible. Like it had to be like a 2-step optin where like they'd have to click the link and then a pop up and then they would approve it. But like that page right there? Like, I don't like if I don't know, every time I've tried to do something like that, they've shut me down. Or they haven't allowed me to promote the ad so if you had something like what I'm showing you right now and that was turned down, it was probably something other than your landing page content that triggered it. And if you want to shoot me some specific examples like I'll try to isolate that for you. But you know, this was a landing page, that landing page that I just told you about its headline is can you trust your Google Analytics data? It's a pretty barebones landing page, just a bit of content, but I triggered my ads for people searching, you know how to do a audit of Google Analytics or Google Analytics implementation best practices. Basically, things that I thought people might be searching for. If they didn't trust the quality of their data. And like I said, with just a very limited budget, this generated quite a few weeks, some of which have now turned into customers. Some likely will become customers in the short term. But this is something that was built in HubSpot. I cranked this out in just a matter of minutes. You basically create some templates that you work with. It usually mirrors the look and feel of your website, and it's just a wizard editor, so you would quickly go in there and type and put in whatever you need to. This is that persona field that I talked about. So best described your role. You could also say, best describes me. This is how you assign what that persona is. Mine are currently very generic. Down the road will probably get much more targeted, but we're still being an early stage company. We're still getting a good feel for who that real ideal fit is for us. Shawn, when you look for the keywords, you're going to go with that people are searching for what is the search volume that you're looking for in order for this to rank and not take 18 months to do so? Yeah, sure. So if it's organic and I know it's a very valuable keyword, it's something that if somebody were searching, I want to be talking to that person. Yeah, you don't need a lot of search volume because, you know, you just swing low 100s or thousands, low hundreds, OK, low 100s. With adwords, you do have to have a little bit more volume in order for your ads to trigger. So something like this, I probably be looking at a minimum a few if it's a few thousand. Chances are there's going to be a large percentage of those people who aren't qualified. They're not a fit. And those are probably people I don't want to pull in at this stage. They're just not going to be qualified. So lower numbers are actually better in some cases. Right but this is the HubSpot marketing portal. So they first give you a breakdown of all your contacts. So it's sort of like a mini CRM. If you're in marketing, you could pull up all the details you know about somebody their email address, their company, their social handles, your list of interactions with that person over time. Any list that you've created for segmentation workflows is where you build your any automation. So lead nurturing campaigns. That's something you would build out using workflows. You build out all your forms, you build on a lead scoring model. I don't know if you guys are familiar with lead scoring, but the idea behind it is as somebody browsing through your website, the more content they consume, the higher their score becomes. So if somebody has a score of 10, they're probably not as engaged as somebody who has a score of 75. So if I'm looking at two separate leads and I want to figure out who I want to pick up the phone and call first, I'm going to go for the person who has a score of 75 because they're more engaged, and that's something that I would have built out in HubSpot. But to build out my landing pages, I'd go into the content menu and here's where I could write blog posts. I can create emails. I'm in the landing pages module, and this is that specific landing page I shown you and you can see this has only had 203 views since I created it. It's only had 16 submissions. Some of those were by existing contacts. That's why it says there's only 12 new contacts and it says one customer. But as of yesterday, there's actually two. And again, this is something that took me an hour's worth of time and a few dollars and it's now made me tens of thousands in return. Not all of them are going to work out that way. But the cool thing is, you know, you get a breakdown of what brought people to your website, so out of all your traffic sources which actually converted into leads, so you get things like conversion rates. So I see that this performed really well on social media. So if I'm thinking of ways to amplify this and promote it in the future, I think social is probably going to be a likely place that I look to at. The same time, paid search was the way that I captured a customer, so maybe that's the right channel for me to focus on moving forward. To actually edit this landing page, I would just go to Edit and it's again pretty, pretty straightforward, it's just a WYSIWYG editor. So, you know, you type things in, you make changes, blah blah blah, which is pretty cool. The other nice thing about this, though, is that let's say I want to have a slightly different message if somebody is, let's say, in manufacturing versus if they're in higher Ed. So they have different business challenges. So they're the ways that they're using Google Analytics is going to be slightly different. I could use this smart content feature to personalize this content. So if somebody is coming from a manufacturing company, the copy that they see here is going to be different than if they were coming from a different industry vertical. That's very effective, and that's a nice way to increase your conversion rates. Hey, Sean, I had a question. Go for it. Did I understand you correctly that when you create a lead magnet and then you put it behind a lead capture wall like this, that the way your target market is finding it is just through organic search on Google, you're not paying for ads to push this content up to give exposure. That's right. So we prioritize search above all of the other channels. So if we do not think something will do well in search, we probably won't spend the time to put any effort behind it. But once we do see that it's performing well, I may get a little bit more traffic in front of that by promoting it through paid advertising on social media or. You know, we're potentially paid search like I did with this one hour ranking, and pretty quickly then because the only thing you have here or in that would be able to rank as just the landing page, right? Well, so with every offer, again, I would create a series of blog posts that are tightly related to this. So for this specific offer, we haven't done that yet. But for some other ones, you know, we'll write 10 to 15 blog posts that are very closely associated to it. So as people are doing searches trying to solve various problems by reading that blog post, it'll lead them down to that particular content offer. So this is the blog post that I mentioned earlier. And you know, the search I was really trying to target here is for that person who's trying to figure out how to incorporate SEO into their editorial calendar process. So I go into detail on how I actually do this. I talk about how first I identify my personas and the ones that are going to be most valuable for me to target how I actually go about doing my keyword research, how I identify the questions that they're asking. I give them a free template that they can use. So this is not gated. You guys could even use this if you wanted to. It's just a Google Sheet. So a lot of people have used this. But then as they continue to read through this and they get to the bottom, hopefully they're hooked on the concept. They're convinced this process would work. And now I include a link to a template. To create buyer personas. Nothing really special or unique about it, but it would help me do all the things I just outlined in the blog post. So unlikely to submit this form, I click on this. That brings me to a different landing page using that same template I showed you before. Slightly different content. Very short form. I download, and now I'm going to get a series of emails that are. Kind of based off this theme that carries them further down the funnel. So it's more so this blog post that ranks and gets them to the content offer, the content offer is just my way to convert that anonymous visitor into a known lead because having 99% of people come to my website anonymously. Never tell me who they are. Just doesn't sit well with me. You know, I want to be talking to those people and have an opportunity to nurture them. Make sure to add something in that. Totally go for it. So search is definitely the primary. Mission of Hubspot, but there's also other ways that you can tap into your known customers and stuff like that. Importing a list that you download from LinkedIn and using their email marketing tools. Tapping into a public social conversation on Twitter. These are both things that the tool can also help you with. That is a little bit more controlled than sending a landing page out. So you can also kind of reach out and touch people that you already know that you've already identified can be leads that way. It's a great point, and you know, something I might do here is I'm prospecting, I go to somebody's website or I see somebody on LinkedIn and I think, man, it'd be great to work with them. I think they're a great fit. I might spend a little bit of time browsing through the website, see what they're doing for their inbound marketing efforts. And if I see a few things that could potentially improve, I might email them directly on LinkedIn and say, hey, I spent a little time on your website. It was really good. I really like this feature, but I notice this one area was lacking any call to action, so there's no way to guide somebody from this step to the next step. So maybe that's something you would consider. I actually created a great resource on this that might help you. Here's a link where you can download it. So I provided them some value in my initial email out right reach. I personalized it to their specific situation. And that individual, and hopefully because I provided some value, they'll now go to my link, download it. And it's another way that I've pulled them into the system. So this is the Marketing side. Now I've got them into my system. They've gotten a series of emails. Hopefully they're pretty well qualified and now I'm going to start to reach out directly to that individual and move them through the sales process before I dive into that. Does anybody have questions about this? The marketing side, or hopefully that covered most of it. Anything more in the marketing tool, you know, I don't want to get crazy with demoing the platform. I had AI had a question I heard that HubSpot was going to start adding more paid solutions like DSPS, and I don't know what their integration with Facebook is and Twitter is now, if I've looked at it in about a year and a half. But is that now part of it or is that just? Yeah, so so in the early days, they were very much like, oh, you know, you shouldn't do any advertising whatsoever. Yeah, that's not realistic. You know, what it comes down to is that you're doing it in what they would call an inbound way where with your advertising, you're still trying to help your prospects navigate through their decision process, you're providing them with value. So instead of putting out an ad that says bye bye bye. Talk to us now. You might promote something like a free e-book or a tool or template that's going to actually help them. And once you've done that, then you could start to lead them a little bit further down your sales process. So they've recognized that change, and they release the ad on a year ago. It's called ads add on, which isn't very creative, but that allows you to manage your AdWords campaigns and your LinkedIn campaigns through HubSpot. So that's pretty cool. OK I suspect they're going to add some additional options in November. That's usually when they release a lot of new products, but at least initially, it lets you do AdWords and LinkedIn. It seems like more of a B2B solution, I mean, how to B to C companies use HubSpot. Yeah so I would say that's mostly true. If you are a C who has still a longer, complex decision making process, it's still a good fit because it's still a considered purchase. It's not something you're just going to wake up one morning and buy, you're going to take a few weeks or a few months to make that decision, right? Then it still makes a lot of sense, even if you're an e-commerce. You have people going to your website to look at a product, maybe even add it to the shopping cart, but they don't buy. You can plug-in HubSpot to, I think, Shopify to send them an automated email 24 hours later that includes the product that they were looking at, or they add it to their shopping cart and you pull them back in. So it does serve BSA pretty well, depending on the type of B2C you are. If you're on the B2C side, B2B side or if you're in professional services, it's a very good fit. You know, a few of the things on the marketing side before you go into sales, you've got a lot of great social tools so you can schedule all your month's worth of social post if you want. That's the way we do things. We just take one day at the beginning of the month. And basically batch out all of our social posts for the month ahead. We'll still sprinkle in some, you know, personalized spur of the moment stuff throughout the month. But in order to make sure that there's a steady flow of new content going out there, we'll pre schedule it through the tool. We can also monitor what our prospects are leads and customers are saying on social. So once somebody is in your system, if you've connected that to their Twitter handle, you can look at everything they're saying and you can reply, retweet like their stuff directly within the tool. Hey, Sean, I don't know how much more content you plan to go over, but I wanted to make sure we had time to do Q&A. I have a lot of questions for you as a person, your business, your business model, who your customers are. I don't want to interrupt the flow of this, but let's kind of be mindful. Like we try to wrap at nine 30, but I want to leave time for Q&A. When do you have to bounce? I can go right up to it's 12:30 my time. So whatever that is for you. 9:30 Yeah, so you can go up to 9:30. So why don't we do this? Let's say 15 minutes for Q&A. I have some very direct questions. I want to ask you about your business model. It's very interesting to me. So why don't you time it out for that? OK, so I'm going to skip the slides from here and I'm going to go directly into the sales side. So that's the CRM. So once somebody submitted a form like this and they've gotten to the point where we consider them to be a qualified lead, there's a second process that we're going to carry them through partially through Hubspot, partially through direct outreach to qualify that lead and carry them through a process. So I'll give you a quick example. Let's say Chris was somebody who came to the website. They downloaded something, and I don't really know if they're a good fit yet, but I saw that they downloaded one of our awareness stage content offers. I'm going to put in his email address and right away, HubSpot is telling me a bit about him. It's pulled in his profile. Chris, I don't know if this is an old Twitter handle of yours or if somebody just plugged in some bad information at some point, but it looks like it's an old one. OK, well, if you've looked at it lately, but it's a bit wacky, but it automatically pulls in some information about that person. It'll also show you a log of all their activity. So this is referencing some of the emails back and forth. We've had over the past day or so. It's also telling me that you clicked on a link that I included and you went through a PowerPoint deck that I sent you. So using Hubspot, let's say you downloaded something and I don't want to type up the same thing. I'm always writing I could use pre-written templates, and I've got a template in here for inbound lead from content, so I click that hit Insert. And it's automatically going to pull in things like their company name. And a draft template that I might reply with saves me a few minutes and cuts back on some of that repetition. So I'll start with this, but I'll usually tweak it a little bit. I might format it a bit to kind of fit the situation, but it saves me some time. I then send that to them, and by having this selected track email of HubSpot sales, I will see if Chris. Chris, I'm going to send you this email. Could you open it really quick? Yeah Let's see if it pops up, I may be disabled, it will see a little notification enjoying our content. God is spam is killing me. This John guy is just out of control. Should I click on something? Yeah, go, figure. not going to work. So on my phone right now, you guys can't see it, but I just got a little pop up that says christou opened enjoying our content. Usually it'll also give you a notification on my desktop, say me, that they also opened up that email and you know, that might be my opportunity to pick up the phone and call them directly. I can also see if they never opened it, and that may trigger me to send a follow up a day or so later. I can also pull in documents that I frequently send. So this would be a cool place for case studies. Any forms that you require people to fill out and everything that you send, you can log directly in the CRM. So if I want to look at my list of interactions with Chris, find out more detail. I would just click through and CRM, and it brings me directly to his contact record. And I haven't entered his first name and last name yet, or he hasn't given it to me in a form submission, so I just have his email address. But from that email address alone, Hubspot's told me his company name. It's pulled in a list of all of our back and forth via email. If he replied to a tweet or something like that, I would see that here if he viewed certain pages on our website. While cookie, I would see that I see how I captured him in the first place. So I'm getting quite a bit of information, I'm also getting a profile about his company, so I might look at, well, what industry is in, is that a fit for us? Is this the type of company. We typically work with? Does their annual revenue tell me that they're going to be a fit for us? Where are they located? I might look at the company's Twitter handle to learn a bit about them, the type of things that they're doing before I decide to pick up the phone and call them or reach out. But let's say this is somebody who is a good fit. Maybe I'll put in a little note about myself, about this person and say, you know, Chris enjoys the band, whatever, and maybe that's something I'm going to bring up on a future phone call. I usually don't do a lot of that stuff, but it's something that you could do if it's helpful. It's any context or information that's going to be useful to you during the sales process. So I'll save a note there. I could send him an email directly from the tool. It pulls in my signature automatically. I can also call them directly from the CRM, and all of that activity is going to get logged in the record. So if I want to go back and see everything that I've done to follow up with this person or even give myself reminders to follow up with him in a week, I can do that directly here. It also enter some information about him, fill in the blanks manually based off my research. I would probably look at his LinkedIn profile. Basically, just fill in these blanks. I'm going to assign a persona, so I don't know if Chris, I put you in the CEO business owner bucket or the agency bucket, but I'll put you in agency for now. And now I've added a little bit more detail about this person. I probably spoken to him at this point, and maybe he told me that they're actively searching for somebody to help them with their inbound marketing. So I would go down to deals. I would create a New Deal. And this is where Chris now becomes an opportunity in my system. So he's no longer just the lead. Now he's going to be at the opportunity status I somebody who's farther along in this process. So this is blind ink New Deal. Let's say the deals for $100,000. You know, I'm just guessing at this point because we've got to have too many zeros. We've got to have a few more conversations. But I think this is something that they'll be ready to pull the trigger by the end of October. So I create this deal and now I can start to add notes about this as they move through the process. So our sales process, we have an initial connect call after that connectable call. If they're a fit we had, we schedule a second call where we do an exploratory. We do a little bit deeper dive and we basically carry them through a very well defined step by step process to make sure that we're highly aligned on the types of services that we offer, that we're a good fit for each other culturally. And I also know the likelihood that this is going to close. So I could forecast for any hiring or things like that. And then once this person becomes a customer, this company becomes a customer. I would move them to close one. So this is the CRM, in a nutshell. It also gives you some pretty cool things. You can look at which anonymous companies have been on your website, so that could clue you into somebody who may be interested, but they're preferring to do their research anonymously. You can schedule meetings. I have the meetings link that I send to people. It just saves me some time on the calendar, back and forth, a lot of really cool stuff. So I'm probably going to stop there and I guess just open it up for questions. OK, I'm making my list of questions. I'm going to do rapid fire style, but before I do that, I want to let everybody else. You guys have five minutes to ask John any questions before I just take up all the time. Hey, guys, it's Rafael. Just one quick question, how much can we really do with just the free CRM portion versus the Add on modules? So everything on the sales side that I just showed you, you can do with the free version where I'm logging phone calls, you know, recording them or creating some of these automated follow up sequences that requires you pay the $50 a month for the pro version. Chances are you won't need that, or at least you won't need that for a long time. So the free version, you get up and running right away, it's pretty straightforward. I will say, if you are thinking about doing this, let me know. Let me spin one up for you because I do get a little kickback from it. If you don't want to, you don't have to, but it definitely wouldn't hurt me. So, but the free version is very powerful. You could do the vast majority of what you need to do from a sales perspective. Everything on the marketing side requires that you're using there anywhere from $200 to $400 a month platform. So it's quite a bit pricier. I just want to add something to because we really like the free version of HubSpot that we're using. And one of the things that you showed was in the deal stage, how you can take them all the way to closed one that's all customizable. So if you have a specific process that you want to like, add in there or a milestone or a step, it's really nice to like, filter out from like, OK, who have I presented or who have I sent a contract to a proposal to, but hasn't gotten back to me and actually sign the contract? So those stages are really customizable and that's available in the free version as well. We use that a lot. Great point. When I tried out the HubSpot while ago, I remember the cost wasn't so bad, it was the actual per email fees that they had on. Is that still the is that still the same, Sean for every email contact that you get? Oh yeah, Yeah. So you know, once you get over a certain threshold for contacts, it does start to increase your price. You know, there are some nice workarounds there. You don't need to have every contact that you own in HubSpot. You should probably reserve that for those who are active, you know they're downloading your content or you're pushing through the sales process. But if you are building, you know, purchasing lists or scraping lists and you've got like 500,000 people, you probably don't want to put them all in Hubspot, right? It seems as some kind of integration, even with the sale, the free sales tool that you can actually add other email campaign programs, which is kind of cool. Mm-hmm Yeah, it's definitely not a mass email marketing tool, right? Yeah, and if they find you're doing mass email marketing, you're buying lists, you are effectively spamming people. They'll see that there's a lot of clear signals that tells them that you are doing it and they would probably freeze your account and actually that you stop or you find a new solution. That's actually true with a lot of email providers these days. You know the questions. Yes are you ready, shaun? Yeah all right, here we go. So we're going to do this rapid fire style. So short answers. You can't think too long. If you feel uncomfortable, just say pass. All right, you ready? Sure all right. So first, you already hit stop sharing, right? Yes, I did. I think I did. Can you guys still see my screen? No all right. Yeah, I stopped. OK, first question is, what's your background? So I guess I started making websites back in the dial up internet days. It was a hobby of mine. It was just a fun thing to do. So I did it for fun. And you know, a few of the websites I made started getting a lot of traffic. I had little communities of people who enjoyed what I was creating. So that sparked my interest in marketing. So not only how can I get a website out there, how can I start to get people in? And I attempted to do some freelance work very early on in my career. But you know, I didn't know anything about business. I didn't know what I was doing. So, you know, I made a few bucks here and there, but it wasn't sustainable. So I said, I've got to work full time somewhere and kind of learn, learn the ins and outs of how the real world works before I try to go it alone. And that's what I did. I started working for a small business, basically got them going with inbound marketing before I knew it. Inbound marketing was. And basically, we completely transitioned our focus from one business model to a totally new one because we found that by putting content out there, we were attracting more valuable leads. And that was just a very eye-opening experience. But it was a small company, and I wanted to get the other side see what it would be like working for a very large organization. So I stepped into a role at PerkinElmer. I don't know if any of you guys ever heard of them, but they're in the biotech, life sciences space. They're like a $2.2 billion company. And I was on their marketing operations team, so doing a lot around some of the things we've talked about today, but very much demand generation programs, helping generate leads for the organization, using marketing automation, and other cool tools and technology to facilitate that process. Then I switched went to a sort of a mid-sized company as a director of marketing kind of manage the digital team there got them to embrace inbound marketing. And at that point, I'd been doing it for long enough. Or I had, I think, a much better business sense. I knew the pains of people working for companies trying to execute these programs. So at that point, I stepped away and informed people and how long ago that was July 20 '15. So we're just a little bit further along. Yeah now, I'm surprised to hear that you've been developing sites since the dialup days because you look like all of 24 years old. Are you sure you got this right? I was young. I was young when I was doing it. But I mean, you were young. Look at your face right there. All right. Baby faced assassin. OK, so how many people in your company? Three ok? Do you work from home or you will go to an office? Or do you work from home where we're hoping to get into an office in january? So we're looking around now. Ok? are you guys all partners or are you the sole? Are you the sole? Yep OK, well, Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, no. I'm the sole. I'm the sole owner. OK average deal size. It's been 30 six, we're pushing really hard to get that to 50. Three thousand, yeah, is that broken up over the course of a year usually, yeah, we try to get everybody on a 12 month retainer, 12 month retainer. How much does that then? That's about 3k 4, 3, 2 4K per month. Right so so right, right now, I'd say the average is going to be about $3,000 a month. We're trying to phase that out and only do 5,000 and up on the high end. We've got somebody who's was at 18, but we actually pushed them down to 12. OK, so you're going to start doing you're going to raise your minimum price to five a month, 12 months. That's going to push you to 60 k, then you do discover at the beginning, starting at around five k, right? Yep. OK. And then how? How long? What's the average length in which a company stays with you? We haven't lost a client yet, so to be determined? You know, I guess that puts us a little longer. I don't know what is that 13, 14 months now? Yeah, something like that, right? Yeah what I imagine it'll end up looking like is maybe about two years. And then at that point, they probably start to bring rolls in in-house and either we start to scale back the engagement or, you know, whatever it looks like. OK, perfect. What do you currently how much do you pay HubSpot currently at the level, which you're getting? I don't even know it's now. I mean, it's so for us, it was so central. I mean, we're encouraging our clients to use Hubspot, so it'd be silly for us to not be using it. I think we're at the pro version, which at least is, I think, 400 a month. I should know this, but my figure is good enough. So about $400 a month or is it more than that? It's a little bit less. Yes OK. Yeah yeah, OK. And then I want to get your mic ready. I'm going to ask you a question in a second here because I want to compare it to how you ready? Yeah, OK. I want to based on what Sean has shared with us. How do you feel about this? How this compares to agile crm? OK um, I like HubSpot a lot better. It was just. I learned something today. I think for me to be long sales cycle, HubSpot makes a lot of sense. Agile when I'm going after people, it's a Colder thing. It definitely works for me. You just need emails and you need to have your messaging spot on. It's a different approach because like, yeah, it's different. It's completely different. Big companies are using agile, too, and they're sending. I mean, I'm having conversations with the back end guys like, Oh yeah, we have a client sitting 30,000 emails like, Holy smokes, you know, like. So it's definitely not. It's being nice. Yeah OK. All right. Cool yeah, go ahead. OK, back to Sean. Sean, what's your Roi been so far for hubspot? You can give us a multiplier percentage, something like that. Having done the math, but I don't think it would be possible if we weren't using it, so, you know, that's not going to be true for everybody, but our business models built very closely to the software, so we're strategically aligned. We probably wouldn't exist if we weren't using it. OK, Chris, Vinny had a great question, and I'm going to start using what stopped me dead in my tracks from going forward with HubSpot. I understand the whole platform, it's the content. And so I want to know, Sean, where do you what? Who are your partners to create the content? Because that really is what kind of made me realize like, Holy smokes, this is a bigger thing than I realized. Yeah so you shouldn't buy something like HubSpot if you either don't have the content or you're not going to have the bandwidth or resources to produce it. So when we're working with clients, it's going to vary by client, but either it'll be a shared responsibility where they're sourcing some of their content through us, they're producing some on their own if something's a little bit more. So blog post, for example, the best case scenario is that somebody at the actual company is creating their own blog post, but that's something that takes a long time for somebody to feel comfortable doing, you know, to know how to write and communicate their expertise. People at a company also have a tendency to try to sell, and you really shouldn't be doing that with a blog post. You're there to help. So it's usually a mix when it comes to blog post, when it comes to content production. It depends on the sophistication. If they need something that's super high polished, super professional, I might turn to somebody like some of you in this group and work on a deal where we sub out certain deliverables. If it's something that is not super sophisticated, we'll just produce the content for them. So it depends. So you're really relying on your clients to produce the content for you most of the time, it sounds like. I'd say it's even split. It's definitely a split right now. But do you have partners or is it like your own team that's creating the content? Yeah so I've got a pool of freelancers, contractors that I'll work with. I'll produce some of the content myself. I'm not a designer, but you know, I'll take a shot at it sometimes. But yeah, I mean, it depends on the job, the specific deliverable. We'll get it in front of the right person so you can see yourself more of a marketer than a designer, without a doubt. Yeah, absolutely. OK and we're very open about that, too. You know, we're not we're not a design shop we wouldn't pretend to be. All right. What are your revenue goals for 2016? Working on those, I think I would very much like to pull in a million in New business next year. That's that's ambitious for us. That's going to require some pretty heavy upfront investments, but I think it's doable. OK wow, that's great. So if things go according to plan, what were you guys close at the end of 2016? If your goal is for when you say your goal is for a million in 2019? What is it going to be? How big is that jump from where we should be around 600,000 by the end of this year? That's a good goal, then. I love that. So that's OK. Excellent So is this inbound marketing. Once you get the content and the strategy down, is it a matter of just injecting it with cash to scale up? Four could you repeat the question. I want to sound like. So you're going to do 600 this year and you want to hit a million next year? How do you get there? Is it? Is it a function of cash? What is the strategy to get there? So really, this first year, I've, you know, just starting a business, I've been very, very focused on getting our systems and our process down. So, you know, I kind of took the mentality of, if I'm going to hire somebody, I have to learn how to do it myself first. So I am not a sales person, but I've taught myself how to sell. You know, I am not a copywriter, but I've taught myself how to write. So basically anything that I might offer as a service or try to sell, I first try to learn how to do that myself. I document the process. So that I could bring somebody on board with little to no experience, and they can quickly ramp up, hit the ground running in a way that I feel comfortable. So that is where we are today. You know, a lot of I say the bulk of that has now been documented. We've been through it enough where I feel comfortable with it. So at this point, I'm looking to make some of my first hires where I don't exactly. I don't have this down precisely right, but I'm trying to have a nice balance in what I'm forecasting to pull in and hiring somebody far enough in advance where they can have training wheels on for a few months before we put them out there into the wild. That's great. And I don't pretend to know what I'm doing here. I'm just that's just how you're figuring it out as you go. Now Yeah, exactly. I found that great advice to, you know, I'm in other groups like this one, I'm in a few like mastermind type groups, so, you know, learning from other people has been really critical. Correct me if I'm wrong. Are you all self-taught? Yeah, I mean, you know, from an inbound perspective, you know, if these are types of services that you might be offering, HubSpot does do an excellent job at giving you an approach or a methodology to go about doing these things. So I've learned a lot from them. I've learned a lot just by figuring it out. I certainly didn't learn this in college, you know, so it's been. What did you study in college communications and advertising? But the program was very geared towards. You know, a more traditional advertising agency, and it did not touch anything digital. It was at the time at least completely ignorant of some of the things that were changing. So a lot of that I learned by experimenting and kind of creating my own projects. Great here comes the 2 hardest questions you ready? Well, think about it. Those are softball questions. Here we go. What are the biggest challenges you're facing right now to grow and scale your company? You know, just that finding the right, the right mix, you know, do I feel comfortable bringing on another big retainer? You know, is it the right time to hire somebody or do I need to wait a little bit longer? You know, I take the hiring process very seriously. I want to know that I'm not going to hire somebody and then have to let them go three months later. So that's something I've had to hire and fire people in previous roles. And that's a painful thing to do. So personally, that's something that. Is a big challenge for me. I want to make sure I get that right. Yeah, but then, yeah, just kind of balancing that against the desire to keep growing. And finding good talent is terribly hard. Yeah, so that's the other piece. Maybe that's a blog post, totally, and it'll come to you. Yeah, right. OK, last question here from me is I'm pretty sure I speak for at least some portion of the group here. I'm fascinated about what it is that you're doing, and I realize the holes in our game in terms of sales. And now I have a much clearer picture as to what I don't know. And how do we work with you or how do we get involved with you? Or is that even a possibility with me? You know, like I said, you know, I think there's a lot of there's a lot of skills and talents and services in this group that we, you know, have no desire to start offering. So, you know, I'm always looking for partners, whether that's an agency or a freelancer. Um, you know, I turned to those people when the project calls for it, again, we're transparent about that. So if it's a single deliverable, we just may ask for a price and then mark it up. If it's going to be a more in-depth engagement, we might bring you in as a strategic partner. So, you know, if you think something you offer would complement what we do well, website design is a great example. You know, we're going to offer website design as a service, but our projects often require that they redesign their website. So, you know, looking for people like that? Perfect and if you guys have a client, I'm going to assume if you guys have a client and this idea of driving and traffic to you developing an inbound marketing plan, you know that Sean wants to start at 5 k a month. So if your clients can afford 60 k in that range, it's time to talk to Sean, maybe as a partner the other way, right? Right absolutely. Yeah OK. I'm very happy to talk to any of you if you are interested in collaborating. You know, there's obviously a number of different ways that we could do that and a few of you have, you know, have reached out. I've been slow to respond. So I think Nathan just did a fist bump. I'm not sure. I think he did something like that. Oh, there you go. See? whatever that is, the power move right there. Awesome OK. Just to be respectful of your time. We have a minute left here. Anybody else have any other questions for sean? Yeah, I have a couple of questions I want to know, like how long does IT certification take for hubspot? Yeah, so they do well. So there's a number of certifications that they offer. They do have an inbound marketing certification, which is a good primer on some of the things that I just went through. It's free, you know, you could blast through it and probably six hours if you really wanted to. Reality is you probably break it up into several sessions. Do it over a week. They have a great partner program, so if you're interested in starting to offer these types of services, I'd encourage you to check that out. I could connect you with some people there. If you are interested or I'm also happy to talk to you offline, see if it might be a good fit for you. But I would encourage you all to at least try the inbound marketing certification. I'll share a link in the group afterwards. And that's free. I think Nathan has a question. Go ahead, Nathan. Go for it. Yes so I was wondering, with your business being so ingrained into one single product with like Hubspot, are you ever fearful of kind of being at the whims of like another company in terms of that, you know? Yeah, absolutely. So we do have additional services that. The I started the pilot, and that's something I'm trying to package and standardize and hope to roll out next year. So easy example here we may generate a bunch of leads for a company, but then they don't know how to follow up with them. They're struggling to close those deals, carrying them through the sales process. So there's quite a bit of sales enablement activities that we might help them with. There's things like conversion rate optimization. Some people require a little bit more in depth work their analytics measurement. So there's a few different things. We're exploring, adding as additional offerings. But our core focus will remain inbound marketing, whether or not HubSpot is the tool of choice to do that in the future. It doesn't really matter right now. It is so. Yeah, even if it changes, the principles are spot on. Mm-hmm And like I said, you can't do this stuff with other tools, we just happen to think it's easiest with HubSpot. OK, great. OK, first, I want to thank you, Sean, for doing this and for other people, yeah, silent clapping. Awesome job, man. Thank you. I hope it was helpful. It was. That was really Andy falling off the bed. What's going on with you? OK, I just want to let you guys know this is something that we're going to continue to be doing. I created a Google Doc and supposedly you guys are submitting topics, but I haven't seen any topics submitted. People have asked for permission. I've given it to you. So if you're listening to this and you're on this call right now, something's happening. Direct messaged me. Because everybody has asked for permission to speak about a particular topic. I've granted you permission, but I've seen nobody edit it now. I'm no master Google docs, so maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I would love to see somebody else come on two weeks from now. OK, so when we meet up again the following Wednesday, we will be back on our regular curricular curriculum and going through brand attributes, going deeper into core. I want to thank everybody for showing up, especially Sean. This has been awesome. I have to watch the replay of this a couple of times to get everything that you're talking about, but this was really good. If anything, my biggest takeaway from this was, my god, we are not doing this right at all. Thanks for that, Sean. Oh, Chris, Yes. You guys, I think it should be great for blind and for, you know, for your future. Absolutely And I'll say this, we have had and still do have several people selling for us. I'm not sure they're doing it in the modern era away. They're still doing old school, packing on different things. They're not looking at who's opening out at all. And now it makes me a little paranoid. Every time I look at an email from Sean and other people like, oh, they are tracking my every day. That's why the Epson guys keep emailing me because I need that projector. I keep looking at it, not giving up on me because I keep clicking on that thing. Chris, I recommend doing the free 30 day trial. It's phenomenal. You'll be blown away in. The tracking is so good. I like it better than Google Analytics is. It'll say, John from this company looked at your site and Google doesn't do that. I mean, you can find it. It's just like you've got a really. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. I need to try it, not for me, but some of the other companies actually doing the sales part, they need to do it. I'll throw, I'll throw this out there, but I just got done. Just to throw, if you are thinking about spinning up a free trial or to potentially use one of these tools, shoot me a note. First, I'll jump on a 15 minute call with you. Walk you through some of the initial setup. So you get the most out of it. Hey, Sean, because not everybody knows to get hold of you. Can you put your email in the chat window down there? You've just gave everybody. My email address. I feel like it's fair now when this gets broadcast that they had. I saw that I'm like, Oh no, you just put up my private email up on the web thinking we have to get a new email address. There it is. So it's Sean at pepper land marketing. If I don't reply to you right away, just give me a day or two and use HubSpot on him when you send the email. So you can see if he's opening it. Yeah, I do it. All right. And I just wanted to say two days ago, I ended up deciding to pull into the good night and was downloading all the course materials and stuff, and John over at HubSpot saw that, and he immediately gave me a call. He goes, oh, you're getting into the certification. So how do we get you moving on this? And I ended up sending back to them on HubSpot CRM, and I said, I see what you did. I know what you're doing over there. Awesome awesome. Awesome resource. Hold on. Hold on. Sean, are you going to inbound? Yeah if anybody's going, it's in November. We'd love to meet up with you. So let me know. I'll be out there. So let's connect. Good stuff. You too. Marketing nerds. Ok? check this out. I don't know. This is related, so I'm just trying to jump in on your deal. A guy named Kip Bodnar from CMO HubSpot sent me an email offering me a deal to save some money right now. So they're all over your data, dude, right? Yeah Daniel's saying he knows what's going on. I got to do. Oh, that's the thing, Chris. I want to be real clear to everybody. This data that you're feeding, how it's about your fat, you're feeding their database, basically, you know, they're so stupid. Like, I gave them my email address. So now I'm in the moment. Hey, Sean, if somebody is ready to like, pull the trigger on this kind of stuff, is there a way that we can get you a commission or an affiliate link? Do you have something that we can go to give you for this? Thank you for the prompt. That's a nice of. I will set up a form where you can. What I'll do is if you do go through me, I'll give you a quick walkthrough and a set up. Also, share some resources kind of help you through the process. I do get a little bit of kickback. There So if you are seriously thinking about this, yeah, definitely. Let me know. Because it would, it would be helpful. So look, guys, if anything, one of the reasons why we have this community is to help each other, and it hurts nobody to use an affiliate link or to go through his portal. Why not? And I'm an advocate for it because I'm telling you guys, if you buy anything on Amazon, please use my link and somebody else has another link. I'll use yours so we can help each other out. There's no reason why we wouldn't do it here. This isn't specifically for this purpose, but if you don't want to wait for me, use this and I'll figure it out that you came from here. And I'll also hook you up with one of your private life is over. Yeah all right. OK, I'm going to officially end the recording right now. Guys, Thanks for tuning in, but we can stick around and chat for a little bit, but.