Craig Bailey
Interview with HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar
Episode 40 of HubShots is now available! This is a cross-post from the HubShots site.
Consider the following annualised generative AI revenue comparison:
- Accenture (a consulting company, advising on AI): $3.7B
- OpenAI (an AI provider): $3.4B
- (And further, OpenAI is selling more AI services than Microsoft.)
People are spending more on AI advice than they are on the actual AI.
(Sure, there’s lots of other AI companies besides OpenAI. There’s also lots of other consulting companies.)
Thinking more broadly (not just AI), we’ve seen increased velocity of feature releases from HubSpot this year (admittedly many of them include AI).
And yet, when we review the HubSpot portals of prospects and new clients hardly any of them are using any of the new features (let alone the AI ones).
Not for lack of interest though. Recently, Ian Jacob (who I co-host HubShots with) ran a webinar with HubSpot, focussed on AI features. More than 1000 people registered and HubSpot said it was one of their most successful. There’s definitely plenty of interest. Or is it FOMO?
Lots of Interest, very little implementation
The reality is that most businesses struggle to get even the basics in place.
In our HubShots Framework we outline a maturity model for using HubSpot. Starting with the foundations, then moving to activity, automation and attribution.
Most conversations with new clients start with excitement and interest around the advanced areas - personalisation, smart content, A/B testing, automation, advanced reports, customer journeys, attribution, etc.
But when we dig into their business we find they rarely have the foundations in place.
You can’t build an automated sales activity report, if no-one is actually logging their sales activity…
And so we have to steer the conversation to the ‘boring basics’ if we want to do the best by our clients.
We all want fast cars, yet most of us can’t seem to get out of first gear…
Some days I wonder if we’d be better serving our market if we got rid of all our advanced consulting & implementation services and instead simply focused on the basics (see later for some key examples).
Time to build?
Always be learning about technology and its potential. But don’t skip the fundamentals.
As we start a new financial year, consider if now is a good time to resist the temptation of advanced shiny features and AI overpromise, and instead knuckle down and shore up the foundations.
Otherwise, how else will we be able to unlock the full potential of our business platforms?
(See later for common examples of simple basics that unlock advanced optimisation)
Foundations that Unlock HubSpot
It’s worth highlighting a few of the common foundations we like to see in portals (let me know how many of these are familiar).
I’ve taken these from our default HubShots Framework doc - if you’re working with us currently you’ll have an individual one tailored for your business already.
Here’s a few Stage 1 and 2 foundation items, mapped to later Stage benefits.
Marketing foundations:
- Tracking script on your website - so you can see which pages contacts visit (and revisit) ie customer journey
- Integrate ad platforms (Google ads, LinkedIn etc) - so you can see which ads lead to deals and customers ie attribution
- Connect social channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Insta, etc) - so can see how social is engaging ie attribution
- Creating active lists - so you can implement segmentation ie audience targeting (for emails, ads, campaigns)
- Automatic Thank You emails - so contacts get immediate value from you ie automation
- Setting up Lifecycle stages - so you can segment contacts and customers
Sales foundations:
- Connect personal email inbox to HubSpot - so you can track sales emails sent to contacts ie sales activity reporting
- Connect personal calendar to HubSpot - so you can track meetings and offer simple scheduling
- NeverLog settings - so you control data cleanliness and only track important conversations
- Using Views - so you can easily filter to important contacts and deals ie speed of insight
- Custom reports - for sales activities, deal pipelines ie avoid hours of manual spreadsheet analysis
Website and domain foundations:
- Using themes - so you can easily maintain website content (drag and drop, etc)
- Adding redirects - so you maintain Google juice when pages change
- Adding an XML sitemap - so Google knows about your new site pages
- Setting up DNS options - so emails are delivered reliably and website pages are structured
- Adding Google Search Console - so you can analyse organic traffic
Let’s flip some of the above around, and view through the problem lens.
Examples of common business problems:
- Spending hours manually putting together reports when they could be automated
- But further, having the ability to automate reports but not having the basics of logging activity in place
- Manually digging into analytics to try to understand attribution, but not even having social and ad platforms connected
- Wanting to create automated workflows, but not even having an existing follow up email written
- Sending manual calendar invites, when they could just be self-scheduling
- Spending hours manually coding webpage updates when you could just be using an intuitive web content management system
Aside: I’ve been surprised to discover many HubSpot customers don’t realise you can run your entire website on HubSpot (they only know about landing pages and blog posts) - that on it’s own is often a big unlock (ie consolidate everything into HubSpot, reduce the number of separate systems, and improve overall attribution reporting).
BTW we have a whole guide on building HubSpot websites here.
Whether you start with the problem and work backwards, or follow the framework and start with the basics - it’s important you strive to increase your HubSpot usage ‘maturity’ and get the foundations in place.
Is this helpful? Let me know if you’d like to chat through further.
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