Welcome to HubShots - APAC's number 1 HubSpot focussed podcast - where we discuss HubSpot tips & tricks, new features, and strategies for growing your marketing results.
We hope you enjoy the podcast as much as HubSpot's CEO, Brian Halligan does.
This episode we chat through sales workflows, keeping contact lists clean, challenges with personas, plus advertising on billboards.
Listen to the episode here: https://soundcloud.com/hubshots/172-sales-workflows-clean-lists-persona-challenges-billboards
HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.
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Recorded: Wednesday 04 September 2019 | Published: Saturday 14 September 2019
We are recording this on the start of Inbound, and since you are listening to this after Inbound there will be a bunch of new product announcements to go through.
With that in mind, we’re not going to focus on features this episode, instead we’re going to mainly focus on ways to use HubSpot to improve your business.
Love drinking coffee that’s kept at the right temperature. Thanks Ember mug! Listen to shot 7 in Episode 163 for more details:
https://hubshots.com/episode-163/
To clean up your contact lists, use any of the following contact properties to get more context about their original source and why they're engaging with your business.
If your contacts are more than one year old, run a re-engagement campaign to confirm that they are still interested in your content and hearing from you. Also would be worth running them through NeverBounce as an additional check.
Did you know? A spam complaint rate of 0.1% on a single email is a red flag that will increase your chances of bouncing or landing in the spam folder.
Creating deals using workflows. As an example, you can create a deal when you get to a particular deal status.
Tip: think about what information you want in the deal specifically if sales are working on it.
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/workflows/how-can-i-create-deals-with-a-workflow
Associating deal activities. If you create them from a workflow they won’t have the associated activity to start. So be aware of this.
https://knowledge.hubspot.com/articles/kcs_article/contacts/associate-activities-with-records
Special shout out to Joy from HubSpot support.
What we take away from this:
https://medium.com/@bhalligan/hubspot-billboard-experiment-6898fe28319e
You can prepare your personas in a number of ways. Often they are based on roles or function (ie job titles or department), however they can also be approach based, as well as
For example, some clients use approach based personas eg
Etc
This is all fine in terms of preparing content and messaging. But can be challenging when preparing targeting for ad campaigns eg how do you target an innovator on Facebook?
These personas end up needing an extra level of mapping. And usually this needs to include titles and interests.
Some further reading:
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them
https://marketoonist.com/2019/02/marketingpersonas.html
2Bobs with David C Baker and Blair Enns
We love David C Baker:
Glenn Miller from Lupo Digital
https://www.lupodigital.com/business-sales-and-marketing-growth
Zoe Palmer from Brand Chemistry:
https://www.brandchemistry.com.au/
Advice for modern marketers. Automate the buying process. Users are expecting you to automate their processes. They want a self-service experience with your company.
https://conversionxl.com/blog/micro-funnels/
Tools to try
https://www.integromat.com/en/features
Please rate and leave us some feedback as this helps us improve and reach more marketers.
- [Ian] Hi everyone! Welcome to HubShots episode 172. We talk about sales work flows, keeping your list clean, persona challenges and billboards. You're listening to Asia Pacific's number one HubSpot focus podcast, where we discuss HubSpot tips, tricks, reaches and strategies for growing your marketing and sales results. My name is Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found, and with me is Craig Bailey from XEN Systems. How are you, Craig?
- [Craig] Man, I am so good, I am so pumped up on caffeine and sugar tonight, I gotta tell you. And when I'm drinking my tasty beverage, oh my goodness, the temperature is just perfect.
- [Ian] What temperature's that, Craig?
- [Craig] Well, I've set it at 62.5 degrees on my app on my phone, 'cause I now have an Ember mug. That's right!
- [Ian] Now listeners, we've spoke about this Ember mug in some previous episodes, but before I go along I just wanna say happy birthday, Craig.
- [Craig] I wanna say thank you Ian, and thank you for my Ember mug. That was an awesome surprise today, so I feel very, very lucky, and, as a result, caffeinated up with tasty beverage at, what time is it? Coming up to eight o'clock at night, so yeah.
- [Ian] All right, listeners. Now, you're listening to this episode. When this comes out, INBOUND 2019 will have gone and INBOUND 2020 will be on its way, and next year it's actually gonna be in August.
- [Craig] Yeah, that's right, but by the time you hear this, inbound for 2019's all over so we're thinking, well, tonight's not much use if we talk about some latest HubSpot feature because there's gonna be a ton more released over the week so we'll chat about that in upcoming episodes. Instead, what we're really just gonna focus on is ways to use HubSpot, I guess, from an approach-based, as opposed to specific functions.
- [Ian] That's right. Do you want to move onto our HubSpot marketing feature of the week, Craig? Now this is really something key, that we see often, following the last episode where I got myself into trouble with some unclean lists, I thought it'd be really good to highlight the importance of segmentation of your lists and also creating lists to make sure that we are engaging with people that are actually engaged with our businesses. So there's some really good things and there's a support article there that I want to highlight. But to keep your contact list clean, you know, there are lots of properties in HubSpot that you can actually create lists out of, so, you know, when they were created, when the last email date, the recent conversion day, the last time they submitted a form, the last time they opened an email, they clicked a link, they replied etc. So there are lots of things you can do. One of the things that they suggest if contacts are more than a year old, is to run a reengagement campaign to confirm that they still are interested in hearing from you. I would also go another step and say run it through NeverBounce and as an additional check. And this is not a hard thing to do. It's very easy to actually connect to NeverBounce to HubSpot, because it is a platform, and it can connect, so you can run the check through NeverBounce and then push the data back into HubSpot. And I wanna also say, did you know this, and I didn't know this, a spam complaint rate of .1% on a single email is a red flag that will increase your chance of bouncing or landing in the spam folder.
- [Craig] .1%? I did not realize it was that tight.
- [Ian] That's right, and that's why I called it the Did You Know.
- [Craig] Oh, this segment? Nice, interesting. Yeah, well some good ways to break down segmentation there and I like the warm-up campaign, but yeah, behavior-based, it's based on how they interact. You've got some examples here in the show notes, but well, last emailed they opened and how many emails, pages they visit, all those kinds of things so they're good indicators of intent.
- [Ian] Now Craig, onto our HubSpot sales feature of the week, and this is really about optimizing sales process. We want to highlight this because not a lot of people might be aware but you can actually create deals using work flows. Example, how we do this for a customer is when a contact gets a particular lead status, we might then wanna just start tracking that in deals, so we kick off a deal work flow to create the deal at that point in time. We copy a lot of the information that we might have collected from the contact originally into the deal. That's actually required by sales, so that they don't have to keep going backwards and forwards. So that's something else we're doing. Now, the caveat here is make sure the properties you're copying are of the same type.
- [Craig] So when you say the same type, what do you mean?
- [Ian] Example, I was doing one recently, one of the properties I was copying was actually a multiselect. Except when I created the property on the deal site, I just said it was a single entry field, and then it flagged it that there was a problem, so it needs to be identical to be able to do the copy across.
- [Craig] It's a good example. Look, this is a really good tip, actually, creating deals from So, give you an example, it might not just be fill out a contact form, ah, create a deal, that might be a bit premature. But let's say they go through and they might have requested a quote or you're getting them very close to purchase, you wanted to automate as much as possible. Gee, we should have a quote about that in the show, at the end. But really, if you can get them to that point and set up in HubSpot, what you can actually do, they fill out the form, they put a whole bunch of details, okay, creates the deal, you can set the name based on who they are, and then you can also set internal notifications, so that might not go to you, it might go to someone in sales, might go to someone else, perhaps in delivery and things like that. So automating all those thing is a really good idea and deals is just one part of it that helps you not only automate your business, saves time, but actually reduces missed opportunities. Plus I get captured right there and then.
- [Ian] Now, onto our HubSpot gotcha of the week, Craig.
- [Craig] Firstly, shoutout to Joy at HubSpot support. She did a great job at answering this question for me. Back onto creating deals from work flows, I was doing this and I wasn't seeing any activity. So generally when you create a deal when you're in a contact, you'll actually end up seeing, if you've got your settings correct, you'll end up seeing all of the activity in the timeline on the deal. So I'd done this and then I went to the deals. I'm like, "Where is this? It just looks empty." Anyway, there's a knowledge-based article here about why that happens and how to, I guess, get around it or maybe how to fix it if you need to, but it's not readily apparent when you're doing this. So you can associate multiple activities on a deal ticket, or associate single activities, and it's based on the record so you can actually associate those records to that deal, if you want it to show up. So just be aware of that.
- [Ian] Right, so just so I understand this, you're saying if you manually create a deal, you get that option to associate recent activity, 30 days of activity, emails, etc., to the deal. But if you do that from a work flow, you don't get that option.
- [Craig] You're right, so bit of a gotcha there, okay.
- [Ian] All right Craig, onto our marketing tip of the week.
- [Craig] To be done in an INBOUNDy way, no doubt, Ian.
- [Ian] That's right, and this is about using billboards. Now, I thought this was rather interesting. This is an article that Brian Halligan has written on Medium, and he talked about using billboards, why it helps but actually using billboards. So, I thought it was really well written. Like, he had kinda gone through the whole process about why he thought it was a good idea. And not just he thought but he actually took him back to the business and they discuss it. But I thought there were kinda three key take aways that I got from this that he had mentioned in this article. Now, he's gonna write a follow up after this post the billboard being up for a couple of months, and then he's gonna report back. But here's the three that I got. If Brian did not live and work in San Francisco for a month, he would actually not have had this revelation about billboards and how important they were, in San Francisco and in the community that he was targeting. He learned that there are some clever ways to measure the effectiveness of billboards as well, which he didn't actually mention how, but he said he'd discovered them in the journey. Number three, he learned that the message that they did, although the billboard, needed to be kept very simple, because people just don't have time. So just think of the purpose of the billboard, and he goes, it had to be super simple. So literally all they have on the billboard, it says, "Your sales team will love you." That is it. And they've got "HubSpot CRM, Grow Better" on the bottom, which is quite small, but that is the key message here. I'd encourage you to read the article because it kind of opens your mind up. I mean, we do all this stuff in the digital space, what other channels are we missing in the market that we're targeting, because we're not actually looking at it from a customer perspective.
- [Craig] I think this is really interesting as well. By the way, we've got a screenshot in the show notes of the billboard, what it looks like, and it is very simple. It's cool. I'm really interested in this kinda thing. It's offline, as we would say. But I was actually looking at not so much big billboards, but actually the digital billboards you see around, 'cause we see a lot of them in Chatswood and around the city here. They're digital, and I actually was looking at this when my wife's last book came out, 'cause I was gonna do a bit of book advertizing. I was actually looking at, 'cause some of them have got them in bus shelters now. But more specifically, I was gonna be looking around in the center of Sydney, around George Street, because there's a few K Dymocks store there. Dymocks is a bookseller in Australia, for any overseas business. And I was actually gonna try and do it impression-based, just to have those key moments, like lunch time, etc., to advertize her book. And in terms of measurement, it actually would be very easy to measure because these are digital billboards, you can say, "Oh, well I'll put it on for this week "and check the results." 'Cause we do get semi-real time book sales results. The thing that stopped me, and I think this is only a short term thing, the minimum spend was just too high. So it's not like Google Ads or Facebook you can jump on and do $10 a day or something. They just needed corporate accounts that need many thousands of dollars of spend at a time and which was too much just for promoting a book. But that will change, the whole self service billboard market I think will come in, and especially digital billboards. You see these outside lots of lifts in buildings these days. It's another piece. Now, we typically don't do that 'cause we don't think we can measure it, but I, and I'm interested to see how Brian measures it, but for my point of view, it's actually quite easy. Turn it on for a week, turn it off for a week, and as long as there's a very strong tie to purchase, so an eCommerce piece would be the most obvious example, or book sales would be another. If you're promoting a profession services piece, that might be a bit more difficult to align. But certainly, those other mediums, those other channels that coming in place, and I'm really keen to use them. I actually think there's those first moments for opportunities for those as well, for small business. Of course, the big brands have it already, but this is coming downstream to small business as well.
- [Ian] All right Craig, onto Inside of the week. Mapping your personas to ad targeting. Now this is something that you and me have both come up against and understanding when we talk to businesses it's about understanding who were targeting and how do we talk to them, right?
- [Craig] Yeah that's right, so I'll add a bit of context around this. I'm gonna say most, actually might not be most, but many people when they think of personas and they prepare personas, they'll do them role-based, so we'll say they're role-based, so it could be job titles, job function, that kind of thing. That's pretty common and I think HubSpot would even push you down that path if you hadn't come across personas before. I guess very simple to understand about a persona, about a person, you might add some demographics, age, etc., but it's often role-based in what they do. And that's because it's very easy to target. Now, bigger brands and, well, maybe some actually more sophisticated brands don't always go down role-based, they'll go down approach-based. So an example might be they say, "Aw, look, we've got an innovator," or "we've got a collaborator," or "we've got early adopter as a persona." And I often build out messaging and content around that, and that's actually, it can be quite powerful. I was actually in a strategy session today with a client and they've gone down that path with approach-based personas, and talking about it, "Right, so how do we get campaigns going on?" I'm like, "Okay, that's a good approach "but there's actually a second piece of mapping "that you need to do," because when you think about all the paid channels, they are quite often role-based or function-based or interest-based. So you can't go onto Facebook and go, "Ah, I wanna target innovators," or "I wanna target first--"
- [Ian] Collaborators.
- [Craig] Collaborators, or early adopters, right? It's a lot harder. You've actually gotta do some extra thinking about how you target them. Now, on Facebook, that's quite often based on interests, but on LinkedIn, for example, you've often gotta tie that actually back to a role or a title or job function. So, I think the inside of why we include it in the show is just to be aware that personas that can have extra, more sophistication, there's pros and cons of both.
- [Ian] All right. Craig, our podcast of the week.
- [Craig] I've been listening to the 2Bobs podcast, and, you know, our friend, good friend of the show, David C. Baker, we love him. So he cohosts this with Blair Enns, who wrote the book ""Win Without Pitching"", which I'm reading at the moment.
- [Ian] I have read that book a while back, yes.
- [Craig] It's so good, I'm really enjoying reading this. This is perfect for agencies, but also for marketing managers, I would say. So I've listened to a couple episodes, been going for ages, so this is not a new podcast. Been going for ages and I've only just started listening to it now. Fantastic.
- [Ian] And what's been one of the one stand out highlights that you heard recently, Craig?
- [Craig] Okay, so he targeted this ad agency, this was talking about six types of people that are a bad fit for your agency. However, this could also work with marketing departments. But he looked at personality types where, you know, people come in and extend their influence and all kinds of characteristics that they do, or they try and block out other people so that they have, kinda, in charge, they're the go-to people, they make themselves indispensable. All these kind of staffing issues, so that was one. Then he was in another episode, they were looking at some of the ways that you deal with procurement. Really interesting insight, I found, as an agency, 'cause Blair was actually recounting this experience he had at a conference where a procurement manager for, like, Coca Cola or something like that got up and said, talking to a room full of agencies, and said, "Ah, you all think you're so differentiated and so unique," and they said, "You're all the same. "You all charge the same some kinda costing model. "You all say you're different but it's all the same, "you know, you've all got this unique process, "but it's actually all the same thing "and it just presented differently. "You're not unique. "We're gonna pay you X dollars per hour, "that's it, take it or leave it," right? I thought it was a really good comment. And so, as you would know, both David and Blair, when they talk about differentiating, they talk about expertise. So it's not really the way you position your agency, it's about the expertise you bring to it. So I found that really interesting and I guess for any marketing managers presenting their own product to the market, it's about how you differentiate and based it on expertise or other features.
- [Ian] Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Craig. That's exactly what's going on, right? Take away is to go have a think about that and actually figure out, are you positioning yourself correctly with your expertise? All right Craig, we got two shoutouts of the week. So Glenn gave you a shoutout from INBOUND. Hey Glenn, this is Glenn Miller from Lupo Digital, and he sent you a video, didn't he?
- [Craig] That's right. Very kind of him. Thank you Glenn. Keeping us, we're not at INBOUND, in case you didn't realize this as we're not at INBOUND, we're missing out on the fun but Glenn's over there.
- [Ian] We are gonna be there next year, Craig.
- [Craig] I think so. And I wanted to give a shoutout to, you know Glenn's Lupo Digital agency in Sydney?
- [Ian] Correct.
- [Craig] Potentially a competitor. You know how people keep saying, "Oh, another HubSpot on their competitors?" We're like, no. We don't consider these other agencies competitors at all. Here's another one. So Zoe Palmer from Brand Chemistry, I love their stuff. Potentially we could say Zoe and I are competitors?
- [Ian] Yeah
- [Craig] She's actually been giving referrals to me and, oh, you know, and Amobee, Amobee. We should shoutout to Amobee, he gave me a referral, I gave you a referral--
- [Ian] You did, thank you.
- [Craig] There is so much good work to be done, and so many good agencies around, I don't think we'd see any of them as competitors. We're collaborators. Should be an avatar for that persona.
- [Ian] What I love at the core of them, they're all good people. Now before we finish this segment, Craig, INBOUND next year, if you're thinking of going, is actually August 18 to 21 in 2020.
- [Craig] Is that because that's before the election or--
- [Ian] I would suspect so, because I remember four years ago, when we were at INBOUND was the day of the election. Anyway, so there's two kinds of passes. You can get a all-access pass if you book in the near future, it's 6.99, and you can have a power-pass, Craig, for 12.99.
- [Craig] The power-pass is what it's all at.
- [Ian] All right Craig, onto our quote of the week. And I thought this would be a befitting quote from Brian Halligan. "Advice for modern marketers: automate the buying process. "Users are expecting you to automate their processes. "They want a self-service experience with your company."
- [Craig] Only could automate the process of creating deals in.
- [Ian] That's right, Craig. And paying for it too. All right, there's some bonus links of the week. I think there's some training from ConversionXL about microfunnels, not fly wheels, funnels.
- [Craig] Look! I know you baited me there! You can't escape the funnel. Everything I talk about, the funnels, everything with clients, they understand funnels. No one gets the fly wheel.
- [Ian] You just gotta talk more about the fly wheel. It's about less friction, Craig.
- [Craig] It is about less fiction. Well, yeah.
- [Ian] Anyway, maybe we can do it and place it on the fly wheel.
- [Craig] Later on.
- [Ian] Well Craig, I hope you've had a great birthday, and listeners, if you are listening to this and you love this show, we'd love you to leave us a review on our podcast or Spotify. And we'd love you to contact us on Instagram, 'cause we love hearing from you guys, or email us. And to those that we haven't met in person, please feel free to drop us a line. We are actually thinking of running some dinners in Sydney. And, of course, when we are at INBOUND in 2020, we will get together there again. Well I hope everybody has a great week, and until next time, Craig.
- [Craig] Catch ya later, Ian.
- [Ian] Thank you for listening to this episode of HubShots. For show notes, resources, HubSpot news including practical strategies you can implement, visit us at HubShots.com.