29. How to use HubSpot to simplify sales and marketing for your small business

Introduction

How much time and money do you waste each day just doing sales and marketing "stuff"? When everything takes so much effort to do, and you do not know whether or not it's working, many small business leaders just give up.

But there is a simple technical solution to reach your ideal customer that doesn't cost as much as you might think. Today Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber are going to look at one of the tools that you can use to implement that. HubSpot is one of the modern customer engagement tools that you can use to simplify your sales and marketing and track its success. And it does way more than you think.

To help you improve your marketing strategy, download the free brand script worksheet, which includes sections for each part of the storytelling framework we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below): 

demodia.com/brandscript-worksheet

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Episode Transcript

You know how it works. Your sales contacts live in your spreadsheets. Your marketing leads go into the email marketing tool. Your website leads, well, they start out in WordPress, but then they get copied into your email marketing tool. And when you want to know the ROI of all your marketing efforts, well, who cares? In any case, it's just marketing, isn't it? Yeah, we all start out that way. But when you think about it, How much time and money do you waste each day just doing stuff? When everything takes so much time to do and you've got no idea whether or not it's working at all, many small business leaders just give up and they hire a student to do some basic branding or events instead. But there is a simple technical solution and it doesn't cost you as much money as you might think. So last week We talked about the authentic engagement framework. So this uses story based communications to help you reach your ideal customer. And. Today, we're going to look at one of the tools that you can use to implement that. HubSpot's one of the modern customer engagement tools that are out there that you can use to simplify your sales and marketing and track its success. And it does way more than you think. So let's get started. Hi there, I'm your host Simon Harvey and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice that will help you create marketing that works. So I'm going to be brutally honest with you today and say that when I founded my company Demodia, the way that I used to manage all my customer information was on the address book app on my Mac. I wrote down the name, email address, and telephone number of all the people that I met or spoke with and that became the way that I used to run my sales and marketing. I did move on and I did start using Excel after a few months but the basic approach didn't change for me for quite some while and I think the reason for that was that as a small business we never used to have access to tools that the big companies used to have, not without paying an absolute fortune. So, you know, yeah, we could use Salesforce, but it used to cost thousands of dollars per seat and without a reasonably large revenue stream or a pipeline to manage, that's not something that most of us can afford, is it really? So, something that we've seen in recent years is that there's been a real seed change in the market. You know, more and more companies are now bringing out sales and marketing solutions that are specifically targeting the needs of small businesses. So, tools like Zoho or Odoo, you know, they're really moving the market forwards. One of the more established players that's out there as well, that is often overlooked I find by small businesses, is HubSpot. Having decided that spreadsheets weren't the way for me to go for managing my customer data, that's the way that my customer journey actually went next. In today's episode, I wanted to share that journey with you, you know, so I wanted you Introduce you to HubSpot, and I wanted to explain to you why that I've found this to be such a great tool for running my small business. In fact, for running any small business or startup out there and doing sales and marketing. So, let's step back into my role as a marketer. You know, as a marketer, at the very basic level, our job is to attract an audience, you know, bring them into our website, for example, and then explain to them through the content in there and through the content that we deliver to them, how we solve a problem and ultimately, ultimately to convert them. Once we've got some basic contact information, then we want to engage with those people. So that's when our sales and marketing communications come in, and we engage with them, hopefully, until they become a customer. The key thing here is that we need to make sure that we're doing not just collection of data, but we're actually using that data as well. And I think that's where having all your customer data in a single system has really helped our business in that sense. It eliminated all that shuffling I was talking about earlier. There was no need to put things in spreadsheets or capture stuff in a website and copy it into an email tool and then copy it back into another system to manage. Consent or any of those sorts of things. You know, it meant that we could ultimately start to target individual messages at small groups of people, you know, rather than sending bulk emails to all of them, you know, that very lazy approach of just batch and blast email marketing that we see over and over again. Then the other thing I think is because all the information wasn't in one place, the other thing that I found is that we could start to actually use it. It became the tipping point for our business that really turned what were sort of random acts of marketing into something that was focused on growth. You know, marketing became a growth tool for our organization and not just an expense. Yeah, I've done a lot of talking there, but that's the great thing I think that we found when we moved over to HubSpot. You know, it helps us to grow our business. So, that's a bit about my sort of story. The other thing that I'd say in here is that it's a common misconception that HubSpot is expensive. It really isn't the case. Even as a small business, there's something for you there. If you're just getting started, HubSpot Pricing starts under 50 a month. And the best thing is that there's also a free tier. So anyone can jump in there and they can use the basic CRM and marketing tools for free. So there really shouldn't be a reason that you can't test out or can't use some of those things within every business. So I've done a lot of talking so far and I think my voice has started to go a bit. I think it's time probably to introduce Daniel back into the podcast and you know, What I wanted to learn from him today was a little bit more about how the rest of our team at Demodia here are using HubSpot as a marketing tool within our business, but also how they're using that with some of our customers. Hi there, Daniel, and great to have you back here again.

Hello, Simon. Yes, it's been a while, but it's good

to be back. So we've been talking today about CRM and automation tools. And more specifically, I've been talking a lot about how we're using HubSpot in house here. So I thought it'd be good to have you here as someone that's working with customers quite a bit to maybe give us some specific examples of how HubSpot's working for the customers that we're working with in real life. As a small business owner, Maybe you can explain to me, you know, what's the best starting place? How do I get started with something like HubSpot?

I think a great place to start would be around the sales hub. I've got a question for the listeners out there. Have you ever used an Excel spreadsheet or the address book app on your computer to keep records of the people and companies you're working with? Excel is one of the tools that small businesses use most of the time to keep track of their customer records. Almost every business starts off using it to log the contacts that they talk with and the sales conversations that they have. So the first thing I wanted to mention is the CRM tool. For those that don't know, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and it's basically a tool where you can store all your customer data in a central place. The most useful thing about a CRM is that it's not just your address book, it becomes your company's address book, where everyone can access and update data in real time. And as a growing company, having a good CRM is pretty much essential. Yeah,

I think it makes a lot of sense to have all your customer data in one place. Uh, and particularly we found the same thing as a growing company. You've got multiple sales people and multiple people interacting with customers. So you need to be able to see what everybody's doing. You know, being able to see what your whole company knows and what communications everybody's had with them really is an essential part of building good customer relationships. My journey went on next to sales. You know, how do we do sales? And over to you, Daniel. And my next question would be, what about managing my sales pipeline? Now, how do we go about managing a sales pipeline as a company? And tell us a bit about that, maybe? Yes,

of course. So imagine you're managing a bunch of potential customer leads and Trying to turn them into actual deals, right? HubSpot makes all of that way easier. Picture this, you've got this portal in HubSpot where all the leads you've collected through your website forms show up. It's pretty cool because now you can start personally reaching out to these leads directly through HubSpot. HubSpot also has this tool called DealPipeline. It's like a visual map of your entire sales funnel. You can see exactly where each lead is in the process, like who's just a new lead, who's interested and who's about ready to seal the deal. It's very useful for keeping track of everything and making sure you're not missing out on any opportunities to turn those leads into successful deals. So HubSpot is like having a personal assistant for your sales process, keeping everything organized and moving

smoothly. Yeah, it definitely is. I mean, it saved me a massive amount of time having somebody there or something there to tell me what was going on. So they're tools that I know I use all the time, and having that right information to hand as well as the regular notifications to let you know when something needs doing certainly has saved me a massive amount of time, you know, I've got a terrible memory, especially when it comes to multiple things going on simultaneously, and just something to ping me that says, you know, you need to get back in touch with Joe today, because you spoke to him a couple of weeks ago, and he said, Yeah, let's reconnect at the beginning of the month. Those sort of things who you spoke with what conversations you had, the things that you need to do relating to them, you know, I found those really useful to have in there. It's also been a great tool for me, at least for being able to plan our sales pipeline. So you know, Daniel mentioned the the deal flows earlier. And The thing that you can do with those is actually attach revenue to each of the conversations that you're having. And you can see at the end of the day, well, this is what my revenue potentially is going to look like. This is what my pipeline looks like. And it helps you substantially when it comes to business planning. So maybe we can move on slightly then, Daniel, and take a look at a little bit at the marketing side of things. What would be an example maybe of how you could use that?

When HubSpot developed their marketing hub, they focused on the main pain points that marketers have. And I have to say, they did an amazing job. As a startup, most businesses end up using so many different tools. One tool for building and maintaining a website, one to do lead capture, one to create and send emails, and another one for social media. The list goes on, you know. HubSpot saw that and developed a tool that combines all of these different tools in one place. What they call their marketing hub. It may not seem significant to begin with, but having all your sales and marketing data in one system can save so much time and effort further down the line. Just think about all the modern privacy regulations that we're seeing cropping up around the world. When you work with data, you need to make sure that your way of working is compliant to local laws. When you're using different tools for each task, you end up with similar data in different systems. Some of which gets updated, some of it doesn't. You never truly know what's the most recent information. It becomes really hard to market in a compliant way. And you don't need all these separate tools. This is going to save you money on subscriptions and also simplify any user training that you may be doing. Yeah,

I think you're absolutely right. I mean, you talking about compliance in there again, a very real example that crops up frequently is companies that are capturing data into their website and having another email tool for capturing email marketing consent. But then the sales guys are sending out one to one emails. Um, or cold emails more often from a completely different tool, you know, they've got no idea that there's already been a marketing email gone out that somebody has opted out of. So that's certainly where people can end themselves in hot water. I think these days, certainly with regulations like GDPR, certainly all around Europe and a lot more of those things coming into the U. S. as well. So I think that leads really well onto one of the main reasons that I love HubSpot. And, uh, you know, in the last episode, I talked a lot about the authentic engagement framework. You know, we looked at that as a framework for telling your story within sales marketing. And this is really where the power, I think, of having an integrated system comes in. If you think about the way that you tell stories, you need to tell the right story to the right person. Now that's the starting point of all this. If you tell the wrong story or tell somebody else's story, people don't engage. Customers only care if they feel like they're part of the story. So if you're talking to a customer that's been to your website and look to a specific product or service and then you start talking about a completely different product or service, they're not interested in those sorts of things. You know, they're not going to be listening. So once you've identified the story that they're interested in, you need to guide them through that story. They start on the webpage, but that really is often only just one chapter in the story. To hear the full story, they're likely going to have to engage with you multiple times. They're probably going to look at your blogs, they're definitely going to have to engage with you through emails, and there may be other content that you're producing that all forms part of that story and needs to be read or used at the right time in the journey. And again, I think technology is the way that we can make sure that people get that information at the right time. So, maybe Daniel, you could take a couple of minutes and just tell us a little bit more about how HubSpot helps with something like that. How do you build out something like this within HubSpot? Sure, Simon.

As you mentioned, there are a couple of things that you need to have in order to tell the story. By monitoring the content that visitors view or interact with, you can choose the most appropriate story to tell. The way I would tell the right story to the right person is by adding them to contact lists which we can then send emails to. You can then use the information that you know about a contact to personalize their path through each story, using workflows to send them nurture emails at the right time. Having all your assets in one place really helps when it comes to sharing the right content at the right time, as you walk them through the story. Then the other key thing not to forget is that when it's done, you have all the reporting data to tell you what worked and what didn't. Yeah,

very much so. You can tune your journeys and that's the key thing in there. You need to know which of those stories are the ones that are having the most impact and you can help to refine stories or throw away stories if they're not working in there. I definitely plan to go into that overall flow much more in future episodes. In fact, we're going to have a lot more of this whole season is about how do you actually implement that authentic engagement plan using tools like HubSpot basically to engage customers in there. But just to summarize here, I think, you know, we've seen sales hub basically is used to store your customer data and manage your sales pipeline marketing hub. On the other hand, that's going to help you promote your offerings. You know, it's going to make it possible to communicate with the right people at the right time, in the right way, and in an automated fashion, which I think is essential one last little bit, just before we sort of move on. I know I talked a lot earlier about using your website. I mentioned that as being a critical part of the story. And something that a lot of people that I talk with don't actually realize is that HubSpot itself actually has a really great CMS, uh, a really great website building tool as part of it. If you want to go and take a look yourself, uh, they call it the CMS hub, not surprisingly there, but it's a really great tool. Many founders that I work with often ask me about things like WordPress, you know, They think it's the cheapest tool that's out there and the best CMS, but I've got to be honest with you. My first advice is that this really is a false economy. You know, having used WordPress for many, many years, it is great. It's free. It's fantastic for personal websites, or if you've got a little personal shop front, that probably isn't much better. But when it comes to running your business, you need a different thing from your website. You need something that's easy to update. So all your marketers can get in there and update without having to worry about technology. You need it to be secure, so people can't get into it. And you need to make sure that it's got regular backups and updates in there. But most importantly, it needs to be something that integrates with the rest of your customer data. You know, if you're going to go through that process of capturing information, you don't want your customer data stored in yet another database. You want that stored straight back into your customer database. And if someone updates their own personal data through the website. You know, you want that to update that central database as well. Save yourself a little bit of effort in there. So, I mean, what's your experience, Daniel? What have you come across on the HubSpot CMS side? How's that been useful for you?

I would rate a company's website as their most important communication tool. When a potential customer comes to your website, they don't come for no reason. They landed on your website because they have a problem or some issue to solve. They're looking for a solution to their problem and they don't have much time. These days you have a couple of seconds to get someone's interest, otherwise they're gone. Again, the great thing about HubSpot is that everything is in one place. With WordPress, you have to have another platform to manage. You need separate developers. And in many cases, marketers find it difficult to make updates themselves. With CMS Hub, you don't even need coding experience. And it's easy for marketers to make changes where they need to. And. As you mentioned before, it integrates seamlessly with other HubSpot Hubs, ensuring your marketing and sales efforts are perfectly aligned with your customer's website journey.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely key. I mean, you know, going back to WordPress, we keep talking a bit about that. But, uh, you know, security to me has got to be one of the biggest reasons. I mean, who out there knows somebody that hasn't had their WordPress website hacked? That was always the biggest bud bear when we were using HubSpot. Um, there's just constantly threats out there and the great thing about HubSpot is it's part of their main tool and, you know, it's got all of their security team looking after it every day for you. So, we've talked a lot about sales tools, marketing tools, we've talked about the website in there. We're coming up, I guess, to the close today, but it's really worth noting that HubSpot has got so many other tools in there as well. Some you'll use more, some you'll use less, but it can do things like managing customer feedback, capturing tickets and monitoring responses on those. And again, the key thing is it's got such an extensive place. And the other thing is that it's got an extensive partner marketplace. You know, there's massive amounts of integrations with other tools that you can use for. Monitoring contacts, finding contacts, creating contracts, you know, you name it. There's an integration out there with HubSpot. So thanks very much for your time today, Daniel. It's been great to go through and hear some of your experiences in there. And, uh, yeah, I look forward to chatting with you again and getting more of those things as we talk about how we use HubSpot to build out the authentic engagement plan in future episodes.

Sounds exciting. Thank you very much, Simon. It was my pleasure.

So if you're having problems generating leads or optimizing your marketing processes, then you can hire an authentic engagement coach. Just go to wantauthentic. com to hire a coach that will show you how to use HubSpot to tell your story and give you an easier way to grow your business. For today's action, what I want you to do is go and take a look at HubSpot. You know, see for yourself how it works. You can go to HubSpot. com and as I mentioned earlier, you can sign up for a free subscription that's going to give you basic access to all of the HubSpot functionality. If you do this, then you can see for yourself some of the great things that you can do with there. And if nothing else, I really encourage you just put your contacts in there, start building up that central contact list and just do simple email marketing through there. It doesn't cost you anything apart from a few minutes of your time. As I mentioned, The more important reason that I want you to get into there is throughout the rest of this season, I'm going to be taking you through the key parts of the authentic engagement framework, and I'm going to show you how you can implement those using HubSpot. So if you've got your own account, then you can follow along and you can build out and tell your own stories as well. So that's all for today's episode of the authentic marketing podcast. Thanks as always for listening. And don't forget to bookmark the podcast and follow or comment with us on LinkedIn. You know, I love to hear what you've got to say. I love to hear what you want to know and how we're helping your business succeed. See you next time.