How to Use Marketing Automation to Increase Campaign Effectiveness with Alex Desnoyers

In part 7 of our Masterclass Series on Building a Strategic Marketing Plan for Your Business, host Eric Dickmann talks with Alex Desnoyers. Alex is a Channel Consultant for HubSpot Solution's Partners. This group is an integral part of the HubSpot ecosystem and they work closely together to strategize and build scalable solutions to help HubSpot's customers grow by taking full advantage of marketing automation technologies.

Alex likes to nerd out on data hygiene, automation, and email deliverability, stemming from his past experience working at digital marketing agencies. In this episode, we dive into marketing automation and how these tools can help businesses improve their campaign effectiveness.

For additional resources on this episode and from our other episodes in this Masterclass Series, visit https://fiveechelon.com/masterclass

For more information about Eric Dickmann and The Five Echelon Group, visit https://fiveechelon.com/

For more information about Alex Desnoyers, visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-desnoyers/

For more information about HubSpot, please use the link below.

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Transcript

Carla: 0:01

The Virtual CMO podcast is sponsored by the strategic marketing consulting services of The Five Echelon Group. If you’d like to work directly with The Five Echelon Group and receive personal coaching and support to optimize your business, enhance your marketing effectiveness and grow your revenue, visit FiveEchelon.com to learn more and schedule a free consultation.

Eric Dickmann: 0:24

Welcome to The Virtual CMO podcast. I'm your host, Eric Dickmann. In this podcast, we have conversations with marketing professionals who share the strategies, tactics, and mindset you can use to improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities and grow your business. This week I'm excited to welcome Alex Desnoyers is to the program. Alex is a Channel Consultant for the HubSpot Solution Partners Program. HubSpot Solution Partners are an integral part of the HubSpot ecosystem. They work closely together to strategize and build scalable solutions to help HubSpot's customers grow better. Alex likes to nerd out on data hygiene, automation and email deliverability, and is a great guest for our topic using marketing automation to increase your campaign effectiveness Alex welcome to The Virtual CMO Podcast and our Masterclass series on building a strategic marketing plan for your business. So glad you could join us today.

Alex Desnoyers: 1:21

Thanks for having me, Eric, really looking forward to this.

Eric Dickmann: 1:23

Hey, this is going to be an interesting discussion. I'm a huge fan of marketing automation, huge fan of HubSpot, this is going to be a really interesting conversation that we can have together about marketing automation technology. This is now part seven in our Masterclass series. We've talked a little bit about why a strategic marketing plan is important to your business, we've talked about identifying your target market and ideal customer profile, we've talked about product-market fit and competitive differentiation, building out a brand story that resonates with your ideal customer, how do they dominate your competition with a compelling market message and then using that market message in content and leveraging freelancers and content creators to be able to create valuable content for your marketing program. And that sort of leads us into today's discussion, which is really all around marketing automation technology and increasing your campaign effectiveness. So, I think this is going to be a fascinating conversation and HubSpot has certainly been at the forefront of this. How long has HubSpot been around now?

Alex Desnoyers: 2:30

HubSpot in its teenage years. It's actually coming up on its 15th birthday I believe this summer. you know, certainly not the new kids on the block anymore, but still a lot to continue to grow and learn.

Eric Dickmann: 2:40

Well, not only do I like HubSpot as a, as a platform, but I love it as a company for what it stands for and the culture code is certainly gotten a lot of publicity over time. HubSpot was one of the pioneers in this whole idea of inbound marketing. What is inbound marketing in your definition?

Alex Desnoyers: 2:59

Yeah, that's a great question, right? So when I think about inbound marketing, we can start with the inverse, right? So outbound marketing was just very traditional notion of how people were trying to communicate what you described in the preview of the Masterclass, right? Like you have an understanding of your brand and your audience. How do you get it out there? Well, traditionally, that was a very outbound approach. Things like print advertising and billboards, and just sort of generally broadcasting to anyone that was available to listen. The idea of inbound marketing is that we're trying to find the right people at the right time on their terms. So it's primarily focused on like a content strategy, really leveraging SEO to make sure that. When someone is identifying that they have a problem and they go to find an answer that they're likely going to find you and realize that you're a good fit to help them solve that problem. So I think it's really kind of centered on making the customer or the prospect, the focal point in turning it back on to them. So rather than just broadcasting to anyone with a set of years that might listen, and for most people, they're just going to go ahead and ignore it, we're trying to be a very targeted approach to people that really would benefit from hearing from you. And again, it's about meeting them on their terms and not kind of creating a lot of extra noise. It's about really concentrating that signal in a matter of that is best for the customer and has them at heart.

Eric Dickmann: 4:21

I love that because when we were talking about defining your ideal customer, your target market, that's really why you need to do that because you need to understand how to craft that message to be able to meet these people where they are, understand what their needs are, and then how you can produce not only messages, but content that is going to be of value to them at whatever stage they may be. Correct?

Alex Desnoyers: 4:46

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, we talk about the buyer's journey and people are going to be at various stages of that, and it's obviously depends on whether you're B2B or B2C and what kind of product or service you're selling but it's important to understand that there's you know, we're not trying to put people in a box and there's not a cookie cutter approach. It's really taking the time to ask the right questions of your audience, and oftentimes that's one of the best ways to do it is to literally ask them, you know, survey existing customers, you know, survey the market and understand like who are they? And really try to meet them where they are, is something that always sticks out to me in a lot of our HubSpot content is like, you know, if you seek to help the results come right. You know, and really not being too salesy, if you will. And just really seeking to understand them, if your offer or your service actually helps them, then things can work out, you know, and there's a very crowded marketplace. And so a lot of that is how do we differentiate ourselves from other competitors that offer something very similar to us? It's a fact that even HubSpot faces, it's just a competitive crowded marketplace kind of, regardless of what you're selling or what you're servicing. So a lot of that can be what sets you apart, and that could be how you sell and how you service, not just the end product itself. So really always keeping that prospect that lead that customer at the center of everything. What keeps them up at night, you know, what can you actually do to genuinely help ease their pain? If you always keep that at the heart of what you're doing and your North Star then things will probably go in the right direction.

Eric Dickmann: 6:18

And I think a great example of that is if you do a Google search certainly for anything around inbound marketing, but even things like buyer's journey, really anything marketing related, chances are a HubSpot blog is going to show very high in those search results, right? Because, HubSpot is a company has made it a point of putting out a lot of valuable content for free, and that draws people in. It's not just, you know, that you're a great company that you want to give everything away for free, you're giving valuable content out as a way to build trust with your ultimate customers and then drawing them into your ecosystem.

Alex Desnoyers: 6:58

Yeah, absolutely. It's a debate that I have with customers and partners at HubSpot all the time about, you know, sort of the gated versus ungated content reasoning. But as you mentioned, sort of the proof is in the pudding, right? Like HubSpot is going to come up at the top of a lot of those Google searches and for good reason, it's because we've put a lot of thought into our content strategy and really just making sure that we're putting content out there that is genuinely helpful. Right? And so it's not just the knowledge base articles that are going to help existing customers understand how to use the tools. It's things behind the why, right? Like why we're even promoting inbound in general and all the nooks and crannies there in. Right around the time I started at HubSpot, there was this big shift in our own content strategy that we started to push out as a bit of best practice around just pillar pages and how you generally organize your content, because we needed to adapt to how search engines were changing. And so it's the responsibility of the thought leader to make sure that content can be found, right? Like you need to get that content in front of those people at the right time. And you know, those search engines are serving their customers, so they're going to do right by them and we have to kind of play their game.

Eric Dickmann: 8:10

And I want to drill in on two things that you mentioned there, just to make sure that everybody fully understands what you mean here. So the idea of gated versus ungated content, just for people who aren't familiar, this is really the idea that for everything that you're giving away, you don't always have to ask for something in return. You don't need to collect somebody's email, address and name, and phone number. Every time they download a white paper or infographic. It's deciding at what point in the buyer's journey you actually go for that information collection, right?

Alex Desnoyers: 8:42

Yeah, absolutely. And I think uh, again, like just sort of simplistic pushback, whenever you have that conversation about like, well, I think this piece that you're working on is something that would be really helpful. It would really help educate the customer where they're on the buyer's journey. It would also help show your authority on the subject to search engines, improve your rankings. And the initial pushback is well, we're missing an opportunity to capture really critical information. And that you know, is true in a sort of black and white approach to it. But think about the fact that it helps you build that authority, so that a little bit further down the line when someone does ultimately fill out that form, they're probably more qualified because of their familiarity with your with your authority and your subject matter expertise. So it's a little bit of a push and pull. And I think, cause you mentioned that the critical thing is it's about where in the buyer's journey, you choose to do that and what that content is. You know, it's like any other part of a marketing strategy there's nuance. It's not like we should be ungating everything or gating everything, but in general, usually the truth is somewhere in the middle, it's a mixture of both, right? Like where does it make sense to ask for proportionate information in a form so that someone gets content that is commensurately helpful for what they're providing you versus you know, I think this is something that our audience just should know about we're going to make it publicly available and not hide behind a gate and just kind of do the right thing to help educate the audience.

Eric Dickmann: 10:04

I didn't load it up here today as part of the live stream, but it will be in the show notes for this episode, but one of the great pieces, it's a slide. I think that HubSpot has put together is really an explanation of the buyer's journey and some of the different content types that fall underneath the various stages in that buyer's journey. And that gives you a rough template as to where you might be getting that, um, that prospect to a point where they truly are showing interest, truly are more qualified, and maybe at a certain point in that journey, that's when you want to start capturing their information. But for those early stage leads that may not have shown enough buying intent yet, yeah, maybe the idea is just to build that trust, to give things away for free, to show the value. That your company can provide and then work them through that buyer's journey by offering them things. You know, I get emails all the time from HubSpot with the various blogs that are produced and it's great content, and to me over time that has created a real value. That's one of the first places that I go when I'm looking for information or research or trends, and that's all because you've built that credibility over time. The other thing I wanted to drill down into that you mentioned before is this idea of pillar pages. When people look at their website and how their website is organized, this idea of pillar pages is really something to help you build additional search credibility within Google, right? To help increase your SEO results, because you've got a page that is very comprehensive. What, What do you define as a pillar page?

Alex Desnoyers: 11:39

Yeah, that's a great question. So again, sort of born out of how search engines have evolved, I mean, they've become incredibly smart. And so, do you use HubSpot as our own example? You know, we had been blogging for quite some time and we had a sea of blog posts on various topics. And at any given point in time, if you pick one of those blog posts, it was kind of competing against every other blog post on that subject out there on the internet, right. So the idea of a pillar page is to kind of create like a hub and spoke strategy that creates a, a literal and sort of metaphorical connection between different topics and subtopics. The idea of which is to show the search engines that, you know, while this person might have a pretty long tail query that's pretty specific, but you can see through the literal website architecture that we have with how we link these blog posts to a main pillar page, which is like a big ungated piece of content on your website. It allows the search engine, understand that I'm probably going to pick this blog post because I can see that it is very authoritative and how it connects with all of the other pieces to the puzzle. So, you know, if we use inbound marketing as an example, Maybe you have a pillar page on like, what is inbound marketing or inbound marketing one-on-one, and that's supported by a series of content pieces, these blog posts on those various topics. So we go into social media marketing, we go into paid advertising and marketing automation and it's it makes sure that the internet and the search engines understand that it's not just this one topic, trying to fight the keyword battle on its own, it's how all of that fits into a cohesive content strategy. And it's all kind of anchored by that pillar page right there in the middle. And again I, when I am explaining it to people for the first time, it's like, think of it as an ungated ebook on your website, and that's kind of what holds it down and ideas that there was, again, the semantic connections kind of tell the story to the search engine to say, look, we know what we're talking about, and I think you should probably pick us at the top of those search results.

Eric Dickmann: 13:45

Yeah. When you pick up a book, you know, it's got an index with chapters in it and everything is linked together, and a pillar page is somewhat like that, only more descriptive, right? It's got a lot more information there, but it's linking out to all of these other areas that are related, which if you are Google and the search engine, and say, well, this is very authoritative. And if you look at some of the best examples of these pillar pages out there, it's like a one-stop shop for everything that you want to know about a particular subject area, and obviously that builds a tremendous amount of authority within Google and for your company as well. There, they take some time to produce, it's not for the faint of heart, but I think they can be very good for your organization. You know you mentioned a couple things and I think we want to dive into the whole topic of marketing automation. I'm a big advocate that for every marketing strategy, you need to start out with a hub. As you add additional tools, additional technology to your stack, you can have a central repository where all of that data is going to come, because one of the most important things in marketing, is being able to measure and monitor what your results are because it's part art, it's part science, there's experimentation that needs to go on, and you'll never know if you're being successful in your efforts unless you can set up some metrics and monitor those. But a conversation we've been having here on the podcast a lot recently is there is just so much marketing automation technology out there. I'm going to throw up a slide for the audience and you can't even read this slide because it's so small, but this is really the 2020 landscape of all the different marketing automation tools that are out there in various segments. The logos on here are so small, you can't even read them. You know, you go back five years on this same chart and it's a considerably different looking chart, right? So to break that apart a little bit, when you first Uh, started engaging with clients who don't have a marketing automation hub, who don't have that main platform to build their marketing strategy on top of. What do you tell them? I mean, why is a platform like a HubSpot important as that ultimate hub for your marketing data?

Alex Desnoyers: 16:01

Yeah. And I think, you know, the term hub obviously is something that resonates with us here at HubSpot, right? As you mentioned it's really critical to have that single source of truth, right? And so, you know, it's something it's still surprises me to this day, that there are a number of companies that I'll come across that are still living in Excel spreadsheets. And no, don't get me wrong. I certainly have plenty of things that I do that really help me with Excel spreadsheets, but, you know, leveraging a tool like a HubSpot, to do a little bit more of that work for you than just store that data and run some basic formulas, it becomes a source of truth that helps you execute your marketing strategy. So the tools are kind of part of that science, as you mentioned, if you will, and then obviously the human strategy is going to be a part of it. But to, to your question about like, where do you start? Oftentimes in my job, I joke 90% of my job is asking people why, right. And so why have you been doing things a certain way? How has that been going? Tell me a little bit about your buyer's journey and you start to uncover these incredibly manual processes, right? And you start to see where the leaks are in the bucket. And particularly for the SMBs that have been the focus of HubSpot for so long, it's so critical in those early stages. If you want to get to a point of scaling. That you really plug those holes and think about scale, right? And so if you think about that linear growth, when you're starting out and you maybe only have a couple dozen customers. You can kind of get away with doing a lot of things by hand and saying, I remember I need to follow up with Mark because he downloaded that offer last week, and I think he's going to be a great fit for us, I'm going to follow up personally. And it's not to say that there's any problem with personal follow-up, but if you really want to scale your business, you're going to go from a couple dozen to a couple of hundred, a couple thousand customers. And the automation engine that hub at the beginning and at the center of what you're doing is ultimately going to allow you to have that architecture so you can scale your business. And there's a lot of different things it can do, but the first thing I think, as you mentioned, as we've talked about before, is just like getting the data right. Is always so important. I think we've all been on the receiving end of those emails that either just have the wrong information about you or seem like they were not meant for you. And that's a big face Palm for a lot of those companies. So it's about getting those things, right. Having that customer experience be thoughtful and precise at scale and in a tool like HubSpot, many, other of the ones in the where's Waldo chart, you just showed are going to be able to help you do that. And certainly, you know, HubSpot's not the only tool that can do that as well.

Eric Dickmann: 18:34

It's not unusual to go in and see that maybe on the sales side, they're using a Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce, and then on the marketing side, they've got their Mailchimp or Constant Contact to send out some emails. Maybe they're using Buffer to do some social media posts. Maybe they're going in and creating some ads in Facebook directly. But everything is disconnected. There are separate lists over here for one thing. If somebody responds to a Facebook ad, then maybe it's a manual process of turning that over to sales. There's no real tracking to see what works and what's effective. It's a lot of data in a lot of different places, but it kind of prevents you from having that single view of the customer. HubSpot is a pretty broad platform growing every year, but it's a marketing automation tool, it's a CRM, it's a service platform, It's a web hosting or content management system. How would you describe it to people? You know, what's the difference between a HubSpot as a platform, and all of those tools that are separate?

Alex Desnoyers: 19:40

Yeah, that's a great question. I think at the time when I started at HubSpot, I started to really see the shift in how we were thinking about that and talking about that and, the term ecosystem comes up all the time for us. There are plenty of customers. I talk to where, as you mentioned, you know, we have various hubs for at this point where, you know, some businesses can kind of get all that they need on HubSpot and that's great, and you know, what a lovely story for us that is. But the reality is there are a lot of other tools out there that people have preferences for and solve specific needs that we might not yet solve. And I think one of the strengths of HubSpot is that it's really become an open platform. So, you know, we will often talk about all in one versus all on one. So maybe HubSpot doesn't have everything inside of it that you need, but we want to HubSpot to be a platform that allows you to. Integrate, and so that you have everything you need on one platform, you know? And so maybe that's integrating MailChimp or integrating Salesforce or Air Call, or anything that you can possibly imagine. You know, our app marketplace has grown at some point in 2020 to reach the 500 plus native integration mark. And so we have really leans into this idea that we care more about your data integrity than you purchasing every HubSpot product. Obviously we'd love for you to purchase HubSpot and be very successful with us, but if that's just the marketing hub, as you've mentioned with that marketing automation piece, or just the sales hub for that sales acceleration piece, we want to make sure that like your business has that centralized view, that source of truth, that clean data structure so that you can have a really well executed marketing strategy kind of meet people where they are. So I think one of the exciting things about how HubSpot has developed in the last year. You know, people always get excited around the time of Inbound or what have you with different tools and all the bells and whistles that HubSpot's bringing out. But for me, some of the most exciting stuff is the APIs that we continue to develop and the ability to continue to be even more connected with the rest of these tools that are out there. As you sort of described it's always a nightmare when you come across the Franken system, where there's even for these SMBs, they might have dozens of products that they use for all these different functions. But if they're not talking to each other, your customers are the ones that suffer for that.

Eric Dickmann: 21:56

Yeah, and I think that's the key point here is that there are a lot of great tools out there, many times some of these very specific offerings out in the marketplace, they offer some truly unique functionality. And if that's the right functionality for your business or your marketing campaigns, great. But what I always advise my clients on is look for tools that have that open integration so that if you decide to use something outside of your main platform that it still integrates backwards. For example, my website is a WordPress website like many of the websites out there, but all my contact forms are HubSpot forms. So they're embedded within the a WordPress website and they integrate back to my central repository. So if somebody says, Hey, I'd like to get in contact with you, that immediately is going into my HubSpot database where I can follow up with them. And I think that's the biggest thing that I advise clients on. Now I will say that with all of this tremendous creativity and energy happening out in the Martech space, the first thing that a new application developer is going to do is not work on their API is right? Integration is generally not the first step in a product's development, it usually comes later. But I would want to make sure that if I'm heavily invested in some new technology, that it was definitely on their roadmap to have that kind of integration capability, because otherwise you've got this siloed piece of data that's sitting out here that doesn't fit in with the rest of your solution, and it makes it very difficult to pull analytics. Next week, we're going to be going into a deeper dive on CRM and analytics, but that was one of the things that I love so much about the HubSpot dashboards, is just being able to see sort of in real time how my marketing campaigns, uh, where going. And that's sort of a great segue into this next idea, which is really around workflow and automation. And once you have that data, once you have those integration points, now you can do some really exciting things about workflow. So talk to me a little bit about what is the power of workflow in a marketing automation platform?

Alex Desnoyers: 24:05

Yeah. So I think you raise a great point in that, you know, once you do have that tech stack kind of tightly sewn together and you're getting that data from the proper sources, so maybe you're getting webinar, registration information over from zoom and you're getting, you know, interaction data from the VidYard videos, you're sending out to your prospects, you know, any number of those examples, but you have that sort of nicely tighten under the roof of your CRM. So now what do you do with that data? I think a lot of that. You know, comes from the analytics. What we can kind of gather about what I like to call it, the digital body language of your prospects. Like what are they telling us about how they're feeling about your content. How they're feeling about your service. How they whether or not they're coming back to your website. And so what it does is it provides you a lot of opportunity. And again, it comes from starting to ask the right questions of yourself and of your product and have your goals, right? So it starts to come from how you define things. And I always push my customers on this to understand like, as much as we understand the buyer's journey, we want to understand those life cycle stages as well. So really what does make a marketing qualified lead? And I think we can get into lead scoring is sort of the first example of that, where once you kind of understand what those different touch points are, what that body language adds up to, what makes a qualified lead, that becomes a really valuable trigger off of which you can automate different types of outreach. So. I also tell people to start simple, right? It's think about the basic things and also put yourself in your own inbox. Like we've all been on the receiving end of these kinds of marketing outreaches. I still get a happy birthday email from the Jeep dealership that I bought my first car from, and I think that's really interesting and really nice. And you know, maybe it's a reminder of an upcoming appointment or because I downloaded this ebook last month, you know, we think this new piece that sort of builds on that topic, you would also be interested in, so here's a little nudge to maybe check this one out. And so, you can only put the right things in front of the right people if we have the right information in place, and we have that data integrity. So again, it's about orchestrating things from the ground up, starting simple, asking the right questions and just making sure that we're meeting people on their terms and doing it at scale, staying personalized, staying relevant, staying timely.

Eric Dickmann: 26:25

And I think that what you're talking about is so important because, yes there is some complexity, even when you start simple, you know, using a workflow engine or integrating these various pieces, it, there can be some complication to it, for sure. But the beauty of it is once you get some of these automated processes set up and you get the rules figured out as to how you want people to enter a workflow process, then this kind of magically works behind the scene. You know you have somebody request a piece of information on your website, they went through one of those content gates that we were talking about before, and then you send them a series of follow-up emails. While you downloaded this, hey, you might also be interested in this, and you know, maybe they're interested in subscribing to the newsletter or whatever it may be, but you can put them through a series of predefined steps and you as a marketer, really don't have to do anything once that automation is set up. And that's really powerful, that means that people don't fall through the cracks quite as easily.

Alex Desnoyers: 27:22

Yeah. I think it means people don't fall through the cracks. It means they're having a consistent experience, but also for like the business owners out there, I'd be listening to this, to CMOs that might be listening to this, it means that the members of your team, your resources can better use their time and your budget, right? Because they're not doing those day-to-day repetitive mundane tasks. The automation is helping to take care of that and usher that along. And a lot of times, you know, the automations job as well is to let you know when we need you. Right. So you spend your time on the white board, working out the strategy for the client, thinking about your next big campaign, and we'll notify you when it's time to get your attention, particularly if you're on the sales team, right? So, again, it's the benefit is for the audience, for the customer, for the prospect, but also for those business owners, right? This is having your budget be better spent having those resources have their time better allocated. And, you know, really using your money more wisely.

Eric Dickmann: 28:17

Yeah. And I would just add to that, that one of the benefits, if you're a salesperson and you are working on an integrated platform like this, is that when you are assigned a lead, you can go in and see exactly what the marketing was to this lead. You can see what things they were sent. You can see what things they downloaded. You can see how many times they've visited the website, and what pages they went to. And if it's integrated with other tools, you can see what some of those integration points where as well. And that's tremendously valuable because you've got all of that insight. I mean, how many times have we all experienced calling into our call center and asking them a question and then having to call back a week later and they have no idea that you called in a week ago. That's very frustrating.

Alex Desnoyers: 29:02

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of my favorite examples of sort of that AHA moment that you get to enjoy. And when you work in customer success is, you know, the customer I was working with the integrated HubSpot with Salesforce, like so many of our customers do again to our previous point, like really taking advantage of two of the players in that very crowded marketplace and getting the best of both. And, you know, when they were fully set up on the integration, one of the last steps was to get sort of the HubSpot intelligence module added to the Salesforce dashboard. And I was sitting in on a Zoom meeting, sort of finalizing those touches, taking that live with them, and it was sort of the first time that the sales reps got to see that and they were like, Oh my gosh, like I don't have to go anywhere. I can stay in my tool that I know and love so well but now I'm getting more information that I didn't have before. I know where to start the conversation. I know what they were opening recently. I know what they were looking at and I know that they've visited our pricing page the other day. So it gives you that, you know, sort of translated body language in the right place and an integrated system like that it's going to put the information where you need it for your team to be most effective. So I always loved those moments when there is sort of the light bulb goes off and they're like, look, this is what some people think is sort of the unsexy part of like getting your data in the right place and data hygiene and integrations and APIs, but the outcome is that your sales team gets the ammunition they need to, you know, take advantage of those at-bats that they get.

Eric Dickmann: 30:26

Well and it's important to recognize too, that prospects don't always raise their hand, right? Sometimes it's a little bit more stealth. Maybe you've sent them something or maybe you sent them a proposal, or they downloaded something from the website, but they've had no more interaction with you since then, and you don't know whether they've just gone dark or not, but if you have these tools, these kinds of platforms, you can say- Oh yeah, the last three days they've been on the website and they keep going back to this one product page. You get some intelligence about what they're doing and if you're in an organization that doesn't have a platform and is doing things manually, you're missing out on a lot of buying cues, a lot of buying intent signals, because there are a lot of things where people are just not going to raise their hand. In fact, with all this communication that's going out, all this noise, people are more and more reluctant to raise their hand. So you have to look for some of these kinds of nonverbal cues, if you will.

Alex Desnoyers: 31:24

Yeah. I mean, one of my favorite pieces, just to bring back to the automation because there's automation can be simple and elegant. In HubSpot we have a lead revisit notification. So that's exact scenario where someone filled out that form and then they kind of went quiet and, maybe it's because it wasn't what they were looking for, or maybe it's because their direct report or their managers just told them we don't have the budget until next quarter. So then next quarter, they come back around and they've now revisited your website and you want to get that notification so you can prioritize that outreach. And so little bits of automation can help all over the place. And I think just to bring it back to the marketing conversation, right? When you think about all of the hard work that goes into planning a cohesive campaign, like all of those elements that can go into that, the automation can be you know, kind of touching every part of that. It's the scheduling of the social media posts in advance. It's the queuing up of those nurture emails in advance. Its those internal almost admin pieces to sort of say when someone does do this action, notify the sales rep and make sure you pick up the phone. So there are a lot of different places where you can start to apply that force multiplier to really speed up the process and help you do it at scale.

Eric Dickmann: 32:35

Hey, it's Eric here and we'll be right back to the podcast. But first, are you ready to grow, scale, and take your marketing to the next level? If so, The Five Echelon Group's Virtual CMO consulting service may be a great fit for you. We can help build a strategic marketing plan for your business and manage its execution, step-by-step. We'll focus on areas like how to attract more leads. How to create compelling messaging that resonates with your ideal customers. How to strategically package and position your products and services. How to increase lead conversion, improve your margins, and scale your business. To find out more about our consulting offerings and schedule a consultation, go to fiveechelon.com and click on Services. Now back to the podcast. One of the things that I think we're leading into as well is for years we've talked about this whole idea of funnels of sales and marketing funnels of getting people a broad group of leads down to a very small group of buyer ready leads and that sort of evolved um, especially HubSpot has been pushing this new idea of sort of a flywheel. And I was hoping that you could just take a minute to explain what that means, because I think this is really important when you start thinking about the buyer's journey, and it's not a destination if you will, once they make a sale, the buyer's journey isn't over. It's this continuous process. Talk to me a little bit about this flywheel.

Alex Desnoyers: 34:02

Yeah. So, ever since. You know, our co-founder Brian Halligan went up on that Inbound stage of this big goofy fly wheel and started talking about the end of the funnel in the beginning of the flywheel, it's been really interesting to see how people kind of sit with that message. And I think fundamentally, as you sort of pointed out our older notion of a funnel was that the customer is the output and sort of mission accomplished, right? We've put all our marketing and sales efforts into narrowing down this pool of leads and getting them to the point where we capture some customers and retain some revenue. Like isn't that great. But the idea of the flywheel is again, sort of this hub and spoke model brought back to life where at the center is your CRM, where those customers will now live, but on the each side of the spokes are how your marketing influences that how your sales influence is that, and just as importantly, how your service function influences that. So when they become a customer, the journey is far from over, right? It's in a lot of ways, just beginning. How do we continue to ensure that they remain a customer for those folks that I have a recurring revenue model. You know, we all have seen those studies that show that retaining existing customers is a lot cheaper than getting new ones. So especially thinking back to this past year where a lot of businesses were really affected by what was going on in the health community and with the economy, retaining customers almost became the new form of sales. So with a flywheel, we think about how those three major pieces of your organization, your marketing, your sales and your service help each other, and help the whole organization spin faster, right? And so if you think about the spinning is, or this acceleration in this growth, it's about a cohesive strategy and inter departmental cooperation that all helps to reduce the friction for those leads, those prospects, those customers, those recurring customers. And it really, sort of turns the funnel inward, I think. Right? So like the funnel's not gone, right. We still have some of those principles where we start with a broader audience and we try to qualify those leads. We start with that list of prospects and we try to qualify and close those prospects, but it's just the conversation isn't over once they become a customer, it's really just beginning and it's about how we all work together to keep that thing spinning.

Eric Dickmann: 36:20

And I think for me at least the importance of this idea behind the flywheel is if you're in an organization today where you pass your leads off to sales, and then, you're sort of done with it, you're missing the whole point, because if that lead then becomes a customer, now what? Marketing it has been disconnected from that lead altogether. You're no longer part of potentially upselling them to other products and services. To continuing to build the value in your company and the trust in your brand. It's two separate organizations doing two separate things. And I think the idea of the flywheel is so great because it's this continuum. Everything is interconnected and working together, and that's what platforms like a HubSpot can really facilitate is keeping all of these interactions both before the sale, during the sale and after the sale, all working together.

Alex Desnoyers: 37:14

Yeah, absolutely. And I think you hit the nail on the head too, to what we were kind of talking about earlier is it's, you know, in that world where the marketer sort of says mission accomplished, I held up my end of the bargain. I handed you X number of MQL per month. But then if there's no mechanism to report back what the outcomes of those sales conversations were, how can they really continue to do their job better? So that's a breakdown in the data flow, right? And there's a question about how we report that back, and I think it's, again comes down to the art and the science. And I push a lot of my customers on this because I think there's this perception with tools like HubSpot and the other ones on the market, that if you just buy the tool, it's going to solve your problems. And it's certainly not true. You have to implement it correctly and effectively, right? But also there are still humans involved, and so one thing I say to those marketers that kind of have that attitude or those sales folks that are complaining about the quality of the leads they're getting is have you had a conversation with those folks about this, you know, like, have you had a flywheel meeting where you had stakeholders from services, marketing, and sales that get together regularly and talk about how things are going and their progress towards their shared goals? You know, you still need to have that human communication. You I need to be pulling in the same direction. We're all fallible and the systems do solve a lot of problems, but it's also, you know, you still need a carpenter to use those tools.

Eric Dickmann: 38:38

Yes, absolutely. That's so true. And, you know, just starting to have those conversations within your organization about how the various teams can work together. I mean, that's certainly a great jumping off point and technology is an enabler, right? it's not going to work on its own. It has to be supported by processes and internal dialogue, and making sure that everybody has the same set of goals and objectives for sure. We've covered a lot of ground here today, but before we sort of wrap things up for the day, I want to give you just an opportunity, to talk about HubSpot. One of the things that I know is that they do offer some free options for people as well. If you're interested in just checking out the platform and seeing if it's the right fit for you, there are some free options.

Alex Desnoyers: 39:20

Yeah. One of the things that I've loved about HubSpot ever since I've been there on coming up on three years now, is that there's so much about the core of who we were when we first were founded as a company that's still there, right? And I think that's exactly what you were sort of alluding to. So there are to this day, even as you know, HubSpot past surpasses 100,000 customers and close to a billion annually, recurring revenue, do we still have that true to form we care about the SMB identity, where we make our basic CRM completely free. And it's not like one of those offers where it's a free trial, that they don't really tell you and it's in the fine print, and then all of a sudden it does require a credit card. There are customers that are on HubSpot and have been on HubSpot for years and still just use the free CRM. So we really do believe in that growth from where you are, that freemium model, where maybe that's all you need right now. And then as you grow and as your business scales, we have tools that the starter, the professional, and even the enterprise level. So, the idea that we wanted to remain true to the SMB will always be there, but I think the big mission of the last year in the next few years is to continue to be the company that scales with you. As you showed with that graphic, there are so many options out there and we're painfully aware of that. And a lot of our best customers are also using those tools and integrated all the prior points to our previous conversation. But we want to make HubSpot the tool that is a constant with you that grows with you and continues to meet your needs as your business continues to grow and scale. So I think that is kind of at the core of our ethos and you know, what we want to continue to do moving forward. We're going to continue to innovate and build from the ground up. I think there's also a traditional track record of a lot of companies were you know, we see mergers and acquisitions and sort of stacking on and creating these Franken systems. One thing I'm most proud of that HubSpot is that our product team is incredibly dedicated to building things from scratch and really putting a lot of thought into how we build the tools with the customer in mind, so that it's easy to use, but also deeply powerful. And so, you know, there's never a bad time to start a, it's always a good place to go to, to get something for free and give it a try. Like I said, for all those folks that might be living in their inbox and Excel spreadsheets, starting with a CRM can make all the difference in the world. And if HubSpot works for you, then that's great. And we're excited to welcome you to the family, but I think with all the choices out there, we understand that HubSpot should hopefully be one that you consider.

Eric Dickmann: 41:51

That's great. And I'll definitely have some links in the show notes as to where people can go to take advantage of those offers. Where can people find out more about you online?

Alex Desnoyers: 42:01

So surprisingly enough for someone who works for a technology company, I'm not super active on social media, but you can find me on LinkedIn, and that's where I like to spend a lot of my time. I think one of the things I enjoy most about working at HubSpot is that can interact with so many of our solutions partners and customers. There's a very vibrant community there on LinkedIn so I would definitely recommend reaching out to me there. You can find me Alex Desnoyers on LinkedIn and a I'd love to connect and start the conversation.

Eric Dickmann: 42:25

Hey, that's great, Alex. I really do appreciate you spending some time with us here today. Obviously you can tell from my questions that I'm a huge believer not only in marketing automation, but I love HubSpot as a tool, I've been using it for years. And have been very happy with it, loved the mission of the company as well, which is also really important to me. So I will make sure that we share all of this in the show notes as well as that a graphic we were talking run the buyer's journey because I think HubSpot produces a lot of really great content. So thanks for your time today. Really appreciate it. I hope this has been valuable to our audiences, we continue on our Masterclass series, so thank you again.

Alex Desnoyers: 43:02

Thanks so much for having me. It's a lot of fun.

Eric Dickmann: 43:06

Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Virtual CMO podcast. For more episodes, go to fiveechelon.com/podcast to subscribe through your podcast player of choice. And if you'd like to develop consistent lead flow and a highly effective marketing strategy, visit fiveechelon.com to learn more about our Virtual CMO consulting services.