You’ve had the onboarding from HubSpot, the initial training and setup and somebody in your team (you, probably) has gone and done the inbound certification on the HubSpot Academy. You have even printed out your certificate (Woop woop!), but HubSpot is not working. Here's why...
The leads aren’t flying in. “WTF! This isn’t what HubSpot said would happen…” So you start to blog.
You recruit (bully) your best salespeople into blogging. If you are lucky, they write 1 or 2 articles for you. They are crap. But you persevere. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
The leads aren’t flying in. “WTF! This isn’t what HubSpot said would happen!”
You go back to HubSpot. You say something like this; “HubSpot is not working!
They say; “Have you created a content strategy? Mapped your buyer personas? Evaluated your keywords? Built your content clusters? Established your SEO strategy? Crafted your social strategy? Incorporated captioned video and infographics into your content streams? Are you blogging every week? Have you unified your sales and marketing teams? Have you turned on messages? What about Automation, is that set-up and running? How many steps in your workflows? Are you using dynamic content? Have you established KPI’s that sales agree with? Have you established the threshold for an MQL? Is your lead scoring strategy in play? Have you considered upgrading to our new xyz product, because that it’s even more awesome?”
It’s been 3 weeks now. You’ve spent (or committed to spend) a minimum of £10,000 on this so far.
After a day or so, you pull yourself together and begin to enthusiastically (manically) trawl through HubSpot blogs and case studies. You watch hours of HubSpot Academy videos. You are bolstered. You crack on… empowered, with renewed focus.
So you build your first email workflow. It is fantastic. It has 300 steps in it. You feel like a genius.
In building your masterpiece you’ve had to write 9 emails, but that’s okay. Each has 13 dynamic pieces of content, perfectly crafted to be unique to each recipient. This is going to be amazing.
You build 7 CTA’s and 4 different landing pages. You forget to remove the navigation from the landing pages. You’ve selected your lucky recipients and you hit send. You also forgot to create a campaign in th campaign tool - but that’s okay too, you’ll pull all the assets together later and report on them then. Somehow.
You get 11 leads. You want to nurture them. Sales immediately call all 11 and tell you that they are shit. That that this entire HubSpot 'malarky' is shit and they'd have been better off with an extra salesperson.
Then they call the CEO. They tell them that you are shit.
Once your eyes can cry no more you come to realise that a Formula 1 car can not drive itself. It needs a unified team of engineers, certified specialists that finesse, refine and evolve the beast.
Those engineers are backed up by a team of strategists who identify the best opportunities to overtake and when to pit. Then there is the driver (you) - they are the pilot, they are out there, in the firing line, in the danger zone. If they make one wrong move it could be race over and they could ruin their expensive race car.
You can run HubSpot (and run it well), in-house. But you will need a support team that is engaged in the same vision. You will also need a full team of strategists, writers, designers, developers, illustrators, animators and certified HubSpot software practitioners. Then you will need campaign know-how and experience.
In a recent post: 'HubSpot for In-House Teams: 3 Important Fixes' we identify 3 key steps you should take to build a high-performing in-house HubSpot team.
Drivers (marketers) like you, know that their own on-track brilliance does not mean they will win races. They know they need support from the best team they can assemble.
When marketers need to engage their entire team, identify and focus on the real goals, set their HubSpot account to actually work for their company or when they need to zero-in on the best content strategy that will fuel their entire championship campaign. At that point, they often turn to Project36.
Happy racing.