Why Change Selling Blog

For B2B marketers, quality trumps quantity in lead generation priority and according to a recent Marketing Sherpa poll, generating quality leads is the greatest challenge marketers face.

"We have just spent $25,000 on an SEO project and we don't have the budget right now!"
I have heard this sales objection a couple of times in the past year
from prospects in discussion around providing inbound marketing strategy and services (we are a certified HubSpot partner) and I was going to write a post and share some lessons learned.

In preparing to research this article I ran a number of searches and Google'd up the phrase "SEO is not a one off event" as it perfectly encapsulates the sentiment of the article I was planning to write.  A couple of clicks later I came across an excellent article on SEOMoz from 16 year old Fryed7 entitled "The definitive guide to awesome Web content".

This is a long, but excellent article and well worth the 5 minutes or so it will take to read, more if you follow all the links....and maybe you will want to watch the 17 minute Seth Godin video on TED on building Tribes.

I love Ed Fry's jet engine metaphor (an original thought) and although Ed calls it Tribal SEO, in the HubSpot community, creating "manifesto" content is one of corner-stones of Inbound Marketing strategy. Bob Apollo's brilliantly titled blog yesterday social media without thought-leadership is like broadcasting into space echo's this idea.
Take-Aways

In the past couple of weeks I have spoken to three entrepreneurs who have created, or are creating SaaS solutions to serve very specific needs for a well-defined market opportunity. In conversation it emerged that none of them were planning on having any sales people in their business.

The thinking here is that since the products are so strong and the market need exists, by offering a free trial, the prospect will learn to use and love the product and convert into a customer; all without needing a human touch. Who needs sales people anyway?

This approach is similar to the "Field of Dreams" (if you build it, they will come) strategy; popular with entrepreneurs who are long on product engineering skills but underestimate the importance of marketing and selling in the lifecycle of successful products. This attitude has led to the premature death of many killer-products.

Now let me say here that I would not advocate putting a salesperson in the way of a buyer who was motivated to buy and did not require interaction with a salesperson. Dell recognized this desire early on and enabled people to self-serve PC’s and Laptops nearly ten years ago and cut billions out of their cost of sale. Dell had a couple of things going for it that early stage SaaS companies don’t; - brand equity and market dominance in a mature buying category.

Killer-products, and especially software products don’t sell themselves unless they fulfill the following criteria

• A mature, clearly defined buying category exists,
• Market demand exists for the products/services,
• Acquisition is as simple as buying a book on Amazon,
• Implementing the products is seen as risk-free and the vendor is trusted,
• The products are easy to use, learn and deploy,
• The buyer knows what they want and it's really a matter of what color and how many.
• The market price is established and the vendor offerings are within an acceptable range.

I had dinner with a Sales VP of an early stage technology company this week and discussed her business and her experience in building the startup revenue stream. We got down to talking about "the how" of building the sales team, recruiting the channel and generating revenue.

They now have 6 people in sales globally and their resellers are starting to sell their product, although she mentions it was a painful process in getting there.  

This month marks the second anniversary as HubSpot Inbound Marketing customers and the following is a review of what we have achieved and learned in our second year.

We signed up for the HubSpot Inbound Marketing platform halfway through the product demonstration, when we realized that it exactly fulfilled our lead generation requirements and perhaps more importantly had the potential to fulfill the lead generation needs of most of our clients.

If you are interested in our first year experience please visit HubSpot-Inbound-Marketing-Performance-Review-Year-1. If you are interested in how we did in our third year, visit our HubSpot Year 3 Performance review.

Prior to HubSpot we had a second generation "presence" Website of about thirty pages for our consulting and training business, but we did not receive any inbound leads from the Website, although we were creating content monthly for magazine placement and did see a small traffic spike with every article we published.
We updated our sales and marketing methodology by replacing our old outbound lead generation methods with HubSpot and their Inbound Marketing Methodology and our lead generation process is dependent on it today.
Since we started with HubSpot we have generated over 220 leads (a lead is defined as a visitor who exchanges their contact details in return for viewing a joint AMC-HubSpot Webinar, downloading our WhiteboardSelling whitepaper or signing up for a free Marketing Messaging Alignment Consultation.)

Wow, what a year for Admarco.net and for HubSpot.
In our 4^th year as HubSpot customers, this review will by necessity examine the advances in the HubSpot platform as well as what we have achieved in using it. Prior reviews are available.
Hubspot Review – Year 1
HubSpot Review Year 2
HubSpot Review Year 3 

This year HubSpot took some very big steps in product usability and capability which established the product in a new market, where it is able to compete directly with marketing automation vendors Pardot, Marketo and Eloqua, but with some fundamental and important distinctions in that it is a robust and easy to use inbound marketing platform.

HubSpot accelerated growth and now has more than 8,000 customers in 46 countries. During the year HubSpot placed itself on the path to IPO by adding key executives and raising a further $35M in a funding round to bring the total funding raised to $100M. 

As Hubspot customers, Hubspot partners and fellow travelers on the inbound marketing journey for 10 months now, we heartily recommend "Inbound Marketing", by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, as this book represents a very readable and do-able playbook for implementing inbound marketing methodology.

Packed with concise guidance, case studies, and practical to-do’s that you can implement today, this book is really a text-book on the subject and is one of the most important books for Internet era marketers published to date.

This article is a warning and some sage advice from someone who has been burned by making some of the mistakes listed below.   

The industry is rife with consultants offering best practices on Linkedin and selling services around helping you get started and leveraging the power of the network. This is not one of those articles and I have nothing to sell.
I offer this free advice so that you can learn from my from experience.

This article will be of interest to anyone using Linkedin Groups and in particular the HubSpot Social Media Publishing capability.

HubSpot allows you to set up and automate social media publishing and monitor buzz for any number of keywords in an integrated fashion… it's great, it's powerful and it's convenient.  

LinkedIN groups are very useful as well, - if you can find the ones that are well controlled and where people you wish to influence are participating in the dialogue.  

The fact that HubSpot-Linked combination is so powerful and convenient comes with some warnings and a few things to consider when you start up.
  
Here are few simple rules to follow: