Why Change Selling Blog

This HubSpot Review marks our third anniversary as a user of the HubSpot system for Inbound Marketing.

We had a record year last year, which we attribute to increasing inbound traffic more than 50% and doubling our average visit lead conversion rate. Our ROI on HubSpot license fees last year in terms of revenue directly attributable to our inbound marketing activity is more than 60:1

Your company is fairly successful, but you're not about to be acquired by Google or Facebook for a billion dollars, so it's more of the same for the immediate future.

The business is more than 5 years old and great news - you got out of start-up mode quickly with the discovery of a scalable business model and ramped marketing and sales to achieve revenues in excess of $25M (or $50M or $100M).

According to business lists on Manta, there are more than 500 mid-size technology companies in the US with revenue between $20M and $500M.

Our Objective is Revenue and Profit growth.

I have met with leaders in a number of mid-market technology companies over the past year and nearly every one I met has an aggressive growth objective for the next 12 months. Growing at 30+% is easy to say, but not so easy to do.

• Achieving aggressive growth targets in an established market means taking market share....what are you going to do differently to achieve this?
• Achieving aggressive growth goals in a nascent market is about developing mind-share; finding and selling early adopters in a value-created way and working your way across the chasm, one deal at a time.
• Would your company get found for the ideal Google query from someone with an idea looking to solve a problem that your company is perfectly placed to fix today?
• If leads are the oxygen of any B2B company, then competent sales execution is the muscle tissue. Somewhat surprisingly, leads - or the lack thereof and poor sales engagement and execution are the biggest barriers to success in many mid-size technology companies, it's seldom the product. These companies are old before their time and are facing a mid-life sales and marketing crisis.
   

This is the first in a series of articles that sets out the symptoms of the problem and how to solve it. Our next article will address how to overcome the lack of leads issue.

I need more leads

The two biggest problems in the quest for mind-share and market-share are not solved by the traditional approach to marketing pursued by many mid sized technology companies. As HubSpot's co-founders eloquently state in this brief video, the traditional approach to technology marketing is not working. Aside from social media marketing, not much has changed in Silicon Valley in the past 4 years.

 

Let me replay a sales call I made this week in Silicon Valley on a mid-sized technology company to see if there are parallels in your company.

I received an inbound lead from the VP Product Management around this post on measuring clarity in messaging. After an initial telephone dialogue we agreed to meet in their offices.
In our conversation the following issues came to light.

• We are not getting enough workable leads
• We have a strong brand, but plenty of competiton in our product markets.
• We get 50,000+ website visits a month. (Subsequent analaysis reveals that 95+% of the search traffic arriving at the site is based on a keyword with either the company name or product name in the search string. This means that potential prospects doing research to solve real problems will not find them, but will find their competitors.
• We are paying a lead generation firm to generate leads for us and we are not happy with the quality of the leads or the ROI on this investment.
• We have a marketing automation platform, but we are struggling to overcome a bunch of issues and it doesn't help fill the top of the funnel with new leads.
• Our Website message is fuzzy and it needs a refresh, our market positioning is vague and people can't really understand how our channel creates value through integrating our product.
• We have a marketing person doing social media and have 5000+ Facebook fans and we are active on Twitter with a few thousand fans, but they are not driving leads that turn into customers.
• We do exhibit at tradeshows and they are a good source of leads.
• We have a fairly big Google Adwords budget and this is our primary source of quality leads.
• We publish a couple of blogs per week, but the readership is low and we get few comments or shares.

In the past year we have generated hundreds of inbound leads using our HubSpot system and I've noticed an interesting trend that I thought I would share. I have come to realize that many sales and marketing leaders are looking in the wrong place for sales performance.

Here is an awesome and comprehensive summary of the transformation under-way in marketing. If you're in sales and struggling for leads, you might want to pass this on to your marketing colleagues and your exec team.

During recent bathroom renovations I had cause to research the alternatives to replacing the wall-mounted toilets in our 1960's California Ranch style house and became aware that some industries are way behind the curve in reaching consumers around their interests and needs vs. the traditional approach of advertising their products...the plumbing supplies industry for example.

Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as "the wrongful appropriation, close imitation, or purloining and publication, of another author's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions, and the representation of them as one's own original work." (source Wikipedia)

I responded to a comment on LinkedIn last week on the topic "Marketing and Selling SaaS is hard!!!" on the difficulty in recruiting B2B sales channel partners and getting them to sell-through and I thought  I’d expand on the subject with the help of my former colleague Bob Langer. Here is the original article Marketing and Selling SaaS is hard

This is a hot topic - not only for the new cohort of SaaS solutions providers, but for every entrepreneur with visions of channel sales success as well as medium sized companies wanting to sell innovative products through an indirect model.