Why Change Selling Blog

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.

The HubSpot $32Million series D funding round from new investors, Salesforce.com, Google Ventures and Sequoia Capital, with all original investors doubling-down is old news by now, but the ripples are now being felt in all parts of the marketing automation industry.

Big news this month at HubSpot is the integration between HubSpot's Inbound Marketing platform and Shopify's e-commerce platform.

• No-one's reading our email newsletters,
• Cold calling is a simply not effective and we're not getting any voicemail callbacks,
• We have a WordPress Blog, but no-one is reading it,
• Our referrals and word of mouth leads have dried up,
• We have a Twitter and Facebook account; what a waste of time!,
• We have inquiry and registration forms on our Website, but we're not getting any leads,
• I fired all the sales guys and now it's me calling and I suck at it.
• No-one has ever heard of us, despite the fact that we advertise, spend a healthy sum on Google AdWords and have been in business for 10 years.

1. What is a lead worth and how many leads do you need to produce a year, based on your conversion ratios to hit your revenue goals?
2. Who is your target audience, who are the buyer persona's you wish to engage?
3. How will you reach your target audience, where do they hang out online?
4. In what areas can the agency claim thought leadership; how does the agency create unique value for clients, how does this connect to your brand?
5. What are the major marketing messaging themes that will resonate with buyers and what keywords do you want to rank for on Page 1 of Google?
6. What is the goal of the email newsletter, how will you track conversions and improve performance?
7. What is the goal of the Website and in particular, what is the goal of the home page?
8. Have you created compelling content that can be easily shared, downloaded or viewed in exchange for contact details?
9. Have you created calls to action that lead to high quality landing pages with compelling offers? ("A Contact Us" page tends to collect more SPAM than leads)
10. Is there a blogging platform to amplify thought leadership, that integrates with the main Website, with hyperlinks to and from main Website pages, where content is easily shared....or is the blog stranded, lost Robinson Crusoe style in the vast ocean of the Internet?
11. How will you nurture prospective customers that do register as leads, but are not yet ready to buy?

Take-aways

To make this marketing 2.0 stuff, (Inbound Marketing) work, you need the following

• Clear messaging to engage your target audience,
• Proven inbound marketing methodology,
• A toolset that's integrated and productive, that enables small agencies to compete with the big boys,
• Inbound marketing training for Marketing Agencies, (which can be found for free),
• Consistent input, ongoing analysis and optimization, a strategy to drive it and top down commitment to making it happen,
• Easy access to a trusted, skilled talent-pool and services marketplace, to leverage in-house skills.

Technology companies come and go, but only a small fraction of 1% of founding teams discover a scalable business model and steer their company to an IPO or acquisition with valuation more than $100 million.

We moved from our home of 5 years in Scotland last month as we are returning to Northern California after 7 years away, settling in the Carmel/Monterey area...(also a reason why this blog has been quiet for the last month). We were amazed by the amount of stuff that we had accumulated in that time, stuff we did not need.

On Monday two weeks ago we received a surprise call from a prospective client who was running a HubSpot trial. We started the trial to gather data to make the business case for an investment in our Sales and Marketing Messaging Alignment process , HubSpot, and our HubSpot implementation support.

What we learned

1. If you actively use HubSpot as a blogging and social media integration platform, HubSpot works as advertised. See our visitor chart below, showing inbound visits, repeat visits and lead conversion events.
2. The charts speak for themselves....you can't fudge the results.
3. We began climbing organic search rankings almost immediately, purely through blogging on a weekly basis.
4. We needed a conversion vehicle to capture interested visitors and added our professionally developed white-paper on 30th. September, (see spike on chart) and have been averaging about 12 inbound leads per month and will close our first new clients as a result of these leads in the next month.
5. White-papers create conversion opportunities, but they take time to write and they have to be high quality.
6. We engaged a professional, Stephanie Tilton from TenTon Marketing who did a fantastic job editing our white-paper, asking questions to help us focus our message and formatting it to produce a high quality product.
7. We used an idea from David Meerman-Scott, which was to give part of the white-paper content away with no registration required. The theory is that after spending 10-15 minutes reading part 1, sufficient trust is developed which motivates the visitor to complete a form (and become a lead) in order to download part 2. The Guide to better sales performance is the part 2. of the the white-paper and requires name and email for download.
8. When we started blogging we were a bit internally focused, but soon learned that people are interested in your ideas first and then make decisions about product/service, so focus blogging on ideas relevant to target buyer buyer-persona, not on your products or services.
9. Blogging takes time and in the style of blog I write, requires intellectual effort and must be posted at least weekly; link blogging is quicker and also effective in getting inbound visitors initially, see chart blog subscribers.

What we like about Hubspot is the Integration of keywords, blogging, social media, analytics, SEO, landing pages, keyword grader, link grader and page optimization wizards and CMS on one easy to use platform which gives us tremendous productivity at low cost.

• HubSpot provides quality support and every time we have had a problem have gotten an answer within a couple of minutes.
• HubSpot forums are rich and useful and the 2000+ HubSpot customers provide a tremendous resource base of expertise very willing to help answer questions.
• Finally we love the fact that we can do it ourselves, see and analyze the results, make the changes and watch it grow.

What were going to do differently in 2010

1. Set up lead nurturing within HubSpot....this requires thought and mutliple offerings to be effective.
2. Set up multiple conversion events including regular Webinars and an eBook.
3. Stronger and more obvious calls to action.
4. Redesign of the front page and restructure of content around our business focus for 2010 to make it easier to for visitors to understand how we create value.
5. Refine our focus on target markets and messaging, keywords and phrases for target markets
6. Engage our target buyers more actively through social media.

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.