Owning the Outcome

This week, we have Patrick Thorp, co-founder and CRO of Ebsta, on the podcast to discuss the move upmarket and the importance of deep, actionable sales and revenue intelligence. Patrick starts the episode with tips and tactics for go-to-market teams looking to effectively engage upmarket businesses, including moving from lead-based to account-based strategies, the importance of phone calls over emails (and other saturated channels), the right metrics for measuring productivity, and the value of multi-threaded, multi-contact relationships. We then move into revenue operations and its role in enabling an upmarket sales motion. We discuss how a successful revenue operations function yields revenue intelligence—which increases sales velocity. Patrick references “Closed Won DNA”, and speaks to the impact the visibility into what drives revenue for a business can have for how it can generate more revenue. It isn’t just about reaching more prospects—it could be pulling the right levers for the prospects already in your pipeline. Patrick wraps with the implications for customer success teams as well, and how this level of intelligence can improve retention and create expansion opportunities.

Katie Street, founder of Street Agency, comes on the podcast to explain that marketing is oftentimes the solution to a business’s sales problem. Katie starts off by explaining why, and how marketing (specifically, content and brand marketing) can meaningfully contribute to an org’s sales efforts. We also talk through, and unpack, the successful event-led strategy Katie and her team leverage, through both in-person and virtual, webinar-based events, to accelerate her sales efforts—and how other agencies can replicate the same playbook. She goes on to share her recommendations for measuring the impact of marketing campaigns in terms of its impact on sales, the elements and considerations to maximize impact and ensure successful campaigns, opportunities for repurposable content and micro-content creation, and how organizations should be thinking about ensuring sales and marketing team alignment.

This week, we’re joined by Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of the Marketing AI Institute, who breaks down the emergence, and seemingly overnight sensation, of ChatGPT and how it’s set to disrupt agencies, services providers, and HubSpot solutions partners in 2023. Paul starts by explaining what ChatGPT and generative AI tools are, what they allow users to do, and how to design your prompts for the desired outputs. He then shares how AI tools like ChatGPT present an immense opportunity for agencies today—and a threat for any laggards. He breaks down the impact and implications it can have on process efficiencies, creativity and productivity, and more. Paul explains that ChatGPT will force agencies to rethink their pricing models and billing strategies, and opens the door for agencies to bring new, innovative products and services to market. We wrap with a look ahead—and where machine learning language models, generative AI, and AI use-cases are going in the not so distant future.

This week, we’re joined by Emma Lynch, Managing Director and Founder of BBD Boom, who comes on to discuss her team’s growth through a successful apprenticeship program. Emma starts with where and how it started and carries us through what it looks like today. She shares what she looks for when seeking out a local college or university, and the things she finds make a good college partner. We discuss the programs and candidate pools, and effective ways for finding and selecting the right candidates. Once they join the team, Emma shares her approach for onboarding new apprentices, the type of work they’re responsible for, and how they plug into client engagements. We talk about the evolution of these candidates, from green, fairly inexperienced apprentices to client-facing, strategic contributors on the team. We wrap with discussing the impact BBD has felt from this apprenticeship program—from the growth of their team, the growth of their culture, and the growth of their leadership tier of employees. Knowing what we know about the talent shortage partners are facing, this program has helped BBD Boom with employee happiness, employee engagement, employee retention, and more.

Stuart Balcombe, Product Marketer at Arrows, joins the podcast to discuss how organizations can run customer success functions in HubSpot and why it can be so valuable in delivering a connected customer experience. Stuart highlights the benefits of using HubSpot for customer success, including ease of process creation, cross-org visibility of data and the customer journey, efficiencies and opportunities automation, and more. We discuss customer-facing plans, what they are, their importance in driving action, and orienting the customer journey, and how organizations can build their own. We then spend time diving in tactically to the configuration of HubSpot for customer success. How to set up your company, contact, deal, and ticket objects, how to customize and structure your contact timeline, how to facilitate the customer success handoff from sales, how to structure onboarding flows, how to manage renewals, and how to automate repetitive work.

Phil Vallender, Director of Blend Marketing, joins the show to discuss changing B2B buyer preferences and his team’s method for adapting. As Phil notes, buyers are attempting to remain as anonymous as possible, with a strong partiality for data privacy, the avoidance of cold calls and spam messages, and a general disinterest in a seller’s “lead nurturing events”. Phil offers his read on changing preferences and what his team does to enable buyers to self-serve through the buyer’s journey and what this means for his team’s GTM and approach to inbound for themselves and their clients—a strategy he’s coined “inbound demand generation”. Phil explains inbound demand generation at the tactical level and what it means for the deployment of HubSpot and the associated strategies executed within. Specifically, Phil shares how the HubSpot CMS can be such an impactful tool to account for, and align with, this shift to yield positive results.

Mandy Thompson, Founder and CEO of Digital Reach Online Solutions, joins the show to talk about both her approach to building a globally distributed team and a big bet the team is making on productizing the complex end of HubSpot services—like API integration deployment. Mandy starts with her approach to building global teams, including the human-centric principles the team anchors to, the methods for establishing a company culture, and how she drives accountability across the team. From there, we talk about HubClub—her team’s platform for productized, self-service HubSpot services. However, via HubClub, Mandy’s team executes more advanced, technical HubSpot tasks—a contrast to the normal “rinse and repeat” style of productized offerings. She shares how HubClub is operationalized to be able to offer these services in a scalable way—and how she factors in the technical consultation, business analysis, and change management functions required.

Sean Katz and Carlos Pantoja, co-founders of Optima Solutions, joined the podcast to talk about improving sales performance, and accelerating sales velocity, with automations. They first set the scene on their ICPs, or ideal customer profiles—sharing the types of orgs, sales team sizes, org chart makeups, and key problem areas—that benefit most from their team’s automation services. We then get tactical, with Sean and Carlos walking us through which tasks and functions are prime for automation inside HubSpot, including lead qualification, routing and assignment, task queue creation, pipeline management, reporting, and more. They explain their process for determining what, when, and how should be automated based on client requirements. From there, they dig further into data—and how strong automation, and improved sales performance as a throughput—relies heavily on a “clean data lake” as they put it. They also explain their approach to integrations, via both the HubSpot marketplace and custom development, and how they interlock into this process.

Nick Redding, Managing Director of Reddico, joins the show to talk about his organization’s journey to being certified as a B Corporation, or B Corp. As Nick explains, B Corps give as much consideration to their social and environmental impact as they do to their financial returns, and so he starts our conversation off with explaining what this means for Reddico, the process it takes to become eligible and then certified, and what about becoming a B Corp was attractive for his team. We also anchor his new B Corp status to the age of the connected customer, and Nick shares where and how this certification has shown up in his team’s culture, operations, and overall go-to-market strategy—including the impact on marketing, prospecting and setting meetings, and building relationships. We wrap the episode with the long-term context behind Reddico's pursuit of the B Corp certification and that’s it’s actually just the most recent milestone in a much longer series of progressive decisions Nick has made for his organization. He shares his history of challenging the status quo, the types of progressive decisions he’s made for his firm, and what is coming next.

Ben Rubin, VP of Revenue at Remotish, joins the show to share his perspective on the age of the connected customer and the resulting big bets he sees his organization making as we prepare for 2023. Ben digs into the importance of human connection, and how it manifests itself in sales calls, client engagements, and hiring pipelines—citing that even in B2B communications and interactions, it’s human-to-human. He also digs into the value of a connected platform and access to data that covers the entire customer journey. Looking ahead to 2023, Ben shares some of the adjustments Remotish is planning to make to their operating model—including the required lengths of their RevOps and WebOps service offerings and the installation of a new, role-based learning path model for team development. Remotish also has historically requested their team to complete and achieve all of the certifications offered by HubSpot Academy, but is making a change to reflect a catalog of certifications growing in size and in diversity of topic/function coverage.