Marketing Predictions & Lessons from HubSpot Partner Day 2016

IMPACT’s been a HubSpot Partner for about four years and if you know me, you know how much of difference it has made for our entire team in that amount of time.

The HubSpot Partner Program gives marketing agencies around the globe the tools, resources, and connections they need to earn sustainable revenue, improve its service, and overall grow.

One of my favorite ways it does this is through its annual Partner Day conference.

This year Partner Day was held on May 18th and 19th, and in the video below, is a quick reflection of everything my partner, Tom, and I learned about the industry today and the future of inbound marketing and sales. Take a look and let me know what you think in the comments section below!

Video Notes:

I’m Bob Ruffolo, founder and CEO of IMPACT.

Last week, I went to HubSpot’s Partner Day. For those of you that don’t know, it’s a 2-day event put on by HubSpot for their top Diamond, Platinum, and Gold Agency Partners.

During this event, they share with us what they’re working on and what we need to know as partners, and a bunch of their agency partners, including myself, will have sessions talking about what we’re working on.

Today, I want to share 5 or 6 of my favorites sessions.

• Future of HubSpot Sales by Chris O’Donnell, who’s HS’s VP of Sales Products
• Moving away from emails
• Really trying to prevent users from creating spammy emails
• The inbound sales methodology
• Identify, Connect, Explore, Advise
• If you’re not familiar, i’ll include it in the blog article that accompanies this video
• They have products for the first part of the methodology
• The marketing platform, The CRM, sales tools such as templates, sequences, meetings, and messages
• Plans to develop more tools for second part of inbound sales, which may include some document signing and on boarding tools.

• Shawn Fitzgerald’s session on how Thomasnet is using Growth-Driven Design with their clients
• He had the funniest quote of all of Partner Day when he said before GDD, he worked on a website project that took over a year..
• Then he showed a picture of his newborn son saying that he was able to create a full-blown human in less time that it took him to build a website.
• If you don’t know what GDD is, we have a great article on it on IMPACT’s blog.
• Luke Summerfield, the godfather of GDD will be speaking at BMSS, which is coming up quickly - Friday June 3rd in Branford CT. Get your tickets here!

Two sessions on Future Proofing by HubSpot’s marketing team

• First session was by Ginny Soskey and Emma Brudner
• Shared great tips on how they cut their blog subscriber list in half, an unsubscribe workflow - 6 months no clicks (and notify them of this)
• They eliminated instant emails
• Reduced engaged subscribers to 500k to 250k
• And emails send from 144 to 32
• Traffic increased from these activities
• Open rate and click through rate went up
• They had phenomenal results
• We haven’t done this here at IMPACT yet, but it’s something we’ll definitely be testing out in the next 30 days.

Second session on Future Proofing by Pamela Vaughn and David Khim

• Pam talked about how to optimize old posts for conversions.
• She talked about going back to your older, top performing posts and adding an inline CTA about two paragraphs into the article.
• After doing so, she found that’s where over 80% of her post conversions were coming from opposed to 6% coming from the CTA at the bottom of the post.
• We do this here at IMPACT, and if you’re not, it’s something you may want to try.

David

• David shared something very interesting as well..
• Instead of gating content as pdfs, open up the content and gate useful tools that accompany the content.
• We’ve had great luck with this tactic. (i.e. this blog post and the corresponding kit)

• Brian Halligan
• Buyers don't have voicemail
• Buyers start their process by asking their peers at other companies, top of funnel, references in the beginning of the sales process
• More educated people are clicking on google ads 
• Website, buyers are looking for two things: Answers to their questions and case studies
• If blog is done well, incredibly influential
• Same on social - as long as it's good
• Spend half their time on mobile
• Many are not using apps
• Sales reps - are useful:
• What's not on website
• Negotiate price
• People try before they buy
• What's going to change in the next 10 years
• Search - turn to Siri and Echo
• Research - from website to Facebook
• Collaboration - from social to messaging systems - slack and messenger, private networks
• Work - email to Slack
• Information format - from written content to podcasts and video: Facebook and YouTube
• Information Access Method - web browsers through messenger bots
• Sales reps - only the most complicated deals will be done by reps, rest will be automated.
• Advice for tomorrow's marketers and salespeople
• Learn Adwords
• Get good at fathead SEO
• Invest in Facebook
• Can't buy a list or advertise on private networks
• Diversify your content
• Don't fight the bot AI revolution - it's coming
• Automate as much as possible, including sales and marketing

• HubSpot science fair:
• The coolest thing at the science fair was Dharmesh’s new passion project
• Spotbot