HubHeroes EP1: Start With Why ~ Turing Humans into Heroes

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub Heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the Hub Hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub Heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that both Devin and Max are currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer.

All right, Hub heroes. That's right. We are here and we are ready. I'm super excited to be here on what we might call launch day of the League of Extraordinary Inbound Superheroes. The future is bright, my friends. The future is bright. Why, you might ask? Because we're here to help you do inbound HubSpot content, segment sales. Heck, you name it better. Or at least not alone. Now, first, before we jump into the good stuff, the conversation of the day, what do I mean by we? Well, I'm not alone on this fantastic journey. I have two other superheroes by my side, so let's meet them first. First up, Devin Bellamy. Devin, you didn't know this was coming, but why don't you let the Hub Heroes listeners know a little bit about you, who you are, what you do, and maybe some information that we might find shocking or unique.

No, I didn't know it was coming. And I also didn't know that that intro was coming. I'm. I'm not cool enough to be brought in by any of that, but glad to be here. For those of you guys who don't know me, my name is Devin Bellamy. I work at HubSpot. I work in the partner enablement. I deal with partners, solutions, partners who basically help customers grow better. Before that, I was in the partner program myself. I've done onboarding, I've done strategy. I've built out who knows how many portals, built HubSpot, CMS websites. Tons of fun. And let's see, a fun fact about me. I used to teach kung fu. That's the interesting tidbit There we go.

All right, next up, joining us for the high flying adventure is Mr. Max Cohen. Max, why don't you let the Hub hero listeners know a little bit about you, who you are, what you do. Man, this one scares me even giving you this opportunity. But a little tidbit of information that we might find shocking or unique.

Hey everybody, my name is Max Cohen. I am currently a solutions or senior solutions engineer. I just got a promotion over at HubSpot. I've been at HubSpot for around six, going on six and a half ish years right now. Did a lot of stuff from customer onboarding to learning and development as a product trainer and now I'm on our sales team and it's super fun cause I get to have really awesome conversations with customers reps about HubSpot and the possibilities and all that fun stuff. And I also just create a lot of content around inbound marketing, sales, HubSpot, things like that. You can find me on, on TikTok if you haven't already. Maybe not. A lot of people in the LinkedIn and like HubSpot universe may not know about me is that my life outside of like HubSpot and Inbound, beyond being a dad of two wonderful daughters is I've played and coached like competitive paintball since I was 15 years old. That's like another big half of me that like I don't really talk too much about on LinkedIn cause I don't really think people care too much about it. That's kind of the other, the other side of me. And you know, now that the pandemic is finally, hopefully over, I'll be getting back into a little bit of that instead of just sitting behind this desk all the time.

Oh, we might have to get some video clips of that. Here's the thing listeners, I want you to know, like hopefully you heard all of the years of experience, years with HubSpot. The nerdiness that is coming through. By the way, I'm George B. Thomas. I have been doing Inbound and HubSpot since 2012. I've been training, doing onboarding, implementing. Well, listen, my office is orange, my mic is orange. On any given day I'm wearing orange. To say that I love HubSpot and the people that use HubSpot is probably an understatement. By the way, the weird thing about me is I love peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. So you can chew on that one.

For a little bit.

How long have you been pregnant?

Oh, well there's probably a joke there, but we'll move on. You may have stumbled onto this podcast. You may have clicked on the link in the socials, but did you know that you have your very own hall of Justice? That's right. You can head over to thehubheroes.com at any point to catch up on future or historical episodes, depending on on where in the timeline you are listening to this here episode. Also, over@thehubheroes.com you'll be able to join the League of Heroes, suggest an episode, and even see all the podcast apps and listening locations we're broadcasting too. So head over to thehubheroes.com and get what you need. One last thing we need to mention for you, the community. Before we get into the topic of starting with why, you need to know this. You, my friends, have a special hero signal at your fingertips. You know, kind of like the bat signal. Anywhere on the socials at any point in time, you can use the hashtag, hashtag hub Hero podcast and we're going to come running. All right, here we go. Let's get into the good stuff and start the conversation. Starting with why Turning humans into heroes. Devin, Max, where do you guys want to start with this conversation? On starting with why A lot of.

This kind of stems on why we wanted to get together and, like, do this podcast in the first place. Because the one thing that I think really kind of ties all of us together is in one way, shape or form. We. We were all HubSpot trainers. Or are HubSpot trainers and still in some capacity HubSpot trainers? However. However you want to shake that out, the most common question that I've gotten is like, all right, we have HubSpot, where do we begin? Or we're starting to do inbound marketing. We're starting to do inbound sales. We're starting to do inbound in general. Where do we begin? And I think when we were talking about this a while ago and kind of coming up with, like, our first topics and ideas for this show, we call this episode, like, starting with why? I think for, like, a reason for me and Devin and George, I want to hear, like, your. Your takes on this, too. Five years ago, like, you know, while HubSpot was kind of turning into a CRM or morphing into a CRM and it was still, like, mostly a marketing tool, I think it was a little more obvious the answer of. Of why are you getting started with HubSpot? And that was really to do inbound marketing. This is back when, like, inbound was just marketing. We didn't think of it as this more like amorphous, larger sort of business, all encompassing business strategy that is now inbound. So I think a while ago the starting with why conversation was probably a little bit more narrow. But now that, like inbound is a strategy, HubSpot as a product does a lot more than just focus on marketing. Whenever you're getting started with any of it, asking yourself, why, like, why are we getting into the idea of doing inbound? Why are we using a tool like HubSpot is the most important question you have to answer. Because HubSpot is a giant blank canvas. Inbound could do many different things for you. It can touch a lot of places in your business. But for me, like, when it comes down to starting with mine, it's like, why are you, why are you getting into either deploying the strategy or using this tool? Because from there that's where you can start to think about like, hey, what are our first moves? What are our first steps? What are the things we want to think about when it comes to reporting? What are the problems we want to be able to solve for a business? All that. And like, that's just kind of the question that I'll like, turn around on people. You know, I'm curious before we dive like too deep into it, you know, Devin, what have those conversations looked like for you in the past? Where. What have you told people in terms of like, where to begin, things like that?

The thing that I always explain, you put it great, it's a big blank cabinet, it's a tool and it can do so many things. But the question is, what do you need it to do? And that's the biggest thing that you need to identify first is before. The first step to using HubSpot is not even opening HubSpot. You don't even log into your portal. What you need to do is identify a strategy that you want to do well. First you need to identify a goal, Identify an objective that comes from identifying problems. So I'm going backwards here. You start with the problem, then you create a goal, and then you figure out how you're going to get to that goal. And then you take HubSpot, bend it to your will, and then use that to accomplish your goal. For instance, if your goal is more leads, we'll start with a very simple one. Using your website to get more leads. All right, great. Now you want to think about how you're attracting the content that you're going to put in. Because HubSpot is a tool, not a magic Wand. You can't just turn it on. And then all of a sudden, oh, my goodness, I'm being inundated with people who want to talk to me. That's. That's not how it works. What you got to do is you have to come up with content, ideas and strategies. Compelling. Something that makes people want to interact with you, that makes people think that, hey, you know what? This person's amazing. And then what you do is you use that to create a path that people can then convert. There's a technical term, we like to call it conversion path. That's what you want to use. And that's just like the marketing aspect. And then you talk about CRM and sales and how you can get that interdepartmental cooperation and kumbaya and alignment and all that fun stuff. That's why you start with a. Why you can't. How can I use HubSpot better? No, how can you attract people better? How can you be awesome out there? And then how can the tool work for you?

And I want to jump in here because I think there's so much good happening in this conversation and I want to even go like a step before this, and I really want to take a moment to empower the listeners who might be listening this before they even get HubSpot or they just got HubSpot and empower them from the Lord lack of knowledge of why the crap. Somebody just bought this tool and said, now use it and said, good luck. Because what I want to empower them with is the ability to say the question you should be asking the people that are in the C suite, the people who purchased the tool that looked at you and said, you are the implementer. You should turn and say, why? What are we trying to achieve? Just like Devin and Max said, what is the problem? What are the hurdles? What are the goals? What is the roadmap? What can I actually line out and look at the future and gain a vision for where I'm trying to go? Because then another piece of what you gentleman said was bend it to your will molded. I want everybody to be educated on the fact that HubSpot is not paint by numbers. It's a box of play doh. You can literally pull it out and mold it with things like custom objects, custom properties, views that you can actually make dependent upon how your team needs to use them. And it's not just this out of the box SaaS, Silver Bullet Software. We were winning, we paid thousands of dollars, and now we're like, make it rain.

No Turned on the lead speaking.

We turned on the lead speak. No, it literally is this thing of we've got this tool, we have to build a roadmap, we have to customize it to our needs. And it all does come back to why now with that understanding and empowering and educating these folks on this, my question is, what are. And again, we may start at marketing, we may start at sales. We may talk about service. We might just talk about RevOps, which talks about all of them. What are these foundational elements or items that you historically have seen as trainers around Inbound and HubSpot that you're like, buy all that is holy. Get this in place. Or like, think of this thing.

The funny part that I think a lot of people don't even consider is like, no matter what part, if we were to kind of like take the basic parts of Inbound, strategy, Attract, engage, delight, let's look at the big three parts of the methodology. Depending on how your business, your organization, whatever you are, depending on how you're doing and where the biggest pain points are in that whole cycle, you might be starting at different places. What a lot of people don't think about is like, okay, what do we do if we get really, really good at that one piece of the puzzle? What sort of like, downstream problems does that cause? So, for example, you know, someone could be thinking like, all right, we're thinking about, like, attract here. Let's turn on the content machine. Let's get really smart at thinking about who our buyer Personas are. Let's get really smart about demand with content, and let's think about what people are actually searching for online when they have certain problems and preach it. Yeah, let's pretend you get really, really good at just attracting people and maybe you're setting up some conversion paths. I know there's plenty of people today that believe in completely ungating everything. And, and I think within Inbound, there's even an argument for that too. But that's, that's neither here nor there. Let's say you go and you're just collecting a whole bunch of leads because you created a lot of great content. It's like, cool. Now what, are you just going to send them over to sales? You're creating all these people that are coming and they want to gather all your content, but you don't have any sort of plan of taking them from someone who's just built up enough trust that you in you and, and giving you their information. And like, now what, you're just going to send them over to sales because you didn't really think about what was going to happen in the in between. You didn't really think about how you were going to begin to like engage them or the marketing to sales handoff or anything like that. There's always going to be some sort of physics involved. And if you do really good at this, what is that going to mean? Downstream, if your sales team becomes extremely efficient, right. Maybe you get the sales hub, you know, and they start being able to communicate with a much higher volume of people at a much faster rate. And they're, they're having a lot of great conversations. And because they're not spending a bunch of time on administrative bs, maybe that means they're closing more customers and they're creating a lot more customers. That's awesome. But if you don't have like the customer service or the customer support infrastructure in place behind that, well, then that's going to get really ugly really quick. All your new customers are going to go back to your salespeople because you don't have a CX Org in place in order to be able to help them when those people have questions or you don't have something like a knowledge base that's going to help people self serve. Not only do you got to say like, hey, this is what we want to do to get started, you also need to like think a little bit about like, hey, let's say this goes well. What's the downstream physics of that mean for us? And do we have the ability to like answer or solve for those problems as they come up? Right. And I'm not saying think 3, 4, 5, 7 steps ahead, but just say like, hey, here's our first initiative. If we do well, what does that mean? And maybe there aren't any problems.

Maybe there is six or seven steps ahead, but at least two. And Devin, I'm going to kick it over to you here in a hot second, but I want to unpack something to hit. My brain is in HubSpot, like in life. Best case scenario, worst case scenario, have a backup plan for both of those. Because sometimes your best case scenario, if it's too much of best, is all of a sudden a lot of friction or force in the wrong direction. Which by the way, the reason I kicked in here real quick because I want the listeners to know and you two to know that I've gone over to our massive library of ideas for episodes and we added inbound physics as well as I added this one max because of something you said to Gates or not to gate. That is the question episode. So back to the conversation. Ham, Devin, what are your thoughts on kind of what Max is unpacking and the direction that we're going?

I think one of the biggest friction points that people are going to not going to. That every day people deal with when implementing any system is unwillingness to change. And that's either from an organizational standpoint or from a just an individual standpoint. Like it could be something you're willing to do. One of the biggest mistakes that I've seen people make is let's say they've been working with mailchimp for years and then they get handed HubSpot. What they try and do is make HubSpot work like mailchimp and it's like, don't do that. Yeah, stop it. Or they. When we talk about the sales process, what we do is we do all this cool stuff and then we export everything to spreadsheets for the sale. Don't do that. What you have to be willing to do is to adopt an entirely new process, an entirely new way of doing things. And I'm not just talking about going from stick shift to automatic. I'm talking about going from bus to boat, sailboat. It's a completely different experience and you're going to find that it requires a different set of skills and a different mindset in order to accomplish what it is that you're trying to accomplish. But the second thing, you not only need to have C suite buy in, you need to have everything come from the top down. If you're an individual contributor or even a mid level manager, you're not going to be able to initiate the change required in order to be successful with your new tools because you can't tell one of your co workers, hey, you have to do this thing now because they're going to tell you a certain number of expletives that may or may not result in them getting reported to hr, but if it comes from the top down, that, hey, this is what we're using. This is the process that this person's creating we're going to do. If you can give feedback on it, on whether or not you see issues with it, great. But if you just want to have a total complaint fest, go ahead and do that self channel in, in Slack where you can just talk because we're not here for that. That's, that's not conducive to growth.

Yeah, I'm not down with that party, brother.

Yeah, but the biggest thing is that in all of these things, when we talk about the why is that you have to understand that if you were awesome already, you wouldn't be doing this. You wouldn't be implementing the new tools. If you were already dope at generating leads or you were already getting a whole bunch of sales through the pipeline and being able to accurately forecast what you need to do. If you're able to completely service everyone that comes in, if your website can tell you about who's seeing what and when and how interested they are, if you were already doing all of that stuff, you wouldn't need this.

Yeah.

And Max, at some point we're going to need you to create your evil laugh as like a sound that we can use in the podcast. Because here's the thing. I feel like Lord Lack struck again. Devin, in that first section you were talking about, you were literally talking about lack of innovation and a lack of change. The, the ability to somehow, when it's the worst case scenario, to be stuck in who you are and what you've been doing for the last five years knowing that it's not working. Which by the way, is insanity. The other thing is too, I want to unpack that second part and where my brain went and what I heard is that yes, it has to come from the top down. But I'm going to give you a little super secret tip. You can be a leader without being a leader, meaning you might be the person in the middle and you've been told to implement HubSpot, you can lead the leaders in what you need them to say to the people around you, below you, whatever. So it does come the top. Even though think of it a little bit, not in a bad way, as the Marriott of getting the buy in, getting the verbiage, getting the things that you need to be successful for your team to be successful. So don't get hung up in this. Well, I'm just this, as soon as you hear yourself say just no, just nothing, you can be a leader even though you might not be a leader. Where else does your mind go on this topic of starting with why? When it comes to inbound and HubSpot and all that good stuff, I wanted.

To kind of like hop on, on, on that thread, Devin, that, that you were talking about getting the buy in from leadership to be able to make big changes like this. Because let's not, you know, bullshit around it. Going from a company that's doing completely outbound everything, buying paid media in, you know, TV shows or you know, commercials or you know, ads in the newspaper or billboards and sending out physical mail and just cold calling everybody until all your sales reps burn out, saying, hey, we're going to stop doing all those things that we've been doing for so long and we're going to try this whole inbound thing. I think that, I mean that that's a very tricky conversation if that initiative isn't coming from the top. But let's say you're a marketer or you're someone in sales and you realize that the current tactics are causing problems or stunting growth or just making it really difficult for you to grow the business in the way that you want to. How do you, like, approach that conversation with those folks who are able to make those decisions? And I think the whole idea around starting with why is kind of pertinent here because you can start by saying, why are the way we do things right now, like, not working? Or why is the way we're doing things right now not working? And kind of be able to call that out? I think that is either really easy or not so easy to kind of like identify in your organization if you haven't educated yourself in the other ways of doing things. And when I'm saying the other ways of doing things, I'm. I'm talking more about inbound and demand generation and really looking, you know, leading with content and things like that versus what your company may have already been doing for so long. And I think that could be a pretty daunting task for that marketer that's seen the light or that salesperson that's seen the light being like, oh, these leads are kind of crappy, or, you know, cold calling people all day kind of sucks, or these people don't really come to me thinking that we can solve a problem already. You know, it's. It's really, it's really hard, I guess. What would be your advice? Or that person who's trying to drive that change management in terms of, like, getting themselves educated so they can either pitch the idea of change or get people on board with. Before you even think, think about.

Because it's.

At the end of the day, it's not about buying a piece of software. It's not about buying HubSpot. It's about deciding that you're going to change the way that your marketing, sales and service organization operates. How would you coach someone who's kind of feeling like a little bit intimidated by a task like that? Like, where would you tell them to start?

First of all, I'm just jumping here real quick. And then my kick it back to you, Devin, for a second. But I have to say, if when you purchase HubSpot, it doesn't change your ecosystem or destroy your echo chamber, then you are probably not going to be headed in the right direction. And if I could wave a magic inbound wand over everybody, I would make certifications in HubSpot Academy education mandatory, either one on one. But even better as a group, like every Friday at 12 o', clock, bring your freaking lunch. We're gonna do this one hour of training because you need to know the methodology, the religion, the let's go amen of why the freak we're using this expensive. Oh, I'm sorry, HubSpot not expensive. Very valuable tool. And not just let it lay there on the shelf. So education is the key. It is the life chamber. It is the thing that will breathe oxygen into new ideas, new strategies, new things that you want to push forward as a company. I'll stop. Get off my soapbox. Devin, what are your thoughts?

Well, I'm gonna hop right back on my change management soapbox buddy. Here's the thing. Getting people to do a thing that they are uncomfortable with, getting people to get out of their comfort zone is annoying and it sucks. One of the things that's worked for me is getting someone else to come in like an outsider, a consultant, and having them set the change. Because like the Christian says, Jesus wasn't even accepted at home. Why would you expect that you would be? The thing is, is that if you bring in someone else to work on it and to document and implement and keyword document is a part of implementing this change so people can go back and refer to it, then that helps. Even if you're the expert, even if you are the absolute go getter, boss hog when it comes to HubSpot, the fact that they will respect an outside voice before they respect yours, Sometimes that's the case, but the other thing is just setting the expectation that everything is changing. Normally, I'm all about parallel testing and gradual transition, but this is like changing from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right side of the road. You can't gradually change that. That's just something that one day this is what we're going to switch over to and this is how it's going to happen and we're going to migrate all this data from the old thing to the new thing and this is what it's going to do. If you can't handle that, regardless of how much of a rock star you are within the organization, if you can't handle that. There's going to be consequences and repercussions and so you can leave with a carrot, but there's got to be some stick behind it. Which is why I talk about getting buy in from management C suite and then George hit it right on the head with managing up. You. You have to empower leadership to enable these changes because they don't know what they're doing. That's what they hired you for. If you can make these changes, it would be great. But the other cool thing about the systems is that you can set up and automate and then give a demonstration on why this is so cool and why this is going to make their lives so much easier and get them excited about the new change. Point out, hey, here's why you suck right now and here's how you can stop sucking and people will be excited about not sucking anymore, even if it means that they have to learn something new or do something different.

Yeah, I love this. Max, I'm going to kick it back to you here in a second, but the idea. There's two things running through my head. This last point that you just made, about the only way that you know where you can go is knowing where you're at and if where you're at is suck and what you want is success, like, you have to know those two points to move forward. The other thing is, I want everybody to know this is why I am so excited about this podcast. Because, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to realize we just had a Jesus reference and a Dukes of Hazzard reference in the same clip from my man Devin Bellamy. It was the boss Hog, and it's hard to be a prophet in your own town. I'm just super excited, Max. Let's continue down this journey of why now. For me, where I start to go is like, should we share the why we got excited about Inbound, why we decided to make it part of our why we decided to train and implement, or if you want to take another direction, we totally can do that too.

What got me, like, super excited about Inbound, man, I'm like, really trying to kind of go back and think about my experience as a sales rep at Apple before I came here. You want to know how we, how we got leads? When I was working at the Apple store as a business sales rep, when people who came into the store to buy something could be a personal item, could be anything, if on their receipt we saw that they had a business email, we would then try to reach out to them and Call them. And that was excruciating. And though the wild thing that I noticed was when we would do like workshops where we would actually talk about educated topics around how to use Apple products in your business, we would one get people showing up that actually cared and then to show people that we knew what we were talking about and we could be trusted advisors. And all of the leads I got from those ended up turning into great relationships. Who would have thought? And that kind of like, proved to me, like, how important it is to build trust with your marketing or whatever emotion you go through to capture leads, generate demand, get interest. I know those are different things, but they're also, you know, very closely related. I think the biggest thing too is just like I hated cold calling so much. Like, I just thought cold calling was just a weird thing to do. At the end of the day, if you think about the physics of what's happening there, it's you calling someone up, not because you care about their well being or helping them. You just want to sell something. And like, that just like, didn't sit well with me. You know what I mean? I always thought, like, there has to be a better way of generating folks who are interested in talking to salespeople in a way that doesn't totally suck. And to me, like, when I finally started learning about what Inbound really was, and that was really only when I started working at HubSpot. I had gotten Inbound certified when I was in college and that's when I first heard about Inbound. But the way that I understood it at the beginning was that, oh, it's just how you use social media, which I was completely wrong about. But what I really like, understood is, hey, content's what drives everything. It's all about building trust through the content you produce and recognize. Really doing all the legwork to build trust and generate demand for your product before someone even talks to a sales rep. That to me just felt like a much more human, wholesome way of marketing. Because even if people aren't buying stuff from you, you're still putting like good out there into the universe because there's plenty of people that can take your advice. Things you talk about the content you create and go out and solve the problems that they have on their own. And that's awesome. If you do that, it's tactically awesome for a number of different reasons, which I'm sure we'll kind of dive into, into more depth as we kind of continue this series. You know, that's what got me super stoked. About it is that like you could do marketing in a way that had a good benefit not only for your customer, Right. But also for your other internal customers, like your sales reps and stuff. You could send people to them that were actually excited to talk to them. Right. Or actually wanted to talk to them or already had a certain amount of trust going into that relationship versus, you know, and I've been a sales rep in a non inbound situation, right. And like no one likes that. That's kind of what got me jazzed up about it at the beginning.

For me, long story short, it helped me make a lot of people money and it in turn made me a lot of money. For me, what happened was I discovered HubSpot on accident, really. I was doing a website redesign for the company I was working for and you know, entry level marketer, even though I have like way above entry level skills, having no degree in coming off of over a decade in radio, people are going to treat you like you don't know what you're talking about. So. And I didn't sound intelligent at all when I talked about marketing. I would just try and explain concepts that I had reversed engineered from these multi billion dollar organizations like McDonald's. You know, I, I didn't sound, I wouldn't have given me money. What ended up happening is the CEO asked me to create the website and I asked him what websites he likes. He's like, HubSpot has a really cool looking website. I'm like, all right. And I went and checked out websites and I'm like, wow, that is cool. But then I started looking at the content. I'm like, wow, that, that is cool. And then I got the inbound certification and got invited to a Grow with HubSpot event in Philly and met James Stone, who is still to this day one of my favorite HubSpotters. I really fell in love with the people first and then they actually, him and Andrew Farnoli actually helped me create a marketing deck that explained financially why we suck and why we could be better in marketing. And it worked. And so not only was I able to speak intelligently thanks to HubSpot Academy, but I was able to get C suite buy in thanks to these awesome hubspotters. And then not only that, but I was able to follow through and knock it out the park. With their help, I was able to set KPIs and identify what our goals could be. And then we knocked them out of the park in the first quarter just off of an E book campaign because it was killer content. My favorite thing was getting promoted past my boss and becoming his boss just off of using HubSpot effectively and working the system after identifying the goals. It was like, it was magical. It's just been. That was like six years ago, almost seven years ago. And I've kind of been writing the HubSpot orange rocket ever since. And it's just been. It's been amazing as HubSpot's grown, as you know, the sales tools launched as the business model has completely changed and the hubs have completely changed. I've grown with it. Now my life is pretty dope. I get to buy talking deadpool heads and stuff like that.

I love it. And, you know, here's the thing. Earlier, I got really excited about education. And you'll see why I get excited about education, why it really is a passion point, why I believe I'll be a HubSpot trainer until the day I die. Because education is key. And honestly, I tell people, I think HubSpot found me. I didn't find HubSpot. In 2012, HubSpot Academy did this thing called the world's largest webinar. Our social media guy, small agency, four people, Massill, Ohio. Our social media guy comes running and he says, hey, there's this company called HubSpot. They're doing this thing called the world largest webinar. We're like, who? What? He's like, I think we should watch it. So we go out to the, you know, the conference table. We got it on the big screen tv. We're watching the webinar and we hear, I believe it was Mark Killens at this point, say, we're going to give away 10 free tickets to the top 5% of tweeters. And John, our social media guy, his fingers are on fire, just tearing it up. Zach and I are just like sitting back like, yeah, okay, let's check this out. Long story short, we win two tickets. Zach and I go to Boston for the first time. I hear Gary Vaynerchuk speak, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, before this, I was a designer, developer, six pack and a pizza comes in, a website comes out the other side. Don't talk to me. Leave me alone. 2012, I go, I want to be a marketer when I grow up. And I'm like, I know nothing about marketing. We come back, September 2012, we get HubSpot for the agency. I start attending webinars. I get one certification. One becomes three, three becomes six, six become 12. 12 becomes 21, 21 becomes 38. HubSpot Academy certifications, literally multiple, probably college degrees based off of HubSpot Academy education. It ends up enabling me to get a job at the sales line, which then enables me to become a professional student speaker, which then enables me to onboard companies that if you asked me in 2012, will you ever talk to employees of these types of companies, I'd be like, no. But I've been able to do that because of education. And this is why, when I said a while ago I would make education mandatory. Because if you can learn what you don't know to implement what you need, your future will be bright. I need you to rewind that part of the podcast because there's the key to life and a key to HubSpot and a key to Inbound. In that last 15 seconds. Now here I'm going to tie it all together. The reason I fell in love, my why with this whole journey was because in 2012, HubSpot was preaching, don't call me a customer, I'm a human. The reason the why that your company has HubSpot, the reason the why that you should focus on your why, the reason the why that you should go past your hurdles and head towards your aspirations is because of the humans that you are serving, the humans that you are helping pass their hurdles with the content and the strategy and the sales that yes, at the end of the day ends up being revenue, but in reality was life changing to those people around you.

Yeah, what he said, all of that, that's the thing. I think HubSpot Academy is one of the most game changing things people can bring into their lives. It's constantly expanding. I mean, even beyond the certifications, the gems that are in just the straight courses. If you just take time. Like I remember I spent a week, it was like over the course of a week or two weeks, I got every HubSpot certification that became available and I came out of the other side of that a completely different marketer. When I would go to Inbound every year and I would go to the breakout session, I literally just did a speaking engagement at a conference in Wisconsin. Shout out to the everybody at Experience Inbound. I did a breakout on email deliverability. And everything that I spoke about, everything I said I either learned through HubSpot Academy or I picked it up from different years of going to Inbound. It's like people like you said, I never, five, six years ago, I never would have imagined giving a talk to professionals about email deliverability, being the guy on the stage talking about email deliverability and just Having that I went to college for music education. Like, that's. This is not at all how I pictured my life. Big. And. And if you, if you do nothing else, get on academy.HubSpot.com if this is.

The last episode of the podcast you listen to, the next thing you should do is just spend your time at HubSpot Academy. And here's the other thing I think we hear a lot lately just with how everything is crazy with the economy and crazy with the job market, all this stuff. You hear a lot of people talking about the idea of, like, breaking into tech. I think there's also this concept of like, breaking into the HubSpot universe. HubSpot Academy, which, by the way, is through, free. For anyone listening to this that isn't familiar with HubSpot Academy yet, all of this educational content, lessons, tracks, courses, certifications. Free. Free. Free, Free, Free. Free, right? Free.

All the way free.

Did you say they're free?

They're free?

They're free, right?

They don't cost currency. They're free. What's wild is like, sure, you work at your company, you want to learn more about Inbound. It's not just a HubSpot product. Yes, you can go in there and you get certified on the product, but the majority of the stuff in there is all about strategy, which is product agnostic. Let's say you want to break into the HubSpot universe. That's a great way to get started. But then, something to keep in mind, this is great if you want to work at a company that's using HubSpot or just deploying inbound. If you want to work at a HubSpot partner or a agency or some kind of company like that, because there is lots of folks in there that are helping HubSpot customers deploy HubSpot, run inbound marketing campaigns, manage their entire portal and their whole setup and everything. And hey, maybe also you could be a freelancer, you could start your own agency, or you could even come work for HubSpot one day like Devin's doing now too, as well. And, you know, started with HubSpot Academy. There is this massive ecosystem and universe surrounding this whole HubSpot thing for folks who are looking for a career change. And you don't need to go back to college to do this, right? You don't need to go to college. If you haven't gone to college before to do this. All of the education that you need to break into this wonderful community, massive university. And there's this whole idea of the rise of the HubSpot admin. Now that's becoming a thing. It's all just kind of sitting there right in front of you at this HubSpot Academy. So, like, don't sleep on that. Go check that out. Is if you're listening to this podcast because maybe you just got put in charge of this HubSpot thing, or you just bought HubSpot recently and you're realizing maybe it's a little bit more difficult than. Than I anticipated. Academy is the greatest place for you to start. Like, I promise you, if you're looking at HubSpot spot right now and you're looking up at the navigation and you're just like, wow, that's a lot of words, That's a lot of tools. That's a lot of stuff. If you just go get your inbound certification, all of it will start to make sense. The thing that a lot of people don't put together, especially folks that are evaluating HubSpot for the first time or new to the community, new to the product or the strategy, whatever, is that there's two things. There's inbound strategy and then there is the HubSpot HubSpot product. Yes, the HubSpot product is built to deploy the inbound strategy. You could do the inbound strategy without HubSpot. Is it a pain in the butt because it involves tons of different tools and cobbling together a whole bunch of systems in order to do it? Yes, it's a pain in the butt, but that's what HubSpot solves for. But again, every single part of HubSpot and how, it's all built together to be one piece of software that does all this stuff. It's all meant to kind of support this inbound methodology for Flywheel, attract, engaged in delight, whatever you want to call it, it's built to support that inbound strategy. The two work best together.

The last thing, just to tie together this whole episode is the hardest thing about using HubSpot, or any tool for that matter, is the strategy. The hardest thing about all any of it is the content, is the strategy is the why. If you can figure out a why and then create a plan to solve those problems that you. You are, you're diving into. At that point, the HubSpot user interface becomes extremely simple because there are so many different moving parts to HubSpot you might not ever use. Yeah, there are a lot of tools in HubSpot that are available that may not be applicable to the goal that you're trying to solve. And that's okay. Everything within it is exceedingly powerful. The tools that you are going to use, even if you just use a fraction of the hub that you got in order to accomplish the goal that you've set, you're going to see remarkable benefits. And I'm not just saying that because I bleed orange. I'm saying that because it's made me a lot of money over the years doing that. Being able to know strategy the way I do, being able to be a strategist, being able to come up with a plan for success all across the organizations, not just in marketing. That is what allows me to look at HubSpot and says, okay, I'm going to take this tool and take this tool. I'm going to take this tool and take this tool. I'm going to put together all of this and do something dope. And then people are going to look at it. I'm going to generate reports, the C suite's gonna love me, and then I'm gonna get a pay raise.

Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, the one thing I'm gonna say to end this episode, whether it be HubSpot Academy, whether it be listening to future episodes of this podcast in your mind, Simply put, this 1% better with the massive wall, but enjoy the journey along the way. Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will lose Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure to tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden, hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend, leave a review if you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag hubheropodcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into on next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course, always, always be looking for ways to be someone's hero.

Sa.