HubHeroes EP7: The Engage Phase, is Building Trust Bull Crap or Not?

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 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.

Yep, yep, yep. I love that intro. It doesn't matter how many times I listen to it. I'm like, yeah, I need to dance or fist pump or whatever. But today I'm super excited, gentlemen, because we are going to dive back into this thing that is really the Flywheel. That is the Inbound methodology. We started a couple weeks ago where we talked about attraction. What the hell is good content? Anyway, we deviated a little bit because inbound, which by the way, is days away, not weeks away.

Woo.

My goodness, I can't wait. And then we had last week, our special first co host. Host, whatever you call them, Troy Sandage and man, talk about just a massively valuable gross strategy conversation. Devin was dropping bombs and mics through the episode. Troy was killing it. I was just along for the ride. I was like, buckle up, giddy up, let's go. Now, today though, we're going to talk about engage phase is building trust. Bull crap. Again, I always love when we start these out because I don't know where this is going to go, but I do want to have a little history lesson because if you're listening to this, which you are, because you hear my voice, just. Just get that out of the way. You're listening this. If you have joined Inbound and HubSpot in the last four to maybe even five years, there is no history to what it used to be like versus what it's like. Meaning if you came for the ride and it was initially the flywheel and it was attract, engage, delight. That's all you know. You don't have the historical seasoning of what the inbound methodology or the buyer's journey used to be. Because here's the thing, what I want people to realize. If you look at the flywheel and I've never heard anybody talk about this, there was a dramatic change because inbound 20, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, whatever it was this four step thing where it was attract, it was convert, it was close and it was delight. And all of a sudden, through the magic of an inbound stage and a big huge flywheel and Brian Halligan, we went from four things to three things and nobody explained how the four became three and what the frick that meant for marketing, sales or other folks. And so today, as we think about and talk about funnel versus flywheel, friction, vers, force, historical, inbound versus the, you know what we're doing now, we have to have a little bit of a conversation of how attract convert close and delight morphed into attract, engage, delight. And so what does that mean for the convert close that is now the engage for your sales, marketing and service teams? Anyway, that's our history lesson, gentlemen. When I bring that up, there was nodding of heads. Where does your brain go? What are your thoughts?

The thing with engagement, I personally like it a lot more because it's more, I guess you could say it's more holistic as far as your approach. It's not like you're thinking going into it. It's like convert, I won or yeah, now I'm going to sell them the clothes. That's a bit too dialed into, drilled in, into task and not about the buyer itself and the buyer's journey. That's, that's just where my head's at. I have strong feelings and opinions on engage. All positive though. All positive.

Yeah, I agree with you. I much better like the idea of engage. Especially when we start to think about the idea of the inbound strategy being like an all encompassing business growth strategy versus just a marketing methodology. I think like when we talk about convert close, it very much kind of sits it very specifically within the realm of sales and marketing. And service has like almost nothing to do about it until you get to delight at the end. And it puts like too much of an emphasis. I think the other thing too, like when you really think about it, all parts of a business can attract, engage and delight in their own ways. Service teams can attract, in certain ways, you know, marketing teams can delight. You know, like there's sales teams can delight, there's. Everyone can kind of do everything. So it's cool because it kind of takes that framework and it, it makes it a little bit more flexible for all areas of the business to kind of have a hand in and think about how they're applying momentum not just in their specific area, but how they can apply it all around this sort of growth cycle. Yeah. And I just like how it makes it a little bit more flexible because again, all businesses are very different. Not everyone has the same exact sort of tightly defined definition of converting and closing somebody. When you open it up a little bit more and make it kind of like a sturdier framework that can apply to more businesses, I think it makes the utility a little bit better there.

I love that we are actually very all aligned on this because I too am not complaining about the change, but I think you have to mentally have history in your brain so that you can understand what the future is to bring. When you start to talk about this flywheel, this inbound methodology. And I love Engage for two reasons. One, it is very much more a human term that you can wrap your brain around. I'm supposed to Engage and to what you said, Max. The second thing, it becomes now a very holistic business. Holistic thing where it doesn't matter if you're the janitor, if you're the support rep, if you're the chief marketing officer, if you're the business owner. It all still comes down to in your job, in what you're in charge of. You are in that kind of Engage phase now. So the listeners know, if you haven't listened to the attract episode, go back, do that. That will be in the links in the show notes. Also know that moving forward because I tried to count Max, but I lost count the amount of times you said delight. In your last segment. We are going to have an episode that is about delight. That's going to be coming up next. Delight, happy customers, happy life. We all know that's probably true if we can make that happen. But I have found that there is this interesting question that I've started probably 57% of the episodes with that I felt like, you know what? That's what I'm going to start with again. And because both of you have been historical trainers, I want to know when all of a sudden Engage showed up on the scene and convert and close were like, you're out of here. Brothers fired. When Engage came on the scene, how did you start? And even now, how do you teach people or explain Engage across sales, marketing or just general business when that change.

Happened, you know, a big thing I always tried to do as a, as a Trainer is try to take something that was like, a little more abstract, which, let's be honest, the flywheel is sort of an abstract idea, right? Because you can define a lot of those stages very differently, depending on how your business works. I tried to take that and make it, like, very literal, so it's super easy to kind of understand. So when I think of the engage phase, you can look at this in a couple of different ways, I think, because I think it's kind of good that they got rid of the idea of convert being its own stage. Because in this new sort of age of inbound, where, you know what, maybe we're not gating all of our content. I know we're going to do a whole episode on that in the future. Maybe we're not trying to get people's email addresses off of every e book and thing that we do. Like, maybe we're making a lot of that stuff sort of free and open the divide or the gap or the transition between the attract stage and engage stage kind of blend a little bit. If we were looking at more of the traditional sense, however, where you're gating your content to capture someone's information, for me, that's kind of where the classic way that we look at engage like starts. You attract folks by putting content out there that people are looking for. They read enough of it to trust you enough to give you their information. So this crucial engage phase, like, starts when they literally give you a way to get in touch with them. They give you their email address, maybe they follow you on social media, whatever. In the classical sense, we're kind of saying you've captured their email and maybe some information about them. So the question now is, like, how do you get them to a point where they're ready to talk to a salesperson? We also got to think about the sales process too, because the stage after engage is delight. So at that point, we're kind of assuming not all the time, because, again, I think you could translate the flywheel in a lot of different ways. But if we were to give it a little bit of rigidity, we would say you probably start delighting someone after they've become a customer. Which means the sales process also happens in the engage phase, at least the first one or the first time someone becomes a customer. So if you need a very rigid way of looking at it, the way that. That I tried to make it make sense to me and anyone I kind of like taught the concept to is a rough way that you can look at it is it starts when you get their email halfway through, you get them to a point where hopefully they want to raise their hand to talk to a salesperson. And then the second half of that engaged face is the sales process and they leave that engaged phase and move into the delight phase once they become a customer. If I had to give it a very rigid prescription, that's what it would be. However, we don't all have to live by those definitions. It can kind of blend a little bit more. All parts of the businesses can engage in different ways, but like that's kind of how I made it make sense to myself. And whenever I was explaining the flywheels like a new concept to someone that's kind of their rigid frame, I sort of gave it so they could kind of understand who, quite literally what's happening when it starts, as you're going through it and when it ends.

For me with Engage, when it came, it really, for me shifted my mindset in operations and allowed me to be more fluid in how I operate. Like when I, when I teach people, I basically teach people how I personally operate and then do my best to make sure that how I operate aligns with basically how Academy has taught me. But when I'm thinking of engage, first thing, engage does not mean sell. Engage doesn't even mean talk to them. Let's just get that straight out the gate. Engage means what do you do when you have their intention? That can be something as simple as tailoring the messaging that they're already receiving. If you have a cookie on their machine, that can be something as simple as, as using Smart Content HubSpot CMS to segment how they see things and what they see. And it's basically starting a conversation when it's not even, you know, clear that you have started a one on one relationship as far as information is concerned. And these are all things that can be automated, which is fantastic. The second part is that when you do get involved and start engaging, it's that you are being very intentional with meeting them where they're at, not with where you want them to be. One of my favorite things that I love talking to people about is that like when you're engaging them, find out where they are in their own journey. Don't just come out like, hey, I got a demo, let me feature drop on you and Logan's a three thing. No, that's, that's not engaging correctly when someone is. And I always bring this up because it's always going to irk me if someone is in my LinkedIn and the very first thing they send me is, hey, look at all the things I do. You should talk. Can I get time on your calendar? And it's like, I'm gonna block you. That is how you don't engage with someone. Also, just as a side note, if anyone has gotten this or if the person who does this is listening, don't try and send me images that you say your five year old made, because I know they didn't that I'm not stupid. Stop insulting my intelligence. Your child did not do this. It looked like an adult who was just really bad at canva. Finally, engage can just be as simple as having a conversation. It's like just as simple as that. Like, there's this one person who sent me a LinkedIn message, said, hey, how are things going in your neck of the woods or your side of the pond or something along those lines. And I almost answered. Then I looked at their profile and it's like, oh, you're trying to sell me something that was good. I wish there had been like a little bit more authentic in the interaction or at least as a bdr, gone through someone else or done something that made me feel like more than just some prospect or a number they're trying to hit. Taking all the way back to the engage raise versus a convert and close. I think Max put it beautifully. It's a spectrum. They blend together. You can go from attract into what would have been traditionally convert into what would have been traditionally closed. You can do all that step by step as it pertains to your business and culture, using the engage face.

See, I love so much about what you both have been talking about and, and I want to spin back around here in a hot second, Devin, because even the picture that you were painting, when we think about engage, engaging as a good human or engaging as a maybe not so good human, at least you might be a good human in real life, but your marketing, your sales, your business tactics are allowing you to lean out of what should be happening on that good human portion. And I want to circle back around here in a minute to the idea of setting goals for what would be successful, successful customer engagement. And I am using the word customer because one of the things I wish more companies would do is just treat their prospects like customers. There's this mental thing that happens that a customer is of value and a prospect is just somebody that I'm trying to cram through a historical funnel or throw onto my whirly burrow flywheel. And if we would just have this idea of nope they're all customers. I'm going to treat them like they're a customer. All humans have value. I do want to circle back to this. Setting goals of what does successful customer engagement or successful engagement look like? But the other piece of this is Max, and you talked about this. If I had to create a rigid explanation of said engagement phase, this is how I would tell you that the first time, when it was inbound and Brian was standing on stage and he spun the flywheel.

What a moment.

The thing to me that was fascinating, that I don't know if everybody paid attention to is if you watch the flywheel, it was blurry. Now, I want you to think when you were a kid, you had the pinwheel. The wind would blow, you could hit it, spin. Red and silver and purple turned into, like, almost a solid color. And so for us to give a flywheel a rigid set of rules is kind of weird. And I almost wish there was a way, not in a funnel way, but a way that we could flatten out the flywheel for a hot minute and realize, gosh dang it, we're going to be engaging during awareness. We're going to be engaging during consideration. We're going to be like all the historical four steps that we talked about. We're going to be engaging in delight, all of those. And if we even come down to the flywheel, we're going to be engaging in attract, we're going to engage and engage, and we're going to engage in delight. So it becomes this, like, blurry map, which, by the way, I can delight people the first time I meet them. It is a possibility. I don't have to have 37 actions to delight you. You could watch one video and be like, that dude is dope. You're delighted.

Yeah.

And so I want people to think about this flywheel as it does get blurry, it does overlap. It probably shouldn't be rigid. And again, we go back to that. Blurry, but in a beautiful way, holistic, all teams and focused on it's where, like Devin said, where are they? Let me do what they need there.

I think what you're talking about is a really good example of it's not marketing's job to attract, it's not sales jobs to engage, it's not services job to delight. Everyone can do it. I'll use me as an example. I work in sales, yet I do a lot of attracting by creating a lot of content. As a salesperson, I engage people by having conversations on LinkedIn, working with customers throughout the sales process, supporting my sales reps so they can have meaningful conversations with people. And I delight folks by ensuring they're buying for the right reasons. They understand the different avenues for support and help they can get in the future. Checking in with folks and even talking and engaging with customers already out there in the community and making this a good place everyone can touch every single piece of it. If you're a marketer, it's not like you stop sending educational content to folks once they become a customer. You're doing all this stuff. We're creating video and blog content and doing all your search engine optimization stuff to attract people so you can talk to them in the first place. But then as you're nurturing them with continuous educational content that's relevant to them, you're doing a great job at engaging with them. You're giving them avenues to raise their hand at the right time to talk to sales when they need to, continuing that engage motion. And then after they become customers, look at HubSpot Academy. That is part of the marketing team. We are helping people get more out of it and be delighted. And we don't work in support. If we're in marketing, everyone can touch every single piece of it. So flattening it out I think is a huge piece. There's one thing I wanted to circle on what Devin was saying about like where engage kind of started and it's not necessarily just like when you capture their information. I think as folks continue to have the conversation around demand gen versus lead gen, it's not so much. I think it can. It sure it can start when you capture their information in that more traditional sense of inbound marketing. Whether you're a ungate everything hard L or maybe you're a gate everything and really do the. The super traditional way we understand it or you're something in the middle really doesn't matter. It could be that it starts when you capture their information or when you capture their attention and you haven't really captured their attention if you haven't really put the work in in the attract phase anyway. The methods I think in which you go about engaging, if we capture their email, great, we'll use email as a tool. We'll do it the right way. We'll use their information, not abuse it. But engaging when we're not capturing emails at the top of the funnel and we're more so working on capturing attention. That has everything to do with community building and engaging through social and the dark social stuff that a lot of people are talking about and video Content and, you know, more experimental stuff too, as well. Today, you don't have to capture the email to engage. You can. You don't have to capture their attention.

Now, Max, you get a ding, ding, ding. On this episode, I literally went to our notes section and I added demand gen versus lead gen, because that has to be a conversation that we have on a future episode. And Devin, before I kick us off into a new direction where we start to talk about successful engagement goals, that type of thing, is there anything that you want to unpack out of your brain on. On what we've said in the last couple sections?

As usual, on point and aligned. We definitely need to find something that we disagree on at some point, but right now, no, we're. We're all basically saying the same thing. Engagement isn't just about trying to sell. And it's like the job isn't done once you capture the email address. And the job doesn't just start when you capture the email address it. As with almost every part, like Max said, you can attract no matter where you are in the organization. You can engage no matter where you are in the organization. And you can not only delight no matter where you are in the organization, but you can delight at any point during the buyer's journey. Your goal should be to delight at any point in the buyer's journey. The engage phase is important because at the end of the day, every goal in your interaction should be solving for the customer. And even if you don't close them, ideally you want them to pay you to solve their pain point. If the information that you're giving them or the conversation that you're having isn't getting them closer to the goal that they need to accomplish, you're doing it wrong. That's the mindset you should have and engage, which I guess leads us into our successful goals.

And we'll get to the successful goals here in one second because I do want to take a little bit of break again, because the title of this episode was Engaged Phases Building Trust. Bull crap. You can't listen to a sales or marketing podcast. You can't read a sales or marketing blog article. You can't really turn around left to right without being. And the key word is trust. Well, okay, is it like we'll talk about goals and trust and if that's crap. But I'll tell you, there's a couple people that I want to mention because obviously they're starting to trust us. See what I did there, ladies? And gentleme? One is JR title and what I'M talking about is there are people who are starting out of the Hub Heroes community to let us know what they think of the podcast. They're leaving raving just amazing reviews on their favorite podcast app. So JR title, thank you very much sir. He says these three are bringing some really high level insights with each episode. They're all veteran HubSpot pros that know their stuff. Oh man. We could stop right there. But it goes on. You can read it if you go over to the app. Also, Mike, Alton, I want to thank you brother for your kind words. This is terrific. By the way. There's an exclamation mark after that. So it was. This is terrific. I'm so excited for this show. George is a tremendous host and is clear the entire crew. Yes, that's right. Max and Devin are amazing too. Amazing wealth of housebot knowledge that I can't wait to learn from. And so ladies and gentlemen, if you are enjoying the show that we are putting the Hub Heroes podcast, please let us know on your favorite podcast app. And of course we'll give you a shout out on the show like we did J.R. and Mike. Now let's get back to the conversation of setting or goals or just this idea of successful engagement. When you think of digital marketing, inbound marketing, content marketing, inbound sales, abm, all the words that we could throw at it. What is successful engagement look like and why, My God, why is it so important?

I feel like we're, I feel like we're about to get into the, the very controversial MQL discussion. I mean, like, I feel like this is especially since I've been getting into like the, the B2B content creation space where kind of a lot of the B2B marketers and the B2B salespeople are kind of clashing together. Is this whole controversy and conversation around marketing is just making MQLs and that's like the thing they're hanging their hat on. And the problem is everyone's defining MQLs differently. But also you kind of have to because everyone's process is different. What an MQL is for one business is going to be totally different for another. But I do think you're probably seeing a lot of folks saying, if I'm a marketer and I capture the information and I send it over to the sales team, my job is done. And it's like, no, it's not. And I think that's where you're seeing a lot of friction and controversy around that acronym marketing qualified lead. And you know that's probably gonna happen because again, it's just, it's defined so differently. But we should maybe try to broach that subject, I guess of.

Or.

Or I'm wondering if it's even like fruitful because again, everyone's gonna have a different definition. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna show for a second.

No, no, no, no.

Yeah.

Trust me, the direction you wanted to go.

But I know we have, we were gonna land there eventually.

Here's the thing. In my life, I never really plan to arrive anywhere. It just ends up taking us there. This is the life that I live. So Devin Max brought up mql. I really am curious as the historical sales dude on the show, you know, your, your brain power and thought because trust me, trust me, ladies and gentlemen. Oh my God, do I have thoughts on this? But Devin, as the sales guy, what are your thoughts when it comes to this lifecycle stage MQL SQL bullcrap battle that we typically end up in?

I think that they're highly necessary for scalability for one. For two it becomes a moot point if you have a SLA in place. If you have an sla, then you have clearly defined marketing qualified leads and what they attributes they need to possess in order to become a sales qualified lead. The other reason why they're important to me is because, because the life cycle stage is not a one way street. The thing is, is that people are going to be buy ready and then no longer be buy ready due to circumstances beyond their control and you need to have some way of segmenting them that lets marketing know that they need to be put basically back in the machine and work with some more. They're not ready to come out the oven. The thing is, is that if your organization is set up correctly where there's sales and marketing alignment, then yes, it needs to happen. If you're in a small organization where you're not getting very many leads and so basically you're going to try and squeeze the water out of whatever rock rolls into your yard, then hey, go for it. Feel free to funnel the form right to the sales team. Good on you. I personally recommend investing a little bit more in your conversion path development process. But that's just me. The thing is, is that if you are putting your value in your specific phase of the pipeline, my job is to generate MQLs. All I can say is I hope to God that you have a manager who sees the bigger picture. I really hope that you have somebody who is looking over the entire pipeline and is saying, okay, this conversion path is set up, but this conversion point is struggling and it's anemic. And so then we need to change the definition of what is MQL versus an SQL versus just the lead that has no business wasting people hours on. That's just my take on it. It's not for everyone because they don't have the foundation and the fundamentals in place to do it correctly.

I fully understand. The next words out of my mouth are either going to open up a hornet's nest of hate mail or I'm gonna have a thousand tulips or rose petals at my feet. I'm not sure which one, but. Ladies and gentlemen, georgebthomas.com feel free. Here's the thing for all of you marketers out there that thought when Max and Devin were talking about this of like, yeah, yeah, my job is done. I made MQLs. My gosh, I don't know who ever put it in the world that your job was based on an individual property inside of a SaaS software, because that's what Lifecycle Stages is. Lifecycle Stages is a property inside of a SaaS software that is. Oh, here we go. Hang on, hang on. This is what people do. Oh, well, the lifecycle stage is the vertebrae of my marketing process. Yet on the other side of the room, you've got a sales team. Oh, life cycle stage is the vertebrae of my sales process. No, no, no, it's the vertebrae of your business process. The vertebrae of your business process is what I'm going to tell you. And here's the thing, it's a property with options you can pick, which means you should do list segmentation. And based on that, what it is all about, ladies and gentlemen, is understanding where they are. So you can automate the right communication at the right time to the right people based on the vertebrae of your business. Not that you did a. Because as a human you should be engaging, as we said, in awareness, in engagement, in delight. In other words, we should always be talking and creating relationship with humans so that we can sell them or help them with the products and services that we provide. Let the hate mail or love mail begin. I'll step off my podium.

Being an implementation specialist and training people. This was always the funnest part because as soon as we got the idea of the flywheel down or the inbound methodology down, then we got the idea of the buyer's journey down and then came along this fun little thing called life cycle stages inside a HubSpot and then it was just like, oh, we gotta do have this conversation now. And it's a tough one because for the longest time, up until very recently, inside of the HubSpot tool, you had eight lifecycle stages, subscriber, Lead Marketing qualified lead, Sales Qualified lead, Opportunity Customer and evangelist and other. Can't believe I remember them all, but I've had to explain them that many times and you could not change them. You can now, which is a little known fun fact. You can actually customize those, which is super cool. But since they had such sort of rigidity, if you will, in the way that they were set up, I feel like I had to do not a lot of mental gymnastics, but I had to come up with a way that I thought it made sense. You know, where it's like pretty easy, right? Subscriber, someone subscribed to your blog. That's it. Awesome. A lead, someone filled out any form, great mql, SQL. There's nothing automatically that moves them because everyone defines them differently. So a lot of the times I had to like tell people, hey, you can kind of define marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead kind of however you want. You just got to think about how you're using them. There's the conversation of, hey, maybe if your marketing sales team gets together, you take a look at how many MQLs either turned into SQLs because they were further qualified or maybe you're using SQL for something completely different. Whenever I thought about the marketing qualified lead and what that means, I feel like there has to at least be like a minimum when I think marketing qualified lead. A lot of people will define these as, oh, they filled out a landing page to get an ebook. Send them to sales Marketing qualified lead. No, stop, don't do that. At a minimum, you can define marketing qualified lead. I kind of think within your own parameters, but I think at a minimum it means someone would have had to have taken an action where they implicitly know they're about to talk to someone kind of in a sales role. If they said request a quote or talk to sales, like they know what they're getting into when they fill out a form that says that, when they say request a consultation or get a demo, they kind of know that they're starting off the sales process. The reason that's important is because as a marketer, to get someone to that point, you've done enough, either directly or indirectly, to get that person not to trust you with their children, but to trust you enough to take that step. You've done the work, whether it's the content you've created, the brand you've built, the delight that's happened, and people have spread your name through word of mouth, you've done something to get that person to be like, yeah, maybe I'll take this a little bit more of a serious step. That's way different than downloading an ebook. So for me, when you think, how am I defining a marketing qualified lead when there's a hand raise, that's very much high intent. I know I am maybe not high intent as some people would describe it, but they know at least I trust you enough to talk to a salesperson. I think that should be the floor of what defines a marketing qualified lead. If you're using that as one of your lifecycle stages. Because who knows? Now you can call it whatever you want, you can call it a banana. It really doesn't matter. Come up with metrics that kind of make sense, but just make sure those stages have utility. Whether it's from a reporting standpoint or just someone looks at that stage and they understand what's going on of that, you know, in that particular life cycle of that customer or potential customer. Just make sure it has utility. And to me, that's what very much separates a lead in the classical sense that we understand lifecycle stages from a marketing qualified lead. So you got them to take that important step and they wouldn't have done that if you hadn't done somewhat of a job as a marketer in some way.

Dang it, Max. Now I'm hungry for a banana. Why did you have to call it a banana?

I use that example for everything. I don't know why it's my go to fruit.

So the banana. Devin, what are your thoughts on this? And again, we can either continue to hammer out about MQL switch. By the way, don't even get me started on the conversation of MQL to SQL is like a blip on the radar screen. Fractional seconds that could be actually happening. Don't get me started on lead status and how that works with life cycle stage. Anyway, those are probably whole other conversations. But if we circle back around to what does successful customer engagement or what does successful engagement look like? Do we want to keep heroin mql or is there something else that comes to your brain?

My first thought is as far as what successful engagement looks like, the simplest term is to drive them towards their goal, not what you want them their goal to be. You want their goal to be to give you money. That's not their Goal. You don't go out every day thinking, who can I give money to? Who can I handle my hard earned dollar to? To do a thing that I may or may not need. That's not the way it's going to work. Sorry. If you're good at what you do, your company's good at what it does, and you are well versed enough in what the company does to understand the problems that the company is solving, then good engagement is helping people understand problems that they may or may not not be aware of and helping them get to the goal of solving them, which is the whole reason why they were attracted to you in the first place. Good engagement is offering value and not doing the call to action to close. The idea is to get a little, give a lot. That is good engagement. Being a good human human being in general means giving more than you get and, or, or, or more importantly, giving more than you take. And what you should do is focus on being a good human being and just helping. And if you do that well and you're good at problem solving, then you're gonna make money.

Oh God, I love that so much. I mean, anybody who has listened to me over the last nine years has heard me say, be a happy, helpful, humble human. I mean, come on, be a happy, helpful, humble human. You reap what you sow. You put good into the world. Good's gonna come back to you. Max, what are your thoughts on success here?

Yeah, okay, so I think we gotta separate. There's the tools and the levers you can pull and then there's like the overall strategy of like, what are you trying to do? What are you, what are you doing? In the engage phase, try to like make it as general as possible so you can then take your business and get more specific with it. I'm a firm believer that this framework apply to almost any business. You just kind of take it and make it more specific to like what you're doing. When we, when we think about the tools, think about what you got at your just, you know, your disposal. Content again is always going to be the most important piece because you can't really engage anyone if you don't have original, helpful, educational, valuable content that people actually care about. Okay, bar none. You're still focusing on your content here. Your delivery methods that you have, email, social media, some sort of community engagement video, all the same stuff that you have available to you in the attract face. You've got all these tools, you can figure out how to use them. A lot of that's gonna Be experimentation. But in terms of like, overall, what are you trying to do in the engagement? Well, one, use their information, don't abuse it. So a lot of, a lot of what you do in engage is like, what do you not do? You don't immediately send them to salespeople when they're not ready to talk to salespeople. Okay. You don't spam them and bombard them with every piece of content you have, thinking that's gonna magically get them to want to buy something from you. It's just going to annoy the shit out of them. So don't spam people. Send them. If you are going to send content to someone, make sure it's actually going to be relevant to them and it makes sense about, you know, it makes sense to send it to them based on what you know about them. So like, ask good questions on if you are using forums. If you are gaining content, if you are doing anything where you're capturing information, make sure every question you ask is going to provide value to you as a marketer. You get value as a marketer when it's something that you can use to hone that experience that's going to happen after, make you market to them better. Not just a phone number and an address and the Social Security of their first child so you can give it to the salesperson. No, you want to make sure you can continue crafting a much better experience for them. So you continue to engage them out and you give them a good experience. Why is it important to provide a good experience? At the end of the day, this is what's going to happen. People that are engaging with you are either going to eventually buy from you or they're not. There's going to be way more people that don't buy from you. Again, marketing is still a numbers game. So what do you want to make sure you're doing with those people that aren't buying from you? You still want to make sure they have a good experience because maybe they just engaged with your content after you captured their attention or captured their information, like, whatever. Maybe they just engaged with your content. Maybe they started to engage with your sales process for some reason they didn't get all the way to the end. You still want to make sure those people either feel like they can come back later because maybe they didn't get to the end because it wasn't the right time, or maybe you want them to go like, recommend your content, your services, your product to someone else because maybe they know someone else that would Be a good fit even though they're not. So you want to make sure, whether they buy from you or not, they go through that experience of learning and getting more educated on their topic, going through a delightful sales process or even just, just engaging with more of the content that you're nurturing them with. However you do it, social, email, video or whatever, you want to make sure, even if they're not buying, that they're having a good experience and they're telling other people about it, or they're either seeing you favorably. So if someone else comes across them and they ask you about them or they find themselves in a conversation, you can still create promoters of your content and that's great. Even if they're not paying you money. Those are free marketers. Honestly, it's going to take a lot of experimentation to figure out how your audience likes to be communicated with. Some are going to love email, some are going to hate email, some are going to be super active on social, some are not going to be super active on social. Some are going to be in very specific communities online and you have to go to them. For example, like when I did my new hire presentation at HubSpot, I got all my traffic from posting in very specific places on Reddit. That's where I got a lot of my blog traffic. You got to go meet people where they're at. It's a combination of a lot of those things. But tactically, at the end of the day, you're trying to. Once you have their attention and you have their information, the next place you have to get them to is you want to get them into the sales process and make sure that sales process is a delightful experience.

Oh my God, it's probably another episode. But what's funny, Max, is when I listened to you talk, then that last section my brain went to and I wonder, I wonder how many people out there are asking the humans that they're helping, how do you best like to communicate? Email, phone, I wonder how many people out there asking, how do you best like to learn Text, audio, video? How many people are paying attention to who the human is and how they like to go about their day. And then again, as we said earlier, meeting them there. So we're going to close it up. We're going to give them some action oriented tips or tricks or hacks. They've listened to this whole episode on engagement and trust, which, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, I know we're going to probably circle back around and have a complete episode just on the word trust. Pertaining to your business and things that you can, should, could, whatever do. But what are some actionable takeaways? We can do one or two each, whichever, probably one each. But action will take ways that the Hub Heroes listeners can take with them and move forward next week.

Be prepared to nuke your whole system. That is usually my default with whatever advice. Be ready to look at your entire process, see that it is broken, see that it is toxic, see that it is doing more harm than good and get ready to scrap it and start over. You can iterate your way out of crisis, but sometimes it is just all you're doing is polishing a turd sometimes you going to flush that bad boy. Be ready to nuke your system of engagement and restart from scratch. If you evaluate what you got going on and see based on the conversation that you've heard today that it ain't it, then it's time. Then it is time that you just need to get rid of your stuff and start over.

My actual takeaway is going to is going to just hit on a trust thing for a second. There's this concept that I'm seeing people talk about now called marketing romanticism. People kind of get caught up in the idea of, oh, we're just like building trust with people and we want people to trust us. And it's this very like altruistic just idea that marketers are here to make the world a better place. I think making the world a better place and all that kind of stuff can be a byproduct of doing a lot of this stuff right. And I think that's okay. When we think of this idea of trust, though, I kind of said it earlier. When we talk about building trust with your customers, we're not saying they trust you with the life of their child or they trust you with, you know, something huge. What we're talking about is they trust you enough to do something specific. So like when we say build trust throughout a lot of this stuff, it's more that I trust that you know what you're talking about because you've proven it through your content and expertise. I trust that you won't abuse my information because you're not selling it to people. I trust that you won't try to hard sell me and send an army of sales reps down my throat and burn my phone with all the cold calls. I trust you enough to give you money. I trust you enough that you're not going to screw me and that you're going to deliver on your end of the bargain. I trust that you can support me and help me reach my goals as a business. Again, we're talking about building enough trust to get to the next step of the relationship. We're not talking about trust in this very brouhaha, very, you know, fluffy kumbaya sense. So just don't overthink the trust thing. Little bits of trust that you earn along the way if you're doing this the right way.

I mean, I might have just teared up a little bit. I'm gonna throw that out there. That. That was like Max was preaching. And I may preach a little bit here towards the end too, because my action item, my tip is that I really need everybody to break this idea, this methodology of singularity. And what I mean by this is when we get a conversion, typically as a sales rep or a marketer, we think of the conversion as Max Cohen or Devin Bellamy or George B. Thomas or John Hancock or Betty White or whoever that single human being is. But we all know that there's this six degrees of separation. We have to understand that Max's cousins, sisters, brothers, ex, fiance, actually owns an automotive shop, which, by the way, is who you actually help with your products and services. Automotive shop. So while somebody converted and we have this Singularity mindset instead of this audience mindset, As a professional speaker, I know when I communicate, I'm communicating to many, not communicating to one. And if we could start with our sales and marketing to realize all these years we felt like we're talking to one individual, but we're talking to an ecosystem of families and friends, that would be what I would want people to do. Change this mindset of singularity conversions and singularity conversations. Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or will we be able to to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure you 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 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 Hub Heroes Podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time when we meet and combine our forces remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And, of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.

Sa.