Lead Scoring Mastery & Freelance Freedom | Women of HubSpot with Casey Hawkins

Welcome to the Women of HubSpot podcast, the show that celebrates the voices shaping marketing technology and the ever evolving HubSpot ecosystem. Hosted by George B. Thomas from Sidekick Strategies, each episode brings you the stories, strategies and superpowers of the women driving this industry forward. It's their time. It's their mic. This is Women of HubSpot.

All right, so we're back for another episode of Women of HubSpot and I'm excited. These have been some of the most amazing conversations that I have had and I'm going to tell you if this is the first one that you're listening to or watching. This all started my family was watching the Super Bowl. The Philadelphia Eagles were part of the Super Bowl. Who knows when you're watching or listening to this? So I'm not even going to try to go back to the year. The important piece is the conversation that I was having with my daughter. She was talking about the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback and how he had an all woman team and how she thought that was cool and empowering. And it just became a very interesting conversation to which I was sitting there and I'm like, why is this not happening in our space? And I threw out a LinkedIn post zero strategy of like, hey, if you know a dope woman of HubSpot, tag him in this post. The post went crazy. I looked at my daughters after the Super Bowl a couple days later and was like, there's gotta be conversations that could be had here. Let's do something to actually change the fact that my brain went to why is that happening in our space? So that's why we're here today with Casey Hawkins. Casey, how the heck are you doing today?

I am doing well, George. I am excited to be here. George and I hang out every morning, but I'm curious how much you know about my. My background and everything.

So that is one of the funnest parts about this. I have learned some interesting things about humans that I thought I knew until we had these conversations and then I really do start to know them. So, Kasey, for the folks who are just tuning in and don't hang out with you every morning on the customer platform show like I do, maybe explain real quick just who you are, what you do, where you do it.

Hello, I am Casey Hawkins. I am a HubSpot and marketing consultant. I help teams make their marketing and sales processes work better, work more smoothly, more efficiently, specifically in the HubSpot space. And I am based in Annapolis, Maryland. Nice sailing capital of the world.

There you go. Okay, so let's go ahead and get into this, and I'll warn you, Kasey, I've warned all the other amazing women who have come before you on the show. It's a little bit of like a mountain and valleys question. And I promise you, towards the end, we climb up to the peak of the mountain, but we have to go through some of the trenches of life or valleys of life to get there. So let's just start at the very beginning, and that beginning can be totally up to you. But if we go back in time and we meet young Casey Hawkins just starting out, what would we see and what would she be most surprised about? Where you are now?

Usually, I start my journey just out of college. I was working at a local pool construction company. I had just graduated from college. I was interning there while I was still in college, and the owner of the company called me one day and said, hey, we're about to fire our bookkeeper. Can you put a job on Indeed. For a bookkeeper? And I said, mike, I'm. I'm kind of not really doing anything. Could I just do that instead? He was like, sure. He was like, I didn't know you wanted to do anything other than basically just hang out at the company. So I spent a year as a bookkeeper at a small local pool construction company, and I hated bookkeeping. I tell my clients right now, my accounting team, who is me, is terrible at their job. It's just never something I liked. And so one day I tweeted out, I hate my job. And one of my friends from college tweeted me back and said, come work with me. And she worked at a marketing agency based out of Columbia, Maryland. So a couple weeks later, I put in four weeks notice at the pool construction company. And the same day I went to interview with her company. And basically four weeks later, I started there. It was a. At the time, it was a diamond partner HubSpot agency. And I started as just a marketing intern. And I really leaned into a lot of areas that agency and I have kind of adopted this. I'm very into the wide t marketing concept where you know a little about a lot of marketing and then you deepen your tea into a couple areas. Obviously, HubSpot ended up being one of those areas of deepening knowledge for me. I think I would have would be really surprised that I was in marketing operations kind of side of things. I say this a lot too, especially if I'm talking to, like, college students or new grads. I think it's a hidden side of marketing. I thought I wanted to be in social media marketing, which I guess I now a little bit for him, but I didn't think it would be LinkedIn, I guess. And so I think that side of marketing I just had no idea existed and I would have been really surprised to be there.

So I am learning some things. Bookkeeper turned inbound expert, HubSpot expert. I also will agree with you, I am a big fan of the T shaped marketer and have talked about it for years. I think we're even getting to point where there could be a T shaped HubSpot admin at this point, which gets real interesting if you start to break it down that granular. But I love this idea of starting from the bottom and working your way up to where you are now, which is interesting to me because you basically run your own thing, you have your own clients and so you've gone from like again the very beginning to where a lot of people may even dream about being able to get to as a, as a human supporting people who use HubSpot. So along that journey from like very beginning to where you're at now, who are some of your biggest like inspirations or mentors along the way?

So I mentioned my friend who I followed in her footsteps. Camille Bosley. She still one of my best friends. I was on a road trip last week and she was on the road trip with me. She's still one of my mentors and everything and I very much followed in her footsteps at the time and to this day take her advice very seriously. We had a long chat in a Culver's around lead scoring. My husband kind of hates when we hang out because it's boring. But definitely she has always been a big inspiration. I know this is going to make you uncomfortable, but obviously George, you as well as Chris have both, I feel like taken me under your wings in many ways. Just last week we had a conversation after the morning show and I mean you both make a lot of great content and everything. And I mean early in my freelancing career I was following the Hub Heroes podcast very closely and I just told some friends this weekend, I think one of the things I've never liked about freelancing is coming from an agency background. You have this sense of community, you have this network, you have these lack things. And when I started freelancing I didn't have that and I really missed it in a way I couldn't even like explain. I feel like all the time my husband would be like, so do you need help And I'm like, no, it's not that I need help. I just miss having people to talk to. And even just the morning show, I know we record it, but still, it's just this, like, touch base with the same people every day. And, like, when I'm out of office, you guys notice and things like that, in a way. And so it's just nice to have that community.

Yeah. I love this idea of being a freelancer or, like, a solopreneur and having the feeling of community, people that care. By the way, thanks for mentioning my name. I did not pay Kasey 20 bucks to actually mention me as a mentor, But I do love being able to be that human where I just try to give myself to the folks that need it and help along the way. But it's very interesting to me, too. As you kind of are navigating these questions, is there anybody else that you think of that you're like, yeah, this is. And by the way, it could be pre HubSpot, but somebody that has, like, been a mentor or made, like, a massive impact in your life as well?

I'm very close to my family. My mom and my sister are, I say all the time, my best friends. My sister is a very successful real estate agent in my hometown, and I definitely look. I mean, I've always looked up to her. She danced in high school, in middle school, and high school, so I danced in middle school and high school. In college, she worked at the Olive Garden as a server, so I worked at the Olive garden as a server. And now she does have her. I mean, she has her own business. Obviously, we're doing two different things, but when I go home and when I talk to her, we have served such parallels between us, and I often even kind of talk about how interesting that is, that although she's a real estate agent, we have all these similar parallels where we're both, you know, agents, like, these free agents selling ourselves in the public eye to do what we do best.

Yeah, I love that. Okay, so now we're dance breadsticks. Bookkeeping. All right, so I'm starting to piece together the pieces of the puzzle that makes Kasey. Kasey. Okay, so let's go back into kind of your journey that you've been going through. And again, you went from bookkeeping to working in an agency, either place or even before, whichever. Again, this is totally your story. Have there been any hurdles or biases that you've had to overcome in your career? And if so, how did you kind of navigate those?

I think of this more in the agency side. And I think, you know this about me, George. I can be fairly quiet. I'm not going to necessarily always be the first one to speak up and things like that. And especially in the agency setting, there are a lot of, you know, especially men who are much more loudspoken than I am, much more eager to get their voice out there first, which I feel like for my entire career has been. Has meant that often we start doing one thing and then I'm like, hello, the little mouse in the corner. Like, hey, I think maybe we're missing this other little thing over here. And that's something I've had to kind of work on personally, because I can be kind of bulldozed over fairly easily. And so I think it's important, especially now that I'm like, freelancing to make sure that I do make my voice heard and I don't get into these positions where I'm just following instead of leading, especially because people hire me because I have this expertise. And sometimes that can. It can be hard for me to, like, own my expertise almost, in a way.

Yeah, yeah, own it, own it, own it, own it. You have become an expert. I mean, again, just from our kind of conversation here, you started at the very beginning. You've worked your way to be where you're at. You, you deserve to have that voice, that expertise, be the leading indicator or factor of what's going on. So I love that you're a. You know that about yourself and can actively work on that. So, Kasey, and again, these are part of the valley questions that I mentioned at the beginning. I swear we'll get to. We'll get to the climbing the mountain and to the peak questions here in a hot minute. But have you ever faced a moment where you felt underestimated or overlooked or maybe just out of place in the industry? And if so, how did you handle kind of that moment?

Yeah, I'm a lot, like I said, I'm not allowed person. I'm not someone that's going to, you know, I'm not going to go to an industry event and start shaking hands with everyone. I'm probably going to be in the corner and waiting for someone to speak to me in most cases. So I think that can happen. It can happen a lot. I mean, I think about a lot of client meetings that I had, especially at the agency and especially when leadership was on them, where sometimes leadership would start speaking on concepts and ideas. But I was boots on the ground and I felt kind of Overlooked and overshadowed in those instances where. And even today, like, I try to focus my content a lot of times on, like, execution. And, you know, sure, there's a lot of strategy that goes into things, but I like to bring it down to, like, okay, how do we actually use that? And I think sometimes the. The overarching strategies and things are flashier, but if you can't execute on those strategies and implement those things, then it ends up falling flat. Anyway. I try. I try to keep things a little bit more. More grounded. You and I have been talking a lot about lead scoring recently, and there are some overarching concepts around who you should lead score, how you should implement that. I like to do sessions and content specifically around. These are the buttons you should push, and these are the inputs you should put in things like that.

Try to stay grounded was a phrase you just used. And it's interesting, as you kind of talk about this, I'm transported back to Gary V. Who did a video on, like, clouds and dirt, and I always correlated that, and, no, he's talking about strategy and tactics. And you are very much like me where historically I have liked to talk about the tactical. Here's the buttons you push, here's the things that you do, here's the way that you hack it. And so being able to lean into what I hear, by the way, is I lean into my strengths as Kasey, and this. This is what I tried to do to bring good stuff to the world, which I absolutely love. So let's. Let's get raw, let's get vulnerable. Have you ever experienced a significant failure or setback, and if so, what did you learn from it?

Last summer, I think I stretched too far. As an individual consultant. I was billing 50 or 60 hours a week. And I think you know this, George. But if. For the listeners, if you don't know if you.