INBOUND 2016: Andy Pitre "Getting Started with Inbound Marketing and HubSpot's Free Tools"

Good morning, everyone. I trust that everyone is refreshed and ready for the day after last night. Everyone have fun at Club Inbound. Nice. I'm hoping to catch the rerun. I actually went home to bed because this is very early for me normally. My name is Shay. Shay Redmond. I am a product manager here at HubSpot. And joining me today is Andy Petrie, a colleague of mine, also a product manager. What we're going to talk. There he is. Wait. What we're going to talk about today is a little bit of a deeper look into what Christopher demoed and described on the Spotlight session on Wednesday when he talked about the new features coming from HubSpot. And if you can tell from here, we're going to be talking about specifically the free products and how you can get started with HubSpot for the very, very low cost of $0. Just by a show of hands, who here Is already a HubSpot customer? Nice. Okay, so what we're gonna show you guys today, then, you actually already have access to and we're gonna coin a new concept that we're using at HubSpot called the Growth stack. And we'll go into that in a little bit. Who's not a HubSpot customer.

Nice.

Okay, so this is especially relevant for you guys. Very excited to show you what we're gonna demo today. All right, let's get started. So quick agenda. What we're going to cover today. We're going to talk about what exactly the growth stack is. I'm going to go through marketing free, what it entails, what it encompasses and how to use it.

And then I'm going to hand over.

To Andy, who's going to take you through HubSpot CRM and HubSpot Sales.

Free platform.

Sound good? Nice. Okay, so what exactly is the growth stack? Sounds kind of buzzwordy. Specifically, what the growth stack is, is a suite of tools, specifically powerful set of tools to help you grow your business. Your business is one single unit. Sales, marketing, and everything involved there. The software that you use should also be one single unit. And the experience for your leads and your customers should also be one unified unit. You shouldn't have to submit forms from certain platforms, get email from other ones. We're going to talk a little bit about specifically the free growth stack from HubSpot, which is the free marketing suite, helps capture leads from your website and learn a little bit more about them. The free CRM customer relationship management to help manage that relationship with those people. And actually this. And finally the sales platform so we're going to learn about the free suite of tools that can help make you and your sales team a little more productive during your day. Sound good? All right, so what exactly is Marketing Free? In its simplest form, Marketing Free is a suite of tools to help you generate more leads from your website and learn a little bit more about them. The first tool in this toolbox we call Lead Flows. So Lead Flows is simply a conversion funnel made easy. And normally what a conversion funnel entails is usually some sort of call to action on the website. Usually a button that says, hey, I think you'd actually be interested in this particular resource brings you to a landing page where you fill out a form and then redirects you to usually a thank you page or an inline message to say, here's the resource that we're sending you. Thank you for converting. With Lead Flows, what we decided to do was actually, for want of a better word, squish it all into one single widget and make it much easier for the end user to actually get involved and reach out to us. So what we have here are three steps of a lead flow. The first one we call call out. So the call out simply gets the visitor's attention and says, hey, I think you might be interested in this particular resource. In this case, this is from our own website. We're offering a zero budget growth marketing guidebook and it's targeting blog posts and pages that are associated with that topic. Once the actual visitor interacts with the callout, clicks the button, we then show them the form. And the key thing here is there's no redirects involved, there's no page refreshes, it's all self contained inside of one widget, which is great for the end user. No redirects, no waiting. And finally the last step is the thank you. So this is where you deliver on that value. And if you're using HubSpot marketing already, this is hopefully a similar concept. Landing pages, thank you Pages, forums and CTAs all come together to make a conversion funnel in HubSpot. This is a conversion funnel made easy for context. This is what it looks like on the website. Super unintrusive, non intrusive, shows up in the bottom right. In our case, you can put it in a bunch of places on the website and it gives the user an opportunity to convert at their leisure. We're not interrupting them, we're not taking over the whole screen. It's totally up to them. And of course, with so much of the web being mobile, first these Days. Elite Flow is mobile optimized right out of the box. So you'll see this is the exact same lead flow we just talked about, but actually on mobile. So you'll notice it takes up minimum amount of the screen the visitor can exit out if they're not interested in it and they're interacting with the whole thing inside one widget. The key thing here is for the end user it's straightforward, no redirects. But for us, it actually takes a lot of the work out to get a conversion funnel live on our website. We don't need to build a brand new page, we can actually just get this live right out of the box. And we'll go into that in a little bit more detail in a sec. Lead Flows is feature number one in marketing free, but arguably, in my opinion, the slightly cooler one, although it doesn't actually have much of a screen inside the product is Collected Forms. So if you're not using HubSpot right now, or maybe you are using HubSpot but you have your website hosted outside of the HubSpot platform, you may have forms that aren't necessarily pumping leads into HubSpot. Maybe they're sending them straight to your email inbox, or maybe they're sending them into another system. There's a lot of back and forth between different systems, making sure that you don't miss out on anything. Collected Forms sets out to solve that exact problem. What Collected Forms does is it actually hooks into the existing forms on your website, the non HubSpot ones, and will capture a lead when a submission occurs on that site on that form, and just send it straight into HubSpot as if it was a native submission. The key thing here is HubSpot becomes the central database, one unified place where you can manage the entire relationship. You don't need to go back and forth in your email inbox. You don't necessarily need to manage multiple systems. Pumps all those leads straight into HubSpot in one manageable place. Sounds cool. I like this one. Works with any form that you might have already. So if you're with WordPress, there's a lot of form plugins like Formidable Ninja forms, contact form 7, gravity forms, or basically any HTML form. So if you have a system like Squarespace, it's putting a HTML form on the page. With Collected Forms, you can actually pump that all into HubSpot. All right. Once a submission occurs on either a lead Flow or a collected form, what we're providing at the other side is a very enriched contact record that you wouldn't necessarily get. If you say imported or manually created a lead. The beauty about marketing is that you'll end up with a contact record that looks a little something like this. This is actually me. I don't know if you can tell. No, but specifically I want to hone in on the timeline. So with the timeline, you're actually getting a view of all the pages that that lead viewed and navigated around your website along with their original source. So did they come from social media? Did they come from a referral or organic search? And all of this is just given to you with the marketing platform because it's installed on your website, which is monitoring each of the pages and actually surfacing them once a conversion happens.

Cool.

The last feature of marketing free right now is a dashboard. Pretty common for a platform to have a dashboard. There's a few reports that I want to actually hone in on and kind of show you guys. Now we offer a overview of the general health of your lead flow. How many leads are you generating on an ongoing basis? So you'll see in this case, October 18th was a particularly good day for us. Additionally, we give some high level stats. So overall, how many leads are you generating? But this is personally my favorite. We actually show the source in aggregate of all the leads you're generating over the last 30 days. So say for instance, you're venturing into paid campaigns. You want to know how well it's going, all that information is going to be recorded when the lead submits and you'll be able to identify. In this case, we're not actually generating any leads from paid, so we might need to reconsider and maybe rework our paid campaign a little bit. And for sales contacts as well, this is very, very helpful. We offer two modules on the dashboard. Contacts generated in the last 24 hours and even better, contacts returning in the last 24 hours. So if a contact previously converted a week ago, six weeks ago, six months ago, if they come back to your website in the last 24 hours, we'll surface them right on the dashboard so you know that they're actually back on your website back looking for you. It's probably time to reach out and maybe offer a sales demo or something like that. Cool. How do I actually get it set up? So with marketing, we offer a bunch of Options. There's the WordPress plugin, if you're on the WordPress platform. If you're already using HubSpot, it's integrated with the HubSpot tracking code, so there's no additional setup there and we offer a tracking code for any CMS that will allow script scripts to be installed. Think of Google Analytics as tracking code. Any content management system lets you install that. You'll be able to install marketing free and it's a one time setup and it's the same code across the whole growth stack as well. All right, that's the marketing platform. I'm going to hand it over to Andy to talk you guys through the CRM and sales platform. Thank you for joining.

All right, thank you, Shay. My name is Andy Petrie. I'm the product manager for HubSpot CRM. And so now that you've learned how you can capture leads off your website with HubSpot's free marketing tool, I want to talk about what you do with those leads after you capture them. And as a spoiler alert, the answer is you're going to put them in HubSpot CRM. Now, a few stats I wanted to put out there. So this is one that I think is pretty amazing, which is that 60% of small and medium sized businesses today are not using a CRM system. Instead of using a CRM system, they're using Excel, maybe if they're advanced, they're using Google Sheets so they can share it with their team. They're keeping track of things on paper and little post it notes on their desk. If you ever walk by a salesperson's desk, you're going to see a bunch of post it notes, a notepad open and they're keeping track of things in their head. Now the problem with this, if you are a single person who's doing marketing or a single person who's doing sales, or maybe a single person who's doing both, is that if you're not tracking things in one unified system, you're, you're going to let things are going to fall through the cracks. If you're a distributed team and you actually have a few salespeople or a few marketers, you're going to have a number of people who are letting things fall through the cracks and you're also going to have a number of people who are stepping on each other's toes because sales rep number one doesn't know that sales rep number two has actually already reached out to somebody. And so you're going to reach out to them again and you're going to make a bad experience for your buyer. And so the big thing about HubSpot CRM and the reason that we built HubSpot CRM and we made it free is, is because we think every business should be using a centralized database to store all of that information. And the Beauty about using HubSpot CRM in conjunction with the marketing product and in conjunction with the sales tools, is that you get a full record of all of the information that's coming in from your system. So you're capturing leads from your website, you're importing those spreadsheets that you're keeping track of your activities on. You're entering in the notes from the sticky note into the CRM. Now you have all of that data in one place. And in addition, you have the visit information that's coming from your website, and you have the outreach information that's coming from your sales team, and you have one centralized place to see all of the information about the contacts. And we think this is incredibly valuable for businesses. Now, as you're getting set up with HubSpot CRM, I'm going to try to walk over to this side of the stage here. But if you're getting set up with HubSpot CRM, one of the things that you're going to want to do is make sure that you can customize it. Every business is a little bit different. Every business has specific information that they care about collecting from their users. And so with HubSpot CRM, you can create custom fields, you can create custom properties, and you can import whatever information you want into HubSpot CRM or collect that information from the forums on your website so you can customize the database to meet the needs of your specific business. Right. Once you get that information into HubSpot, right. And you get all that information in, in the first place, the next thing that you need to do is make sure that you're tracking all the activities in your CRM. And one of the biggest problems that salespeople have is, or that sales teams have in general, is that it's just too much work to track that information into the CRM. If you're a salesperson and you're reaching out to somebody, and every time you reach out to somebody, you have to take an extra five minutes to open up the CRM to create a contact record for the person you just reached out to create a company record for the person you just reached out to take the body of the email that you sent them and copy and paste it into the CRM. That takes a lot of time. And it doesn't seem like it at first because maybe it takes five extra minutes for people that you're prospecting to.

But.

But if you're prospecting to 20, 30, 40, 50 people a day. That could end up becoming hours of your day that you spend doing data entry. And so one of the beautiful things about HubSpot CRM is that if you're using the CRM itself, if you're using Gmail, or if you're using Outlook to do your outreach, there's a magical button called Login CRM. And when you check that button, we will capture the email that you sent to the prospect. We'll create a contact for that email, if they don't already exist inside the system. If they do, then we'll log the activity automatically on the contact record. And what we'll even do is we'll go as far as creating a company record for that person and enrich that company record with data about their company. So what we do is you send an email to a prospect, we capture the email address, we look at the domain and the email address, and we say, hey, Zendesk, this looks like a company. What do we know about Zendesk? Right? Well, we know that they're a technology company. We, we know that they're based in San Francisco, and we have a database of company information for about 25 million companies out there. So wherever we can, we're going to enrich that information. So now, as a salesperson who's using HubSpot, you didn't have to change your behavior at all, right? You just sent an email to somebody. That email got logged in the CRM, that activity got logged in the CRM. The contact's in the CRM, the company's in the CRM, and the data is enriched so that your marketing team now knows more about the companies that you're prospecting to. You can use that information to segment. You can use that information to do workflows in email. And we think that that's a really powerful feature of HubSpot CRM. Now, the next thing, once you have your contacts in the system, once you have companies in your system, once you're enriching that data and you're getting all those sales activities, you need to be able to actually track your sales pipeline. So inside HubSpot CRM, we have an object called deals, and deals are your way of tracking sales, right? So every time you reach out to somebody, you prospect that person, and that person says, you know, I'm interested in this product. You can create a deal to track your sales process, and you can create a pipeline inside HubSpot CRM that has multiple stages, right? Because very few businesses have like a One call, close sales process. It would be great if everybody did, but unfortunately that's not the case. Right, so you can create a pipeline, you can create deal stages in that pipeline. And we give you a really nice interface if anybody's used to using Trello or used to using interfaces like that, so that you can see your deals, you can see what stage they're in, and you can move those deals through different stages. It's a great thing for a sales rep to quickly see where everything stands in their pipeline. It's also a great tool for a sales manager to sit down with their team and be able to see what deals are in what stage. What do we need to do to move these deals forward? And inside HubSpot CRM, you can have not just one pipeline, but you can actually have multiple pipelines. So if you have different sales teams, if you have different sales processes for selling into different industries, you can manage all of that inside HubSpot CRM. And then finally, one of the biggest reasons that it's really key to have all of your data in one place is because you can do reporting on that data. So inside HubSpot CRM, you can create a forecast so that you can see based on the deals that you're currently working, based on the close date of those deals and based on the probability that they're gonna close. Am I actually gonna hit my numbers at the end of the month? Right. So what's my likelihood? What do I have? If it's, you know, the, what's the date today? The 11th. Right. Then you can say, where am I on the 11th? And based on what's in my pipeline that's scheduled to close later this month, am I actually going to hit those numbers? We also give you activity reports. You can see all of those emails that are getting logged in the CRM. You can see which reps are sending emails, how many emails are going out, how many calls they're making, and then you can actually see, okay, if we're hitting our numbers, great. If we're not hitting our numbers, what do we need to step up? Do we need to do more outreach? Do we need to create more deals? What are the things that we need to do? And so that's HubSpot CRM in a nutshell. So at this point, if we want to review, we're able to capture leads off of our website with HubSpot Marketing free, we're able to manage all of those leads and manage all of those lead interactions in our database with HubSpot CRM. And now I want to talk about HubSpot sales, which is tools that you can give to your sales team who are in that sales process to help make them more efficient and to help them work better. Now, 47% of businesses say that improving sales efficiency is a top priority for them in 2017. And the reason for that is that 40% of businesses say that it's harder to get a response from a prospect today than it was just two or three years ago. And the reason for that is the sales process has changed. And this is not something that is a foreign concept to anybody who's sitting in this room who's been to Inbound this week. More and more of the control is shifting to the buyer. And for you, as a salesperson, you can't kind of withhold information and use that for leverage anymore. You have to accept the fact that your buyer's looking at your website. You have to accept the fact that your buyer may or may not be opening your emails or responding to your emails. And so anything that you can do to be able to kind of get more insight into what they're looking at and what they're interested in before you even engage with them is going to be really valuable for you. And so the first feature of HubSpot Sales, which is part of HubSpot Sales Free, is the ability to see who's opening your emails. So when you send an email from HubSpot CRM, when you send an email from Gmail, when you send an email from Outlook, we put a pixel in that email. So when somebody opens it, you can see that they opened it and you can get a notification that they opened it. And so this, as a salesperson is valuable for two reasons. One, because you can actually focus your time on the people who are opening your emails and who are engaged with your emails.

And.

And also because you can see exactly when they're opening them so that you have a better chance of actually reaching them at a time when they're by their computer, when they're by their phone, and when you want to make outreach, the next piece is templates. So inside HubSpot sales free, you have the ability to create a library of templates that's centrally managed. So if you're a marketing manager, if you're a sales manager, you can create a lot of these templates yourself. And once you create those templates, they're going to show up in HubSpot, they're going to show up in Gmail, they're going to show up in Outlook, and your Reps can just pick from a list of templates that they want to use to be able to more quickly follow up and respond to the people that they're working. And so that not only saves time for your sales reps so that they don't have to manually write out all those emails, it also saves time for your buyer, or it also makes it so that you can reach out faster to your buyer, which is incredibly important because people are becoming more and more impatient. If someone fills out a form on your website, they, they want to hear back from you right away. And having templates helps shorten the distance from getting that lead to being able to respond back to them with relevant content. The next piece is calling. So inside HubSpot CRM, you have the ability to make phone calls directly inside HubSpot. And the beautiful thing there is that one, just being able to make the phone call from your CRM saves a lot of time because you can go through a list of contacts. You can just press one button to click, and then you can dial and you can call that person. The other piece of it is that we automatically record the activity of the call inside the timeline. So when you call somebody, you can know, okay, well, now I don't have to worry that my rep is making phone calls and not logging them into the CRM. If they're making them from the CRM, then, you know, they go automatically into the CRM. And the next piece is that we record the phone calls as well. So as a salesperson, you don't have to worry about taking notes on the phone call. You can be fully there, you can be fully present, and you can know that you can go back later and hear that thing that you told the prospect, hear the thing that the prospect was talking about when they were describing the problems that their businesses have. And so that's calling inside HubSpot sales. And then the last piece is document management. So similar to templates, you can create a repository of documents inside HubSpot sales. And that lets you, again, as a marketing manager or sales manager, have a little bit more control over the content that your sales reps are sharing. Know that they're sending the right file or the right version of the file that has the right information in it, because you're managing that centrally. And then in addition to that, similar to calling, similar to email tracking, when you send something through documents, you're going to get a record of that inside the timeline. So you can say, hey, did I send that proposal? Did I send that PDF to my prospect? You'll be able to see inside HubSpot. Oh yes, I did. Because HubSpot's tracking the things that you're sending through documents. And then similar to email open tracking, when you send a document from HubSpot Sales, we track has someone actually opened this document? If it's a PDF or a PowerPoint, what slides were they looking at in the PDF? What pages were they look or what slides were they looking at in the PowerPoint? What pages were they looking at in the PDF? How long did they look at those pages for? And when they share it with somebody at their company, then they can see, okay, this person shared it with somebody, who did they share it with? Right. That person now becomes a lead in your database as well. So you're kind of growing your tree of contacts at a particular company on your way to getting to the decision maker. So that's HubSpot Sales. Right. And so if we want to review and talk about the growth stack, and talk about the growth stack free, we have marketing free, which lets you capture leads from your website. We have HubSpot CRM which is always free, and that lets you manage all of those relationships in one centralized database. And then we have HubSpot sales, which, which gives you the ability to give your sales team tools to make them more productive. That's the growth stack and that's the free version of the growth stack. Now all of that's really great and we're really excited about it. We're really excited about putting those tools together, about making all of that available to everybody for free. But there's one more piece of the puzzle, which is that with the brand new mobile app that we announced on Wednesday during the keynote, if you're using HubSpot free, you can download HubSpot's mobile app and you can start using the contact management, you can start using the sales tools, you can start seeing visits and things like that in contact timelines right on the mobile app. So you don't have to be at your computer, you can just have your phone anywhere you are and you have access to HubSpot and you have access to all these free tools everywhere you are. So to get started, as Shay was saying, if you're a HubSpot customer, good news, you already have access to all of these tools inside the marketing product. You can go into content and you can start using lead flows, you can start putting lead flows on your website. I highly recommend it. If you're a HubSpot customer and you're not yet using the CRM you can turn on the CRM, and you'll have all of the contacts that are already in your marketing product will just be in the CRM, and you'll have the additional companies, and you'll have the additional deals that you'll be able to use. And then once you turn on the CRM, within the CRM, you also have access to all of the sales tools, so you can start using those sales tools for free as well. If you're not a HubSpot customer, you can go to HubSpot.com new if you are a HubSpot customer, you can Go to this URL too. We're not going to stop you, but you can read more about what these tools are, what these tools do, and then you can link to the pages where you can sign up for all of these things. So thank you guys very much.