INBOUND 2016: D.Tyre + L.Ye "How a Sales Rep Generated 919 New Customers in 26 Hours"

Can I start?

Yeah. Let's kick things off.

All right. So how many people saw the Gary Vaynerchuk keynote? Right? And so he was tremendous. I've spoken with him a handful of times before he spoke. He went on the audience. It was like hugging people. I'm like, oh, that's the greatest thing ever. So I decided to do that. And so if we start a few minutes, like, late. Exactly, Exactly. Exactly. So welcome to our session with, like, the funniest name of any session at Inbot, How a HubSpot Sales rep Blog all the way to the Bank. You guys like that title? You like it? When's the last time any of you guys were in a bank? Right? No one goes to a bank. Your bank is your phone now. Right, but we had other titles too. Right? What does it say in the app? In the app, it says how a.

Sales blog rep generated 919 customers in 26 hours.

919 customers.

By the way, it's not 919 anymore. That number's gone up. And we'll talk about that later.

Teaser. You're good at this, Leslie. All right, 919 customers in 26 hours, right? How many people want that kind of results?

Boom.

All right, that's why you're here. This is Thursday at HubSpot's Thursday, right?

Yep.

You've been on your feet for, what, 48 hours?

I was up for 14 hours yesterday.

You guys, you should be feel blessed that you're sitting right. Unless you sat all morning. Right? You guys want to stand? All right, if you want to stand, just feel free. It's that kind of audience, right? Just get up and do whatever you want. The other thing I learned from Gary is he had, like, people stand on stage. Does anybody want to stand behind Leslie and I. I mean, it's welcome. Usually the entrepreneurs. I did an entrepreneur thing last night, and they'll go, oh, yes, I'd love to do it. Great. All right, so it's Thursday at HubSpot. How many people are exhilarated? How many people are just excited? Okay, a little clapping there. Anybody just, like, happy, right? Anybody exhausted? Anyone disillusioned? Okay. Anybody like, hungover? What time is it?

The airport parties are allowed.

Oh, yeah. If it's one o' clock and you're hungover, man, we got some. I mean, it can be hard. All right, so let me introduce Leslie. This is Leslie Yee. We'll do our bios in, like, 10 minutes. My name is Dan Tyer. I'm super pumped to talk about schmarketing. You guys know smarketing. Say it. Wow, this is a good crowd, right? And schmarketing. I actually invented that term, right? It's an actual term, right? Invented in 2007 when I was getting drunk with Mike Volpe. Mike Volpe was the first CMO at HubSpot, right? And I was the first salesperson for HubSpot. And I was like, cold calling, right? And we just started to get inbound leads. How many people in the audience get inbound leads? All right, Half of you. How many want more inbound leads? Yeah, there we go. That's what we're going to talk about. Hopefully, we'll get to the content in about two seconds, right? And so I said, mike, I need more of those inbound leads. And he goes, dan, it's not that easy. You have to create content. I go, all right, we'll create more content. He says, dan, that's not easy. I got to hire agency or I've got to get a content writer. I'm going to get. We'll get one. He's like, I don't have any marketing headcount. I go, all right, I'm going to give you sales headcount that you can move to marketing, right? I hear you. Sales guys in the audience. How many salespeople in the audience? Okay, the sales guys just went, right? Sales headcount over to marketing in 2007 was, like, crazy. But first of all, it wasn't my head count. It belonged to my boss, Mark Roberts. But second of all, right, and more importantly, in the last 10 years, it's not sales, it's not marketing. It's schmarketing. And this is a great smarketing case study, right? You'll hear a little bit about Leslie. You'll hear a little bit about me, right? Well, you'll hear a little bit about how we engaged to drive all these leads, all these customers, and we want to teach you to do the same thing, right? And what you'll see is that it's hugely exciting, something that you can bring back, right? And then part of the whole inbound aesthetic is anything we can do to help. Not only these sessions, but afterwards, Leslie and I are all in. You can tweet us out, right? Lesley Eantire. We embrace all forms of social media. Let's get started.

All right, so how many of you guys recognize this page? A few. Not too many. That's cool. So for those of you who don't know, this is the homepage of the HubSpot blogs. We take Blogging very seriously. At HubSpot, we had a blog before we even had a product, before we even had a sales team, before we even had employees beyond Brian and Dharmesh. And that's because we believe blogging is like your daily vitamin. You go onto your blog every day, you publish something, you read something, you learn something, and you educate people. The way we think about blogging at HubSpot is that we want to make you all marketing and sales superstars. We publish two times a day per blog. That's about 20, 30 times a week. And every single day, we get up and we come to work and we write marketing and sales tips. And we just try to make you guys the best marketers and sales people that you can. And this is where Dan and I, this is where our story started. So ironically, our relationship started with a cold email. And on the sales blog and on the marketing blog all the time, we say, don't send cold emails. Don't reach out to people you don't know. Don't reach out to people who don't want to hear from you. Thankfully, I had a little bit of context from Dan. If you went to Brian and Dartmash's keynote yesterday, you know that context is king. It's no longer content, it's context. And so I was able to use that to send this email to Dan. Do you remember this?

I don't.

It's okay if you don't.

I like this, is that the subject line is, like, pretty compact and that I could read it on my phone. And it's the hi, Dan kind of thing. So it looks like it has the proper format.

Yeah. So this was May 2015. This was about two months after I'd started at HubSpot. Now I'm not a salesperson. I've never sold anything in my life. And yet I had to come here to HubSpot and write for the sales blog. And I had to teach salespeople what to do. And I thought, oh, my God. So there is nothing that qualifies me to do this. I don't know what I'm doing. I haven't met salespeople before. What do I do? So at HubSpot, we have this expression called ev. It means enterprise value. What that means is you solve for the company above your own needs. You always do what's best for the company. You do what's best for the customer. And I heard that Dan Tyer was the embodiment of EV. He was employee number six at HubSpot. He was always willing to help. And people said he's the guy to talk to. He's been in sales for 30 years. He knows what's up. So I sent him this email, and the rest is history.

Boom. Very, very nice. And so I like that. What we're going to do is for the next 30 minutes, we're going to talk about the process. We're going to talk about what Leslie and I did. Then we're going to tell you and give you some specific steps of how you can bring this back to your organizations. Because the key to smarketing success is everybody's got to do it. It's very, very inclusive. How many people would have difficulty. Have difficulty with sales and marketing alignment? Right. I'm going to say half. Right. We see that all of the time as we go out in the field, as we talk with customers. Right. Marketers kind of got it first. Right. And we're going to talk about a little bit of ways that you can entice salespeople to help you out.

All right, so here's what happened. Over the next 77 weeks, we wrote 43 blog posts together. Spend about two hours on each blog post. And I said earlier that when we had written the title of this presentation, it was back in, I don't know, maybe June or July. And so at that point, it was 919 new customers. That number's higher now. Does anyone have a guess for what that number is at? Anyone? Shout it out.

2000.

2000.

I like that. An aggressive salesperson, aggressive goal. Who else? Give us another 1,500. Very good. All right.

I like your confidence.

It's the marketing person. She's a little bit more conservative.

So the number is actually 13, 16 new prospects in a year. That's 15 new prospects per hour of time we're investing. And the best thing is all this stuff is out there cranking still. If Dan and I stopped working together forever, we would still generate new prospects and still generate new customers. So in this session, we're going to show you how to do it.

Good. All right, so our goal is, oh, you're going to do the agenda slide.

Do it. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to tell you who we are, what we're about to. We're going to walk you through what we did, like, step and step process, how you can bring that to your own organization. We're going to talk a little bit about our results and what that means for the inbound movement. Then you guys are going to Get a special treat. The Dan Tyer classic, the breakfast sandwich challenge. And then finally we'll do a Q and A. We both talk a lot, so it might only be like two minutes long, but we'll try to make it as soon as possible.

Leslie talks quicker than any other human being I've ever met. I'm from New York. Any New Yorkers here? Right. Oh, yeah. Wow. Iowa and New York, Right? That's kind of interesting mix here. Iowa on this side, New York on this side. But Leslie talks very quick. She's from New York. Yes. I guess that's why. So we have like hour long meetings in like seven minutes. Right. And it's hilarious because she's very, very performance driven. Sales managers, if you want to ever meet a marketing person that's very, very specific, she's like, we own this number. We're going to go after it and we're going to do it. Right. And then this whole story is how to get organized so we can go ahead. Good. Oh, and so our goal is to get you to understand all of how this works. We want to get you a little bit excited that, first of all, sales and marketing alignment is important. Second of all, if you approach it the right way, you can bring it back to your organization for marketing success. All right, all right, salespeople.

So salespeople, you guys raised your hands a little bit earlier. I see somebody on your phone, some of you on your computers, stop checking your email and listen to us. Because this is the thing. If there's one thing I've learned in my time on the Hubs sales blog, it's that you guys do not have enough time. There is never enough time to do everything you need to do. There's always another prospect to call, there's always another deal that you can close, and there's just not enough time. You have to go home and eat dinner eventually, right? So this is what's going to help you. Because when you're blogging, you spend an hour writing it, you spend an hour editing, and you go up and it lives on the Internet forever. You can literally be sleeping and generating leads. You can be sleeping and prospects will be searching your stuff, they'll be reading it, and they'll be reaching out to you. They're going to say, hey, Dan, I saw this article on five better ways to prospect. I need help with that. Tell me about the HubSpot sales tools. And believe it or not, that is how our entire HubSpot sales organization is run. People reach out to us. They book meetings with our sales team, because they're already educated, because they've taken the time to research on their own.

I love it. And how many salespeople want that? Right? Raise your hand. All salespeople want that. That's the new way of doing it. So I've spent the last 10 years of my life talking about this inbound revolution. It started with marketers, right? Anybody tweeting out stuff right now, right? You could tweet out at the entire. As long as you're tweeting out, like, screenshots, that's okay. But you guys need help, right? We know you need help, right? For some reason, inbound started with marketers. I have some ideas on that. I think the technology was ready. I think marketers are very, well meaning. I think marketers were tired of, like, spamming and doing the same old stuff, and they were actually looking for something that was transformational, that would really help them provide a better kind of offering to their prospects and customers. But you guys can't do it alone, right? One of the things that we hear most often is no time too hard, right? And creating all this content can be very, very difficult. So in the early days of HubSpot, they let me blog, right? I was a pretty prolific blogger. And then they got really professional, and they say, you can't blog anymore. And then Leslie came around, right? And we practice smarketing by combining sales and marketing. And it is amazing because the message for you guys today is that your salespeople hold the key to your best content. We're going to tell you exactly how to do it. So all of the times you're scratching your head going, how can I get better content? It's in your salespeople's pocket, right? It's in the salespeople conversations. It's in what they talk to prospects and customers on a regular basis. And we want to make sure that we give you the tools to help that. And then CEOs. How many CEOs in the office? All right, here's the thing, all right? I speak all over the world on behalf of the inbound revolution. When I was a salesperson for HubSpot, right? I would pick up the phone And I, in 2007, say, I want to talk to you about inbound marketing. And people would, like, squinch up their face and they'd go, like, what is inbound marketing? And I'd explain it. And they had one other question. Will it work? Right? And I'm like, I think so. These guys are, like, really Smart. They're from MIT in 2016. We know it will work, right? There are 19,000 people who are standing in line all over this convention center talking about how they're applying inbound marketing or they're going to apply inbound marketing. So the key for inbound marketing is that it's a huge competitive advantage, right? And we can prove it. Right? The greatest part of being Dan Tyre is we can prove that all of this stuff works. Right? There's 200 case studies on our testimonial and case study page. I go all over the world And I tell CEOs, right, that schmarketing is the future. The change in buyer behavior has evolved, right? And we've got to move from a classic sales kind of situation where they controlled all of the content and all of the information over to it's a buyer focused process. You all believe that, right? I ask, when I work with CEOs, I ask, do you understand where you stand online? They never did. I said, all right, we can get that information. Any of you need help in convincing senior management about inbound marketing, you let Leslie and I know, and we'll show your customers or your executive team where you stand online. Right? And then I ask, do you know where you stand with specific keywords? And they rarely do. So we say, all right, this is where you stand. Do you want better visibility? And they say, yes. Right? The inbound revolution, right, Is super exciting. It is a competitive advantage. Over the next five years, there will be hundreds of thousands of people who practice over. We want you to be early in adopting sales and marketing alone.

All right, Boom. Let's get started. So this is us, the odd couple. So we're going to tell you a little bit about who we are and what we're about.

Can I do your bio?

You sure can. Fire away.

New York native, political science major, Dartmouth grad, sales neophyte. All right, Tell the audience one thing that you can share with 400 people where they'll never forget you.

So I love live music, and this year I went a little crazy. I've been to 19 concerts this year.

Very nice. What was your favorite?

I'd have to say Kanye west at TD Garden over Labor Day weekend. It was a pretty good time.

What? Any Kanye west fans in the audience? Everybody know who Kanye west is? All right, very good. Okay. You want to do mine?

Yeah. So this is Dan Tyer. He's an inbound sales pioneer, as we call him. At HubSpot. He was employee number six. He was our first HubSpot salesperson. And he's been in five successful startup exits since 1983. He's been selling his whole life, and now he's helping us enter a new era of sales at HubSpot. He's helping us build up a new sales process from the ground up. So, Dan, what's your fun fact?

I live in a purple house. I got a blind dog by the name of Oliver. I used to be a bass player in a heavy metal rock and roll band. Right? I'm a fist bumper. Guys know I'm trying to fist bump everybody at Inbound, right?

Shake your hand.

I know, I know. It's just. There's a long story to that, but it's happy to be here and happy to share the schmarketing story with Leslie.

All right, so here's what we did again. This is the cold email. Dan, do you remember this first email or this first meeting that we had?

I do remember the first meeting. I don't remember the email.

That's all that matters. So I sent Dan's email. I heard he was great. I heard he knew everything about sales. And I said, teach me. And we sat down and I said, and I thought to myself, I want this guy to help me. I want to ghostwrite for him or have him write for the sales blog, but what can I give him? Where's the hook? And so I sat down and I said, dan, I know you speak all over the country, all over the world. I know you've been here since the beginning. You know all there is to know about inbound sales. So let's talk about what you hear on the phone every day. What do people need help with? What are people asking for? What interests you? So from that conversation, I found out, for example, that Dan is a master at building rapport. There's no one who does it like him. He actually just gave an inbound talk on the same subject. I found out that he loves helping startup sales. I've learned that he loves teaching and educating new reps. And so we found that there was a good fit in that first meeting.

That's great. And so there's a lot of wisdom in that. First of all, Leslie asked for the introduction, but she asked me just to talk. Right. Any of your salespeople have problems talking? Exactly. They love to do it. So she said, all right, I'm going to do all of the kind of organization. What I really want to do is I just need your understanding and your wisdom. All right, so the first point for understanding this sales and marketing alignment is that you are asking your salespeople to do something that they do every day to benefit you, your prospects and your customers.

Exactly. All right, so that number that came up earlier on the screen, 1300 prospects, 77 weeks. We didn't get it right the first time, we didn't get it right the second time, the fifth time, the tenth time. It took us a lot of back and forth, a lot of trial and error to learn how we like to work, how we like to work with each other, and ultimately what was going to make us successful. So this is the process that we finally settled on. But it wasn't easy. And don't come in expecting that it's going to be. And we'll tell you how we sort of overcame all those potholes. So the first thing that we do is we have a meeting on the calendar for 30 minutes every Wednesday. Basically, what I said to Dan was in that first meeting, we had a little bit of a productive chat. It seemed like he was interested in writing, seemed like he was interested in contributing. I said, dan, would you be willing right now to commit to 30 minutes every week? I said, well, make it a regular commitment. We don't have to talk every week if it's not a good fit. If you're having a rough end of month, rough end of quarter, or I have a lot, we'll revisit every week and see if it's a good time. But are you willing right now to just regularly speak to me? And so the takeaway there is just to make this a regular commitment. Make this something that is going to be a regular presence in the salesperson or the marketer's life, whoever you're reaching out to, just make sure that they know that this is going to be consistent. And again, settle on a cadence that works for you. This may be too frequent, this may not be frequent enough. Just figure out what the other person wants and how they can work with you.

All right. Two reasons why this is brilliant. Number one, everybody can share 30 minutes, right? She didn't ask for four hours and a big strategy says she said 30 minutes, right. Second of all, she got it on my calendar, right? So 7:00 clock on Wednesday morning, I know exactly what I'm doing, right. I got 30 minutes to talk, Right. So timestamping it, putting in somebody's diary overseas or in their calendar here in the United States is a critical point, part of getting started. Yep.

Step two, we have a topic brainstorm every month. So it's one thing to sit down and have this regular meeting. It's another thing to say, what the heck are we going to talk about when we actually get on the phone together? So replace one of those meetings or add a second one every month and say, here's the list of what we're going to talk about next. So the way this works is I say, Dan, here are the large topics in the sales blog that are performing well for us. It's things like prospecting, qualification, objection handling, you guys know best what your audience wants to hear. And then we sit down and come up with, you know, 30 or 40 ideas in 30 minutes. And then we prioritize them after shared Google Doc.

The brilliance here is Leslie say, just tell me what you say during the week. What do you talk about? What do your prospects ask? I think one of the questions she asked me is what are the same questions that everybody asks all the time that if you didn't have to answer right. Make your life much easier. And this is my favorite meeting of the month because we get to like pull together all these things. In the first one we had like 60 different topics and then we could pick and choose and try to understand a little bit about how we would prioritize and the categories and things like that. Right. But once again, brainstorm topics. The other thing is this, I think it was Emma wrote a blog article about the 74 fill in the blank blog article titles. Anybody familiar with that blog article at HubSpot? Right. Okay. So it's like Mad Libs. Does anybody remember Mad Libs? Wow. Got people over 50 years old in this audience and you go in and you just. It has like blanks. Right. And once you have the titles, it makes it much easier. Right. And so this is a fun part of like a baby step that virtually every salesperson can do that should invigorate them to want to take the next step.

Exactly.

Very good.

Step three, every Monday I send in an agenda and an outline. So how many people in the audience have ever been to a meeting that had no agenda and they suck? Right. You go into the meeting, no one knows what's going on. There's no direction. And then you need to have like six more follow up meetings because everything was so disorganized the first time. And so that's what we did for the first couple months and it was fine. You know, Dan has a lot of great ideas and he obviously is great at talking and I know what the sales blog wants, so we could sort of muddle our way through. But we weren't at 100%. We were at maybe 75% and it was fine, but it wasn't good enough. So now what I do is I set an agenda. I say, here's what we're going to talk about. Here's the one title that I'm picking. Here is an outline of what I'm imagining the blog post will look like. A little bit of preparation goes such a long way. It'll keep your meeting focused, it'll keep it on track, and you always have something written to refer to. The other thing is, now Dan knows on Monday night what he needs to be thinking about for the next 36 hours or so before we talk. And so by the time we get in there, it's not like I'm just springing a question on him and he has to think on his feet now. He has a little bit more organization as well.

Noodling, noodling. I noodle, yes, I like to noodle. And the other thing is I tend to go down tangents. I think you've already seen that today. Right. Things just pop into my brain. It's very interesting to be Dan Tyre. Things just like pop into my brain. They come right out of my mouth. I have no governor and like I would show up to the 30 minute meeting and we'd be like through 23 meetings. 23 minutes. And then let's say, all right, we got to get to the blanket.

Can we please.

Right, exactly, exactly. Coordinating all this right now. I've got an agenda to work for. I know exactly how we can stay focused and it's just a lot more productive and we're able to get to the core a little bit quicker. Exactly.

And then number four, Dan talks. And this is probably the easiest part of the entire process because he has a lot of ideas, he has a lot of thoughts. Obviously he knows what he's heard on the phone. And this is the other thing that's important. Any salesperson in the room, you know that having an agenda is great, but new stuff is always going to come up. You need a little bit of structure to keep things focused. But you can't rigidly just stick to your outline and say, this is the only thing that we're going to talk about. These are the only points we're going to address because you don't know what your prospects need. I didn't know maybe what Dan had heard on the phone just that day, just last week that could be relevant, that I had no idea about. New insights are always going to emerge. So you have to be flexible. You got to work within a Structure. But you can't let yourself be confined by it.

The thing that was really smart here is that as Leslie was learning about sales, she had no problem saying, I don't understand what that means. Tell me more about that. Ooh, that seems like very, very interesting. Expand on that. So there was very good feedback of the direction that you wanted me to talk about. Right? And all your salespeople can talk. This is a great opportunity for them to kind of let loose.

Step five. One of us writes the post. So things have changed a little bit. In the beginning, I was doing the majority of the writing. Dan would talk for 30 minutes. I would basically take notes on what he was saying, and I turned that into a structured blog post. And this took me kind of a lot of time, because an unstructured monologue for 30 minutes isn't the easiest thing to turn into a blog post. You need some structure. You need to find common themes. So it was taking me a while. Eventually, we got into the agenda and outline habit, and our talks got a little more structured. But I was still taking time out of my day to produce a piece that wasn't under my byline. And I still had a certain number of posts that I had to write each month. And so that was getting a little bit hard, but it was still great because we were getting good content. And now, Dan, what happens? Now you write the post.

What I learned over 43 blog articles is that it's like being a sports writer, right? There's a headline, and then there's a first paragraph and stuff. So I learned from Leslie's blog writing, in the very beginning, she had to do all of it. And then by the 13th, 15th, 20th blog article, I could do more of it. And by the end, now I submit almost a completed blog, which is my authentic voice, which doesn't take too much more time, because I've learned how to put the blogging format. Now, I think, in blog articles, right? When I come up to people, I go, oh, that would be a great blog article. That would be a great blog article. And the end goal is for you guys to get to your salespeople to say, that would be a great blog article. Anything they say more than three or four times a week, that would be a great blog article. And it helps them create this thought leadership that's very important.

And this step is great for marketers and salespeople, too, because no one has time, right? Marketers, you can't write six extra pieces of content every week and still do your jobs. Getting a little Bit of that work off your plate is super, super helpful. As for salespeople learning to think in a structure, learning to write in a structure, that's going to help you in every aspect of your job as well. You will be acquiring a new skill. You're going to become insanely valuable because no salespeople do this. Honestly, very few blog. And you're going to be the one that does at your company. You're going to be that first person. So this is hugely valuable for marketers and salespeople. Number six, I take the post into editorial. So again, as all salespeople, marketers know, you write a campaign, you sign a deal with the prospect. That's not when the work ends. You still have to deliver the product. You have to implement it. You have to make sure they're doing well, make sure they're happy so they don't churn, make sure you're promoting things correctly. This is sort of when all of that comes together. So we have the post we put into the software. We got to pick a good headline, pick a good picture. Then we have to send it out into the world and make sure that people want to click on it. How many of you guys are scrolling through, for example, your Twitter feeds, and all the pictures are just like a bunch of dudes in suits and ties sitting around a table having a fake meeting. It's just all stock photos and it's all like six Ways to Turbocharged Boring. Exactly. And so this is where we set ourselves apart. We try to do things that are a little bit fun, a little bit quirky. For example, I love baby animal photos, so whenever I can, I put one up there. We try to come up with titles that are a little bit different. One of Dan's most popular articles is called Stop Doing Stupid Shit. Outdated Sales Tactics to abandoned in 2016. It shocked people a little. Some people weren't that happy, but it definitely got us a lot of attention. And the post got shared because it's a little bit different than all the other content that's in other people's feeds.

So the title is very, very important. But it's also the picture. What Leslie's really good at is getting a picture of a dumpster with garbage hanging out the side for that blog article. That's one of the main reasons why people saw it. And then we have one about establishing a rapport where it's a dog and a pony, right? And then there's one with this dog chasing this little red ball. And that one scored incredibly well. So understanding the title optimized, and then the picture is very, very important. And you got a list of all kind of great, like places that you can go to get really interesting pictures that you're prepared to share with the audience if they'd like.

Yeah, we have a blog post on the marketing blog that's just a list of great stock photo sites that aren't too stocky. They're not just the guy holding a phone to his ear, like what? Because no one talks like that. That's not natural. So you can check that out on the marketing blog. But just make things a little bit different, make them stand out and that's where you'll be successful.

Huge segue. If the only thing you learn from this presentation is you don't have regular stock photos and you go to one of those special stock photo places, which are all free by the way, and put those in your blog article, it will be a huge success.

Last step is the post is published. And again, this is not the end of the journey. This is just the beginning. So as Dan said earlier, we're both very performance driven salespeople. You're always used to working to a number. Marketers you are as well. But sometimes marketing can be a little bit fuzzy. And I think one of the biggest things that marketers have done that's a disservice to ourselves is people think it's arts and crafts, people think it's, we craft a funny tweet and we write a blog post and that's it. And then we move on to the next thing. And that's not how you want to approach this. The thing with blogging is that it takes a while to get results. If you publish a post, we're really lucky that we have a big audience, we have a big list. And so we push a post out to our audience and we get a nice bump of traffic the first day, we get some traffic on the second day, the third day. But by the end of the first week, no new people are reading that post. So you gotta make sure it's optimized for search. You gotta make sure that you have other channels that you're working. And then you also have to make sure that you're following up, make sure you're checking results. A week, a month, three months, six months from now. Dan and I sit down every month and we go through all of our blog posts. We say, how many views do we have? What's trending up, what's trending down? And then we use that data to inform what we Write about next. Because it's great to write a 1200 word article. It's great to make that your magnum opus. But unless people read it, who cares? It's a waste of your time. So you've got to follow up and measure everything and then double down on the efforts that are actually getting you results.

When you're talking to salespeople, understanding that they want more qualified leads is a way for you to draw them in. What Leslie is really good at is, first of all, looking at all those statistics. And so that didn't perform particularly well. That didn't perform particularly well. That one was great. She categorizes them in ways that the blog article is either instructional or a thought piece or a follow up or a list post. And she has them ranked based on these categories so that you can see the direct kind of correlation between customers and leads and the type of blog articles. Right? And so when you get down to that level, it's like eye opening, right? It's like when I realized that I could move from like closing people one on one to all the way to creating all these customers at the top of the funnel. You really see the scalability of sales and marketing alignment and the whole kind of inbound kind of thing. So, CEOs, the reason why you're going to invest in this type of approach is because we know that it works, we know that it's scalable, and we know that your salespeople who spend more time at the top of the funnel helping people solve their problems even before they become customers, is a great business strategy.

So that's our process. Here's what you guys can do to implement this at your own companies as well. So the first step, that first email, that first meeting that Dan and I had, I treated it like a discovery call. So who here has made a discovery call before? Great. And what is the fastest way to ruin a discovery call? You get on, you say, hi, this is Dan from HubSpot. We have an amazing sales and marketing platform that can help you double your number of inbound leads. Do you think you'd want to buy that? It's priced this way. And your prospect's like, no. And he hangs up. And what you want to do in a discovery call, the way you do a successful one, is you have to see if there's a fit. You have to understand what the other person cares about, what they want to achieve. And you have to understand whether that problem is something that you can help with. And if you can't help, you say, I'm sorry, I don't think it's a good fit. Here are some resources that can help you. Great to meet you. Like, let's rap professionally and stay in touch. If it's a good fit, you can move on. You can say, would you like to learn a little bit more? But you don't make that pitch at the very beginning. You never go in with an assumption that you're going to hard sell this person because that's not what inbound is about.

Very good. I've had three meetings this morning with people who say, Dan, I'd love to have sales and market alignment, but salespeople won't play nice. So the tips that I give before the first discovery call is number one. Try to find somebody in your sales organization that is above quota, preferably is like the sales leader. Right. Who is a little bit forward thinking, who would like this presentation, who would want and appreciate a new way or a transformational way of generating more leads. They may be skew a little bit younger. Right. They may be innovative in trying new techniques, but they're willing to work with you through the process that Leslie and I talked about where you can kind of get your groove together. And if you could find that one thought leader, it's like a beachhead. When you're going into the sales organization, what we really want you to do is to have a line of salespeople out your door saying, I want a block, I want a block, I want a block. And we'll show you how you get. But you got to start with baby steps. You have to find one person who will work with you that will help share this content, who will help develop the content and will help push it out.

Exactly. So before you set up that first meeting and before you go into any subsequent meeting with this person, do a little bit of research. Go on LinkedIn. I went on LinkedIn and saw that Dan has been to President's club consistently. He's been the number one rep for a lot of years at HubSpot. He knows what he's doing. If I had reached out to someone who was still ramping up, that would have been terrible. That would have been such a huge ask on someone who was already learning so much. I knew that Dan was established. I knew he was already successful. And so he probably had a little bit of extra room to help out. What I also knew was that I talked to some people and they told me what he was interested in. They told me he went around the country and spoke. They told me that he was the inbound evangelist, they told me that he really, really cared about this cause. And so I had that background information that I came to this meeting armed with and I said, dan, listen, I know that you care about this, but right now I see you selling and you're speaking. How about we do something a little bit closer to home? It's a little bit in the middle of those two opportunities. Let's work together and see what you can do at home at HubSpot. And so understand a little bit what this person cares about. What are they known for? What are they really, really, really good at in the sales process? Do they have a special skill? Are they teaching people how to do one specific thing? Hone in on that and figure out what makes them unique and that's what you want to bring to that first meeting.

Super smart. So Leslie would zero in on a particular skill and would try to kind of evoke whatever the person she was talking to was. Their kind of special sauce that we talk about that plus the organization. Remember, we would walk into these meetings and boom, boom, boom. We'd know what we were talking about, we understand how we transcribe it, we'd understand what the number of blog posts that we needed to produce over that time period. And we understood a little bit about how to work together. So it became a lot easier over time.

Exactly. During the meeting, make sure that you're being realistic. The first thing that Dan and I did was set that 30 minute meeting every week. And the fastest way for us to have destroyed our trust was if I didn't get back blog posts to him on time or he didn't show up. And so we definitely wanted to set an expectation during the meeting. I said, what does your schedule look like? He asked me what mine looked like. Set those expectations and be realistic. If you can only meet once a quarter, that's fine. If you can meet twice a week, that's great. But you want to be. You don't want to make any false promises. You don't want to say, I'm going to do this and then not do it, because that is the fastest way to ruin your reputation internally. You all know this. You don't want to make a false promise to a prospect. You don't want to tell them something that you can't do, that you actually can. So just be realistic and, you know, be organized. The other thing to do during the meeting is just to make sure that whoever's initiating the meeting brings some ideas to the table. You know, provide an agenda, provide some ideas. Don't just come in and say, okay, what do you want to do? Because you've invited that other person to the table, you shouldn't expect them to do the work for you. Do a little bit of preparation, do a little bit of planning. And that's going to go so far in just solidifying the trust and the credibility that you have with that person.

One of the things we found is that when you say the word blogging, people's face twists, especially salespeople. Like they smell a ruptured septic tank in the middle of August, right? They just get that ethereal kind of thing. So call it something else. Call it just discussion, call it just talking, just talk. Just show up and have a conversation, right? You have to kind of soothe that out. And then following that conversation, depending on whether you're just brainstorming or you're getting down into a specific kind of, kind of routine of what you're going to talk about, digging into the subject matter. The whole idea is putting the salespeople at ease. You're only asking for 30 minutes of their time and making sure that it's a good productive use.

After the meeting, follow up, talk to each other. Be honest and be open. Like I said before, it took us three to six months to really get a process down that worked for both of us. Like, I didn't send agendas in the beginning. We would just come in and we would just, you know, we would riff. We'd spend 10 minutes catching up, talking about life. Then we'd spend 20 minutes, you know, Dan would do a monologue on the topic, and then I'd go back and write it. And it wasn't the most organized for me, and I didn't really know what I could do to make it better. And Dan said, listen, why don't we do this? We have our topic brainstorm every month. You're already prioritizing your titles. I was telling him, you know, the top five or ten that I wanted to do. And I said I would say think about all of these and we'll just pick one every week at random. That was terrible. That wasn't organized. It didn't work. And Dan told me. And because he told me earlier rather than later, he would, you know, we had an opportunity to fix it. And so he wasn't just like, silently dissatisfied with the way things were going and just like eventually ghosting on me and having this relationship end. He told me right away. And I told him, you know, Dan, I need edits, but back within X amount of Time. And when I wouldn't set a deadline, sometimes I get them back in a day, sometimes I get them back in a month. And we really just had to be open with each other and say, this isn't working for me. This is. So follow up and be diligent about keeping track of a process and trying to make these first initial meetings into a consistent, repeatable process.

Very good. Go to the next slide.

All right, so the slide that's after this one is something that we're super, super, super excited about. That slide. It's the reason we're all here at Inbound, right? We want to do work that pulls people to us, that makes people interested in our product, and we want people to listen to what we're saying. Otherwise, you're just, like, screaming out into the ether. And so we've basically put up a slide. This is what our results are for. One of our most popular blog posts. Unfortunately, we can't release, like, actual numbers, but this is the upper level.

Take a picture of that. Take a picture of that. That's what everybody wants.

This is one hour of work that we did in June 2015. As you can see, it's solidly up and to the right. Those are different sources of traffic or process or customers. We can't really say because legal will kill us. But as you can see, there's that first initial dip. It did pretty well in June. It goes down in July. It does okay in August. And then things really start kicking in. It really starts climbing up. This is the business case for inbound sales. This is why you have to talk to the people who are doing the work every day. That'll get you information on what prospects care about and what they want to learn.

Irrefutable proof right here. Okay? Everybody wants that chart. Salespeople want that chart. If this was leads, CEOs, CFOs want this chart. If it was customers, right? And that's the power of Inbound, right? Making your website the most powerful salesperson for your whole company. Right? And then publishing content is now an essential part of the sales and marketing process for good results. All right, so people like that. People want to do that.

Oh.

Oh, yeah. Nicely done, girl. All right, so you went backwards.

Oh, I did.

That was a mistake.

All right, so you guys ready for the breakfast sandwich challenge? This is a Dan Tire classic.

Let's go. Who likes breakfast sandwiches? Okay, Everyone wants breakfast sandwiches. We should have had that as, like, an incentive, right? If you write a blog article, it'll give you a breakfast sandwich. All Right? So I do a lot of public speaking. I go out all over the world. I say, all right, salespeople, you need to get involved with marketing content, right? And I tell you what, you go out and cold call for an hour, and I'll take an hour and do some content creation, and we'll compare. And if you can outsell me with one hour of blogging versus one hour of cold calling, I'll buy your breakfast. And then we laugh and we go, that doesn't seem fair. I'll tell you what, I'll give you 10 hours of cold calling, and I'll take one hour of schmarketing and blogging, and we'll see who gets better results. I go, ah, that's not fair. I'll tell you what, I'll give you 100 hours, two and a half weeks of getting on the phone, talking to people who will hate you that you will get very little results from, because we can prove 1.87%. And I'll spend one hour with Leslie, and that's the results we get. And if you can beat me and you can prove it, I'll buy you a breakfast sandwich. So I want you to offer that to your salespeople. I'll provide the breakfast sandwich. I'll send the $3.14 at the Iowa or New York or wherever it is. But we need to get salespeople who are involved in the marketing process, and Leslie and I are complicit in anything we could do to help. Right? We started with inbound marketing. You guys all embraced it. Now we're moving in inbound sales. That's part of the inbound revolution. Sch marketing works. And anything we could do to help you, you let us know.

Thank you guys so much for coming. I don't need Trump professionals like that.