INBOUND 2016: Nick Salvatoriello "Chaos Under Control: How To Organize a Messy Contacts Database"

I want to start by thanking all of my fellow team members at Innovative Marketing Resources, our agency who helped make this presentation happen for you all today. They were part of, they helped make the stories happen that you're going to hear. They helped pull the slides together that you're going to watch. So thank you guys very much. Couldn't have done it without you. So this is grow with HubSpot. So. So I'd like us to do a little survey and find out how many folks here are HubSpot Marketing customers. You have a paid subscription to the HubSpot Marketing product. Wow, look around. That's a good portion of the room here today. Awesome. That's fantastic. Oh, did not mean to do that. So for the folks who are not HubSpot customers yet, this is such a huge topic we're gonna try to cover today. We're not gonna go deeply into other CRMs or working deeply with Sam. This is as it says in the title, this is for marketers working with a marketing database. But there will be screenshots of HubSpot so I hope you check it out. And I believe that a lot of the principles and the playbooks and the stories we'll be sharing are broadly applicable to any database that you maintain for marketing, wherever that is. So let me just say by way of introduction who I am, where I'm coming from. My name is Nick Salvatoriello. As Stacy said, I just go by Nick sales. I've been Hubspotting using HubSpot for over 5 years and my biggest claim to fame as a HubSpot employee was I was the person that was the person you heard when you called 888HUBSPOT. And thank you for using HubSpot. If it sounds familiar, that was me. Now I wasn't hired for that of course, that would have been cool. I actually was hired to do implementations onboarding. I onboarded over 200 organizations to get started and up and running with HubSpot and their marketing later. A couple years later I moved on up to teach at the group level at HubSpot Academy. So I ran HubSpot's training for the Landing page tool, converting visitors into contacts and then I run the class for the list tool and then the contact database tool. My latest challenge I've stepped up to is I just finished my first year leading one of HubSpot's elite platinum partners, Innovative Marketing Resources where I've gotten to work hands on with a select group of customers deeply with their marketing tactics and with their contact databases over Long periods of time. I tell you all this not to try to impress you, but simply just to impress upon you that I understand where we're coming from in this issue. This has been a big issue for many, many years. We're not going to solve it or address everything in just one session. But I hope that some of the greatest hits and the highlights that I've assembled for you here today from our work over the last couple years will inspire you to make a change and move on to where you need to be. So it's just the start of the conversation. I hope we keep in touch and we can continue it after our session today. Okay, so that's where I'm coming from. That's why I'm here. Let's talk about you, why you're probably here. Let's do another poll here. How many folks here are from an organization where you have at least 1,000 contacts in your marketing database? A thousand email addresses you could send emails to. Great, keep your hands in the air. Now if you have over 10,000 contacts. Over 10,000 contacts. Great. Keep it in the air. If it's over 100,000 contacts. All right, we're starting to see some of the leaders here. What if it's over 500,000 contacts? Anybody with that? Over a million contacts. All right, but check out these two right here. Let's hear for the folks. Over a million contacts in their database right here. That's fantastic. HubSpot had something like over 3 million contacts when I transitioned out to this agency. So that's for those folks who have been working on this, whether it's 1,000 or 100,000 as you're moving through this. Why you're probably here is because when you log into your HubSpot and you look at your lists, you probably cry to yourself a little bit. You know, you probably say a four letter swear word under your breath and you try to look for an excuse to log out and move on and find something else to do as quickly as possible. Why? Because it's a jungle in there, right? There's duplicate contact properties and duplicate contacts and lists from campaigns and imports you weren't even here for. And it's frustrating. And we've heard this from customers for many, many a year. And we came up with this talk here to tell you that that's not the problem. That's actually a great thing if you have a plan and if you can get some help. So thank you for coming today. The original plan was for me to write in with the cats and everything Just didn't work out last minute. But we're here to tell you that's a good thing. If you have a messy contact database, that's a sign of action, that's a sign of activity, that you've been doing something. It's certainly a lot better than the opposite, right. To have nothing going on. Crickets. And HubSpot's database over the years was very, very busy and very disorganized, and they had to do a couple of sort of rehash and stuff. Stacy knows what I'm talking about, right? So that's a good thing if you have a plan. So for those veterans here in the room, you know, HubSpot's put out research that inbound marketers who have more landing pages on their site convert more of their visitors into contacts into leads. And it should follow then that inbound marketers with those contacts, with those leads have a greater opportunity to close those contacts into customers, more money. That's good. But you got to have an organized, optimized database. It can't just be a mess in there without you paying any attention and not making anything happen. So that's really what we believe here today, that databases that are optimized for inbound marketing is one where every contact is valued and qualified. Those are two very important words. What do we mean? Look, as inbound marketers, we have to treat those contacts as real people, because in most cases, they are. You know, they've got. They have real. Their attention is valuable and precious, just like your own is. And we need to understand what they value. And further, we need to understand the value that they're going to bring to us. Because one of the lessons I learned firsthand in those heady days of HubSpot's pre IPO growth is that Mike Volpe and his marketing team figured out that every contact in your database has value. You just need to figure out what that value is. And HubSpot realized that those contacts, even if they weren't a great fit for our business, were still people who could evangelize the brand, that could share out the contact with other potential prospects. And actually, they don't talk about this that much. But when you have a large database of contacts paying attention to you in your industry, you attract other companies potentially much larger than you, like HubSpot did, who come calling saying, hey, I'd love to talk to some of those people, and I've got a list of contacts that you might like to talk to. Let's share lists. And that started a spiraling Exponential growth through co marketing because you have some currency, you have people's attention. So that's value. We've got to respect and value these people's time and attention. We don't just spam people and blow them out. And we don't just delete people willy nilly and cut them off either. We have to understand these are real potential relationships. If we can harness them, that's value. Now what about qualified? What do I mean? There is. We gotta qualify every contact, there's a place for every contact and there's a next step that they can take that we have to put in front of them and create some campaigns to move them through their own particular funnel for that. And working with hundreds of customers over the years, I don't care how many lists they had or what they called them or what the segments were generally, folks, your contacts are gonna fall into five buckets. The biggest one is fans. These are people who are just showing interest in you, in your brand. They opted in, gave you their email address, they downloaded an ebook or something like that. And their purpose is to have them be, hopefully, if they haven't been already, to subscribe, like comment and share your content with potentially other prospects or other potential fans. This should be one of the biggest buckets in our database as inbound marketers. Just people being interested. Did you know that if you look at HubSpot, what do they have? 25,000 customers now and they have over 300,000 blog subscribers. Their funnel looks like this. Everybody's psyched about how that's going, right? So this is going to be an exponentially larger group of people. This is not a problem. You got to have steps for them though. Leads obviously is a bucket that's in there and those are folks who are a good fit. They maybe have some interest, maybe they don't, but they at least are a good fit. They match up with our buyer Persona. And those are folks we've got to talk to right now. We've got to nurture them, we've got to score, prioritize them, get them to our sales team, engage them right away. And this bucket actually might be technically kind of small because you're working it so often. And the sales team's either saying that they're not going to potentially buy and they go into the fan bucket at least, or perhaps to this next bucket, which should be in your database, called your customers. And this is a very important list to have in every single HubSpot because these are folks who are qualified to be upsold. Cross sold. To post a review on your site if they haven't, to potentially co author a case study with you. That's their funnel. And eventually to refer new business to you. Do you have a funnel for that? Do you have a next step that you're working on and a campaign for that? Now some of you, as you're hearing me talking about this, you realize I don't even have my customers in my HubSpot database. How's HubSpot supposed to know if that next contact who comes onto your site is a customer or not? Are we going to nurture them like a lead? That would be awkward. All right. Now of course, yes, there is a small percentage of every user's database that has this other group. And these are the churned contacts, right? They've unsubscribed, they've opted out, bad data, a hard bounced email address. And these are folks their next step. They're qualified to be suppressed at a future mailings. That's a law in the United States and Canada and other places. You have to keep them in there to suppress them. Some of those folks you might want to cleanse, clean it up a little bit. Maybe it's just a bad spelling error or something like that. And then potentially you could remove them. And folks, if you've got these other buckets going on these other funnels going, we are all about you removing some of these contacts and maybe saving some money on your tiers. But you can't do that if you're not paying attention and you don't have these other funnels going and then qualified. Otherwise you could be potentially deleting customers and leads or fans who can work for you and help you sell. So then there's this final bucket, right? And this is the catch all the chaotic contact bucket. And I dub it that because it's basically those contacts which are devoid of any order or organization whatsoever, right? And these folks are not the people where you go, well I haven't emailed them in a year, you know, and if I don't delete them, HubSpot's gonna charge me a bunch of money. So this is my deletion list. No, no, that is not what you do with these chaotic contacts of yours. These are the folks that are prime for engagement. We've got to re engage these folks, find out what's going on, we've got to organize them, we've got to attack this list, requalify them for the other real buckets and reduce this list as much as possible so that it may never return again. So that's the picture I'm trying to paint for you of where success can be in an optimized inbound database. Folks, would you like to hear how some of your fellow customers are getting this done? Thank you. I heard the last group was pretty quiet. Great, here we go then. Here's our roadmap for getting you there. The program that we've seen works generally goes in this order. We need to clean up the lists and the contact properties. Prepare the ground a little bit, okay? Remove as many of the extraneous random contact variables and list variables that are out there. Then once you have a little bit less, more reliable, stable contacts and lists to work with, now you can score your contacts after you've scored them and found out which ones are qualified for follow up. Now you can start to create campaigns to re engage those contacts. Depending on how they score, maybe it's high touch, medium touch, low touch, depending on that score. Then step four, not step one. Step four is you can relinquish contacts at the right time because you've done the other steps of preparation. Next up, you need to set up systems to prevent chaos. Lock it down, keep it under control, and then the final step, which I hope we'll all take after today, which is to execute an action plan and access a resource kit we have waiting for you. So folks, part of that resource kit is a complete copy of this presentation, a recording of this presentation, an appendix with examples and templates, and everything I'm about to show you today. So we're going to go fast. And if you want to just focus on listening, taking it in, you can do that without a risk of falling behind or missing anything. Okay, so let's get into it. Chapter one. Clean up those chaotic lists and properties. What's the situation? I want to quote my colleague Gabriella Antunas, another former hubspotter who works with me at imr. And she says that the situation is most customers come to us with lists that have little organization or any label methods. So it's really hard for those customers to know where to start, where to begin when they log into HubSpot. And so nothing really gets done. I also want to quote my business partner, co founder Kevin Jorgensen, who's also our systems integration resident data head, and he said the number one warning sign for him are redundant contact properties. I was talking to an audience member where it's, you know, they have state as a field and then mailing state and other things like that. It's a sign that we haven't established a hierarchy as to what data fields we're actually going to focus on. There's multiple systems we're not being controlling that are pulling in different sort of fields and so on. And it can lead to a lot of problems. Now, before we get into how to solve this problem, I do want to stop and just say, if you haven't done this already, you must complete some buyer Persona research that you can base some of your strategy on here. This is sort of fundamental, foundational, inbound 101 type stuff. So we're a little bit further along in our topic here today. But I do want to remind you to do this because it's going to be very important to your strategy. And let me show you an example of why that is. I do want to point out the folks at Care at Work, their division of care.com and care@ Work provides employers with a platform for their employees to find care for their family caregivers. And even though they've been a customer for a couple of years, the marketing team that had come on was fairly new. And what they had discovered is that there was really no clear Persona profile in place that everyone could rely upon and agree upon to guide what contact data and list segments really mattered for their tracking purposes in their marketing and with HubSpot. So what the leader of that organization did is she hit the ground running and talked to sales and said, let's identify some ideal customers of ours who represent our Persona. Let's identify some ideal prospects that represent our Persona. Let's go talk to them, find out the demographics of who they are, ask them what they value, what their interests are, and then let's put together a profile that we can use as a common platform for discussion about what we're going to track and what's really not important to track at the moment. So that was very, very powerful and gave her a lot of buy in. So Heidi Erdman, who's in the audience today, said that if you don't provide your sales team with insights like this, you're not going to have that credibility in the conversation for asking them to reduce the amount of and to standardize the data that's being passed back and forth between your two teams, maybe perhaps from a CRM. And this gave them massive credibility. And it was a common platform for discussion. It's not what we at marketing think is important. It's not what sales think is important. It's the people who we said were our ideal Persona. It's what they said was important to track about them. Very, very powerful. So you gotta have that Persona in place. So now let's talk about your first objective. Cleaning up your contacts and lists and you have your Persona to reference. You've got buy in from the team. This is just a list of some quick wins here for cleaning up your lists. Maybe you've done some of these things, maybe you haven't, but one of the easiest things you can do is organize those various lists and into folders in HubSpot. That feature's been out for a couple of years and we still aren't using it all consistently. Another thing you can do is delete auto generated lists from imports. If you ever import a list into HubSpot, it leaves a little static list. That's where some of the bloat's coming from. If you look at those names and you go, I don't recognize what this import is. You could flag that for follow up and probably put it in a folder. The rest of them, you probably don't need them. The contacts don't go away if you delete the list. So reduce as many as you can, is what I'm saying, and adapt a specific consistent naming system. This was a big thing that HubSpot worked on because there were so many departments and people touching this thing. You got to come up with some consistent labeling mechanisms as specific as possible. And then finally delete any unused lists that you can because it takes a moment to create them new ones that you need. You want to reduce as many as you can and you can already tell when you look inside the list tool. Now it's very nice that they can show you if it's already being used in a workflow or in an email or something like that. So you don't have to risk breaking anything if you don't see that the lists are being used in those ways. That's just a quick win. And here's a case study of one of your fellow customers who did this. It was a private boarding school and their issue is they had 72 different lists in their database with no real organization method. And this marketer, it was very challenging for her to get in there and figure out where to go for certain events and lists that she wanted to pull. So we talked with her about the common categories that she was looking for. When she went in there, spent an afternoon, just organized those lists into folders. And it was such a relief for her to have someone just get that going. And it didn't take long to do. And of course she's Going to trim down those folders a little bit further on it. But I just want to point out to you it's easy to do, it's a quick win for you to do if you haven't done it already. I wanted to start easy with you some things. Now let's move over to the contact properties. What are you gonna do to clean those up? You can dedupe contact properties once again. If I have State mailing state Role, role one, role master, get with sales. Look at the Persona and use that as a way to break the tie and say this is what we're going to track. And these other two we can still keep on the CRM, I suppose, but these are the ones we're going to keep in HubSpot and track in HubSpot. This is a huge one move single line text fields, the ones where people can type anything they want in the form, including spelling errors. You know, you type, you ask for state, somebody writes ma, somebody writes Massachusetts, somebody misspells it. So if you give them standard drop downs, it's less thinking for them. They'll thank you for that. And it's actually more reliable, a limited set of criteria for you to segment on. So I'll give you an example of also Care at Work, who pulled this off. There was a bright young marketer on this team who came onto the scene and saw that Care at work had over 5,805 different titles for people's roles in their database. Can you imagine that? If you see this list, folks, it's fascinating. It ranges from second vice president, total rewards to zoologist because they target a broad range of decision makers in the HR industry and the IT industry. So what they did is just what I said. They adopted a role and job function dropdown and they added it to all their forms. Now those are standardized, reliable criteria that they can use for not just segmenting smarter emails based on that, but actually smarter reporting as well. So I'm not showing you examples, folks, of people who've just gone over the mountain. They're working on this right now. There's a lot of excitement of this right now. And Jessica Marble, who was really who championed this thing, Jessica's right here in the audience. She can give us a wave. There's Jess, all right. She did a little wave, fair enough. But she's so excited because now when she moves into lead scoring, it's going to make it foolproof because before they couldn't capture all the job titles, all the criteria, they were still missing certain leads. This really Helps standardize it and break it down a little bit. Okay. And when she explained this to her boss, Heidi, she was a little bit hesitant at first. Like maybe some of you folks are, you're afraid maybe your boss might be. But Heidi, I love this quote she said on a call was at some point you've got to decide what's really important to track in terms of your data. And you're going to have to make a decision and focus and let some things go. At least on the marketing side to have more reliable data and long term success. Just like we and our businesses need to focus on our niche, your marketing still, you need to focus on a few key pieces and kind of pick an information or data niche in your own tracking as well. So that's step one. We've reduced as many lists as we can. We have standardized and reduced some of the contact properties. A lot less going on in there. Now it's time to move on to chapter two where we can start uncovering some hidden gems in there using scoring, which will be more reliable with less variables. What's the situation going on right now with scoring? I want to quote Dan Fisher who's the owner of the Manemcha Group. He's one of our clients. And this guy's a one man army. He does all the blogging, all the marketing, all the selling himself. And he's actually quite successful at it, believe it or not. He's got a ton of fans, he's got a lot of followers and some good leads in there. The problem is with Dan is he's all over the place. He's got a lot going on and he didn't know which of these contacts he should prioritize first for some sales follow up. Maybe you folks can relate. And he wanted a lead scoring mechanism to help him prioritize who to call. And that's a perfect application by the way, for scoring to simply help sales prioritize who to call, not who's going to be a lay down and definitely buy on the first touch, but at least who to prioritize to focus on. So what did we do with Dan? The database of contacts with no prioritization strategy. We worked with them and we came up with a scoring mechanism that actually uncovered 42 highly qualified sales leads for him to follow up with. He's able to get right to work right away. So that's what's been happening. That's his solution. It can be done. How can we now follow in Dan's footsteps and implement lead scoring, aka HubSpot score because it's not always just for leads right inside HubSpot. Basically, I want to break this down into three phases. One's going to be an interview phase, a discussion and sort of buy in and strategy phase. Second is a worksheet phase. Gonna kinda test it all out, put it in a nice sheet here, make sure we all agree. And then the third phase is actually implementing it and setting it up, testing it out in HubSpot. Oh, excuse me. And that and getting some workflows and the notifications triggered and set up. Let's break that down a little bit. So the first thing is you wanna have an initial discussion with sales. And this will be very important if you have large teams or dispersed teams, get everyone bought into what we're trying to do here. The buyer Persona profile again will really help get them thinking about what are those priorities of right fit. And they may or may they would probably know that, but they maybe hadn't thought about which are more weighted than the others. And they certainly have not thought deeply about the behavioral pieces. Activity on the website, certain website pages, email activity. You want to prepare the ground a little bit, get them thinking about that. Next up we can then use a worksheet. We like to use a worksheet because it's less intimidating for folks. Most folks are pretty comfortable working in Excel today. And you can start playing with the numbers a little bit and having discussions about where the values start to add up. Now I want to point out that there is a URL. We've been promoting it at the bottom the entire time. We'll make sure that you get it. You can download this whole thing, but this is what it looks like. Basically this is just what we made. And you can make something different if you want. We'll give you ours certainly at the end of the session. But for your eyes, what we have in there is two things. What makes someone a good fit? And then what are the traits of the behaviors that indicate interest. And I'm sorry, there's no magical formula for lead scoring that's going to work for every single organization. But what I would say that we focused on is the fit criteria from a sales perspective should certainly be heavier weighted than the behavior criteria because we can have someone very, very interested in our company, just like we have folks interested in HubSpot. But they might not be a good fit. So it's not going to help to prioritize them for sales. So you want to at least make sure that fit gets them to a certain threshold that you need and then behavior interest is that booster that hits them up to the top of the list perhaps. So now we need to get it going in HubSpot. First thing you got to do, start putting it into the HubSpot scoring tool and then you have a discussion about setting up lifecycle stages. And I'll just focus on two here. One is MQL Marketing qualified lead. I would assume if somebody has all the right traits to be a fit for what we do and buying what we sell. Those are folks who are qualified to be marketed to about what we sell and what we do. Sales qualified leads are those folks who are a good fit and also have shown that they're interested right now. And that's why sales needs to follow up. Free resources to help you get this done. Once again, we're going to give you all the things I just described along with some additional resources at Bit Lynch Contact Chaos. All right, we've cleaned up the database, we've scored our contacts, we're ready for follow up. What do we do to engage the rest of these folks now that we've scored them? This is the third chapter re engage the rest of this chaotic contact list. Here's the situation. I want to quote Ross Simons, another one of my colleagues who is actually the lead scoring project was his brainchild. He's a sharp young marketer, thinks about this all the time. He says the majority of the customers coming to us aren't keeping in touch with their contacts. It's pretty quiet in there. Perhaps you can relate. So there just wasn't anything going on. So it's total chaos when you think about what to do next with these contacts. So what we've done to solve this and what we've seen works is I want to quote this customer from the transportation logistics industry. And folks, I'm showing you multiple examples because I want you to see that it doesn't matter what industry you're in, whether you're a big team or you're a small team, these principles work for every organization. What this logistics company had is they'd at least gotten as far as they got some automated emails going, right? They got those workflows going. That's kind of par for the course in workflow land, right? You get a few emails going out across a few weeks. What about after that? Crickets. So what they did is they put a focus on sending targeted segmented emails whenever they had a new content offer that came out. Helpful educational content. If you're being a good inbound marketer, you're Pumping that out at least once a quarter and then they would send that out to their list with a slightly different message and an introduction depending on the segment and how they scored. And just by doing this, folks, their campaigns, 15% of those folks who opened ended up clicking through. And then 35% of those folks who clicked through ended up submitting on the form to get the offer, increasing their lead score and their interest and also giving us more data about if they were a good fit or not. So this can be done. This is a simple way to get it done. Let's talk about now. Following in their footsteps, creating a campaign to re engage this chaotic contact list in HubSpot. How do we do it again? Three stages to getting this done. One is segment strategy and launch. So first segment, we gotta get these folks broken down as much as we can into about three categories. People with high potential, high touch, medium potential, medium touch, low potential, low touch. What do you do with the high score folks? Those ones with high potential, we don't automate them. We don't put them in another workflow. We pick up the phone or send them a direct email one to one and try to get a conversation going. You want to offer them something like yes, a bottom of the funnel offer free assessment or something like that, or a very valuable offer. Maybe you get creative and do a direct mail piece. The point is these folks, it's not automation, HubSpot time, it's time to get in connection with them right now. What about the medium score folks? Well, those are your classic inbound leads and you want to send them targeted, thoughtful emails from HubSpot until you get a little bit more information about them to see if they're prioritized for people you're going to call or email creatively that day. Like the high score folks. What about the low score folks? Well, you want to be careful here. I wouldn't push these folks approach that I've heard and seen work pretty well is you play curious. Tell us more about you. We haven't been in touch in a while. Have you been moving on, moving up, moving out? You still at the same organization? Are you still interested in what we have to offer? Give them something really low commitment like your top blog post. You don't have to fill out a form. Just want to see if you're live and kicking over there or what. What's happening? So the cta and this is also nice. Ask them to share feedback. Hey, what would you like to hear from us? What are you actually interested in getting help on that's going to work. And at the very least, folks, you're going to find out if these chaotic contacts are actually fans of your business because you bothered to reach out. So those are three ways to do it. Next up is strategy. We're recommending two assets that you complete here. One is an email campaign brief. Because you may want to send multiple emails in this campaign. You're going to talk about who is this campaign for, what are their pain points, how this brief's going to help them get it done. And second of all is the email purpose map the individual emails that will be part of that campaign. What's the specific value proposition for every campaign piece? Folks, could you send multiple emails to your list without doing this part? Yes. But what this will force you to do by writing out just a few sentences in each area is to make sure that you're valuing these people as real contacts, valuing folks as real people, real contacts valuing their time. It's also going to help you justify to other team members or hires up why you did what you did and how you did what you did so that when the results come in, you can show them that you had a strategic plan or maybe they even sign off on these things. Now that stress and that reticence is going to go away. Third part, pretty straightforward for the Hubspotters in the room, right? You're going to build the assets in HubSpot, set up the lists, set up the campaigns and launch them. And there's plenty of sessions here at the conference today and plenty of classes and projects from HubSpot Academy to help you get this done. But you want to send this out. This is an example of that lower score blog email. And the point, folks, is not to hit it out of the park, but just to find out if these folks are interested in being in one of those other buckets. Whether they're going to churn or they're going to be a lead or they're going to be a fan, we're getting somewhere. All right, Free resources to help you get this done. Everything I just described here, these are the tools that we have been using to run these campaigns for customers just like you, available at the end of the session. So we've done these things, we've organized the ground a little bit, we've scored our contacts, we've done the right types of engagement to match where they're at. And what do we do about everybody else, the folks who just didn't come through on these campaigns? That's what we want to talk about next. This might be the time to relinquish those unengaged contacts to the ether from whence they came. So I want to quote Jesse Hartman from the Wellness Institute. These guys are awesome. Love working with Jesse. They originally, when they got started with HubSpot, had just purchased a lot of lists like you folks have never done, right? And actually they ignored those lists because it didn't really work. And they actually did a bunch of inbound marketing. They were getting very successful generating contacts through their blog and other traditional inbound methods. And what happened was is the contract renewal was coming up and they were blowing out their contact here with all these extra purchase contacts. So they came to us saying, what do I do? How do we actually responsibly delete these contacts without losing any potential? So that's the situation. What did they do? We worked with them over the course of a couple different meetings, back and forth and came up with some deletion Criteria that got 29,000 contacts out of their database, save them about $250 in their HubSpot license costs so that Jesse could send an email like this. And I'm sorry, from the lighting, it's not very clear to see, but he basically says, hi Ross, I hereby grant you permission to delete all 29,000 folks that have no financial value worth holding onto. Thanks and have a great weekend. That's a great email to send, right? That's a great email for us to receive. Jesse felt great doing it. How did he actually get it done? How can we also build our own deletion list in HubSpot we can feel confident removing. I want to warn you, please again, do not delete any contacts out of your database just to save a couple bucks on a contract. If you're not sure that there are any contacts that couldn't bring you a superior value as a fan or as a lead or potential even as one of your customers. Got to be very careful here on this topic. So the first thing they did was they put their criteria. This is a screenshot of building the criteria in a list in HubSpot. And what this is are a bunch of people who have no site visits and according to their sales process and how often they communicated. These were people who hadn't viewed the website in more than 26 weeks. They had not opened more than one email. They had been emailing them thoughtful, segmented emails over the last three months and they were not a customer or a sales qualified lead. That's important, right? Because even those Folks sometimes can be just muting us out for whatever reason. So that was one group. If you met that criteria, you're getting sucked into that smart list. There was another set of criteria in that same list. We call these folks the can't emails. These are your classic churn folk. They previously hard bounced on any email send and they're not a customer SQL who just typed in their email wrong or wrong email or changed or something. These leads really aren't worth your time. They're not going to receive your emails. And then finally they have this other group here, semi finally I should say folks who are getting the emails but they're not opening. We all know that we get emails a lot and sometimes we just don't unsubscribe, but we're just muting them out through other tools, other ways or just can't bring yourself to unsubscribe yet. So that was another list of criteria. If, if they met that, they're getting sucked into the list as well. The final list of folks were people based on their source. Their original source was from a paid source or from an offline source. We all have stories of a lot of different imports from trade shows or you don't even remember where these leads came from. If they came from an offline or paid source and they hadn't viewed a single page and they promote their website pages in every single email and they weren't a customer or sales qualified lead. These were typically purchase leads with no behavior that indicated interest. They're going out as well. That's how they did it. Now folks, this is just what the Wellness Institute decided was a fit for them and how they sell and how they communicate. I admonish you. I mean, I advise you to please tweak those numbers and fit the criteria to your own unique situation. It likely will be different for you based on your sales cycle, how often you've been emailing, and where your leads came from. Free resources. To help you get this done, we published a complete list of the contact deletion template. 10 strategies for identifying unprofitable leads. Bit ly contact chaos. It's all yours. Now let's recap. We're almost done here. You were here because your contact database was out of control and if you didn't do something, your ROI was in serious jeopardy. After you follow the steps in this plan, you now have contacts that are all qualified for a next step activity that matches the bucket that they're in. Your database is filled with contacts that feel valued because you're regularly engaging with them and you're engaging them as fellow humans and thoughtfully. And your contact database will finally feel under control. But I gotta ask you, how long will this keep up? How soon until your anxiety returns? Will it be a year? 6 months? 3 months? How long until your database is out of control and in total chaos again? Are we gonna let this happen again? We just went through all this. I say never, never again. We're not gonna let this happen. We've worked too hard to get where we are right now. So how are we gonna do that permanently stop the chaos from returning? Important step. I quote Mark Greco, who's one of the first HubSpot employees and is IMR's contact manager. I'm sorry, account manager at HubSpot. And he just said the key to maintaining an optimized database is simple. Keep in touch with your contacts and keep your data clean. We're going to talk about those two aspects here. Here's a case study from Jesse and his team at the Wellness Institute. They had a bunch of great contacts they generated from inbound efforts, but they really didn't have an efficient system for keeping touch with them over time. And they didn't have any blog subscribers. Why is this happening? I mean, this is a constant drop ball, I think for us as customers. Customers is we didn't focus enough on getting these people to become real fans and subscribe to our content. So we just focused on the point of sale. Basically when people fill out a form to download something, we ask them, would you like to subscribe to our blog? You'll notice we do that on the form that you're going to fill out to get the resources at the end of today. And that shot his subscribers way up. Way up. And then we set up some automated workflows based on if those folks came back consistently to kind of move them up and see if they scored highly enough to be a fit as a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead. You see what we're doing here? Okay, so how can you do it? What are some ways you can ensure consistent ongoing communication? I just talked. Here's just some ideas. And again, there's plenty of academy training and other sessions you can take about how to do these in much more detail. But I want to list off some thoughts here. We already talked about number one with this case study. Second one is maybe do a newsletter in addition to the subscribers and you do something special I would say for your customers would be a great list to, to make sure you're taken care of. Do what the logistics company did and launch all your premium content offers to all of your contacts with a promotional email that puts it in context with each list that you're sending. And then finally, gently nurture your contacts with a slow drip of greatest hits. Anybody here using workflows? You got some workflows, three emails apiece. You can string those together, just change the wording around so they flow nicely. And now you got a nine email long workflow and that's worked really well. Here's one just for the advanced folks. You could set up automated emails that just wait for these contacts to show the right type of behavior and trigger a message about that, hey, I saw you were looking at a case study, saw you were checking out our features. And that way you can be sure that these contacts get communicated with at the right time. Free resources to help you here. I really just have one because I think it's so foundational. If you're not crushing it in this area. This is step one, 25 different ways you can increase the blog subscribers that you have to your blog. It's a really, really key killer way. It's a quick win. It's super exciting to see that number shoot right up. You gotta try it if you haven't done it yet. All right, now the second chapter is not nearly as fun, let's be honest, is perform regular house cleaning activities in your contact database. It's really important though. So number one, if you have a CRM, you want to go test that CRM integration. So chances are you prioritize those contact properties, you've reduced them, you worked it out with sales, which ones you're going to focus on. So now you need to go check and make sure that those contacts aren't going to go flying right back into your database. Right? You probably had this happen. You have the fields go flying right back into your database. Make sure the ones that marketing is not focusing on don't go in. Sales can keep whatever they want in the CRM. If they want specific, write out the titles and stuff, they can keep it there. But you want to make sure if you've got your database nice and clean and reliable for quality marketing, we don't have those same problems come surging back into your database. That's ugly. Next up is review the lead scoring. I'm not saying you're going to get it right on the first time. This is kind of intense and complex, this step, let's be honest. So you might want to check that and see if you want to up and Change the scores around a little bit, give certain behaviors a little bit more weight based on what the sales team has told you is working out for them or not and showing them people with great fit and also great interest. This next one we didn't have time really to talk about, but you could set up progressive profiling, which is a feature to actually add additional questions that automatically load up in your form as these contacts that you maintain communication with come back to your website and fill out the form, thus upping their score, helping you understand more about their fit and interests. These next two are scheduling things, but perform quarterly deduplication of contact properties in there, make sure that none of those extra properties are flowing in from the CRM. And and again, you maybe didn't get them all from the first try in step one. So you want to come back again maybe every quarter and remove a few more, remove a few more until you get down. You can have up to 1000 custom contact properties in HubSpot these days. Maybe it's more now. You know, it's going to probably take you time to do that. Chunk it out every quarter and then finally schedule a biannual list purge party. You know, get a glass of wine or a bottle of beer and go through there and go through your deletion criteria that you've set up and then remove some more contacts as well. You're going to be lean and mean and feel a lot more confident when you log into your database. You're not going to have that throw up in your mouth a little bit feeling when you think about logging into your database. You're going to be really proud of yourself because you've controlled the chaos and now you have an audience of people you can really engage and build quality relationships with. And they're going to be helping you out, they're going to be helping you sell, are going to be helping you get a promotion. So the last step is really simple to grab your seven step action plan, all the resources I talked about today and the resource kit, let's go over it again. You're going to clean up those unused contacts, you're going to de dupe those contact properties. You're going to complete the lead scoring worksheet, create re engagement campaigns. You're going to clear out those unprofitable leads, set up advanced email marketing and perform regular database house cleaning. And folks, this might take you, depending on the size of your team and your database, three days. This might take you three weeks, maybe it takes you three months. But what I recommend is if you're coming up for a contact tier upgrade with HubSpot is try to schedule this plan before, during and after the contact tier upgrade so you can see a surge of momentum and you can be sure of an roi. The free Resource Kit everything I've described to you that we could possibly share is available for you to click and download and get instant access to the last point. We'll email anybody who fills out the form a session to come have us come together again and hold each other accountable. Maybe we can ask some questions of each other if you want. It's just that simple. So remember folks, somewhere out there there's a contact unloved, uncared for like Molly here with no lists to call her home, no segment that she feels a part of and she's just waiting. Waiting for someone like you to email her to qualify her, to show her you care. Thank you very much folks for your time. Really appreciate it. Bitly contact chaos if you want to get the goods.