INBOUND 2016: Rachel Fernandes "HubSpot Partner Tools 101: Growing New Business to Client Retention"

Good morning, everybody. Apologies for my mismatched footwear. My team and my husband told me to break a leg, and so I did. I know, bad humor just to wake us up this morning. So I want to talk to you guys a little bit today about not just what my team does, but also how HubSpot product in general has really dedicated themselves this year to solving for partners. And I want to first show you a little slide of my team. If you haven't realized, they're all sitting in the back row. Say, hi, guys. So this year has been really exciting. We have doubled down efforts to really help partners manage their funnel from end to end, as well as continue to grow with HubSpot. So I want to talk to you about different ways in which the product platform in general has done this, as well as how we've done it specifically for you and build features out specifically for partners to one, generate leads, not just any lead, good quality leads. And two, be able to manage your clients better, be able to deliver success to those clients and really get value for yourself and those clients. And then lastly, of course, continue to grow as a partner with us. So let's get into the meat of it. Let's start with the top of the funnel. So generating leads. Now, when we did our research, we realized that what Brian Halligan was saying at the keynote the other day is definitely true. And it's especially true in the agency case. Customers are the new channel for leads. So we see above and beyond referrals are the highest source of leads for you agencies today. This is from the pricing and financial report HubSpot put out this year. And top three, you could see definitely there's a little bit of a trend. And the trend is it's word of mouth. And that's not surprising. You guys do great work. Your clients talk about it, we talk about it. Maybe you partner with each other. And so you have a lot of referrals coming in from these different sources, and that's great. And you want to continue to encourage that. But having that be the main source of your leads isn't potentially the most ideal scenario. And that's mainly because it's client driven. And so what does that mean? It means that you have less control over your sales process and you have less control over the future growth of your company. And in part, a lot of that reason is the clients may not necessarily be the best fit for you. The ones that are coming through these referrals, maybe they're too small, too big, maybe their budget's too low. Maybe they work in an industry you don't necessarily specialize in. What ends up happening is they're coming in and they're in that consideration phase, and you don't want to let them down. You're also trying to grow, so why not? And so you kind of shoehorn your client's services into trying to help this client out, and that's good for you, but I think it doesn't necessarily end in the best relationship you could have with the client going forward. I think, lastly, it's just not a consistent way to generate leads for you guys, and that's not what we want to see. We want you to be in control of the leads that are coming into your funnel, and we want you to be in control of the quality of those leads. So let's take a look at how HubSpot products in general is trying to help you do that. So we're trying to help supplement the efforts, not necessarily replace it by, of course, working on your website, by working on your social presence, your Internet presence, et cetera. So I'm going to keep this really high level. I don't know if John from Inbound Guru is in the room today, but he did a really great case study with us last year talking about how the marketing platform has really sort of transformed his agencies. That's definitely what we see with agencies coming in the door, becoming partners with us. So the fact that you can see the results of your marketing from start to finish is incredible knowledge. So what exactly does the marketing platform do for you? And again, I'm going to stick a little high level. Basically, it's helping you streamline your funnel, it's helping you take your marketing initiatives and actually be able to measure and track it so you can see which one's doing better than the other. For campaigns, for example, I think above and beyond, what it's doing for you is giving you the ability to define what your ideal buyer Persona is, create a strategy associated with it, and then use our powerful tools like social to be able to actually implement that strategy. And so what does that leave you with? Better quality leads, and you spend less time, less resources going after the wrong buyer Persona. And that essentially translates into future client success. You, you bring on the quality leads, it translates into better, more fruitful relationships going forward with your clients. And so I'm not going to harbor the fact too much. I'm not going to talk too much about the platform. You guys are here this week. There are so many talks going on about the different features and innovations that are happening within the marketing platform. The fact that now it's part of the full growth stack and we're going to continue to develop it as such. What I wanted to show you today is HubSpot product in general is dedicated to helping you market the HubSpot partner product team is dedicated to helping you market with HubSpot. Now, HubSpot, you know, we're pretty good at inbound. We have a decent brand. So how can we help you optimize on that? We trust you, you trust us, let's co market together. And so we wanted to give you the ability to take advantage of the HubSpot network and that's pretty huge. The inbound movement is huge and it's only growing. And so suppose there is an owner, Ollie, in Chicago. Maybe he's purchased the. Not purchased, it's free. Maybe he's downloaded the CRM and he's trying to figure out what to do next. He's not entirely sure. He didn't get an mba, so he's struggling a little bit and it's preventing him from going Forward from purchasing HubSpot, from trying to figure out marketing automation. So that's one side of the spectrum, but then there's the other side. And we see this over and over. There are people who are already HubSpot customers and maybe they're three months in. They didn't realize how hard it is. And it's kind of hard inbound. They didn't realize how long it would take. They don't have the resources internally to be able to manage it. And I want to do, I want to give you a little bit of a side note here. So product manager is what they expect us to do is network. So I've been to a couple of those VIP and some of those other parties that we've had with the partners and that's been great. But we also network internally. We build relationships. I chat with some of the other teams within HubSpot. We work things out together. Product is sort of a collaborative experience. But what I realized over the past year as a product manager for HubSpot is that stalking calendars and stalking Slack channels are also the best way to understand where the world is at. And so I do this with the agency service Slack channel. So this is where all your channel consultants are collaborating with each other, working on like, how can they further help you help your clients, et cetera. And what I realized is almost every day, at least three times a week, you would see someone outside of the team, maybe like a customer success. Manager who works with a direct customer go in and say something like this, hey, I have a customer. They're new, they're going to launch their product soon. They want to make a big bang on social. They have no idea how to do it. Do you have someone? Can you Recommend someone? So 6 months ago, when I was looking and doing the research, the ideal scenario would have been we send them to the partner directory and then they can self serve. But the reality was they didn't trust that. And what they really trusted was their internal knowledge. So they knew, hey, these top three partners have a great reputation. They may not necessarily be the best fit. And in terms of the type of industry or the type of work that they want to do, but I trust them, which is great. But what we realized is we're just perpetuating that word of mouth. And so we wanted to make it more inbound. And so we revamped the partner directory to do just that because we wanted to give you great, fit clients. And so first we wanted to give you the ability to grow a baseline, show off your experience. What do you specialize in? 1, in terms of service offerings. So maybe you're better at content creation versus versus content strategy. Maybe you're better at brand and social, for example. Maybe you're approaching CRM integration and sales enablement, for example, as well as give you the ability to showcase some of the industries that you work with and have worked with in the past, like manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, et cetera. And then a couple other ways in which we help you showcase what you've done in the past and what you're more comfortable with. So what budget ranges do you work in more often than not? We've also introduced languages recently as well. So we what can you create? What content can you create and in what language to really help you, but also help the user that's looking for you understand who would be the best partner to go with. And then on top of that foundation, we wanted to take it a step further. We wanted to showcase not just your specialty, but your expertise. We wanted to give you the ability to show off, but we also wanted to give us the ability to show you off. And so you've all seen the reviews on the directory, and that's going to continue to be a big thing as customers are that channel for you going forward. For those that may not necessarily be encouraging their current clients to do so, this is definitely a CTA to say reviews are a big deal. It's the way the industry is trending. So we're Gonna continue to revamp that process as well going forward. But we've also added the ways in which HubSpot validates and recommends you as a partner, namely tiering status. So that's a big deal, as well as a couple other things. So, like impact awards. Congrats to the guys that have won for 2017 as well, as well as, of course, certifications. What knowledge have you accrued and continue to accrue? Like we saw in Pat Shea's slide yesterday, the fact that a lot of you have this up on the walls, let's take it off the walls and into somewhere that's actually useful for the prospects looking for you. So that's your expertise and we're going to continue to build this out more. The more awards we come out with, the more ways in which we can help showcase to potential clients what you can do really well. And then of course, when you talk about inbound, we talk about content and we talk about relevant and up to date content. So I want to give you the ability to keep that relevant. So right there, from your partner portal, you're able to go to your partner profile and manage all of these fields. Let's say in the last six months you've started working with someone in a different industry, or let's say you've expanded your branch and you're now working in Germany as well. And so you're able to make live updates at any time you want. And so the future of this is probably going to look similar to the rest of your marketing platform. So we're going to give you the ability to track what's coming through here. So right now this is just a foundation for that. And I really hope that those of you that are tiered and have had issues with generating quality leads in the past, and you know there's an opportunity there for you that this helps with that. So I want to switch gears just a little bit. Let's talk, let's go down the funnel. So let's say now you're generating all these leads to the partner directory. Now they're clients. Let's take a look at the industry. So we were doing some research and we realized there are a lot of different opportunities here for you to specialize, for you to be, if you wanted to be full service, for you to be able to accommodate and hire, to be able to do so. But when I look at this, I see there's just a lot going on and there's a lot for you to potentially keep up with. And so a lot of You I've spoken with in the past start out as full service. You realize you're not actually capable of doing that, and you realize you're better suited to particular areas. And so you specialize. And I think that's what we want to continue to see. But it's not only the type of service that you're trying to offer and trying to figure out what you specialize in the most, but it's also the way in which you track value and ROI associated with that service. So your pricing and packaging strategy. And we'd like to see that retainers are above and beyond what's sort of pushing us forward these days. But the reality is not everyone's on retainers. The reality is that you're not on retainers alone. And so a lot of our partners are working with services that are a combination of retainer and fixed, few projects or projects and, let's say, hourly rates based on the job role, et cetera. And so through all of this research, which we really realized and what sort of struck a tone with us was that there are lots of moving parts with respect to how you manage your clients and the future of your client management. And these are just a few barriers to that client's success. So, one, I mentioned juggling all these different service offerings, but then you're also trying to retain current customers and onboard new ones. And we all know onboarding and inbound is not an easy feat. And of course, product is trying to make that easier for you, but it's still hard. Of course, in the background, you're dealing with employee turnover. A lot of you in the audience are pretty young. You have young designers, young developers on your team. You're trying to figure out, all right, how do I transition the knowledge that this guy has into the next person? What are those repeatable processes? And then at the same time, you're trying to deliver value and track that value. So you're trying to prove it to upper management, you're trying to prove it to the client. What's the value actually being delivered here? And then there's a baseline expectation as well. You are the representative of HubSpot to these clients, and that's a big deal for us and for you. And at the beginning of the year, I would say pretty confident that we weren't really helping and enabling you to do any of these. I want to take a look at how HubSpot products over the year has been working tirelessly to try to help you deliver better services to your clients, have a better client experience. In general, and I just chose two examples. But there are lots of different ways as well. Let's start with projects. CTOD announced it at the product keynote the other day. Maggie and her team had a session yesterday, but I wanted to reiterate it here. So we've developed a projects tool. It's for everybody, it's for customers, it's for partners. But I know that Maggie's been working tirelessly with partners to develop this tool. So, one, it gives you the ability to develop those repeatable processes for yourself and with your clients. Two, it gives you the ability to create your own templates. So let's say you want to create 80% in your portal. You bring on a new client, you push it to that client's portal, and you customize the remaining 20% so you can do that now. And then lastly, it preloads agency templates into your portal for you. So we know each of you who's a partner today, we know which portal is associated with you, and we preload Academy agency projects into there. And I know that's only going to continue to grow. They're working on different ways to filter and tag the different types of projects for you to find it easier. So I wanted to reiterate that if you haven't looked at projects yet, even if you have another project management tool, do it. Because I know they're going to come out with great things next year, and especially because my team is going to be collaborating with them going forward. So, speaking of collaboration, the second example I wanted to show you today was with the composer. So, Nate Cirullo, the PM on this team, has been working tirelessly with partners to try and understand how we could better improve collaboration with your content creation. And so the first example is, let's say you're a content writer, you're working with a client that's in pharmaceuticals, but you're not an expert in that. But you don't want to hire someone for your team to be an expert in that. So you have a freelancer, you have a consultant, someone who is an expert, but they're not a user in the portal, they're not part of your company. And so you're creating the content. You guys had a conversation last week about what exactly you should do, but you forgot and you're not really sure what's the best topic to really highlight here. And so today, anyone in the portal can ention anyone else in the portal right there as you're typing, as you're creating the content. But not only that, admins can actually go in and mention anyone outside of the portal who's not necessarily a user and you can keep track of that conversation live. I think that's a pretty big deal and that's something that we're going to continue to build on for partners as well. And the second thing that they worked on for Composer is the live updates. So let's say you're working for the client, so the client's responsible for creating the content. You're just helping supervise, sort of guide them and they're not really sticking to the right topic, they're not really doing what you expected them to do. So you're able to actually highlight and comment live and they're able to do the same thing. These are just a couple examples in which the HubSpot product team in general is really trying to help you with your clients for better customer experience as well as better experience on your side. But there's still some gaps that are missing and I think my team's role is to help fill those gaps, so to collaborate with these guys, but fill those gaps for you. So let's take a look at a foundation that we've put in place to try and start filling those gaps. So we wanted to start with giving you just an aggregate view across clients. A lot of you are juggling quite a few of them, which is great. We wanted you to be able to just see at a glance the value that's being delivered and be able to take some immediate action as an owner and then be able to start managing them more successfully with respect to the HubSpot responsibilities and expectations you have. So let's look at value first. So when we were doing research into this, it was a little bit difficult to really distill what's important for you to track client to client. Like we said earlier, you guys have custom services from client to client. A lot of the times you specialize in very different things. They're tracking revenue. We're trying to figure out what are the different ways in which you can reverse engineer revenue and track that. But when I did more and more research with our teams internally, so our customer success managers, who work with our direct customers as well as you guys resoundingly across the board. What we found is no matter what the service, usually indicators of Success within the HubSpot platform are visits, contacts and customers. So we wanted to start there, give you the ability to see that across the board, give you the ability to see month over month who's doing well, et cetera, and then compare. Now, this is similar to the All Accounts dashboard. You might be saying, if you're accustomed to that. And we know, but it's a foundation. It's a foundation for a lot more to come. For example, you now have the ability to actually click in and see a little more information to be able to better manage the client's subscription and be able to see a few opportunities associated with that client. So let's take a look at that. So you can go in now and see some product information associated with the client. Maybe they have the sales product and the marketing product, but not just that, you're also able to see the types of trials that they're spinning up. So, like, this guy, for example, has spun up a reporting trial that's telling you that there's an opportunity there that you could probably grab hold of. And it's also telling you a couple different things, things you may need to take action on. So, for example, this guy is potentially going to trip his email limit in a bit. So there may be some action you need to take with your clients or with your channel consultant. So it's a baseline for a lot more to come. Like we said, we're going to be collaborating with a lot of teams to try and figure out how to pull in progress with projects, et cetera. And so right now, this is in beta with a few folks, and we're going to continue to develop it throughout the rest of the year and into next year. And there'll probably be a suite of products associated with client success for you guys. All right, we doing good. Cool. This is the last. The last section growth as a partner. So we talk a lot about tiering. And my team, unfortunately, is not necessarily responsible for the rules and the way in which we calculate tiering, but we do facilitate that for the program. We leave it up to the experts. So at the beginning of the year, we created the tiering dashboard. And I wanted to bring it up again because there are some similarities between this one and the client management app that we're starting to create. What we're going to do now going forward, now that we're building out apps specific to helping you with your clients, is this one's going to be honed to helping you as a partner, helping you either maintain your tier, so for those of you at diamond, or actually up tier with us. And so a couple things that we've heard and we've discussed with you is more clarity around what's going on in the background and also give you some more recommendations associated with how you can actually maintain your status or grow your status with us. So stay tuned for a lot more to come there. We're going to work really closely with the program as they continue to make this more representative of what it means to be a quality partner of HubSpot. And I know they're working their to do that as well. And then I wanted to end on this note. HubSpot really values education. I really believe that education is one of the biggest pillars of HubSpot. And I think it's definitely the case for the partner program. And you guys already know that because partner certification, for example, is the baseline for how you tier. And there's a reason for that. I think they're only going to continue to do so. So Pat introduced role based training, for example. So my team actually also owns the learning experience right from your app, the certification experience that's right there. And we worked with customers and partners alike in the beginning because what we were hearing was the content's amazing, the experience is not great. So we wanted to update that for you to sort of encourage continued learning. And so now, as Pat said yesterday in the keynote, you're able to actually see progress associated with each of the certificates that's in there. You're able to see at a glance all of the ones that you've taken, all the ones that you haven't yet. We're introducing filters to be able to help you navigate through those certifications. But then we're also introducing partner specific views to help you see what certifications are there, as well as what specific courses are there for you. And so right now, you can access both of the new role based training content that's accessible now from your app. All right, so I'm at the end of my presentation. I'm going to open it up for questions in a bit. But if there's one thing I want you guys to take away from Today, it's that HubSpot product is dedicated to supporting you no matter what. This year has been a really good year in sort of building up that momentum, and it's going to only continue to grow into next year. But what we need is we need your support and we need you to work with us to be able to continue to do so really well. So I want to just leave a few CTAs for those of you who are tiered and haven't done this yet. You're now able to go into your partner profiles. We've created a project actually, so I'm killing two birds with one stone. You can try out projects and go to this specific template for you that will show you how to do so. Feel free to take pictures, of course. Secondly, if you're interested in helping us with our sort of client management success suite of features, feel free to go to this link. Basically, what that would mean is you're signing up to help have conversations with us about how your client relationships are going, what's not going so well, how we can really help fill in some of those gaps for you, as well as be part of the betas going forward. And then lastly, if you want to just talk in general, if you want to talk about anything, if you want to talk about ideas, ideas for us to collaborate together, et cetera, you can feel free to sign up at that link. All right, thank you so much, guys.