We often find that even the savviest growth stage founders and management teams underestimate the scaling impact that a proper CRM and marketing platform can have on their business. It's one of the biggest tech stack mistakes we see.
When founders ask me why can't they just use whatever shoddy lead capture solution they have, or capture leads right into the product, or run sales out of Notion—I like to jest back, sure if you want to play JV, but I thought we were going pro. I thought we were here to implement the habits of a winning team. And that might involve learning something new.
We're fond of HubSpot, and they offer a great startup discount. Check out our full foundational introduction to HubSpot. But the truth is that the value of a CRM and marketing platform comes almost entirely from having the entire customer journey on one record, whether the lead/demo/deal was generated from outbound, inbound, paid or organic. The value is that the marketing attribution is the very beginning of the record, that then houses sales history, product history, and revenue! This is the only way to ever get inbound off the ground, by connecting these pieces, and right now HubSpot is the most cost-effective solution to unite these functions.
So read on for details on how to make the most of leadgen and conversion from HubSpot as a growth stage tech startup.
Do I need outbound or inbound?
The answer is yes. Savvy companies will use both effectively, and particularly, the earlier stage your company, or the more novel your category, the more you will rely on outbound. Direct outreach grind grind grind founder sales! But inbound is the golden goose. Inbound is the game for scale.
Inbound marketing is predicated on creating valuable experiences that have a positive impact on individuals and your brand. Unlike outbound marketing, inbound marketing does not need to fight for potential customers' attention. By creating content designed to address the problems and needs of your ideal customers, inbound marketing attracts qualified prospects and builds trust and credibility for your tech business.
The beauty of HubSpot is that it will allow for this transition from initial go to market outreach to more and more inbound leads. And it will allow you to compare sales productivity to marketing.
HubSpot’s Arsenal for Lead Generation
HubSpot embodies a comprehensive suite for running inbound marketing campaigns. The power of HubSpot lies in its all-encompassing ecosystem that includes forms, landing pages, CTAs, ad integration, and SEO planning. The integration of ad platforms is tracked natively by the forms, providing a seamless bridge between lead capture and ad campaigns. The SEO planning tools allows for a meticulous mapping of content, allowing you to discern which blog content substantially influences revenue.
Nurturing Leads: Beyond the First Interaction
Inbound is, of course, about more than capturing a lead, it's about converting them. Many of the same tools employed in lead capture can be used in conversion, but the most important is automation. Automation facilitates timely education and information delivery, allowing us to be there for the customer at exactly the right moment. Through HubSpot, personalized communication can be automated yet retain a personal touch, steering leads through the sales funnel towards conversion, whether it be closing deals in the sales pipeline or activating users of your product.
The rapidly growing Fintech Volopay experienced this first hand when they implemented HubSpot’s Sales Hub. Volopay was in need of a robust CRM that would allow them to optimize their sales performance and increase their revenue as their start-up scaled-up. With Sales Hub, Volopay saw a 20% increase in conversions, and boosted their sales team’s time management efficiency by 30%. Upon implementing HubSpot’s CRM, Volopay is producing an increased stream of recurring revenue, providing a heightened level of certainty as they grow.
Analytics: Measuring Campaign Effectiveness
The path to success is paved with lots and lots of measurement. The way to be a brand with actual staying power, a place that your customers actually turn to as an authority, is to measure what resonates.
This analysis is indispensable in inbound marketing, and HubSpot’s analytics tools stand out for their precision and comprehensiveness. The ability to track and analyze such detailed data is invaluable for optimizing campaigns and understanding the ROI of marketing efforts.
Our advice is to run your marketing sprints through HubSpot the same way you run design or engineering sprints. Set a goal, program it into the software, run a play based on a hypothesis to achieve that goal, and measure all the results along the way. Review your tactics at least every two weeks, if not every day.
Conclusion
HubSpot is just software, and it's easy to conflate software with a solution. But, it does offer the best set of guardrails for running and measuring Inbound. If you are aiming to play pro, there's no way to go without it and there's no sense in not using it to the fullest.
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