Intro is officially a HubSpot solutions partner. Harris jumps on the mic to talk about how we got where and what's next.
Blog post announcing the news: https://introcrm.com/blog/intro-is-officially-a-hubspot-solutions-partner-0
Welcome to Pipeline Meeting, a sales podcast for founders and sales leaders. You're going to get ideas that you can apply today to close high ticket deals and find repeatability in your sales process. Pipeline Meeting is brought to you by Intro, learn more at introcrm.com.
[00:00:20] Harris Kenny: I'm excited to share what's probably the biggest update since we became the productized service agency that we are today, about a year and a half ago. Intro is officially a HubSpot solutions partner.
[00:00:35] Now, what does this mean? Why do I care? Why do you care?
[00:00:40] Let me just give a little context. If you're not familiar, Hubspot is a CRM, but it's a lot more than that. They've got an integrated platform for sales, marketing, and service teams, these customer facing teams, to work together and make customers happy.
[00:00:53] The fundamental philosophy is that if you're doing that well, people are going to refer your business. They're going to be happy. You're going to create content that they're interested in. Your salespeople are going to be engaging with more qualified leads. There's a whole philosophy behind the company and they've been building it for almost 20 years now.
[00:01:12] They have a really well-established partner program. And we've been advising, helping people implement HubSpot sort of unofficially, really since I started working out on my own three and a half years ago.
[00:01:23] In fact, my earliest clients were using HubSpot and challenges they had wrapping their heads around everything that it could do, was part of what inspired me to try to create a simpler CRM that didn't get the job done.
[00:01:36] We were originally Intro CRM, and our goal was to build this lightweight CRM. The idea was to extract the deals module. 'Because a lot of times pipelines are not active. They've got these idle opportunities that are sitting. And that was the problem I was trying to zoom in and focus on solving. At the time anyway.
[00:01:57] You know, that complexity turns out, adds a lot of value.
[00:02:01] The platform they've built does take expertise to run. It does take time to run, but you get results when you use it and when you use it fully. And when you connect sales, marketing, and service. One plus one plus one is not three, one plus one plus one is 5, 10, 20, depending on how effectively you're doing it.
[00:02:24] It's something that I've really come to appreciate. With one client in particular who i'm going to talk about a little bit.
[00:02:30] So we pivoted into using the tools for you.
[00:02:33] If you're just hearing about us for the first time, let me briefly explain that what I mean by this is, I mean jumping into seeing form submissions, seeing brochure, white paper and other asset downloads, and literally helping qualify leads.
[00:02:49] Running cold outreach campaigns that are informed by what we're seeing on the inbound side. Very focused outreach that's relevant. That connects to what is happening on the website, and on social, and on other channels where you're seeing interest in your brand
[00:03:06] And the kicker is that we largely work off of performance-based pay.
[00:03:09] So our goal is to get qualified leads into conversations. And if someone's not ready to talk, that's when marketing does its thing, keeps them engaged and they go through learning about the company and then when they're ready to talk and doing more research and they want to learn more, we can help tee up folks to speak with sales.
[00:03:25] It's a function of an SDR and a BDR role rolled into one.
[00:03:32] And we're taking that a step further by joining this program and helping people get the most of it, including now offering implementation, and some more technical services alongside the done for you sales services that we offer, which we're going to be offering within HubSpot for our customers.
[00:03:48] There's a lot of smart folks at HubSpot who are now going to be helping us grow our business. And bringing their knowledge to bear for our customers. And there's also a good community of agencies and other HubSpot users
[00:04:01] You might be wondering how this is different than what we've been doing over the last year and a half. And if I had to summarize it, I would say in short that, we've been trying a lot of different ways of growing companies, some easy and some hard. There are a number of different philosophies on how to grow a business. Different frameworks and tactics and tools. And we've thrown the kitchen sink at it.
[00:04:25] I've been trying to get to the core of, what does it take to take a company from being founder led, to having one to two people in sales and marketing, up to five to 10 and scaling that. That part where you've got a little bit of traction and you're ready to take it up a notch.
[00:04:42] During this journey, we've built some fundamentally strong sales best practices within our business. Capabilities around email deliverability, copywriting, lead reply.
[00:04:57] The blocking and tackling that go into demand gen and creating new pipeline, creating new opportunities. We had one project in particular that showed me that these sound fundamentals when applied to a slightly more mature company with slightly more attraction, ended up getting way better results than what we've been getting with other clients.
[00:05:17] It really changed how I think about our business and who we can help the best. Now this customer does run HubSpot, their director of marketing as someone who I've known for a long time and actually worked with, and we applied the same processes that we've built for other companies that were earlier on that had less traction that had maybe a little bit less customer centered approach.
[00:05:36] We took those same practices and applied it to this company that is more customer centered, was using HubSpot to drive content and to tell stories and generate that inbound interest, find the right events where their prospective buyers were.
[00:05:51] And the results were just wildly different, wildly better, wildly more effective.
[00:05:58] There was an event that a competitor of theirs was involved with and we reached out to a really small list, 33 people, attending that event. Really specific campaign informed by everything that was happening on the inbound side of the business, where they were getting inbound leads, voicing specific complaints and concerns about this competitor of theirs.
[00:06:23] The campaign, out of 33 people, we emailed, we got 33 people to open it, which is a hundred percent. We got 64% to reply. 36% interested, and then 15% meeting rate.
[00:06:34] Those numbers, if you're familiar with cold outreach at all, or just wild. I mean a good. Reply rate would be between five and 15%. Right. And so to get 64%, in other words, two thirds of the people, replying. And overall a third of people being like, yeah, let's talk. Not everyone was available to meet, some people wanted to just stay in touch and get updates later.
[00:06:55] Those numbers are just unbelievable.
[00:06:58] The secret, it was not in the copy.
[00:07:02] The secret, why that worked is all the groundwork that they had laid, that the marketing team, really, this director of marketing in particular, had laid prior to that campaign.
[00:07:11] Sales can be effective when they're put in a position to succeed, when they're led by strong product effort, strong marketing effort. If you have that. And then you put in a strong, healthy sales practices, you can just see outstanding results.
[00:07:26] For us as a company, who's trying to help people grow. I want to try to help more companies that are thinking about growth in that way.
[00:07:32] Combining these two sides of the coin, sales and marketing, and then sitting in the middle, which is what we do with the lead qualification and teeing up the campaigns and running the copy and doing the appointment setting.
[00:07:43] I think sitting in the middle is where we can add a ton of value.
[00:07:46] It's about having the right tools. It's about setting them up. And ultimately it is about using them.
[00:07:53] Putting these three pieces together and seeing the results so far makes me excited about the future, being in this solutions partner program, and getting people set up with HubSpot, whether that's migrating from something else or integrating it alongside other tools that they're already using.
[00:08:08] If you have any questions, if you're interested in learning more, reach out. You can find us at introcrm.com, you can find us on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear from you and I'd love to hear what you think about this.
That's all for now. You can find show notes at introcrm.com/podcast. The theme music for Pipeline Meeting is by Neighbourhood Vandal and it's shared under a Creative Commons-Attribution, or CC-BY, license. If you learned something, consider sharing this show with a friend. Thanks.