The Hub For Inbound Marketing
At Hollywood Branded, we love HubSpot. It's such a powerful tool for inbound marketing. From its sales email templates to its landing page builders, it offers a variety of features that every businesses could benefit from.
We're pretty passionate about the platform, and recently, we chatted with someone who shares this same sentiment, and is an expert in all things HubSpot and Salesforce. In this blog, Hollywood Branded shares how you can leverage both HubSpot and Salesforce to increase your marketing automation skills from the expertise of Lauren Kennedy, who is the Chief Marketing Nerd at Coastal Consulting.
A Little More About The Guest
Lauren is an expert in marketing automations and revenue operations. She is also the Founder and Chief Marketing Nerd at Coastal Consulting, a firm that helps B2B enterprises align their marketing, sales, and account management to create a personalized customer experience using both HubSpot and Salesforce. As a HubSpot solutions partner agency, her team holds over twenty-five HubSpot certifications along with five Salesforce certifications.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: I, we, my agency, happen to be all things HubSpot. We love HubSpot. It runs our business. It is all things for our inbound marketing, but we still don't use it to the level and the degree that your agency knows how to use it. And so I'm really excited to be talking to you today about how other agencies, how other businesses like ourselves, might be missing out on some things. But can you start us off by kind of giving us an overview of how you got where you are today? You're the chief marketing nerd, and in this whole world of inbound that a lot of people still don't really understand.
Answer: Yeah, for sure. So I'm a technical marketer. I have a background in marketing operations, logistics, and event planning. So marketing automation was kind of born out of a weird combination of those three in my past. I really got into marketing automation when I started sending pre event emails for trade shows. So that was a trade show events manager, and I really caught the email marketing and marketing automation bug. And from there I started learning everything I could about HubSpot and Salesforce and freelancing and working with so many different organizations across industries to really master the systems. And from there, earlier this year, I decided to officially go out on my own and start Coastal Consulting as kind of a boutique agency focused on HubSpot, Salesforce, and technical integration.
Question: There you go. So what are some of the things? What are solutions HubSpot brings? People out there are like "HubSpot, why do I need a HubSpot? What is this thing?" Can you give us kind of an insight of what is HubSpot and what makes it so cool?
Answer: HubSpot's definitely the number one leading marketing automation and inbound marketing platform. Something that's really great about HubSpot is you can do marketing, sales, customer service, account management, your website, all of your marketing and really business operations within one platform. Competitors on the market can usually do one of those things. And HubSpot really has a homegrown mentality of all of our features sit in this one hub of HubSpot, so you can log in and access all of that. At Coastal Consulting, we use HubSpot for marketing, sales, and our website. We don't have a big customer service functionality in an agency, so we do not use their ticketing system. However, they do have that, and we use that for many clients. But really, the value prop is just having everything in one system, giving you unified reporting, really good insights into who your customers are, where they came from, and how they're progressing with you and your company.
Question: Awesome. And so what are some of the things when you're working with a client, they come to you and you're like, "Okay, we can help you improve your inbound." What does that mean to them?
Answer: Whenever a client comes to us, they're usually hitting a point where they've been in HubSpot for a while, and they just know they're not using it to their full potential. So HubSpot is such a powerful tool and it can go in so many different directions, but if you get up and running without someone who's an expert in the platform, like been there, done that, you really miss out on a lot of the activation pieces. And you just get kind of stuck in the little things that you've picked up, and you miss the big picture of HubSpot.
So people come to us and say, "What we have is working. However, we know we're not doing the most that we can." And so what my team comes in and does is just get deep into their HubSpot and do a full audit on what they're using, what they haven't touched, who their customers are, and looking into their data, and doing that data analysis piece, and presenting a roadmap for, okay, here's where you're at. You're doing this well. You could improve here.
And then here's everything that we can add that really helps you meet your goals, because it's really important to hone in on like why they want to do that, or what they want to do with HubSpot. But because it can go in so many directions, like maybe you're not looking to work on ads, so if we put together a plan for you to build your ad campaigns, we're completely missing the mark. So really working with the team to understand where they're looking to go in the next year or five years, and then building out HubSpot and a roadmap to match that. Common ways that, I guess that people reach that conclusion is they see a lot of friction in their process. For example, there's no visibility between marketing and sales, and which department's working on what, or what sales needs from marketing, and there's a huge gap there.
That's the most common, is this alignment between sales and marketing. And a lot of times, people encounter this, but they're not aware that they already have a huge gap between marketing, sales, and customer service. A lot of times, organizations are positioned to have, before we have a customer and after we have a customer. And they don't create a big link between that. So really connecting your marketing team with direct feedback from your account managers and your customer service team to have that full customer life cycle. You need to really powerhouse your inbound marketing because then you're able to see direct customer feedback, and view insights directly from what your customer service team is hearing from your customers.
Question: And what are some of the mistakes when you start working with someone? Things that you've seen in their account that make you go "Hmmm."
Answer: Biggest mistake that I see is not getting organizational alignment before you start building. Something that we do with all of our customers when we first start is build a customer journey map, where we map who your customers are, where you first meet them, how you talk to them, how you convert them, and how you maintain them over time. And that's a huge gap that most organizations miss before implementing marketing automation. So they don't get customer service, marketing, sales and leadership in a room and agree on, this is our customer. This is what they want. This is how we can support them.
And without that internal alignment, you have different teams building different things, that sometimes disagree, sometimes overlap. And that's where the mistakes come in. Because if you have a sales team that builds out a bunch of fields in your CRM or properties that are the same as the ones marketing are building out, just with different values, you have a CRM that's 50% complete. So sales isn't updating the marketing fields. Marketing isn't updating the sales fields. And now we have a disconnect. So if we don't start building from that aligned foundation, it's really hard to accomplish what you want to on HubSpot. So that's the biggest mistake I see. There's a lot of symptoms of that mistake, but the biggest one is not aligning as a team before you start building.
Question: And then what are some other nifty things that you do when people work with your team, like with Salesforce as an example? How does that blend? Because Salesforce is a beast on its own.
Answer: The HubSpot Salesforce integration is a super native, easy to use integration, if you have a thing out of the box. So if you're using standard Salesforce objects, and I would want to say vanilla HubSpot set up, you can turn it on and run with it. If you're doing anything more complicated than that, it's really helpful to have a roadmap. So something that I always do when looking at the HubSpot Salesforce integration is give each system a job. So sometimes people want to use Salesforce as a data repository and do marketing and sales at HubSpot, or marketing with HubSpot, sales in Salesforce, however you want to dice it. We do job descriptions. So HubSpot's job description is to send emails, manage our ad activity, et cetera. And Salesforce's job is to facilitate our sales conversations, onboard, and manage clients, et cetera.
So it seems kind of silly to give a system a job description, but that's the best way to divide that line internally. And then from there, you kind of match your automation to your system. So if I'm using those two systems, but I want to do task automation for different things that customers would do, if my sales team is in Salesforce, my automation is in Salesforce. So that's the best advice I have at a high level for managing those two systems, which is divide roles and responsibilities by system and stick to it because you want to be automating in the system you're using tasks for. Reason being that we wouldn't want to put sales task automation in HubSpot, if we're using Salesforce as if you're only using HubSpot for marketing, you may change the marketing tool you're using down the road. And if you've built all the automation that's backing your people in Salesforce and HubSpot, you then have to move that to Salesforce, or redo it in your new marketing system.
And so it's best to just make sure you know what system's doing what, because whenever you're using two tools that have a CRM as the backbone, it can get kind of muddled. And there's also a few things that you need to do. You can check out our blog for help, but whenever you're integrating those two systems, there's a lot of field things that you need to make sure that you're making yourself aware of because there's leads and contacts in Salesforce and contacts in HubSpot, so their default data model's little bit different. So we need to solve for that in the integration too, to make sure that just your data does not get messed up.
Check Out The Podcast!
Lauren has so much great information from her experience in marketing automations. Check out the podcast below to learn more about how to drive your business from her advice and expertise!
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