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New Book Crushes Hubspot’s Culture

This week I finally had the opportunity to sit down with the April 1 issue of Fortune Magazine to read an excerpt from Dan Lyons’ new book entitled Disrupted, My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble.

Hubspot’s culture is explored in Dan Lyons’ new book. (Image: Amazon)

Lyon’s portrayal of his time employed at marketing automation software company Hubspot is wonderfully entertaining.  He takes the reader through the stereotypical approaches put in play by a company intent on creating a worker base of conformists.

For me, it’s also a reminder of why the criteria used by the business press to bestow “Best Places to Work” recognition are so flawed.  Hubspot flaunts a number of such awards, including the Boston Business Journal’s number one ranking.

Here are a couple of quotes from the excerpt published by Fortune:

“The offices bear a striking resemblance to the Montessori preschool that my kids attended:  lots of bright basic colors, plenty of toys, and a nap room with a hammock and soothing palm tree murals on the wall.”

“Training takes place in a tiny room, where for two weeks I sit shoulder to shoulder with 20 other new recruits, listening to pep talks that start to sound like the brainwashing you get when you join a cult.”

“The code (Hubspot’s culture) depicts a corporate utopia where the needs of the individual become secondary to the needs of the group…and where people don’t worry about work-life balance because their work is their life.”

“Hubspotters talk about being ‘superstars with superpowers’ whose mission is to ‘inspire people’ and ‘be leaders.’  They talk about engaging in ‘delightion.’”

 

Strategic Communications Group (Strategic) has a number of clients that have implemented Hubspot’s software for inbound marketing.  Our Web2Sales campaigns intersect with Hubspot, and we’ve found the platform to be feature rich, easy to work with and effective.

However, the company’s culture is the antithesis to what we believe at Strategic.  Here are the core tenets we subscribe to:

  1. Work-life balance is paramount. I recognize that Strategic’s culture starts with me as the founder and CEO. I am passionate about what I do professionally, yet it doesn’t define me.  I am family oriented, coach youth sports and perform stand-up comedy as a hobby.  This is the whole package.  It is what completes me.
  2. The best work results from differing creative views. Our team is comprised of public relations professionals, brand marketers, academics, writers and corporate communicators. We encourage and celebrate unique opinions, rather than fostering an echo chamber.
  3. Professional excellence and inspiration is found within. I don’t micro-manage.  There are no inspirational quotes.  You have to want to do great work for a client because it’s important to you and your career.

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Marketers: Pay Heed to the Siren Song of Content and Social

Here is an attention grabbing find from a study conducted in 2014 by the Business Marketing Association, Online Marketing Institute and Forrester Research: 83 percent of marketers are unable to measure business value from their content marketing efforts.

Depressing and disconcerting…yes! Should this be surprising? No!

That is because – like social media – content creation absolutely, positively does not replace business-to-business enterprise sales. And, if marketers use revenue creation as a measurement benchmark, they are destined for disappointment.

Rather, Web, content marketing, social media engagement and digital communications empower experienced, proven and relationship-oriented sales reps. It makes them more effective, efficient and scalable, helping sales teams more quickly identify, nurture and close deals.

Plus, a carefully crafted and integrated program – commonly referred to as Web2Sales – allows a company to derive more value from its investment in marketing automation and CRM platforms.

It powers lead generation and drip campaigns, while the resulting analytics and intelligence informs lead scoring, tracking and forecasting.

That is a measurable ROI!

For marketers, the challenge becomes how to structure these often disparate activities in a programmatic way, syncing everything with a well defined sales initiative.

Chantilly, VA-based Iron Bow Technologies provides us with an example of Web2Sales in action. The technology services company that caters to business and government customers recently launched a new campaign called Telehealth Education Delivered or TED for short.

Disclosure: my consultancy works on the TED program.

The effort aligns an innovative approach to product demonstrations conducted on-site at customer locations with a well defined Web, content, social and digital presence. Sales resources have also been marshalled for cultivation and follow-up activities.

The take-away here is that marketers must pay heed to the siren song of content marketing, social media and digital. These high-value activities are merely part of a more comprehensive Web2Sales strategy, which, when executed effectively, can provide a healthy jolt to a company’s sales pipeline.

 

DIGITAL EAST from Strategic Communications Group on Vimeo.

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Bringing Structure to the Complex World of Marketing Automation

Many marketers are intimidated by the comprehensive features and functionality built into automation platforms from Oracle Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot, ExactTarget and others.

It’s understandable, right?  Communications professionals have historically trained and matured in a creative environment.  So, the requirement to utilize technology to segment, target, collect, analyze and interpret prospect interactions is daunting — even when it is in the cloud.

The uncomfortable secret of marketing automation is that most companies use a fraction of a platform’s capabilities.  These elegant (and expensive) systems are often relegated to the status of glorified Email distribution.

That’s why I invited Jim Meyer and Pierre Moynier of eTrigue to visit with the Strategic Communications Group (Strategic) team as part of our professional development program.  Full disclosure, eTrigue is one of our partners and we use their DemandCenter solution to power our own marketing and sales activities.

In an informative hour long presentation and Q&A, Jim and Pierre talked us through the more advanced applications of marketing automation that we can put into play on behalf of our clients.

Perhaps most insightful was their segmentation of these applications into four types of campaigns, including:

1. Form Response:  how to effectively engage with a prospect after they have registered for and downloaded a piece of premium content, such as a white paper, analyst report or presentation.

2. Drip Marketing: meaningful contact with prospects on a consistent basis, identifying activity and engagement that contributes to lead scoring.

3. Nurturing: outreach influenced by a prospect taking an action, which may include registering for a Webinar, visiting a Web site and/or downloading collateral.

4. Sales Acceleration: often executed in conjunction with one or more other campaigns, this is about motivating a prospect to take a specific action that propels them forward in the sales cycle.

For me, thinking about the use of marketing automation in the context of campaigns provides structure.  This makes the adoption of features like dynamic progressive forms and persona creation understandable and, perhaps most important, more easily put into action.

 

eTrigue’s DemandCenter is a feature rich marketing automation platform.

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Niche Industry Conferences Remain Real and Relevant

Although the enlightened buyer can remain elusive and immune from traditional marketing approaches, at some point in the sales cycle they reveal themselves to an organization by expressing interest.  They visit a blog site.  They download a white paper.  Or they attend a Webinar.

From there, it becomes paramount for marketers and sales reps to cultivate and nurture the prospect relationship.  That’s because in business-to-business and public sector sales there is typically a lengthy time gap between lead identification and close.

Marketers are armed with a myriad of high impact tools to facilitate the lead nurturing process.  For instance, marketing automation solutions from vendors like Oracle Eloqua, Marketo, eTrigue, Hubspot, Pardot and Silverpop offer content distribution, analytics and scoring functionality.

Yet, buyers ultimately do business with companies…or should I more accurately write “people”…they know and trust.  Yes, it remains a relationship sell.

I was reminded of the impact of the relationship when I spent a few hours today at the Satellite 2014 conference in Washington, DC.

A niche conference that attracts about 10,000 executives in the satellite communications and technology industry, nearly every booth, breakout room and meeting place in the exhibit hall was occupied with customers, prospects, vendors and partners talking business.

Here are a couple of photos from the show.

 

SAMSUNG
Strategic Communications Group client Intelsat featured a broad portfolio of video-based solutions at its booth.

SAMSUNG
Although I am not sure what they do, this company has a wicked cool name.

SAMSUNG
Tricked out satellite truck. Now that’s mobile connectivity!

SAMSUNG
A trade media sighting…is it 2004?

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