4 Secrets to HubSpot

Are you getting the most of HubSpot? In today’s episode of B2B Marketing Agency Insights, Austin LaRoche, CEO of ATAK Interactive, lets you in on a few secrets about our beloved marketing software, HubSpot.

Video transcription below:

Welcome back to B2B Marketing Agency Insights. I’m your host Austin LaRoche, CEO of ATAK Interactive. I’m a company man today, wearing the tee and digging it. I hope you guys are too. Today, I want to talk about four secrets. More specifically, the four secrets about HubSpot that most people don’t know about.

Secret #1: HubSpot doesn’t run on the inbound methodology anymore, which is a good thing. Again, for those who don’t know, the inbound methodology, which I’ve criticized many times in my life, is:

“If you blog it, they will come. We are going to create all this content and people are going to read it. They are going to read through all of it. Then we are going to slowly get them down the funnel and they are going to love everything we do. They are gonna take a very long time to make a decision, but then once they do, we are going to get them because we are going to create the best content.”

I think it is still a very noble idea. But at the end of the day, it’s not really what works. What’s funny is HubSpot is really pushing a lot of their sales enablement features right now because they have built a tool that can align sales and marketing like there’s no tomorrow. It is unbelievable. It is such an amazing piece of software I can’t recommend it enough. So what they are pushing right now is how the tool can help close more deals. They have a lot of sales training for their agencies. They also have sales training for everybody else, like an individual who is looking just to sharpen his or her skills.

But, that’s the thing. HubSpot doesn’t really have this “If you blog it, they will come” mentality. They have something called sequences that automates outreach, cold outreach, to people you never met before. This is the exact opposite of the inbound methodology, and yet, they support it. Why? Because it works and it’s a little bit more effective than what the inbound methodology used to be. Not saying that it didn’t have its heyday and that it wasn’t okay way back when. I’m just saying HubSpot is not using it and neither am I.

All right, secret #2: a lot of the HubSpot agencies are still prisoners to the prototype. HubSpot is doing their best. They are trying to train everybody. I was looking at some of the new agency tools, recently – or sorry, “solutions partner” – educational tools, and a lot of things that they are talking about now are good: customizing services for clients, being able to really survey problems, not putting clients in a blanket retainer of, “We are going to write 10 blogs for you this month. And then we are going to create two eBooks.” Essentially, they are honing in on how solution partners can build out something that’s a little bit more effective. But you still see it a lot.

I can’t believe some of the agencies I’ve gone up against in pitches and actually won. What the feedback has been every time is, “You were the only person who told me how to use HubSpot to increase my sales. Everybody else showed me how they were going to write blogs, how I would get higher on search result pages. But you were the one who focused on, ‘How do I sell more? How is ATAK Interactive going to help me grow my business?‘”

Secret #3: one of the best things about HubSpot is the integrations. The HubSpot integrations are out of this world. I have a lead developer who looks at this stuff all the time and he said he has never seen a cleaner API in his life. And it shows. I love the HubSpot-Slack integration – that’s amazing – and the different form integrations with TypeForm and Survey Monkey.

Every single time I have tried to make something work with HubSpot, it has been so seamless. Anytime there isn’t a native integration, I have seen my Technical Marketing Director use Zapier to connect HubSpot with all sorts of different elements. It is amazing that they have built a tool that can become this centralized hub and can do so many things with the technology we already use. They talk about the integrations a little bit, but it is one of the main strengths that doesn’t get discussed enough.

Secret #4: I alluded to it at the top, but HubSpot is more of a sales tool than a marketing tool. It wasn’t always that way, but it really is a tool that salespeople need to be able to close more deals. It helps marketing teams bring in more leads, qualify them, and organize them in a way that is easy for a sales team to discover. That alignment that we always talk about is there, but it is also a skewed alignment. It is aligned towards helping sales more than it is marketing. You want to know why? Because sales is more important than marketing (says the guy who runs a B2B Marketing Agency).

This is true because sales is what fuels growth. So HubSpot is more of a sales tool than a marketing tool. It doesn’t mean the marketing tools aren’t great. You can develop really great workflows. You schedule social media posts. You can build out great landing pages. The tools are fine, but it is how those tools work and how they support the sales operation. This is the real strength of HubSpot.

I love HubSpot. I think it is an amazing tool. Those are four secrets that I have learned about it, working with it over the past two years. I have a few more up my sleeve, but I don’t know if I’m going to divulge them today. To learn more, you may just have to reach out. Don’t be a stranger if you’re interested. I’m Austin LaRoche saying, “Good luck growing.”