The State of Inbound Marketing and Sales

The Hubspot Lecture at Inbound 2017: Key Takeaways

Hubspot’s popular sales & marketing conference — Inbound 2017 — has brought 20,000+ professionals to Boston this week.

If you’ve never been, the main draw is being able to sit in on lectures from high level executives (e.g. CEO’s, VPs, Founders), specialists (e.g. SEOs, Content Strategists), and pop culture icons (e.g. Mario Batali, Issa Rae, Michelle Obama).

Though the talks from higher-level business moguls can sometimes feel removed from the daily life of someone working at a company, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah (Hubspot’s co-founders) put on a remarkable presentation.

They spoke yesterday about a ton of things, including:

• Musings on the past, present, and future or marketing and sales
• A huge upgrade to their CRM product, making it more competitive with market leaders

But what stuck out most was a dissection of their core mission and values, as they relate to their company, the partners they work with, and their approach to marketing & sales.

These have been printed elsewhere over the years, but the groupings are a great reminder that businesses must focus on, above all else, creating a wonderful customer experience from start to finish.

Attract

This is basically what most marketers think of when it comes to marketing in 2017.

If your brand can provide truly helpful, consistent, and quality content — you’re in a good spot to win the trust of your audience.

Once you focus on that, content creation becomes pretty straightforward.

Engage

This refers to someone who already is aware of your company at some level, and chooses to engage with your brand. Be it through social media. Direct messages.

Or chatbots. Speaking of which.

Chatbots are still in their infancy, but rapidly becoming marketer friendly.

Dharmesh, their shamelessly self-depricating and self-proclaimed introvert co-founder, talked about these. (I thought he was actually a pretty entertaining public speaker, for what it’s worth.)

Learn more about his creation, GrowthBot

And get ready to customize how you want your chatbot to interact when engaging with your customers.

Messaging Convergence

Another takeaway from this engagement front is the increasing push to let your customers engage with you, in a way that suits them.

You want your marketing designed in such a way that it makes it easy for potential buyers to self-select into customer decision journey groups (e.g. interested but not ready to buy, comparing options, ready to buy).

For your business’ backend — email will probably exist for a good while. So will Slack. And the same with a surprising number of private / group messaging apps.

Routing all of these disparate channels into one hub, on both the business and consumer side of things —makes life easier for both ends.

When it comes to technology solutions, it’s clear this area is rife with opportunity. Lots of people are excited to see the forms this will take, and so are we.

So, that’s the future of engagement.

Delight

This doesn’t relate to just content.

From first customer touches, throughout the sales / consideration process, and continuing through to product onboarding and daily use — you must consistently gauge (and improve) the level of customer delight you’re providing to new and old customers alike.

This is a helpful framework (developed by industry experts) for marketers, salespeople, and customer service teams everywhere.

If you’re involved with business, we encourage you to seek out more information about these topics as time goes on.

Because the progression toward simplifying business relationships for the consumer (and the business) will be the trend for the foreseeable future.

And rightly so — a smooth exchange of value, one that provides wins on both sides of the coin should be the way forward.

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