In the May edition of the Bristol HubSpot User Group, Richard Mander (Premier Inbound Consultant at HubSpot) shared a ton of tips and tricks to help attendees remove friction from their sales, marketing and services processes and drive more conversions using HubSpot. 

When asked 'What sources of information do you rely on when making purchase decisions for business software?', 55% of respondents named 'word of mouth/referrals' as their preferred method. Clearly, putting your customers first should be at the centre of everything you do. Richard's talk focused on this idea and shared ways in which you can remove friction for your customers during the buyer's journey so that they become evangelists and promoters of your brand.

The Slides

The Video

The Transcript

Hi everyone. Thanks a million, first of all, I guess, thanks to Claire and the rest of the Noisy Little Monkey team for having me. Lovely to be here in sunny Bristol. I'm Rich, first of all I'm a premiere inbound consultant in HubSpot's Dublin office. Yeah, I am going to talk to you guys about what might be a new concept, for some of you I've heard Noisy Little Monkey have worked on this concept a little bit, already I've heard today. So it might not be so new for some of the other people in the room, but I'm going to talk through that. Also, going to, maybe, if I can, demo a couple of new features and new functionality that you might not have seen in HubSpot so far.

First all, I kind of I want to talk a little bit about my role in HubSpot and what I actually do. The title as you can see is Inbound Consultant. What that means is that I work with a lot of higher value customers. They pay for me as an additional service in order to be able to receive monthly or weekly consulting, training, strategy-type sessions over web-conference generally. So what that means is that I work with those customers on things like the inbound methodology. As you can imagine, being in HubSpot for two and a half years, I've delivered countless sessions on how to set up the inbound methodology in your portal, also things like marketing sales alignment, optimizing your sales funnel would be another big one that we talk to customers about all the time.

What I've started to notice over the last couple of years as that part of this role is that a lot of times when people start working with us now, and particularly customers that have been working with us for about a year or so, they've got that down. They have inbound methodology, they know it, they how to set it up, they know how to get qualified traffic to their website, how to use our blog tool. They know how to drive conversions with really good content. They've got a really good sales team that picks up on the leads they're passing through and they have a process in place for that.

So, yeah kind of started to ask myself how do you actually stand out in 2019? If everyone is doing that, if everyone can do inbound, everyone has HubSpot or a tool like HubSpot, how do you actually stand out from the competition? That's where a concept that our CEO and founder, Brian Halligan introduced last September at our inbound conference in Boston comes in. That's the concept of the flywheel. It's basically a way to look at your business as a whole, to be honest, but particularly your marketing and sales and customer service operations, how to measure that and track that and understand it, understand where the problems are and how you can drive more value within that.

For today's talk, what I want to focus in on is a specific area of that concept, and that's friction. So, what friction means in this case is blockers or issues that prevent or stop or slow down people from becoming customers. Or from introducing more prospects into your sales and marketing funnel. I just want to get a quick check, first of all. I've mentioned it may not be a new concept but I just want to get a show of hands, how many people have heard about the flywheel within the room? Okay. So a few. Have any of you guys tried to implement that for your business, so far? Show of hands again. Just the guys at the front? Okay, perfect. So, hopefully after this talk what you'll know is, number one, for the people who don't know what the flywheel is, number two, why it matters to your business particularly I'm going to focus in on why it matters to B2B businesses in 2019. What you can or should do about it and then as I said how some of the HubSpot tools can actually help with this process as well.

What is the inbound flywheel?

Cool. So, what is the flywheel? So, before I dive in to what the flywheel is, we need to try kind of take a step back and look at what has been the traditional model or the traditional method for tracking your business and the conversions within your business, and that's this one. That's what we call the funnel. You guys probably all know this one, you've probably seen it before. It kind of makes sense, marketing, get there reach out as far as possible and they deliver as many visitors and needs as I said, they pass those on to the sales team and sales converts them into customers for the business. But what Brian Halligan noticed, our CEO, when he talked about this, and something that I'm starting to notice as well, is it's purely in there almost, it kind of ignores a lot of stuff that's going on outside of this. And if you think about how you make purchasing decisions, even me for example, just when I was working on this presentation I thought about the last time I made a purchase for something relatively expensive, it's probably when I bought wireless in-ear headphones last year.

So, my process for that was... Watch the wire yeah, you told me to do that. My process was something like, I went to Google, I looked up two or three different review sites, I figured out what are the best ones, what are the good features of them, those were impartial review sites. Then I spoke to three or four of my colleagues that have wireless in-ear headphones already. I asked them, "Okay, what is good about them? What are the best features? What do you recommend?" Then in the end I made a decision based on a recommendation from my colleague Jack who said he was using Jabra in–ears already, so I bought the same ones. So, basically this is setting the expectation that the only way a consumer is going to make a purchasing decision is by coming to your marketing team, looking at the information you are putting out by talking to your own salesperson, when in reality it's something more like this.

So, this is from a state of inbound report. This is particularly for purchasing decisions around business software. But as you can see, it's pretty similar to the example that I just gave, so the main driver behind purchasing decisions in 2018 was word of mouth, so friends, social media, referrals. So the next one down is customer references. So references from people that are actually already using a platform, And then media articles, so similar to the review sites that I was talking about previously. I can say as well just anecdotally for me when I talk to a new HubSpot customer that is going to work with myself, at least 50% of the time when I asked them why did you buy HubSpot, it's because, "Oh we had a new head of marketing that was already using HubSpot in their previous role and really recommended it. I heard from a friend that I studied with that they are using it and it works really well, or someone I follow on social media, an influencer, talked about HubSpot and said how good it is, and we wanted to try out."

So at that point they reached out to our sales team and they wanted to talk to a salesperson, but the driver was this kind of word-of-mouth, customer reference referrals. So that means that there is a big crack in this funnel, basically. Number one in the sense that it makes those assumptions that consumers are not making those smart purchasing decisions based on referrals and references. There is another crack in this funnel in the sense that it also relies on the fact that customers are at the very bottom here. They are seen as just an output, there are this little small circle that comes around at the end and that is it, it stops there. When in reality if you think about the previous slide and the fact that word-of-mouth and referrals are the main driver of purchases, customers are actually an input in 2019. So they should be at the other side of this, they should be the most important factor here in terms of actually generating new leads and new customers for your business.

There is another crack as well, actually, one more crack in this funnel. So we are definitely, totally getting rid of this. That is the fact that it relies on the idea, and this goes back to when I worked in sales in my last job that the sun rises and sets on your quarter. So I know for me, in my last job, if we came to the end of the quarter, the last few weeks of the quarter, if we weren't going to hit our target or it looked like we weren't going to hit our target, we were going to be going through every single lead that had gone dead over the last couple of months. We were certainly going to be having all of these amazing discount offers or end of the month offers, we were going to be calling them, emailing them, and just desperately trying to get some more leads through.

We were also going to be getting in touch with our marketing team and asking them, can you run a stand-alone campaign? Let's just try to generate some new leads through here before the end of the quarter. What that means is you get to the end of the quarter and all of the resources are dried up. You're going to have taken every single bit of energy out of the marketing and sales team, all of those leads that you had, and that's it. You're at a dead start for the start of next quarter. So for us, in my last role I know what that meant was that we had to start hitting the phones we had to rely on business development reps to be pushing these through to us, and we had to be waiting again for marketing to start up the campaigns again and drive some more leads through.

In reality what we know is if you are running inbound marketing and you are doing it properly, and you've got the inbound methodology in place, that is not how it works. You've got organic traffic just naturally coming to your website, you've got social media followers that are going to be clicking through to your website. You've got conversion paths with a really good piece of content that act as lead generation tools. You've got automated nurturing, set up with workflows and email which is just going to be generally converting leads into an MQLs on an ongoing basis.

So what this funnel actually looks like now in 2019 is something more like this. Luckily, it fits pretty well into the three hubs that HubSpot has. In this examples are marketing, sales and service hub and your customer's in the middle. Luckily, as well, it actually fits in pretty closely with the inbound methodology, and the attract, engage, delight ideas that we've talked about in HubSpot for the last six or seven years, don't want to focus too much in on those, but you guys have probably seen this type of thing already. Basically, what you are going to be doing is you are still going to be looking to attract prospects with solutions to problems, so you are still going to be using our marketing hub. So basically our blogging, SEO tool, landing pages, forms, CTAs, those types of tools, you are still going to be trying to drive qualified visitors and convert them into leads.

You are going to be engaging with them on their terms so you are going to be using, again, our marketing tools so workflows that I mentioned already, email, some of our sales tools can be used here as well, so things like sequences, the meetings tool. Then you've got your delight stage. This comes in at every stage in the process, so we always want to be delighting people if they are going through this process. Our service hub tools can really help here as well just in terms of getting that feedback back from customers and also tracking and measuring that as well.

Putting your customers at the centre of everything you do 

Then as I said customers are at the centre of everything. That's the CRM, everything feeds into that one place and what happens in that case is you get your flywheel spinning like this. So those customers that you're driving down in to the delight phase and you're starting to turn them into referrals, they put that energy back in to this flywheel and it starts to spin like this and what you get is growth. Cool. So why this matters to your business? We kind of answered this one a little bit already with the second slide that we had up there. It matters because the number one way people are making purchasing decisions is referrals and word-of-mouth. So obviously it's really, really important that people are working on these types of strategies. The other reason it matters is because 80% of CEOs believe they deliver a superior customer experience. So, 80% of CEOs think that they are doing that delight phase perfectly and they are driving referrals back into their business. Does anyone want to take a guess at what percentage of consumers think that businesses deliver a superior customer experience?

20? 4? Somewhere in between, so it's 8%. So there is a pretty huge gap there. I think as well the other thing about that is 8% of customers agree, it's not necessarily that your business suddenly has a really bad customer experience, it's not that you are doing anything wrong, it's probably more so that the expectations that customers and consumers have increased so much. 2019, we live in a world where you can want some food for your lunch, you can download an app, you can buy the food, you can watch it get delivered to your house and it's there 15 minutes later. Just like that, seamless, really low touch, simple process. So that's kind of where people's expectations are and that is where that comes in because B2C businesses and there is going to be quite a few B2C examples in here but B2C businesses have been doing this a lot. They know referrals are really important. B2C businesses just don't really do this type of stuff.

And that's where it's like a huge, huge opportunity because it's actually an opportunity to be a disruptor and to start to differentiate yourself from the competition. So how do we avoid falling into that gap? And that goes back to actually what a flywheel is, not even what the flow will is in HubSpot sense, like what a flywheel is. So the flywheel was actually invented by a guy called James Watt from Scotland when I was looking this up as well, I actually found out there's another James Watt who's the founder of BrewDog. So you guys have a BrewDog in the town actually. So it's not that one, it's not the craft beer guy. It's actually the guy that invented the steam engine and created the industrial revolution pretty much from there.

What he did was he invented the flywheel on is way to building a steam engine and there's kind of three key elements to it. So first two who are pre-friction enforced. So obviously to get that flywheel spinning the way we had on that [inaudible] there we need to be put in some force inwards. We also need to remove any friction because that's going to slow the flywheel down. And then there's a final step, which is what it releases. So it releases energy and energy or in HubSpot sends growth and for your business growth for your business as well. So if we want to avoid that gap that we are looking at their basically what we need to do is make sure that the friction that we're seeing, which you will see naturally if you have a growing business, right?

Friction comes in as your business grows

Friction comes in, in your processes as you grow, it's harder to have a really great customer experience. I think I was talking to someone earlier that has their businesses kind of grown pretty rapidly and that's where their focus is on making sure that this customer experience stays really, really strong, but it gets harder as your business gets bigger. So that's going to naturally come in. But what we need to do is make sure that it's less than the force that we're putting into the flywheel. So how do we do that? Let's first of all look at a couple of examples of what friction could be and I want to give you guys a couple of specific examples from HubSpot for this as well. So at the top one is kind of really important here at such handoff points. That's one that we struggled with a lot in HubSpot actually.

So I'll give you guys an example of a customer that's going to end up talking to me. So I'm an account manager. They're going to start working with me on an ongoing basis from probably three months in. At that stage they'll have talked to more than likely an inbound sales representative. They might've talked to them on live chat on the website, someone, a business development rep might have spoken to them on the phone. They're then going to talk to what's called an inbound growth specialists. So that's their sales representative who's going to try and figure out what products are the best fit for them. They'll probably talk to a sales engineer who's gone to see if there's any technical roadblocks to the deal and make sure it all goes smoothly. They'll then talk to their implementation specialists who's going to do the onboarding and try and help them get set up at, they'll then probably within the onboarding if there's any technical issues, end up talking to multiple technical support reps and then eventually they'll get to talk to me.

Now the reason that happens in HubSpot is because we have a ton of specialists. We have onboarding specialists and specialists sales roles and myself I'm a specialist as well because you actually pay for my service. But that creates a lot of friction, right? Like you're working with tons of different people. The relationships aren't being built, you lose the trust. It also creates delays as well because you've got to wait for answers from different people and get on the phone with different people as well. So it's something that we're working on a lot of HubSpot is you could probably tell it's a tricky one for us, but one of the ways to remove friction is really just to reduce down those handoff points to have as little specialism as you can within your business. The other examples here are probably the ones that I would focus in on.

The things that add friction is things like a business that only opens nine to five Monday to Friday. It's hard to get people to work on the weekends and odd sort of hours obviously. But that's one I know that really frustrates me. So if you can, having like an online purchasing process for your customers on your website that's open 24/7. Things like having to go to a store when you should be able to just post something online and yeah, having to talk to a sales rep like multiple times just to be able to buy something. So obviously the ways to remove friction are the opposites of that then. So if you can have self-service checkouts and online purchasing, if you can be open 24/7, if you can reduce down that specialism as I said you can really get the friction out of your process.

So I'll give you guys an example of one that HubSpot did there again. So last year we actually introduced a program for our sales reps. So what we wanted to do was make sure that everyone in the business is focused on this, is focused on making sure that our customers are set up for success. So rather than having your sales reps focused on just delivering more deals and getting through more sales, we actually changed their commission program. So if a customer cancels within the first year, the sales rep loses their commission and the commission gets taken away. We also put in like kickbacks or bonuses for the sales reps whose customers have the best long-term retention. And what that means is that the sales obviously service ourselves as the account managers. Everyone is focused on getting the customer set up correctly and making sure that they see long-term success.

Another example actually that I was going to share of companies that have a really good frictionless process. Netflix is obviously the really obvious one or Spotify really easy to sign up for. You just log in online, use your Facebook to login. That's it. You're good to go. Uber is the other big one. So I was actually in California a few weeks back for Coachella music festival and just wanted to get that into the talk somehow. Basically we stayed in a motel so we got an Uber to and from the festival every day which yeah, getting taxis obviously after a festival it can be a pretty hard process, but what we ever had was the most frictionless process I've ever seen in my life. Basically, you walked out of the festival, you ended up in this huge Uber parking lot.

They had music playing that loads of people there to help you, they'd free WiFi even though there was no WiFi anywhere in the entire festival for the whole weekend. Other than that one point you walked into that lot, you went on your Uber app, the popped up with a code. You showed the code to your driver who was like waiting. There was a queue of drivers waiting to pick you up and they took you home. So just a really, really easy way to make things easy for consumers and customers and just a big, big win whereas like Lyft, they didn't have that. No one was getting Lyfts at a Coachella basically. Cool. So yeah, the next one then is going to be forced. So one of the big questions here is actually where you should be applying the force.

So if you think back to that flywheel and they attract, engage, delight stages. If we go back to like the 90s maybe even early 2000s, yeah, in my job as well especially like the place to put in force was in the attract phase or the engage phase, kind of a mixture of the two because you are putting it into your salespeople. You're hiring as many salespeople as possible, getting them to make as many phone calls as possible, send as many emails. And that was it. That worked because in the 90s especially people didn't have access to as much information. They weren't as informed as I was in that wireless earphones example, they couldn't do that. So sales reps had the ability to add a ton of value by having access to that information basically. That didn't change in the early 2000s to kind of the more inbound marketing model whereby consumers had a lot more of the power.

So what we did was, well HubSpot introduced inbound marketing as an idea in order to give away those resources in some sense and give away as much information as possible as a hook to get people in and in there in your nurturing programs and you and you go from there. In 2019 what we'd be seeing is probably the place to put your force is that the light face as we've seen because yeah, as we saw already, you're actually your own customers are the biggest way to add value to your business. Specific programs or things you can do to add force would be, yeah, having a really great onboarding program. Using service hub to get feedback and testimonials, customer references, having a really good customer service program obviously helps as well. A couple of other ways maybe again, another specific example from the B2C sphere would be, I was having lunch the other day and one of my colleagues Ian is a big fan of burritos.

He goes to a particular burrito store, which I don't think you guys have here called Boojum and he eats there a lot. They have your typical B2C customer loyalty programs or like, you get a card, you get to stop each time you get a burrito after 10 burritos you get a free meal. What's really cool was after, I think it's 30 burritos, you get a free meal and a free T-shirt and they actually put a bit of money into the T-shirts or they've got really nice designs. It changes all the time and they're like really, really sought after. So even when I was looking it up before this there was people selling them online for quite a lot of money. You see pictures of celebrities wearing them. It's kind of a cool thing, for me when I heard about that. That was the perfect example of turning your customers into promoters and getting that flywheel spinning.

It's a perfect delight strategy. Again it's B2C, but B2B you can kind of do similar stuff. So free trials as I said, like just making the purchasing process a lot, lot easier. Cool. A final stage then as I said is energy and growth. So this is where there's a kind of a little bit of a equation at play. So we want to make sure, is that the force, so that's the money you spend on marketing, sales and service and the resources you put in their divided by the amount of friction that is left equals this basically. So if you start to see growth in the number of leads, the number of referrals you're getting, customers, online reviews, partnerships, revenue and particularly retention of that revenue. That's when you know you've got this equation right. That's when you know you're bringing the friction weight down and the force that you're applying is working and get enough flywheel spinning. What you should do about it or what can you do about it?

So number one is probably just apply the flywheel to your business. Before I would ask you to go and do that, I wanted to take you guys through like a few examples from actual HubSpot customers that have done this and inform ourselves as well. Actually these might be a little bit hard to see but I'm going to go through them. These guys are office furniture warehouse. So they basically provide the furniture and help you cut out a new office fit out and they've been also our customer for five, six years I believe. And they've got a couple of really specific delight or flywheel type strategies. One is the focus on sustainability, so they use reusable materials or materials that would otherwise end up in a landfill and they use that to actually build their furniture. By doing that, they've actually been able to partner with a lot of equal consultants and sustainability companies and they just deliver leads into the business.

And because the partnership is so strong and people want to work with them. Another thing these guys did was they also focus really, really heavily in on that kind of onboarding or consulting process when someone decides to become a customer. So they could just sell them the furniture obviously and leave it there, but they actually come in as strategy type advisers on how to fill out your office as well, which apparently is there like a really, really big value add because a lot of office managers just don't have the experience of that. They don't have the skills and they're getting really, really good results from it. So couple of things to pick out here is repeat customers on the outside here. So 49% of their revenue is from repeat customers, NPS. So net promoter score is 95, so basically anyone who becomes a customer loves them.

And in big one here, which is, yeah, I think you can kind of see that. So 13, nearly 14% of their new business comes from referrals. So this is really working well for them. And they actually, these guys, won tickets to inbound because they sent this to Brian Halligan and he really loved it. So next one, these guys are in software company they were actually billing for eCommerce and they again were pretty standard HubSpot customer, they'd been doing inbound marketing and using the sales tools for four or five years. When they went through this process of building out their flywheel, what they actually did is identify some really, really big friction in the process where you'll see it is just with these kinds of backward arrows on the setup and client relations phase.

What they actually figured out was happening was there was basically no handover process between the sales team and the onboarding or setup. So it's a software that takes a bit of time to set up. They had an onboarding team, they had a sales team, but there was just no alignment there. There was no conversation. So a customer went from sales straight to onboarding. What was happening was people were never getting the thing set up. Expectations were completely miss set and they were just falling off. They were cancelling the service a few months in or even earlier because they never used them. So flywheel strategy that they implemented was just putting in that alignment process between sales and onboarding. The sales guys actually had to join the first onboarding call, give their info that they got from the sales process, set the expectations and I think it was like a 50% reduction in churn and within the first few months is what they saw after just implementing that one tactic.

This last one and this is a bit more simple, this is to just be like kind of first step that you could take when it comes to using display, real idea for your business. This is just measuring what's happening in your business right now within this model. So I mean, the only big thing that these guys did was implement a customer NPS score just to track if they were getting promoters or if people were happy with them. But yeah, they're basically just using it for reporting, seeing how many new prospects are we adding in the attract phase? Is this NPS actually having an impact the new prospects at the top? And are we going to get it spinning?

Yeah. One more example as he said which again is how HubSpot thinks about this. This is actually direct from our marketing team and how they're thinking about the flywheel. So they came in to give my team at talk a couple of months ago and basically it ended last year, beginning of this year, they mapped this out and try to identify the friction in the HubSpot flywheel. So what they saw was like, yeah, we do a lot of things well, we're pretty good at inbound marketing and we get a lot of website visits. We get a ton of signups and people convert on the content that we have, retention rates are pretty high, but it wasn't slowing down so much. It was just kind of plateauing. So it's was kind of like how do we actually improve things? How do we actually put everything into positive here rather than having neutral or negative trends in some of this metrics?

And the decision they came to is that in order to grow better, we need to change the way we do things. So the first question is changed from what? So this is still the way things are done in HubSpot for the most part. And they were still kind of implementing this process for if you went to a HubSpot blog posts on end, like our marketing sales blog, at the end you're generally going to see like a really nice image-based call to action, which is for relevant content offer, drives you to a landing page with a form like this one. You fill that in, you're going to receive the offer and you're going to start getting emails off of us. We're going to try and nurture down towards maybe using some of our free tools or talking to a salesperson.

Delighting your customers

It works. But I mean for me there's a lot of clicks in this. If we go back to the Netflix process or the Uber process, this is a lot more cumbersome, there's a lot more friction in there. So the way the marketing team is actually thinking about this is customers deserve better. So they want to have pretty similar to the Netflix or Amazon type idea, one login, no spam, personalized experience, recommended content, free tools all in the one place. And so they're actually going to be moving a lot of our resources and a lot of our content that we have all inside the academy and learning centre. So if you're on a blog post, you'll actually see a call to action that just drives you straight to that academy centre, single log in just with your email, that's all it's going to ask you for.

And then basically we're just going to track your usage after that. So if we do this, obviously yeah, potentially we're missing out on a lot of information that we would have got from those forms, we're losing a lot of touch points with potential customers. So basically we have to come up with a way then to retain and monetize those leads that are coming through. So big focus is on retention. So if they do convert on that single login, getting them back to log in again and check out more of our content. So we are going to be triggering emails based on their usage data and have an in app Chat Bot, which is going to make recommendations, just standard emails with recommended content based on new content or what a lot of people are viewing at a certain time.

And then really important lead scoring based on that usage for our sales team. So if there is really engaged leads they can pick up on that. Real life example of this, 35% of Amazon's revenue is generated by its recommendation engine. I don't know if anyone has got like the recommendation emails off Amazon, but they're not particularly good from my experience. They usually recommend something that I don't want to buy or that I already have bought but still 35% of their revenue actually comes from there. So that's like the biggest, so what Brian Halligan actually said it is inbound targets and this is like a really good example of it is it's not what you're selling, it's how you're selling it. And so using some of these tactics can have a big, big impact on your business, even if you're not your product or your service isn't that much better than the competition.

Cool. Hopefully I can help yet want to I guess finish off by demoing a couple of pieces of functionality if I can, if it hasn't logged me out. First one is probably my favourite, if not one of my favourite features and it gets a bad rep with its pop-up forms. How do I get in here? Yeah. Cool. So pop-up forms for me are actually really, really useful, but only if used in the right way. So how do we use them in the right way? I've got a few examples here actually just keep on present for now. This is number one.

And yeah, so this is like your kind of typical example of top of the funnel type offer. But rather than implementing like a CTA that goes to a landing page and you have to fill in a form, then you go to a thank you page. It's just a really simple public form, takes like 15 minutes, maybe less even to implement. What I really like about this is one, they placed this on really relevant pages. So if this was going to appear, it was going to appear on blogs where people were reading about weight loss or dieting, those types of topics. The image does a really good job of selling the piece of content in this case, text is basically all you need on a good landing page anyway to be honest.

And then really strong call to action to download the eBook. So this is basically like your full conversion paths, CTA, landing page, thank you page all in the one system. These guys had some pretty good traffic to their website, but they actually got like a seven, 8% conversion rate on this, which is really, really high for a public form like that. So just an example, if you do it right, it can work really, really well and it's a lot less friction than your standard full conversion path process. Cool. Next one up. I will need to move the tool. So let me open this up. So this is kind of then maybe you're more middle of the funnel and I know I got rid of the funnel earlier, but I'm talking about a lot again now it's hard to get away from, this is like your standard webinar signup pop-up.

When I work with my customers for these ones, generally what I'm going to recommend is using the dropdown banner that comes down from the top of your website generally like on a really high traffic page. So it usually the home page for something like this, again, it's going to say what's going to happen at the webinar. Ask for your details and give you the thank you message. What's really nice about this, which is a new feature if we go to options, is this scheduling option here. So this is quite new. It's just for professional and enterprise marketing customers of HubSpot but actually what you can do is decide when you want this to start appearing and when you want it to stop appearing on your website.

So if you've got a webinar, you can schedule this to appear maybe a week, two weeks before the webinar is going to take place. If you're then like away in an event or if you just don't really have the time to be honestly, you can then set the on publish date and time here as well. So just take this box, it's going to let you choose a date and time that you wanted then to come down off your website because the webinar is already happened. Again, just a really, really simple way to convert leads using the public form too.

And then last one is in here as well. So this is more your kind of bottom of the funnel option then, it's called exit offer here. This is one of the first things I always try and do if I get like an eCommerce type customer come through to me and they're saying we get tons of abandoned carts on the website, like people go through to our checkout page and then they never complete the purchase. First thing I recommend is probably looking at implementing something like this, this is your public box. In this example, we're offering like 20% off. All they need to do to get that is enter their email and then it's going to give them a discount code and that they can use a checkout. So the really cool thing about this is it only appears when someone goes to leave that particular page that you've put it on.

So with the pop-up form you can actually do the annex and intent. What that means is this will only appear if I take my cursor up off the page. So you're still giving someone the chance to convert to a purchase. If they're not going to do that, if they're going to leave the page, the pop-up appears, at least we get their details through, we get their email and we can put them into our nurturing programs from there. And this is like your standard eCommerce example can still be used. It doesn't have to be a discount. I think it still works for those delight strategies that we were talking about when it comes to the flywheel. So whether it's premium content, free trials, those types of things as well. It can still be used for those types of processes as well.

Cool. Yeah. Next up is events. So events is actually a enterprise only feature for HubSpot. But anyone who has our marketing enterprise tool should be using this, plays back in really, really well to the flywheel in two ways. One, because it actually lets you map out what that conversion path that you want people to take is. So for example, if it's you want them to visit a particular URL or a particular page on your website, you then want them to click on a particular link or a button on that page and then you want them to complete a particular form, we can actually create all of those as custom events in HubSpot. And then secondly, we can actually measure where people are falling off in that pathway. So with what's called the events funnel report, which I'll show you guys in a second, you can actually see the percentage of people that are converting from each of those custom steps that we're going to build up.

There's two ways to kind of build these events in HubSpot. One is your clicked elements. So that's any area of your website that you want people to click on. Two is the totally customer event. You can also do submitted form or visit the URL as I said, really simply, you're just going to choose the form for a submitted form of venture. Just going to insert the URL for the visited URL event, the clicked element one, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to show you guys, but this is really, really straightforward to set up as well. You don't need to be like a developer to do this or to have any idea about code and because I don't and I can do this. So basically what you're going to do is go to the settings in your HubSpot accounts tracking code and it's down here event Chrome extension.

So this is a really, really cool Chrome extension that HubSpot built that basically allows you to download and install something into your browser once you do. I don't know. Am I okay to download that? Yeah. Cool. Once you do, you'll be able to go to any page on your website, select a button or a link within the page or any area of the page really, click in it and give it a name and it will be created as an event in your HubSpot account, just like that. And we'll start tracking as people complete that event. Let me see if we can get this to work. I won't sync it to your account for now.

Oh, cool. Cool. Okay. So I try and show this to you guys. So I'm on the homepage of my website and I sell cookies. There's my public form, that's how not to implement it, on all pages and always popping up here. So yeah, this is actually, this is just a test site that I use for HubSpot. But yeah, basically I'm going to click on the Chrome extension up here, look for a selector, and then you'll be able to hover over any place on the page. So let's say I want someone to go to my footer menu, for example, and click on contact us, select it, give it a name and hit submit. That's in the attract event that's going to be tracked as people complete it in Hubspot. So really, really easy to set up. Once we start tracking that, then as I said, what's great is the event funnel reporting then at that point.

So this is basically where you can go into our standard custom reporting tools. Sorry. If I click on this link, hopefully this will work and we can choose from a custom series of those events that we've set up. So like I said, if for you guys it's visiting a particular URL, clicking on a button, filling in a form, and we can actually just build that out as a funnel from there. So I'm just going to create a custom report in here, I'm going to choose funnels, again funnels and events. Next, here's all my events that we've created in HubSpot. This is just a demo account so not a ton going on in there right now. You can change the date range there to go all the time, see if anything else has been happening, visualization. And then I'm just going to choose my events.

So let's say it's, yeah, page visit [inaudible] sales pricing page, clicked on, create an account and filled in the signup form for example. Run the report that's going to create a visualization. How many people have gone through that process, where the fall off points are, and you can then start tracking that and seeing what the issues are in your conversion path. Probably won't bring up any data in this example, so I'm just going to move on. Cool. Yeah. Final one is just this is like my number one go to if people are having problems with tracking conversions and they feel like they're losing leads somewhere along the way. And that's just getting our CRM and sales tools set up correctly, this is something I used to do a ton of consulting on when I first started and HubSpot and used to use this image quite a lot.

Again, it's a funnel. In this case it works really well because it's our life cycle stage funnel. And basically what's happening here is HubSpot's going to automatically track a lot of this for you. So any new contacts that get created, we're going to mark them as a lead lifecycle stage. If they get to a deal or an opportunity, we're going to change the life cycle to opportunity. If we moved out to close one, we're going to try and change it to customers. So straight away without doing anything, you're going to be able to see your conversion rate from lead to opportunity and from opportunity to customer and keep a track of that within the tool.

So that's just a standard default report that you can add to any dashboard in your HubSpot account. If you want to get a little bit more advanced, you can implement the custom contact property like lead status to track where people are between lead and opportunity. If you want to get even more advanced, you can use workflows to automatically set marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead status and then track the lead status within that. A little bit harder to get the reporting on that, but you can get like a pipeline report.

So you'd be able to see how many contacts are sitting at each of these stages and track that on a month by month basis. And you won't get the conversion rates unfortunately, but that could be calculated outside of HubSpot, I guess. Obviously deal stages is again, really important one. In this case you will get the conversion rates. So you can set up your customized deal stages, you can track opportunities through those stages and you will see your conversions from one stage to the next. You'll be able to see in your sales process where are people falling off, where deals getting stuck, what are the holdups in this process? Really good for one, I guess talking on an individual sales rep by sales rep basis. Like if you look at one sales rep's pipeline and there's tons of deals at appointment scheduled and then they're not moving to need confirmed, there's something going on there or turns or getting to need confirmed and then they're all moving to close lost.

Maybe they need a little bit of training or just a bit of guidance on what they are doing. A similar thing on the lifecycle stage site we're able to get, I guess something like a report like this, which is going to track your entire sales process. So we're going to be able to see yet, or if it's those six key steps that you want to track, we're going to be able to do it with a combination of custom statuses and lifecycle stages. Generally, yeah, tons of people that get to the first stage in this process, not so many will get down to the very end, but what you want to look out for is where you start to see a huge drop off between one or the other. So if you see that you got to dig in and figure out where the issues in your conversion process are, and ideally implement some flywheel type tactics to try and stop those issues from happening. And with that, we can get the flywheel spinning and that's it. Thanks a million.