The HubHeroes Podcast

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, Lord Lack, lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge. Never fear hub heroes.

Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Of heroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that both Devin and Max are currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer.

Alright, hub heroes. That's right. We are here, and we are ready. I'm super excited to be here on what we might call launch day of the league of extraordinary inbound superheroes. The future is bright, my friends.

The future is bright. Why you might ask? Because we're here to help you do inbound, HubSpot, content, sales, heck, you name it better or at least not alone. Now first, before we jump into the good stuff, the conversation of the day, what do I mean by we? Well, I'm not alone on this fantastic journey.

I have 2 other superheroes by my side, so let's meet them first. First up, Devin Bellamy. Devin, you didn't know this was coming, but why don't you let the Hub Heroes listeners know a little bit about you, who you are, what you do, and maybe some information that we might find shocking or unique.

No. I didn't know it was coming, and I also didn't know that that intro was coming. I'm I'm not cool enough to be brought in by any of that, but, glad to be here. For those of you guys who don't know me, my name is Devin Bellamy. I work at HubSpot.

I work in the partner enablement. I deal with partners, solutions partners who basically help customers grow better. Before that, I was, in the partner program myself. I've done onboarding. I've done strategy.

I've built out who knows how many portals, built HubSpot CMS websites. Tons of fun. And let's see a fun fact about me. I used to teach kung fu. That's the interesting tidbit.

There we go. Alright. Next up, joining us for the high flying adventure is mister Max Cohen. Max, why don't you let the Hub Hero listeners know a little bit about you, who you are, what you do. Man, this one scares me even giving you this opportunity.

But a little tidbit of information that we might find shocking or unique. Hey, everybody.

My name is Max Cohen. I am currently a solutions in or senior solutions engineer. I just got a promotion over at HubSpot. I've been at HubSpot for around 6 going on 6 and a half ish years right now. Did a lot of stuff from customer onboarding to learning and development as a product trainer.

And now I'm on our sales team, and it's super fun because I get to have really awesome conversations with customers or reps about HubSpot and the possibilities and all that fun stuff. And I also just create a lot of content around inbound marketing, sales, HubSpot, things like that. You could find me on on TikTok if you haven't already. Maybe not a lot of people in the LinkedIn and, like, HubSpot universe may not know about me is that my life outside of, like, HubSpot and inbound beyond being a a dad of 2 wonderful daughters is I've played and coached, like, competitive paintball since I was 15 years old. That's, like, another big half of me that, like, I don't really talk too much about on LinkedIn because I don't really think people care too much about it.

That's kinda the other the other side of me. And, you know, now that the pandemic is finally hopefully over, I'll be getting back into a little bit of that instead of just sitting behind his desk all the time.

Oh, we might have to get some video clips of that. Here's the thing, Listeners, I want you to know, like, hopefully, you heard all of the years of experience, years with HubSpot, the nerdiness that is coming through. By the way, I'm George b Thomas. I have been doing inbound in HubSpot since 2012. I've been training, doing onboarding, implementing.

Well, listen. Is probably an understatement. By the way, the weird thing about me is I love peanut butter and pickle sandwiches. So you can chew on that one for a little bit.

How long have you been pregnant?

Oh, well, there's probably a joke there, but we'll move on. You may have stumbled onto this podcast. You may have clicked on the link in the socials, but did you know that you have your very own hall of justice? That's right. You can head over to the hub heroes.com at any point to catch up on future or historical episodes depending on where in the timeline you are listening to this here episode.

Also, over at the hub heroes dot com, you'll be able to join the league of heroes, suggest an episode, and even see all the podcast apps and listening locations we're broadcasting too. So head over to the hub heroes.com and get what you need. One last thing we need to mention for you, the community, before we get into the topic of starting with why you need to know this, you, my friends, have a special hero signal at your fingertips. You know, kinda like the bat signal. Anywhere on the socials at any point in time, you can use the hashtag, hashtag hub hero podcast, and we're gonna come running.

Alright. Here we go. Let's get into the good stuff and start the conversation starting with why, turning humans into heroes. Devin, Max, where do you guys wanna start with this conversation on starting with why?

A lot of this kinda stems on why we wanted to get together and, like, do this podcast in the first place. Because the one thing that I think really kinda ties all of us together is in one way, shape, or form. We we were all HubSpot trainers or our HubSpot trainers and still in some capacity HubSpot trainers. However, however you wanna shake that out. The most common question that I've gotten is like, alright, we have HubSpot.

Where do we begin? Or we're starting to do inbound marketing. We're starting to do inbound sales. We're starting to do inbound in general. Where do we begin?

And I think when we were talking about this a while ago and kind of coming up with like our first topics and ideas for this show, we called this episode, like, starting with why I think for, like, a reason. For me and Devin and George, I wanna hear, like, your your takes on this too. 5 years ago, like, you know, while HubSpot was kinda turning into a CRM or morphing into a CRM, and it was still, like, mostly a marketing tool, I think it was a little more obvious the answer of of why are you getting started with HubSpot and that was really to do inbound marketing. This is back when, like, inbound was just marketing. We didn't think of it as this more like a morphus larger sort of business, all encompassing business strategy that is now inbound.

So So I think a while ago, the starting with why conversation was probably a little bit more narrow. But now that, like, inbound is a strategy, HubSpot as a product does a lot more than just focus on marketing. Whenever you're getting started with any of it, asking yourself why, like, why are we getting into the idea of doing inbound? Why are we using a tool like HubSpot is the most important question you have to answer. Because HubSpot is a giant blank canvas, inbound could do many different things for you.

It can touch a lot of places in your business. But for me, like, when it comes down to starting with why, it's like, why are you why are you getting into either deploying the strategy or using this tool? Because from there, that's where you can start to think about like, hey, what are our first moves? What are our first steps? What are the things we want to think about when it comes to reporting?

What are the problems we want to be able to solve for our business? All that. And like, that's just kind of the question that I'll like turn around on. You know, I'm I'm curious before we dive like too deep into it. You know, Devin, what have those conversations looked like for you in the past?

Where what have you told people in terms of, like, where to begin and things like that?

The thing that I always explain, if you put a great it's a big blank canvas. It's a tool. Yeah. And it can do so many things. But the question is, what do you need it to do?

And that's the biggest thing that you need to identify first is before the first step to using HubSpot is not even opening HubSpot. It's you don't even log into your portal. What you need to do is identify a strategy that you want to do. Well, first, you need to identify a goal, identify an objective that comes from identifying problems. You so I'm I'm going backwards here.

You start with a problem, then you create a goal, and then you figure out how you're gonna get to that goal. And then you take HubSpot, bend it to your will, and then use that to accomplish your goal. For instance, if your goal is more leads, we'll start with a very simple one, using your website to get more leads. Alright. Great.

Now you wanna think about how you're attracting the content that you're gonna put in because HubSpot is a tool, not a magic wand. You can't just turn it on and then all of a sudden, oh my goodness, I'm being inundated with people who wanna talk to me. That's that's not how it works. What you gotta do is you have to come up with the content ideas and strategies compelling something that makes people want to interact with you, that makes people think that, hey, you know what, this person's amazing. And then what you do is you use that to create a path that people can then convert.

There's a technical term, we like to call it conversion path. That's what you wanna use. And that's just like the marketing aspect. And then you talk about CRM and sales and how you can get that interdepartmental cooperation and kumbaya and alignment and all that fun stuff. That's why you start with a why you can't.

How can I use HubSpot better? No. How can you attract people better? How can you be awesome out there? And then how can the tool work for you?

And I wanna jump in here because I think there's so much good happening in this conversation. And I wanna even go, like, a step before this, and I really wanna take a moment to empower the listeners who might be listening to this before they even get HubSpot or they just got HubSpot and empower them from the Lord lack of knowledge of why the crap somebody just bought this tool and said, now use it and said, good luck. Because what I wanna empower them with is the ability to say the question you should be asking the people that are in the c suite, the people who purchased the tool that looked at you and said, you are the implementer. You should turn and say, why? What are we trying to achieve?

Just like Devin and Max said, what is the problem? What are the hurdles? What are the goals? What is the road map? What can I actually line out and look at the future and gain a vision for where I'm trying to go?

Because then another piece of what you gentlemen said was bend it to your will, mold it. I want everybody to be educated on the fact that HubSpot is not paint by numbers. It's a box of Play Doh. You can literally pull it out and mold it with things like custom objects, custom properties, views that you can make dependent upon how your team needs to use them. And it's not just this out of the box SaaS silver bullet software.

We were winning. We paid 1,000 of dollars, and now we're, like, make it rain. No.

We turned on the leads speaker.

Yeah. No. It's just yeah.

We turned on the lead speaker. No. It literally is this thing of we've got this tool. We have to build a road map. We have to customize it to our needs, and it all does come back to why.

Now with that understanding and empowering and educating these folks on this, my question is, what are and, again, we may start at marketing. We may start at sales. We may talk about service. We might just talk about rev ops, which talks about all of them. What are these foundational elements or items that that you historically have seen as trainers around inbound and HubSpot that you're like, buy all that is holy.

Get this in place or, like, think of this thing.

The funny part that I think a lot of people don't even consider is, like, no matter what part if we were to kind of, like, take the basic parts of inbound strategy, attract, engage, delight. Let's look at the the big three parts of the methodology. Depending on how your business, your

organization, whatever you are, depending on how you're doing and

where the biggest pain points What a lot of people don't think about is, like, okay, what do we do if we get really, really good at that one piece of the puzzle? What sort of, like, downstream problems does that cause? So for example, you know, someone could be thinking, like, alright. We're we're thinking about, like, attract here. Let's turn on the content machine.

Let's get really smart at thinking about who our buyer personas are. Let's get really smart about generating demand with content, and let's think about what people are actually searching for online when they have certain problems and Oh, preach it, brother. Yeah. Let's let's pretend you get really, really good at just attracting people, and and maybe you're setting up some conversion paths. I I know there's plenty of people today that believe in completely ungating everything.

And and I think within inbound, there's even an argument for that too, but that's that's neither here nor there. Let's say you go and you're just collecting a whole bunch of leads because you created a lot of great content. It's like, cool. Now what are you just gonna send them over to sales? You're creating all these people that are coming and they wanna gather all your content, but you don't have any sort of plan of taking them from someone who's just built up enough trust that you in you and and given you their information.

And like now what you're just going to send them over to sales because you didn't really think about what was going to happen in the in between. You didn't really think about how you were going to begin to, like, engage them or the the marketing to sales hand off or anything like that. There's always going to be some sort of physics involved. And if you do really good at this, what is that gonna mean downstream? If your sales team becomes extremely efficient, right, maybe you get the sales hub, you know, and and and they start being able to communicate with a much higher volume of people at a much faster rate, and they're they're having a lot of great conversations.

And because they're not spending a bunch of time on administrative BS, maybe that means they're closing more customers, and they're creating a lot more customers. That's awesome. But if you don't have, like, the customer service or the customer support infrastructure in place behind that, well, then that's gonna get really ugly really quick. All your new customers are gonna go back to your salespeople because you don't have a a CX org in place in order to be able to help them when those people have questions or you don't have something like a knowledge base that's gonna help people self serve. Not only do you gotta say, like, hey, this is what we wanna do to get started.

You also need to, like, think a little bit about it. It's like, hey, let's say this goes well. What's the downstream physics of that mean for us? And do we have the ability to, like, answer or solve for those problems as they come up? Right?

And I'm not saying think 3, 4, 5, 7 steps ahead, but just say, like, hey, here's our first initiative. If we do well, what does that mean? And maybe there aren't any problems.

Maybe there is 6 or 7 steps ahead, but at least 2. And Devin, I'm gonna kick it over to you here in a hot second, but I wanna unpack something to hit my brain is in HubSpot, like in life, best case scenario, worst case scenario. Have a backup plan for both of those. Because sometimes your best case scenario, if it's too much of best, it's all of a sudden a lot of friction or force in the wrong direction, which by the way, the reason I kicked in here real quick because I want the listeners to know and you 2 to know that I've gone over to our massive library of ideas for episodes, and we added inbound physics as well as I added this one, Max, because of something you said, to gate or not to gate. That is the question.

There will be

a future episode. So back to the conversation, Ham. Devon, what are your thoughts on kind of what Max is unpacking and the direction that we're going?

I think one of the biggest friction points that people are gonna not going through the everyday people deal with when implementing any system is unwillingness to change. And that's either from an organizational standpoint or from a just an individual standpoint. Like it could be something you're willing to do. One of the biggest mistakes that I've seen people make is, let's say they've been working with Mailchimp for years, and then they get handed HubSpot. What they try and do is make HubSpot work like Mailchimp.

And it's like, don't do that. Yeah. Stop it. Or they when we talk about the sales process, What you have to be willing to do is What you have to be willing to do is to adopt an entirely new process, an entirely new way of doing things. And I'm not just talking about going from stick shift to automatic.

I'm talking about going from bus to boat, sailboat. It's a completely different experience, and you're going to find that it requires a different set of skills and a different mindset in order to accomplish what it is that you're trying to accomplish. But the second thing, you not only need to have a c suite buy in, you need to have everything come from the top down. If you're an individual contributor or even a mid level manager, you're not going to be able to initiate the change required in order to be successful with your new tools. Because you can't tell one of your coworkers.

Hey, you have to do this thing now because they're going to tell you a certain number of expletives that may or may not result in them getting reported to HR. But if it comes from the top down that, hey, this is what we're using. This is the process that this person is creating and we're gonna do. If you can give feedback on it on whether or not you see issues with it, great. But if you just wanna have a total complaint fest, go go ahead and do that self channel in in Slack where you can just talk because we're not here for that.

That's that's not conducive to growth.

Yeah. I'm not down with that party, brother.

Yeah. The the but the the the biggest thing is that in all of these things, when we talk about the why is that you have to understand that if you were awesome already, you wouldn't be doing this. You wouldn't be implementing the new tools. If you were already dope at generating leads or you were already getting a whole bunch of sales through the pipeline and being able to accurately forecast what you need to do, if you're able to completely service everyone that comes in. If your website can tell you about who's seeing what and when and how interested they are, If you are already doing all of that stuff, you would need this.

Yeah. And, Max, at some point, we're gonna need you to create your evil laugh as, like, a sound that we can use in the podcast because here's the thing. I feel like lord lack struck again. Devin, in that first section you're talking about, you're literally talking about lack of innovation and the lack of change. The the ability to somehow, when it's the work case scenario, to be stuck in who you are and what you've been doing for the last 5 years knowing that it's not working, which by the way is insanity.

The other thing is too, I wanna unpack that second part and where my brain went and what I heard is that, yes, it has to come from the top down, but I'm gonna give you a little super secret tip. You can be a leader without being a leader. Meaning, you might be the person in the middle and you've been told to implement HubSpot. You can lead the leaders in what you need them to say to the people around you, below you, whatever. So it does come to the top even though think of it a little bit, not in a bad way as the mariette of getting the buy in, getting the verbiage, getting the things that you need to be successful, for your team to be successful.

So don't get hung up in this, well, I'm just this. As soon as you hear yourself say just no, just nothing, you can be a leader even though you might not be a leader. Where else does your mind go on this topic of starting with why when it comes to inbound and HubSpot and all that good stuff.

I wanted to kind of like hop on on on that thread, Devin, that that you were talking about is getting the buy in from leadership to be able to make big changes like this because let's not, you know, bullshit around it. Going from a company that's doing completely outbound everything, buying paid media in, you know, TV shows or, you know, commercials or or, you know, ads in the newspaper or billboards and sending out physical mail and just cold calling everybody until all your sales reps burn out saying, hey, we're gonna stop doing all those things that we've been doing for so long and we're gonna try this whole inbound thing. I think that I mean, that that's a very tricky conversation if that initiative isn't coming from the top. But let's say you're a marketer or you're someone in sales and you realize that the current tactics are causing, is either really easy or not so easy to kind of like identify in your organization if you haven't educated yourself in the other ways of doing things. And when I'm saying the other ways of doing things, I'm I'm talking more about inbound and demand generation and and really looking, you know, leading with content and things like that versus what your company may have already been doing for so long.

And I think that could be a pretty daunting task for that marketer that's seen the light or that salesperson that's seen the light being like, oh, these leads are kind of crappy or, you know, cold calling people all day kind of sucks or these people don't really come to me thinking that we can solve a problem already. You know, it's it's really it's really hard. I guess what would be your advice for that person who's trying to drive that change management in terms of, like, getting themselves educated so they can either pitch the idea of change or get people on board with before you even think about because it's it's at the end of the day. It's not about buying a piece of software. It's not about buying HubSpot.

It's about deciding that you're gonna change the way that your marketing sales and service organization operates. How would you coach someone who's kinda feeling like a little bit intimidated by a task like that? Like, where would you tell them to start?

First of all, I I'm just jumping here real quick, and then I kick it back to you, Devin, for a second. But I have to say if when you purchase HubSpot, it doesn't change your ecosystem or destroy your echo chamber, then you are probably not gonna be headed in the right direction.

And what it is,

if if I could wave a magic inbound wand over everybody, I would make certifications in HubSpot Academy education mandatory, either 1 on 1, but even better as a group. Like, every Friday at 12 o'clock, bring your freaking lunch. We're gonna do this 1 hour of training because you need to know the methodology, the religion, the let's go amen of why the freak we're using this expensive oh, I'm sorry, HubSpot. Not expensive, very valuable tool, and not just let it lay there on the shelf. So education is the key.

It is the life chamber. It is the thing that will breathe oxygen into new ideas, new strategies, new things that you wanna push forward as a company. I'll stop. Get off my soapbox. Devin, what are your thoughts?

Well, I'm gonna hop right back on my change management soapbox, buddy. Here's the thing. Getting people to do a thing that they are uncomfortable with, getting people to get out of their comfort zone is annoying and it sucks. One of the things that's worked for me is getting someone else to come in, like an outsider or a consultant, and having them set the change. Because like the Christian says, Jesus wasn't even accepted at home.

Why would you expect that you would be? The thing is, is that if you bring in someone else to work on it and to document and implement and and keyword document as a part of implementing this change so people can go back and refer to it, then that helps. Even if you're the expert, even if you are the absolute go getter, boss hog when it comes to HubSpot, the fact that they will respect an outside voice before they respect you or sometimes that's the case. But the other thing is just setting the expectation that everything is changing. Normally, I'm all about parallel testing and gradual transition, but this is like changing from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right side of the road.

You can't gradually change that. That's just something that one day, this is what we're gonna switch over to, and this is how it's gonna happen. And we're gonna migrate all this data from the old thing to the new thing, and this is what it's gonna do. If you can't handle that, regardless of how much of a rock star you are within the organization, if you can't handle that, there's going to be consequences and repercussions. And so you can leave with a carrot, but there's gotta be some stick behind it, which is why I talk about getting buy in from management c suite, and then George hit it right on the head with managing up.

You you have to empower leadership to enable these changes because they don't know what they're doing. That's what they hired you for. If you can make these changes, it would be great. But the other cool thing about the systems is that you can set up an automate and then give a demonstration on why this is so cool and why this is gonna make their lives so much easier and get them excited about the new change. Point out, hey.

Here's why you suck right now, and here's how you can stop sucking. And people will be excited about not sucking anymore, even if it means that they have to learn something new or do something different.

Yeah. I love this, Max. I'm gonna kick it back to you here in a second, but the idea there's 2 things running through my head. This last point that you just made about the only way that you know where you can go is knowing where you're at. And if where you're at is suck and what you want is success, like, you have to know those two points to move forward.

The other thing is I want everybody to know. This is why I am so excited about this podcast because, ladies and gentlemen, I want you to realize we just had a Jesus reference and a dukes of hazard reference in the same clip from my man, Devin Bellamy. It was the boss hog, and it's hard to be a prophet in your own town. I'm just super excited. Max, let's continue down this journey of why.

Now for me, where I start to go is, like, should we share the why we got excited about inbound, why we decided to make it part of our lives, why we decided to train and implement. Or if you wanna take another direction, we totally can do that too.

You know, what got me, like, super excited about inbound? Like, man, I'm, like, really trying to kinda go back and and think about my experience as a sales rep at Apple before I came here. Wanna know how we how we got leads when I was working at the Apple Store as as a business sales rep? When people who came into the store to buy something, could be a personal item, could be anything. If on their receipt, we saw that they had a business email, we would then try to reach out to them and call them.

And that was excruciating. And the the wild thing that I noticed was when we would do like workshops where we would actually talk about educated topics around how to use Apple products in your business. We would, 1, get people showing up that actually cared. And then, 2, show people that we knew what we were talking about and we could be trusted advisors. And all of the leads I got from those ended up turning into great relationships.

Who would have thought? And that kinda, like, proved to me, like, how important it is to build trust with your marketing or whatever emotion you go through to capture leads, generate demand, get interest. I know those are different things, but they're also, you know, very closely related. I think the the big thing too is just, like, I hated cold calling so much. Like, I just thought cold calling was just a weird thing to do.

At the end of the day, if you think about the physics of what's happening there, it's you calling someone up not because you care about their well-being or helping them. You just wanna sell something. And, like, that just, like, didn't sit well with me. You know what I mean? I always thought, like, there has to be a better way of generating folks who are interested in talking to salespeople in a way that doesn't totally suck.

And to me, like, when I finally started learning about what inbound really at the beginning was that, oh, it's just how you use social media, which I was completely wrong about. But what I really, like, understood is, hey. Content's what drives everything. It's all about building trust through the content you produce and, Rick, really doing all the legwork to build trust and generate demand for your product before someone even talks to a sales rep. That to me just felt like a much more human, wholesome way of marketing.

Because even if people aren't buying stuff from you, you're still putting, like, good out there into the universe because there's plenty of people that can take your advice, things you talk about, the content you create, and go out and solve the problems that they have on their own. And that's awesome if you do that. It's tactically awesome for a number of different reasons, which I'm sure we'll kinda dive into into more depth as we kinda continue this series. You know, that's what got me super stoked about it is that, like, you could do marketing in a way that had a good benefit, not only for your customer, right, but also for your other internal customers, like your sales reps and stuff. You could send people to them that were actually excited to talk to them, right, or actually wanted to talk to them or already had a certain amount of trust

For me, long story short, it helped me make a lot of people money, and it, in turn made me a lot of money. For me, what happened was, I discovered HubSpot on accident, really. I was doing a website redesign for the company I was working for and, you know, entry level marketer. Even though I have, like, way above entry level skills, having no degree in coming off of, over a decade in radio, people are going to treat you like you don't know what you're talking about. So, and I didn't sound intelligent at all when I talked about marketing.

I would just try and explain concepts that I had reversed engineered from these multibillion dollar organizations like McDonald's. I, you know, I I didn't sound I wouldn't have given me money. What ended up happening is the CEO asked me to create the website, and I asked him what some websites he likes. He's like, HubSpot has a really cool looking website. I'm like, alright.

And I went and checked out websites and I'm like, wow, that is cool. But then I started looking at the content. I'm like, wow, that that is cool. And then I got the inbound certification and got invited to a grow with HubSpot event in Philly and met James Stone, who is still to this day, one of my favorite HubSpotters. I really fell in love with the people first and then they actually, him and Andrew Fagnoli actually helped me create a marketing deck that explained financially why we suck and why we could be better in marketing.

And it worked. And so not only was I able to speak intelligently, thanks to HubSpot Academy, but I was able to get C Suite buy in. Thanks to these awesome HubSpotters. And then not only that, but I was able to follow through and knock it out the park. With their help, I was able to set KPIs and identify what our goals could be and then we knocked them out of the park in the Q1 just off of an ebook campaign because it was killer content.

My favorite thing was getting promoted past my boss and becoming his boss just off of using HubSpot effectively and working the system after identifying the goals. It was like it was magical. It's just been that was like 6 years ago, almost 7 years ago and I've kind of been writing the HubSpot Orange Rocket ever since and it's just been it's been amazing as HubSpot's grown, as, you know, the sales tools launched, as the, business model has completely changed and the hubs have completely changed, I've grown with it. Now my life is pretty dope. I get to buy talking Deadpool heads and stuff like that.

I love it. And, you know, here's the thing. Earlier, I got really excited about education, and you'll see why I get excited about education, why it really is a passion point, why I believe I'll be a HubSpot trainer until the day I die because education is key. And, honestly, I tell people I think HubSpot found me. I didn't find HubSpot.

In 2012, HubSpot Academy did this thing called the world's largest webinar. Our social media guy, small agency, 4 people, Massillon, Ohio. Our social media guy comes running in, and he says, hey. There's this company called HubSpot. They're doing this thing called the world largest webinar.

We're like, oh, what? He's like, I think we should watch it. So we go out to the the, you know, the conference table. We got it on the big screen TV. We're watching the webinar, and we hear I believe it was Mark Killins at this point say, we're gonna give away 10 free tickets to the top 5% of tweeters.

And John, our social media guy, his fingers are on fire. Just tearing it up. Zach and I are just, like, sitting back, like, yeah. Okay. Let let's check this out.

Long story short, we win 2 tickets. Zach and I go to Boston for the first time. I hear Gary Vaynerchuk speak. By the way, ladies and gentlemen, before this, I was a designer developer. Six pack and a pizza comes in, a website comes out the other side.

Don't talk to me. Leave me alone. 2012, I go, I wanna be a marketer when I grow up. And I'm like, I know nothing about marketing. We come back September 2012.

We get HubSpot for the agency. I start attending webinars. I get one certification. 1 becomes 3. 3 becomes 6.

6 becomes 12. 12 becomes 21. 21 becomes 38. HubSpot Academy certification is literally multiple, probably, college degrees based off of HubSpot Academy Education. It ends up enabling me to get a job at the sales line, which then enables me to become a professional speaker, which then enables me to onboard companies that if you ask me in 2012, will you ever talk to employees of these types of companies?

I'd be like, no. But I've been able to do that because of education. And this is why when I said a while ago, I would make education mandatory because there's a key to life and a key to HubSpot and a key to inbound in that last 15 seconds. Now here, I'm gonna tie it all together. The reason I fell in love, my why with this whole journey was because in 2012, HubSpot was preaching, don't call me a customer.

I'm a human. The reason, the why that your company has HubSpot, the reason the why that you should focus on your why, the reason the why that you should go past your hurdles and head towards your aspirations is because of the humans that you are serving. The humans that you are helping pass their hurdles with the content and the strategy and the sales that, yes, at the end of the day ends up being revenue, but in reality was life changing to those people around you.

Yeah. But he said all of that. That's the thing. I think HubSpot Academy is one of the most game changing things people can bring into their lives. It's constantly expanding.

I mean, even beyond the certifications, the gems that are in just the straight courses. If you just take time like, I remember I spent a week. It was like over the course of a week or 2 weeks, I got every HubSpot certification that became available. And I came out of the other side of that, a completely different marketer. When I would go to inbound every year and I would go to the breakout session, I literally just did a speaking engagement at a conference in Wisconsin.

Shout out to the everybody at experience inbound. I did a breakout on email deliverability and everything that I spoke about everything I said I either learned through HubSpot Academy or I picked it up from different years of going to inbound. It's like people like you said, I never 5, 6 years ago, I never would have imagined giving a talk to professionals about email deliverability being the guy on the stage talking about email deliverability and just having that I went to college for music education like that's this is not at all how I pictured my life being. And and if you if you do nothing else, get on academy.hubspot.com.

If this is the last episode of the podcast you'll listen to, the next thing you should do is just spend your time at hubspot academy. And here's the other thing. I think we hear a lot lately just with how everything is crazy with the economy and crazy with the job market, all this stuff. You hear a lot of people talking about the idea of, like, breaking into tech. I think there's also this concept of, like, breaking into the HubSpot universe.

HubSpot Academy, which by the way is free for anyone listening to this that isn't familiar with HubSpot Academy yet. All of this educational content lessons, tracks, courses, certifications, free free free free free. Right?

Free. All the way free.

Did you say they're free?

They're free.

They're free. Right? They

don't cost currency. They're free. What's wild is like, sure. You work at your company. You wanna learn more about inbound.

It's not just the HubSpot product. Yes. You can go in there and you get certified on the product, but the majority of the stuff in there is all about strategy, which is product agnostic. Let's say you wanna break into the HubSpot universe. That's a great way to get started, but then something to keep in mind.

This is great if you want to work at a company that's using hubspot or just deploying inbound. If you want to work at a hubspot partner or agency or or some kind of company like that because there is lots of folks in there that are helping HubSpot customers deploy HubSpot, run-inbound marketing campaigns, manage their entire portal and their whole setup and everything. And hey, maybe also you could be a freelancer. You could start your own agency, or you could even come work for HubSpot in one day like Devin's doing now too as well. And he all started with HubSpot Academy.

There is this massive ecosystem and universe surrounding this whole HubSpot thing for folks who are looking for a career change. And you don't need to go back to college to do this. Right? You don't need to go to college if you haven't gone to college before to do this. All of the education that you need to break into this wonderful community, massive universe.

And there's this whole idea of the rise of the HubSpot admin now that's becoming a thing. It's all just kinda sitting there right in front of you with the HubSpot Academy. So, like, don't sleep on that. Go check that out. Is if you're listening to this podcast because maybe you just got put in put in charge of this HubSpot thing or you just bought HubSpot recently and you're realizing maybe it's a little bit more difficult than than I anticipated.

Academy is the greatest place for you to start. Like, I promise you, if you're looking at HubSpot right now and you're looking up at the navigation and you're just like, wow. That's a lot of words. That's a lot of tools. That's a lot of stuff.

If you just go get your inbound certification, all of it will start to make sense. The thing that a lot of people don't put together, especially folks that are evaluating HubSpot for the first time or new to the community, new to the the product or the strategy, whatever, is that there's 2 things. There's inbound strategy and then there is the HubSpot product.

Yes.

The HubSpot product is built to deploy the inbound strategy. You could do the inbound strategy without HubSpot. Is it a pain in the butt because it involves tons of different tools and cobbling together a whole bunch of systems in order to do it? Yes. It's a pain in the butt, but that's what HubSpot solves for.

But, again, every single part of HubSpot and how it's all built together to be one piece of software that does all of this stuff, it's all meant to kinda support this inbound methodology, flywheel, attract engaged in delight, whatever you wanna call it. It's built to support that inbound strategy. The 2 work best together.

The last thing just to tie together this whole episode is the hardest thing about using HubSpot or any tool for that matter is the strategy. The hardest thing about all any of it is the content, is the strategy, is the why. Yep. If you can figure out a why and then create a plan to solve those problems that you you are you're diving into. At that point, the HubSpot user interface becomes extremely simple because there are so many different moving parts to HubSpot you might not ever use.

Yeah.

There are a lot of tools in Hub Spot that are available that may not be applicable to the goal that you're trying to solve, and that's okay. Everything within it is exceedingly powerful. The tools that you are going to use, even if you just use a fraction of of the hub that you got in order to accomplish the goal that you set, you're going to see remarkable benefits. And I'm not just saying that because I bleed orange. I'm saying that because it's made me a lot of money over the years doing that being able to know strategy the way I do being able to be a strategist, being able to come up with a plan for success all across the organizations, not just in marketing.

That is what allows me to look at HubSpot and says, okay. I'm gonna take this tool. I'm gonna take this tool. I'm gonna take this tool. I'm gonna put together all of this and do something dope.

And then people are going to look at it. I'm gonna generate reports. The c suite's gonna love me, and then I'm gonna get a pay raise.

Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, the one thing I'm gonna say to end this episode, whether it be HubSpot Academy, whether it be listening to future episodes of this podcast, in your mind, simply put this, 1% better each and every day. Don't get overwhelmed with the massive wall, but enjoy the journey along the way.

Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will lord lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast?

Make sure to tune in

and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hub heroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the league of heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox, and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag hashtag hub hero podcast on any of the socials, and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into on next.

Until next time when we meet and combine our forces. Remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and, of course, always be looking for ways to be someone's hero.