The HubHeroes Podcast

[00:00:00] George B. Thomas: Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? 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 hub heroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, once again, we can start without that jargon. Devin is not with us today, so we're sad of course, but I'm actually glad that we can dive into this. For those of you that don't watch the podcast, Yeah, max.
I wouldn't drink that if my life depended on it. Max literally put like a can of something that looks like it was about ready to explode. And I'm like, nah, bro.
[00:01:20] Max Cohen: should I open it for the viewers
[00:01:21] George B. Thomas: No, no, I don't think you should. That's gonna be a really big mess. No, forget that. Forget that. Because then you gotta explain it to the wife of like, it was for TV babe.
It was for tv. Nah, no, no. So, hey, here's the deal. Welcome back to another out of this World episode of the Hub Heroes. I am super excited. Uh, this week's up episode is a little bit different. Um, maybe, as you've guessed, if you're listening to this, you've only heard two voices. Uh, also I'm doing the intro, so instead of the whole Hub heroes crew, it's just me.
Your boy George b Thomason, of course, max Cohen, Mr. Max Cohen. Uh, we're rocking the mics today and, uh, I gotta be honest with you, max, I have been excited for this episode right here, ever since the first time we were brainstorming months and months and months ago. And you said the word inbound physics and my brain went, huh.
And so now that we're here and we can actually do it, this is a perfect opportunity, right? This is a perfect opportunity to like, take a deep dive, into what is truly spectacular. Uh, maybe even shifts your mindset a little bit. It might change how you think about and implement inbound. What I really love is.
We're gonna do our darnedest to talk about this so that those of you who are listening can, can stay up with the story and what we're talking about. But those of you that choose to go over to community dot hub heroes.com and uh, watch it while Max is gonna be able to share a screen, you're gonna be able to see some visuals.
Um, and it might even make a little bit more sense, uh, when you're in there and can do that. So we're gonna talk about inbound physics. What is it? Why does it matter? Why is it so radical? And how can this immediately shift how we execute inbound? I cannot, I cannot for the life of me, max Fathom radically shifting or executing inbound in a different way than I have.
But again, I'm excited. I'm excited and I'm gonna try to be the listener, uh, and ask the questions that the listeners might have as we go through this. Um, but. How should we get started? What, where's your mind at when, as a, like a, an entry point for this conversation of inbound physics? First of all, are you excited about it?
[00:03:43] Max Cohen: Oh, I'm stoked. Um, I love talking about inbound physics, um, just because it's kind of me sort of sharing the way that I kind of developed a simple understanding of what the flywheel actually meant. Right. I think the other thing that's like interesting is, you know, ever since the inbound methodology, which by the way the original inbound methodology is just, is just the flywheel simplified.
Like it was always the same thing, right? Um, but you know, ever since there was the inbound methodology or the flywheel, right? Um, I think you've seen a lot of folks kind of like put their own spin and iteration on it. And when you really kind of look at it and, and understand what's happening at a fundamental level in any of those strategies, It's all the same thing, right?
Like inbound is, inbound is inbound. There's many different ways to do inbound, right? There's many different ways to do outbound, but like the fundamental motions of what's happening, right, uh, are ultimately the same, even if you spin it in different ways, right? Um, and I, I think the reason that I like to kind of talk about the basic physics, if you will, of what's happening when you look at that strategy of inbound represented through that flywheel, right?
It's gonna make it easier for people to look at that strategy and have comfort in knowing like, okay, here are these big three giant phases of this thing. What do they literally, in the most simplest terms, mean? Right. What I don't want people to do is look at something like the flywheel and start going through a crazy analysis paralysis of like, what sort of content do I need to write?
What sort of keywords do I have to go after? What sort of funnels do I need to set up? What sort of KPIs and metrics do I need to look at? Right? Like that is just a, a really easy way to just not do anything. Um, and to say, oh, this is too hard. And just go back to traditional outbound methods and like not actually think about why, the flywheel works and respecting why it works, and then saying, okay, what can I do to drive this general motion in my own way with my own audience, with my knowledge?
What, what knowledge gaps do I need to go, you know, fill in order to do something like this? Right? And as long as I can see the bigger picture, because inbound is always about seeing the bigger picture versus like hyper focusing on a specific piece of it. Right. And I think folks who are really able to.
Take HubSpot and deploy inbound, have a healthy se, and, and see success with it. Have a healthy sense of what that big picture looks like. Because until you know what the big picture looks like, you can't really go in there and fill in the details. Right. Um, so I love talking about it cuz it unlocks a lot of stuff for people as it unlocked it for me.
And when I started visualizing it this way, all of a sudden I became more confident in speaking about it. Right. And, and I was able to say, Hey, if something's going wrong, here's probably why. Right. And, and you know, you can follow things back, but I'll stop right there.
[00:06:43] George B. Thomas: One of the things, uh, that I love, and the reason I I'm saying that I'm so excited about this is for, for me, and I think for other HubSpot users, one of the best things you can do is you can realize for your brain, you can insert like new modules, new books, right? Um, and, and one of the most important things to understand about HubSpot and inbound is the connective tissues.
Being able to connect the dots. And so understanding that I'm, I'm getting ready to, uh, plug in a module that I've never taught, never thought about, don't understand what has been in your brain that you've been formulating for years around this. I'm able to plug that module in that the listeners are able to plug that module in.
And again, those, you know, those new wires are gonna be connected. That new way of thinking. The, maybe for some of you it might be like an aha moment. Um, and I love, I love when we're working with clients and we can provide those aha moments. I love when we're on a podcast and I have those aha moments, or we know that we have listeners that have those aha moments.
So here, max, let's start at the beginning though. Like fundamentally, you know, uh, somebody could say, oh, HubSpot, they made up the inbound methodology. You know, it's just a thing. It's kind of this, you know, tactic and like, uh, you know, it's the, it's the religion to like, and then you, you got to the, the, the tool.
I, I would say you're probably in the wrong room if you are saying those things, but, but I really wanna dive into why does it matter how we think about inbound? I mean, can we just read all the books, take all the HubSpot certs, be on our way, execute the inbound strategies to our hearts content, and hey, let's call it a day.
Why is it even important that we're talking about this idea of thinking about it differently?
[00:08:35] Max Cohen: Yeah, and I mean, like, I don't, it's, it's tough for like, sure, like HubSpot called it inbound and really took on the. You know, that really kind of evangelized the idea of inbound and yeah, it has kind of turned into like this weird religion that we all follow, like so, you know, in our professional lives.
But like I, the, the thing that I, I don't necessarily think they invented anything here. I think what they did is they found a very clear way to communicate the most basic building blocks of what you need to do in order to like grow a business, right? Like these, and this is why I call it like physics.
This is always all, all since, since any business has been created, this, these three things attract, engage to light, have always like, had to kind of happen in order for a business to succeed. Right. And I think what they're doing when they show it as the flywheel is they're, they're just giving you an easy way to kind of interpret these, like big three motions.
Right? So if I could like, kind of go through 'em, right?
[00:09:51] George B. Thomas: Yeah.
[00:09:51] Max Cohen: Uh, and, and, and I'll share my screen here. Yeah. And I'll, I'll share here. Can I sh I can
[00:09:56] George B. Thomas: in other words, like are you showing the three big sections or are we done teasing and we're actually gonna like talk about what inbound physics
[00:10:03] Max Cohen: let's get in there. There's this presentation button. I can just share my screener. Wait, uh, I'm not gonna upload a slide. I'll just do screen,
[00:10:10] George B. Thomas: Yeah.
[00:10:10] Max Cohen: uh, window. Here we go. No entire screen. Here we go. Great. All right. So for the folks watching at home, uh, and by the way, if there's any reason that you should go on to Hub Heroes, Uh, website to see the video episodes.
This is the reason why. But for the folks that are listening, just go ahead and just Google the flywheel and go take a look at it. Right? Um, but yeah, I mean, if we were to take a peek at this, right? Attract in, engage, delight, what is this like, not like what does each one of these things fundamentally mean, right?
Not the, not all the different micro tactics and all the other stuff you're doing to like, do the stuff really well, but like, what, what does it mean and what are the physics involved with it? Right? So attract that quite literally means getting people just, I'm just saying this. I'm not gonna say aware.
I'm not gonna say trusting. I'm not gonna say just getting people to become aware of the presence of your business in the first place. Right. Um, finding you, you have to get them to you somehow, right? Um, and you know, oftentimes you're doing this with some kind of content, uh, but the fact of the matter is, if they don't know that you exist, they can't engage with you, right?
That's just a, that's just a fact of life, right? If they don't know you're there, they can engage with you. Nevermind how they found you, nevermind how much they like you, nevermind any of these other things. If they don't know you're there, they're never gonna engage with you in the first place, right? When we think about engage, this is just sort of like how you interact with them when they finally find you.
And usually it's because they're buying something from you or they're hopefully gonna buy something for you, but they're aware of your presence and your communicating and interacting with them. Somehow this is a fundamental truth for how a business has to operate. Cuz if no one buys anything from you, it's kind of hard to be a business.
Right? even if you're not a business that's like a, uh, for-profit business, even if you're a non-profit, right? Maybe people are donating to you or donating their time. There's a process in which they interact with you to create whatever that sort of business or business like transaction is. And there's a way you interact with them.
There is efficient ways, there's inefficient ways, right? But you have to engage with them somehow to have some kind of interaction with your organization, right? And usually that's under the context of them buying something, right? And then delight. This is, you know, the essence of saying like, okay, they gave you money.
Did they get what they paid for? Did you provide good service to them? Did you. Not do them dirty enough where they went and told someone else about you and helped more people become attracted to you. Right. Um, so it's like the, a lot of people like, look at this stuff and then they immediately start thinking about, how do I use software to do all this?
So, and it's like, no, no, no. You just need to realize it's like, these are the three fundamental things that need to happen. You'll see other, you know, I've seen a lot of HubSpot partners do it. I've seen a lot of like, you know, other, other folks that talk about this stuff online kind of make their own versions of the flywheel, where they just take this and they add a bunch of phases to it and they go, this is the real flywheel.
And then you look at all those different phases you can go. That's actually part of attract, that's also attracting, that's engaging, that's engaging, that's engaging. And that's like two different forms of delight. Like it's all this, a lot of it's the same thing. So the reason I love the flywheel so much is that, This is the most, um, simplest form because if you remove any of these things, it becomes really difficult to grow, right?
So for example, if you remove the delight piece, right, which could mean your product is trashed, so people don't like it, it could mean your customer service is terrible or it doesn't even exist and no one gets help. All of a sudden you don't have anybody else going out there and being advocates for you, right?
So your ability to attract people becomes that much harder, that much more expensive, that much more difficult, right? Let's say you get rid of the attract phase, you're not doing anything to make people aware of your business. You're not doing anything to create content that people are actually searching for, right?
And that's another big piece of it, right? You break that piece off and all you do is just like, Have a salesperson ready to sell, someone to sell something to someone, but those people never come to them. Your business is fundamentally broken. Let's say you get rid of the engage piece. You just tell people that, oh, we have this great business, and nothing's there.
There's no, no one picks up the phone, no one responds to emails, no one has any way of communicating with people. No panic plan. Then it's like, okay, you get a fake business. Right? So the reason I, I've always loved this is because like, these are the fundamental building blocks. I like to think of this, and I was talking to Liz about this the other day, that inbound methodologies, almost like the water cycle, right?
You have water on the ground, it evaporates up into the sky. It forms, I don't know, crystals, or crystals or some, and it like it, it condenses or whatever. It falls down. It goes, the runoff goes back into the water, uh, and it does the same thing over and over again. You can. You can say, oh, there's all these different micro processes and like actually when the water rises and it gets into a cloud, it does this, I don't know, reverse osmosis.
And then there's these three stages of the crystal forming. And then once it gets heavy enough, it falls. And, and then when it hits the ground, it does it a bunch of different filtration and like do all this, this other stuff before it actually gets to the what. You could make it more complicated. But those three big things are still the fundamental things are happening.
You take away any of those one pieces, all of a sudden it doesn't work. Right. And so I've used this, this inbound methodology kind of like in the same way, right? Um, I don't know George, if you have any thoughts, but that's kind of the basics of why I like to look at it this way. And then, we'll, I'll show you the complicated
[00:16:38] George B. Thomas: Yeah. We'll, we'll, we'll keep diving in here in a minute, but it's, it's funny, max, because I. When you're list, when I'm listening to you, there's a couple things that have been going around in my brain. One, um, why is there a need to complicate it? There isn't, right? Simplifying the complex is always gonna be a little bit easier road to travel down, um, than something that you've just manufactured to be like a stopping block or hurdle or potholes or things like that.
Now, here's also where I'll go is like I, if you polled a thousand, uh, marketers and asked them where does the flywheel start? I bet many of them would say attract, because the old school methodology was like, attract, convert, close, delight right there. Here's the thing about that rain cycle. Nobody knows really where it starts or ends that you were mentioning.
And so when I think about attract, delight, engage, there is no starting or stopping point, right? It is literally like a wedding ring that you wear around your finger. There's no beginning or end, which is kind of the point because you could be, by the way, attracting new clients as you're delighting the ones that you already have.
Like this is where I think about things like referral programs, right? Um, you can be attracting new people that you don't even know. Of course, this is like content marketing, inbound marketing, social media marketing, all of the marketings that we know that we have. Um, but you can also be engaging those new people and engaging historical clients and like it's, it's just this, almost like. that I live, that happens to be this circle, uh, of things that I can break down in my brain. Here's the one piece though, I'm gonna go nerdy for a second. Because when you're starting to talk about the attract, and I don't know why this is going on my brain, but I, I have always, um, loved magnets. Like I just love magnets, right?
And the idea of attract and the idea of magnets or, uh, having magnetism, it's magnets are producing a force, right? Uh, there's a force that your, your business needs. There's this, there's this motion magnets work on motion. Motion that needs to happen. Um, and what's fun is the right parts of magnets attract to each other.
Yeah. But if you've ever tried to put a magnet together the wrong way, and it just, it forces itself away, right? And so this is where I go into, if we bring it back to business and we're thinking about attract and magnetism and force, um, the right fit clients, like you mentioned, filtration system through the earth, the flywheel can be a filtration system for the types of people that you should be working with.
All right, I'll let you dive back into kind of, uh, what you've now shown on the screen. By the way, if you're still listening to this and you haven't gone to Hub Heroes, community.health heroes.com, you're missing out. But Max, go ahead and explain what we're, what we're looking at here.
[00:19:48] Max Cohen: And I'm so bummed because I, I, I don't know what happened to it, but I used to have a version of this that like layers everything on piece by piece. So it's not like that difficult, but just to kind of like talk to what you said as like, where does it begin? Right. I think that's a really interesting question.
I think when you see a lot of businesses or the, the way that I kind of have seen a lot of businesses when, when I was, you know, doing a lot of heavy HubSpot consulting, especially when we would talk about the strategy is like they're generally decent at one part of this or maybe two parts of it, or maybe they're like decent in all of them, but like, it's not spinning fast enough.
Right. But like, let me tell you this, lemme ask you this, George, when. When you were like, you know, onboarding people onto the marketing hub, right? And I'm sure you always asked businesses the question like, how have you been getting business like up until, and what did you, what's the one word they all say?
[00:20:43] George B. Thomas: Well, if we're talking about buying lists, that's probably the
[00:20:46] Max Cohen: Well,
[00:20:47] George B. Thomas: one answer, but But other than
[00:20:49] Max Cohen: number two too.
[00:20:50] George B. Thomas: yeah. Number two, honestly, I got a lot of like, it just seems to happen or they just show up.
[00:20:57] Max Cohen: Yeah. Well, yeah. And, and that's because the number one answer I would always get is word of mouth,
[00:21:02] George B. Thomas: yeah. Referrals. Yeah,
[00:21:04] Max Cohen: Referrals. Right? Word of mouth and referrals. Guess what? Can't physically happen unless you're doing some kind of delight. Right? And a lot of these, like businesses, they're good at knowing how to take care of people, but they're less skilled at the whole.
Let's make con, let's do content marketing and like really focus on how we're attracting people and, and you know, let's, let's build these sales funnels and process it. Like they're not great at that, but they're good at like, making sure their customers are taken care of or that they produce a really quality product.
Like building a really quality pro product is part of delight, right? Like, if people aren't happy with your product, they're not gonna be delighted with it. You know what I mean? They're not gonna say, Hey, go buy this cool widget that like, you know, if, if it's bad, right? They're not gonna recommend it to a friend, right?
So a lot of the times it's like, people told me, oh, you know, I, it's mostly just been word of mouth and referrals. It's like, alright, cool, well you're doing something right? Cuz that wouldn't be happening. It couldn't happen if you guys weren't delighting people, if you were, you know, screwing 'em over. Had a bad product, bad customer service, however you wanna think about it.
But you were gonna say something, George.
[00:22:11] George B. Thomas: yeah. Well, I wanna dive into you because we're talking about delight and um, I literally want to ask the question if you can delight too much, because I had something happen recently, max, around referrals since you brought it up. Um, I have a client. Who has sent me four referrals that have turned into clients and, and every time, yeah, it's, I'm, and by the way, listeners, this is not bragging,
[00:22:38] Max Cohen: Shout out to the goat.
[00:22:39] George B. Thomas: yeah.
Every time I talked to this human, this is what they say, oh, I could be doing more. I wish I would. I I could send you more. And I'm like, am I delighting you to the point that you feel guilty? Like, you know what I mean? So I want us to like maybe unpack this idea, or maybe that's just a human element that we're bumping into.
But like, the question truly is, when you think about the delight phase, when you think about doing it right, when you think about getting referrals, is there a too much of the apple pie and now you're sick? Or is it just No, you should delight as much as humanly possible.
[00:23:16] Max Cohen: Yeah. I mean, I think it, it, it, it really depends because there's, uh, there's, every time you, every time you hyper focus into like a specific part of the flywheel, what happens is you end up creating a, an imbalance, right?
[00:23:31] George B. Thomas: Ooh, and imbalance in the force.
[00:23:33] Max Cohen: the flywheel can still spin, but it can get wobbly, right? So like for example, right?
If your engage phase. Isn't fortified and your attract phase has got some gas behind it. Right. And what would that translate to in the real world? Maybe you're running these, like you, you, you pick up a killer marketer, they understand content, they really get the inbound thing in motion. They're doing some real crazy demand gen stuff.
They're hyping up the product, they're building a community, they're getting people super stoked. And you know, maybe one day, like you got a piece of content that hits be it about your product, about, you know, some sort of goal or challenge that people have or, or whatever. And all of a sudden you create these like, you know, high intent leads, like a, a, a, a large amount of people that are just like really stoked to talk to sales.
But you haven't set up a sales process to. Catch that ball going really fast, right? You had the, the dams break and all of a sudden, you know, leads are falling through the cracks, like people aren't getting called back. Your sales team has no infrastructure to handle it, right? That flywheel's technically spinning, right?
Like you're attracting people like crazy. They're getting through, engage as fast as they can, right? But it's, it's wobbly, right? Because like engage can't handle that, like throughput. Now does that happen all the time? No. It can, right? Um, but just in the same way you can build up this amazing sales process that's like super ready to take anything you throw at it, and then you do nothing from the attract phase.
And it's like, cool, you got this wicked heavy end of the engage wheel, all right? And nothing spins because it's all outta whack and there's nothing supporting it. There's no balance around the other parts of the strategy,
[00:25:12] George B. Thomas: I sure hope. I sure hope the listeners are hearing, uh, what I'm hearing. And that is you always have to be paying attention to what is your weakest link, uh, in, in these three main phases and the things you're doing in business. What is your weakest link? And it's funny, when you talk about Wobbly Max, I think about tires.
And I was literally getting this visual of like, you've got your whip ready, uh, you've gone to like the racetrack, uh, you get ready to punch the gas and give it a good old burnout and then pop your tire pops. You ain't going nowhere. You ain't in nowhere race because your weakest link was what was supposed to be getting your car moving down the road.
You, you spent so much time working on the engine content by the way that you weren't paying. Paying attention to the sales team and then the sales enablement, by the way, that you needed. Right. And and they're just spitting out, they're closing everybody because everybody fits our product. Uh, now people aren't delighted, by the way.
Yo, you, you about to jack some junk up.
[00:26:12] Max Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. Don't jack your junk
[00:26:14] George B. Thomas: Don't jack,
[00:26:15] Max Cohen: the other, see the other thing I, I made this graph like probably in some kind of like manic episode during the pandemic I think when I was like super bored at home and I was like, I wish I could take like what my brain sees when I look at the flywheel and like post it out there for everybody.
So this was like a picture I posted on LinkedIn like a long time ago. There's like other stuff here that I think, you know, you may see that have like overlaid the original lifecycle stages and the lifecycle stages that HubSpot kind of came with. Cuz I was using it as a way to kind of explain like, how do you overlay all this stuff on top of each other.
Like if you even got the, the buyer's journey, like right there in the middle and, and maybe that's another episode, but like the back to the physics thing around the flywheel, right? Um, the, when we start to kind of take this more, uh, sort of holistic look at like, kind of the general motions that need to happen for like a business to kind of like grow in any sort of meaningful way.
Um, I, I, I start to kind of like say like, okay, if you're looking at this as like a marketing, sales, and service sort of focused growth strategy, right? Um, I like to kind of make it like easy and less amorphous, right? Because you look at this and go, okay, max, you're telling me a track could mean sort of like anything to get people like aware of my, like they have to find me.
I get it, but it's like, what? Like, could you give me like a little bit more of a, uh, specific of like what you mean in like a marketing, sales, and service context, right? So I, I've got you, you, if you're looking at it, you'll see that I have these like phase one and phase two of each part of these flywheels at each part of the flywheel, right?
But you're meant to first look at that by looking at these like red dots and, and for the people who are just listening, If you look at attract, engage, and delight, you'll notice that there is these like chevrons where Attract Meets engage, where Engage meets Delight. Yeah, Chevron, it's like a great. Just look at where the stages kind of touch each other, right?
The, the, the first way to like really think about the physics of like, when are you in one phase versus another? And like, here, let me also just say it's a spectrum, right? Like there, it, it, you know, and some people depending on like the strategy that you go for, right? Like if you're, there's plenty of room in this strategy for folks who don't like to gate any content and there's plenty of room in the strategy for folks that do like to gate content.
This is not a gate or not gate content thing. You need to remember, like, especially there's a lot of people that go inbound is just about gating content and getting, uh, someone to download an ebook so you could get their email and give it to your sales team. No, that is doing inbound. Wrong, wrong. There are right ways to do that and wrong ways to do that, right?
Um, you know, and then people go and call it something different. They go, oh, you should do demand generation. Dude, you're still generating demand when you do inbound because all the demand generation you do is with content and community and shit people actually care about, right? You're doing the same physics, my guy.
It's all the same, right? No matter how you want to kind of break it and switch it off into a new strategy, but basic physics are the same, and I'm not discounting it. What I'm saying is you have a really, really good way of doing parts of this, right, and, and you should do that. You should. You should lean on it because people need frameworks for the more intricate parts of this general overall motion.
Right. And you do what works for you. Right? Anyway, so the thing that I like to kind of get people in the mindset of when they're looking at this flywheel thing is like, look at where each one of the phases meet and what does that like generally mean, right? So like if we're looking at, in the mo more like traditional inbound sense, like back when we were talking about like, hey, you know, you gotta get people's information so you have a way to communicate with them, right?
So, you know, whether this is, I'm putting every ebook behind a frigging pa, uh, behind a, a, a, a gated landing page, or I'm not talking to people until they like request to speak to it, like, you know, request a demo. That really doesn't matter, right? But when you're thinking of the attract phase, right? Attract kind of goes into engage when you've built enough trust with someone to actually con convince them that like, it's okay to give me.
Some of your information so I can contact you in some kind of way. Again, whether it's early on in the, whether you wanna call it funnel or the buyer's journey or it's like really late and they're already like a super high intent league cuz you did some dope demand generation, whatever, it's right. At some point the physics there means I need to trust you enough cuz you either heard about you through somewhere else or, or some content you created is great or like whatever it may be, to actually trust you with my information.
Knowing that like you're gonna use it to reach out to me, right? And then engage once you've actually like gotten that information from them, that's like everything you're doing to actually like use that information, not abuse it, right? Some people say lead nurturing is inside of here. The sales process, I would say definitely firmly sits with and engage.
You could make arguments that it bleeds into delight, right? And there's also the fundamental truth that no matter if you're in marketing, sales, or service, you should be thinking about ways that you as an individual, Org, a chunk of the business, a department, a, whatever you want to call yourself, right?
You want to be thinking about how you're contributing to the ethos of attracting people, delighting them, engaging them. How do we engage people? How do we delight people? Right? Um, you know, for example, like you can think if you're a sales team, how do you create a delightful sales process, right? You don't have to put that on the shoulders of your service equivalent, right?
but anyway, at some point, like generally, That engaged phase is gonna kind of shift into delight or like the broader idea of delight when someone becomes a customer. In most businesses, there is a point where someone exchanges money for whatever it is you got, right? Whether you're for-profit business and they're buying a service or a product from you, or maybe you're a nonprofit and they're giving you money, and then you gotta go out and do something with it that makes them feel delighted that it's met today, whatever it may be, right?
There's a place where someone becomes a customer or an equivalent of a customer, right? That's like a, the, the kind of the, that's where you graduate from engaged to delight. It's more of a, I'm, in a lot of cases, it's more of a fade versus a jump cut, right? But it, it happens at some point. There's some point that it happens.
And then when you're thinking about delight, that's everything you do to do right by that person, keep him happy, all that kind of stuff. And the reason delight kind of pushes into a track is cause at that point, They are going to sort of become a marketer for you in some capacity, right? They're gonna go tell a friend about you, tell a colleague about you, write a positive review.
They're gonna do something to say, I trust these folks enough and they've delighted me to the point that I'm willing to put my, uh, reputation on the line, be it in a very minor way or a very major way to go advocate to them, to somebody else besides myself, right? Whether that's saying like, Hey, I moved to a new job and, and like, I wanna, I want to, I wanna buy you guys again, right?
Or, I'm advocating for your solution to my boss, or I wrote a, you know, awesome Facebook post about the great customer service that I got, whatever, right? But that generally doesn't happen until you've done something to delight them, whether that's just having a great product that you didn't oversell or, or false advertise, right?
And just having like a great. Product or you took care of them. You, you provided great customer service, you created a great experience for them, right? Um, or something went wrong and you helped them, right? It could look a million different ways, right? But until something like that happens, they don't really have a reason to go, like, tell someone else, Hey, this thing is cool.
You should buy stuff from these people. Right? And then, so that's like sort of the, the, the overall physics and kind of how these phases sort of like either, you know, jump cut or kind of blend into each other depending on what your thing looks like. And the other thing I want you to kind of visualize in your head, right?
When you see the flywheel, you see three even sort of like circularly, linear, maybe you're, you're, you're, you're, you're looking at it almost as like a passage of time where you're doing these phases, right? If that helps you, great. The other thing I want you to think about is like, Your business is probably not gonna spend even amounts of time in each one of these phases with somebody, right?
It's totally okay to think like, oh, we've got a really long sales cycle and it takes a lot of content and a lot of community stuff to really get people on board. So maybe my attract phase is like much bigger. My sales process might be pretty quick, so maybe my engage is a little tighter, and then we, we do a lot of leg work to really help it.
So maybe like you, you know, it, it's okay that like, if you kind of visualize these phases as being like longer or shorter, I guess, if you will,
[00:35:18] George B. Thomas: Yeah, I love that.
[00:35:20] Max Cohen: either way they're all there in some capacity, they have to be there or else it, it doesn't really work. Something's fundamentally broken. Again, like we were saying earlier, but George, I'll let you talk before I talk about the phases.
Yeah.
[00:35:33] George B. Thomas: yeah. No. And so here's the thing. I love that you mentioned a fade versus a jump cut because when I look at this and I see the red exclamation marks, um, Again, because I can see the screen as they're doing this. I see the red exclamation marks and I have to go into the mindset of a relay race and a relay race with the baton is one on the handoff, right?
It's the fade, the the five, the seven, the 10 steps from one runner to the other, the baton being tossed off. And so I, it's funny that you use large circular red and white exclamation marks in these areas because I feel like those are somewhat of the most important areas that you need to pay attention to in your business.
The, you know, marketing to sales handoff, these sales two service handoff, the service two winbacks cross sales, like that type of right, like, there's just so many ways that this is a very three very poignant places that you need to pay attention to Then,
[00:36:36] Max Cohen: oh, sorry. Go ahead. Go, go. Go.
[00:36:37] George B. Thomas: So then the other thing that's going through my mind, and I can't wait till you get to the phases and I can't wait till you get to like the phases and also life cycle stages because we did have, uh, somebody who's watching live, by the way, yes.
If you're listening to this on the podcast app of your choice, you could be tuning in live and actually asking us questions along the way. So at some point, max, make sure we tie back into the stages and the lifecycle stages of, uh, so the stage of the flywheel and lifecycle stages, uh, in here. But something that's going around in my mind as I'm looking at this.
This beautiful graphic and listening to, uh, the song that you're singing around inbound physics is for some reason around this entire circle. My brain jumps to StoryBrand and every department needs to be able to tell a great story. Every department needs to have story as the foundation of the communication that they're having.
Then, I don't care what you pick, but I'm gonna use three examples here. There's probably a framework. Or a belief in each one of these phases. So for instance, I think about Attract and I think about Marcus Sheridan, and they ask you answer and the ability to use, they ask you answer to create content that is middle to bottom of the funnel that people are searching for before they're actually going to engage with your sales team.
I look at this engage and I think of Ian Altman in same side selling, where it's actually you're partnering with the person who is trying to actually achieve the goal that they're trying to, instead of like closing them or smashing our funnel or right, same side selling and here's how we're gonna be a great organization.
And then when we think about delight, I go back to John janz, right? And something like the referral engine. And you're literally building the delight phase into this engine that gets you referrals. So think about this full circle story brand. You know, they ask you answers. Same side selling referral engine pieces that you could put around your business that it is now all being run by HubSpot and going through these attract engaged delight phases that Max is talking about for this inbound physics.
[00:38:42] Max Cohen: Yeah, I think it's also really important for like rev ops or whatever. I don't want to get into a, what is rev ops debate? Whoever the, whoever, whoever the in charge of all this stuff, cuz every business is different and we can all call each other whatever the hell we want and that doesn't matter. Right.
But you know, for the folks who are in charge of like looking at the bigger picture and making all this shit is functioning correctly, these red dots I think are places to really look at because this is where a lot of stuff can get screwed up. Right? Like when you think about this like first one between attract and engage, right?
What does that like, look like from like a technology and experience standpoint? Well a lot of the times people are giving you their information. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there, right? It can get to a salesperson too quickly and that salesperson can jump down their throat and create a bad experience.
Right? Uh, it could, you know, get to a place where like high intent leads are, are wanting to get in touch with salespeople and it's not quite getting there cuz you don't have like a good. Lead routing process or like, you're, you're, you know, however, you're like assigning folks to, you know, go work with these, these potential customers, like, isn't functioning properly, right?
Like a lot of problems can happen there because they get super stoked cuz they built all this trust and you, you did the right thing, whether it was through community or content or demand generation or like whatever, right? To the point where they're like, yeah, I'm super pumped. I want to talk to someone.
And then sales drops the ball. Or marketing just spams the living shit out of them with too much content, right? So a lot can happen that a lot can go wrong there, right? You look at the, the, the passage between engage and delight, right? What happens when you fumble the, the handoff to customer service?
Right? What happens when someone buys and they all of a sudden don't know how to get started? They don't know what resources are available to them. They don't know how to get in touch with something when something goes wrong, right? They get confused of who they should be talking to, or your product sucks, right?
Things can go wrong there. Right? On top of that, like if you fumble the delight process, guess what? Instead of people leaving that positive review and helping with your attract phase, Those people are going and flaring you on review sites and speaking ill of your name to everybody that they know.
Because when people have bad experiences and you're really screwed to light up, those people are, I don't know what the, I, I, I don't know what the actual number is, but way more likely to go share a bad experience that they had rather than a good one. Right. Cuz they expect a good experience. Right. Or maybe they do, maybe they don't.
But again, you're more likely to go tell someone about a shit experience you had. Right. So again, thinking of like, These inflection points or these, these transfer points between the different stages here of the inbound methodology can really help you think like, okay, are we doing everything we can to kind of mitigate problems at each one of these stages?
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of stuff that can go wrong, you know, away from the margins, like inside of each one of these stages, right? But again, like typically what's happening here is you're transferring the responsibility, the majority of the responsibility of folks between different departments, right?
They're out of the beautiful story that marketing is creating to them, and now they're going through a new experience with sales, right? And then once sales is done with them, they're going through a new experience with, with support. And if those teams are all siloed and not working together, right? And, and it's one experience here and a bad experience there, that's not fun for everybody.
And you're gonna create, you know, a lot of friction, right? So that, that's the other kind of thing. But to get onto like the phase stuff, right? I know I, I, I like talk. I think it's important to understand sort of the bigger picture of each one of those stages first, but then like to help yourself go, okay, I get the bigger picture, but like within each one of these phases, like what's actually happening for, for it to happen.
And I think you can, you can break each one of these bigger attract, engage into light stages, into two phases each, right? So when we think about something like attract the physics behind that generally is someone has to like, find your content, find your community, be looking for your stuff, right? To, to find it in the first place.
Cuz if they don't find it, they can't consume it, right? Like, if they don't find your content, they don't find your community, they don't find the stuff you're using to generate the mail. What. They can't consume it, right? So a lot of this comes down to like, are you creating what people are actually looking for, right?
We go on the internet to find things that we don't have right in front of us, whether it's knowledge or an experience, a goal that we have, or that we're trying to achieve, a challenge that's getting in the way, whatever, it's, we go on the internet to go find that stuff, right? Or we express that to other people.
And other people tell us, Hey, have you heard about X, Y, Z, right? Be it a piece of content, be it a company that sells a product, that fix that issue, like whatever, right? We have to find it somehow, right? So make your stuff easy for people to find. And that's not, that's your protect about seo. That's not what that is.
That's create what people are looking for in the first place. Cuz if people aren't looking for it, you can polish that SEO turd as much as you want. It's still a turd. And when people find it, If they don't consume that content and it doesn't get 'em closer to like learning something that's actually valuable to them, uh, overcoming a certain challenge, achieving a certain goal or whatever, if it doesn't move 'em in that direction, you're wasting their time, you're breaking their trust and you're not building any trust.
Right. So that second phase is like once people have found the content, the community, the whatever it is, right as they consume it, it begins to kind of build trust. And people don't buy from people they like, they buy from people they trust. That's like a, a real weird, like misnomer. If I don't trust you, I'm less likely to buy from you.
Right? I could really like a salesperson if I think that, and I'm probably not gonna like 'em if I don't trust 'em, right? Cuz I think they're doing something sketchy. Right? Um, but again, I think building trust is like a huge important part of this. I think you could, you could, you could probably redefine trust in a bunch of different ways, but the whole idea is your content is having, or your community is having some kind of effect on these people enough to the point where you're kind of.
Helping them figure out what their problem is, figuring out what they need, figuring out different ways to solve that problem. Right? And eventually you kind of get to some sort of place where I want to engage with you further, right? Like, I think you've helped me figure, like, and again, we're not talking about the buyer's journey here, even though it's on this, right?
Like you, that's a whole different episode, right? But eventually it gets to a point where it's like, okay, here's my info, whether that's for a piece of content at the top of the funnel, or I wanna talk to a salesperson, whatever it may be. You go into that engaged phase. Okay.
[00:45:10] George B. Thomas: Yeah. Don't go in the engage phase
[00:45:12] Max Cohen: yeah, yeah. Hit me.
[00:45:13] George B. Thomas: don't go in there yet, because I, I literally can feel my inner Devin coming out, because I have to say, attract phase one and attract phase two. If Devin was here, he'd be like, listen and spamming me in my LinkedIn dms and stop doing every single day.
Right? Because here's the thing, the opposite of trust is the erosion of that. And there is, if we're talking about, uh, inbound physics, let's just talk about life principles, it is way easier to lose my trust. Then to gain my trust. And so if you start to do any of these radical, fanatical, add whatever words you want in there, tactics that start to erode, trust, guess what happens?
We got a wobbly tire here. So like what I'm saying, it's very important in this attract phase to be very happy, helpful, humble, human ish
[00:46:12] Max Cohen: Yep.
[00:46:12] George B. Thomas: and, and really the focus beyond how can we show up and do the best we can do. Okay, now we can go into an engage. I had to get my inner Devin and slightly, uh, George out there to, to that phase.
[00:46:24] Max Cohen: Yeah. Um, so, so when we think about engage here, right? Back when I made this, I would kind of call, the first half of this, uh, is what people would commonly consider lead nurturing, right? They've given you their info, and then what are you doing? You're, you're, you're, you're engaging with them on social media.
You're sending them some kind of newsletter. You're emailing them content. You're getting them to watch your YouTube videos. You, you know, you have their information, right? And you're communicating with 'em some way. Now, for those of you that are in the camp of gate, nothing, all the content's free, you're still doing this, right?
Like, it's just you've passed into this phase without collecting someone's information. At some point, you're gonna have to get some information from them. That's generally that might be happening in, in, in phase two for you. Right? but like for those of you that are engaging in lead nurturing here, let's say someone does give you their information a little earlier on, not ready to talk to sales yet, but maybe they want to get a piece of content you have and you're kind of following that more traditional, you know, create content gated behind a landing page type thing, which I still think there's room for, right?
the, the thing that you're, you gotta think about with lead nurturing is like, this is also a time where you should be thinking about how do I continue to build trust, right? And that's by, you know, saying, if you're gonna put content in front of them, make sure it's relevant, make sure it's not interrupting them, make sure it's not, uh, just, uh, noisy bullshit that doesn't matter to them, right?
Because at that point, what you're doing is you're not using their information, you're abusing their information, right? No spam, right? This is this, A lot of this would be don't stick your sales reps on 'em too early, right? Um, this would also be, don't, don't send 'em stuff that's not relevant to him. Right.
Um, you know, which again, you can, you can kind of categorize all that kind of stuff at spam, but, you know, make sure you're providing relevant information for these folks and when it makes sense for them to talk to sales, you can kind of move into phase two of Engage, which I think the sales process kind of sits firmly in.
Right. And at least a general sense, again, this blends into delight a little bit. Um, you know, cause you want to have a delightful sales process. Sure. Right. And again, this is a general framework, this is a general set of physics. This is not, you know, it has to be this way. Right. Um, but this is kind of like, I think the, the way you should you think about engage right, is your sales process sits in here.
Right. because it's what happens generally before someone becomes a. Customer. Right. Um, or the equivalent of, so, you know, think about it, lead nurturing first. Continue to build trust. Don't abuse their information. Nurture that trust. Right? Get 'em what they need, educate them, and then you can kind of move them onto the sales process when it makes sense.
Right. And the reason you wanna do that too fast is because you get 'em to sales too quickly. You're breaking that trust, you get 'em to sales too quickly. You're wasting your sales rep's time on people that don't need to be talking to them. Right? So part of this is like thinking thoughtfully about how you're using your resources in sales, right?
Um, and then we can kinda move on from
[00:49:07] George B. Thomas: Yeah, I'm
[00:49:07] Max Cohen: do you have a hard, do you have a hard out
[00:49:09] George B. Thomas: I don't, I don't, I don't have a hard stop. We're gonna keep going. Uh, Noah's gonna hate us cuz it means more editing, but hey, suck it up buttercup. Uh, so here, here's the deal. Uh, I'm gonna go real quick though on this because I just want people to realize, uh, in engage phase one, lead nurturing,
it's a very valuable piece of information.
In those two words, lead nurturing. First of all, leads are humans. They are, they are humans.
[00:49:39] Max Cohen: Oh, there it
[00:49:40] George B. Thomas: Okay, so here's the deal. nurture care for and encourage the growth or development of. An example jar was nurtured by his parents in a close-knit family, similar words would be cherish a hope, belief, ambition,
[00:50:00] Max Cohen: Mm.
[00:50:01] George B. Thomas: lead nurturing.
The nurturing part of this is not force feeding. The definition of force feeding is to force a person or animal to eat. You should not be forcing a human to eat your content. You should be using your content to nurture, to cherish, to give them hope, to direct them to their ambition through education.
[00:50:30] Max Cohen: It's, it's lead nurturing. It's not lead dominating. It's not lead spamming. It's not lead abusing, it's nurture. Right?
[00:50:39] George B. Thomas: like, because that, like fundamentally, again, I know I mentioned the humanness in attract, right? But fundamentally, if you are a, uh, cyborg sales rep, that is all about the process, the process, the process. And if you're a marketing team that is getting pounded to like, publish, publish, publish, publish, publish, email, email, email, email.
Oh, like, we, yeah, I'll, I'll do a dance with some, you know me, but, but it's, no, it's, it's wrong. Like, I really need you in this part to, uh, get into that nourish brain empathy, brain loving brain in this part of, of the stage. Okay, let's move on.
[00:51:25] Max Cohen: Cool. All right, so you've got the end of the engaged phase there. We kind of move on to delight. I kind of think of delight in, in two different sort of sections, right? Uh, the first phase is combating buyer's remorse, right? Um, every, every time you buy something, you almost immediately have buyer's remorse.
You're like, oh, shit, why I spend money on that, right? Like, is that too much? Is this the right thing? Uh, and you immediately regret your decision, right? Um, you know, so combating buyers' remorse is, is, is really important. And like, that could be just something as simple as, again, having a good product, right?
It could be making sure you're, you're putting the resources and the avenues of help in front of someone immediately without them asking for it. So they go, oh, okay, good. I've got a good product. Okay, the product is good. Great. I'm having a good first experience with it, right? Like, I, I don't regret this.
This was a good choice, right? I, I got what I was. I wasn't sold a bill, sold a bill of goods, I was sold. What I got and what I got is what I was promised. Right? Like that's table stakes for combating, you know, buyers' remorse. If you, you buy something and it's immediately trash garbage, it's not what they said it was.
They sold you on the dream. Uh, you're, you're in, you're in piss land, right? so think about combating buyers'. What's the simple stuff you can do that? What's the blanket of love? You can ensure that they are surrounded in if something goes wrong, right? Something doesn't necessarily have to go wrong here, right?
You just need to be able to like say, Hey, here's our number for our support team. Here's a number for customer service. Maybe give them a call and follow up and see how things are going, right? Um, you know, making sure that they feel good with what they just bought, right? The second piece fast. That, that, that phase two is that customer needs to be, A lot of times people say, oh, make 'em happy, happy customers, right?
I think happy is, should be a byproduct of a successful customer. Right. Um, you know, and they're successful because, hey, it did what you wanted to do. They were able to achieve their goal or overcome their challenge by buying that thing, right? Um, maybe something went wrong and you were able to intervene and help fix the problem, so they continued on to be successful with it, right?
Whether it's buying a pair of pants and I was able to successfully go to work in my pants and people liked my pants, right? All the way to like a complex enterprise, like, you know, software solution, right? When things went wrong, you were there to ensure their trajectory to success continued, right? If you don't do these two things, you can't expect any of this stuff in the delight phase to have any sort of positive impact on the attract phase.
Right. Because if you, if you, you, you, you know, you, you blow that first face and someone buys something and it's not what they expected. They're not gonna tell someone, yeah, go get it. It's great. Right? If you, you know, don't help them when something goes wrong and you're not there for them when they need you the most.
Right? They're not gonna go tell people how great you are. Right? Um, so again, you can think of delight as kind of the first things. What are you doing to immediately ensure you're combating that buyer'ss remorse? And then what are you doing to ensure that that customer is long-term successful? And I say long-term in quotations because again, these parts of the flywheel might be really short or really long, right.
If you're a lemonade stand, maybe your delight phase is
[00:54:42] George B. Thomas: sip baby.
[00:54:43] Max Cohen: yeah. It's that first sip and it's handing them a napkin when they didn't ask for it. Right. Um,
[00:54:48] George B. Thomas: Knowing what they needed with before they knew they needed it. Oh
[00:54:53] Max Cohen: exactly right. Um, you know, it, it could be something as simple as that. Or it could be something as complex as a, you know, a, a, a, a long complex implementation plan, right?
Like what, whatever it may be. Right? Again, the the basic physics are always there, right? If your lemonade tastes like shit, that person walking down the street is not gonna talk to the person that's passing by and say, oh, it's lemonade. Don't go, go get that lemonade. It tastes terrible. They're gonna say, avoid that kid's lemonade.
It tastes like gly, right? Like, you know, so again, it's all just like, it's all physics. It's all physics, it's all just like the basic things that are happening, right? So hopefully like this kind of helps, like when you, when you look at this stuff, George, maybe we can have another conversation around like where the, the, you know, the, what is it called?
The lifecycle stage stuff is like a, a bit more amorphous now because when I originally made this, HubSpot had its eight lifecycle stages in the crm, and they were locked in there. And so I, I had a healthy understanding of like where they
[00:55:51] George B. Thomas: still use those and some people have customized it. So what does that
[00:55:55] Max Cohen: You can customize it. Now, I think there is an ideal way to use them, right?
Um, that can apply to most ish, you know, situations, right? If you're following this inbound methodology, right? Uh, and you're doing the whole content creation thing. But again, that this, that, that's all up for debate now, I think
[00:56:15] George B. Thomas: I think a future conversation on, um, the flywheel, the life cycle stages in the buyer's journey could be a, a complete episode in itself. How those kind of interact with each other. Um, here's what I want to kind of, uh, say real quick and then we'll end this bad boy. I'm really, um, interested in how my brain has started to work during this episode because before when I mentioned delight, I mentioned John Jan and the referral engine, right?
But then Max, you even said earlier, the onboarding process and customer delight and combating buyers' remorse. And my brain immediately flew to, uh, Joey Coleman and never lose a customer again. And actually like there's a, a eight phase. I think they all start with a process that maybe you can put on for that onboarding portion of when they go from customer, you know, or, or uh, SQL or opportunity to customer and go into that delight phase.
So again, maybe it's like you start to pair a couple methodologies in these, so delight would literally be never lose a customer again and referral engine. And so then also my brain, I mentioned Ian Altman and same side selling in Engage, but then I was reminded of the challenger sale. And so maybe like there's.
Two things. Or to sell his human right by Simon Sinek shoot, or, or is that Daniel Pink Crap? Anyway, doesn't matter. You guys know what I mean? But the ideas are, there are two or three, uh, mini books that create your business Bible around this whole thing that is inbound physics that Max has been talking about today.
Max, here's the thing. I'm gonna keep it simple as far as closing this bad boy up. I'm curious for you, what do you wish for the people who have just watched or listened to this and what do you hope they take action on? So what do you wish for them and what do you hope they take action on?
[00:58:08] Max Cohen: well, I mean, first of all, I, I wish you the best, obviously, right. I think if, if there's anything I want you to take action on is I want you to like, Look at this, and maybe, you know what, I'll do a, I'll do a simpler simplified versions. We can post with the show notes, right? So you can go grab it in a much less crazy overlay than this, right?
Um, I want you to like look at like these different phases and the, and the overall three phases as well as like where we see those, those exclamation points. And I want you to kind of just think about your business and go, how are we doing all these things? And are there certain problems that we've observed or symptoms of problems that we've observed that might be because there are fail points or cracks in the way we try to accomplish this, right?
And what I think this does, I actually did this with someone a while ago who was like, Just starting a rev ops role where they were kind of overseeing like all of the marketing, sales and service stuff, and just trying to break the silos and, and get it all to work together better. And I gave them this framework and they're like, I, this is literally my checklist, right?
This is all the places I should go check, right? And see and uncover problems that maybe I don't know about yet, right? Um, so just take this, overlay this over to the understanding of your business. Make it your own also. Right? Make it your own. Um, but, you know, try to, try to use this as a way to gut check yourself in terms of like, how are things operating?
Could we improve stuff anywhere? Are there any things that could be causing our flywheel to wobble? Right? And, and use this as a, as sort of a north star to try to find those fault points, right? yeah, just look at it and use it. That's what I would say.
[00:59:51] George B. Thomas: I love it.
[00:59:52] Max Cohen: please do it.
[00:59:53] George B. Thomas: I love it. Well, ladies and gentlemen, no poems, no limericks, no extra shenanigans. Just literally, uh, head over to the show notes and check out the graphic, check out the links to the resources that we'll have over there. Uh, if listening is good enough, then we bid you a fair day. But if you do want to watch this again, remember to head over to community dot hub heroes.com and of course, max, the rest of us will be in there waiting for you to help you.
If you have any questions, uh, inside of the community, max, I am so glad we had this episode.
[01:00:33] Max Cohen: I love you too.