Future marketing trends – create a successful company

To be a better person or a better company, look to some of the best and brightest to see how they do it. Hubspot is a successful marketing company, based in Cambridge, MA. I recently had the good fortune to attend their Inbound Marketing Conference. My head is still reeling from all I learned and the new ideas that were generated.

As I gathered my thoughts about the conference, I thought it would be helpful to showcase some things any person and company can do to become more successful. Afterall, if you have a successful company, you will probably also have successful marketing.

MARK KILENS – Leader of Hubspot Academy, the place for training and educational programs.

Talk topic: “Keeping customers happy: the pillars of delight.”

* The eight customer delight guidelines:

1. Delight employees. Happy employees are the key to creating happy customers.
2. Educate employees.
3. Empower employees.
4. Listen to customers.
5. Ask customers open-ended questions.
6. Help customers.
7. Follow-up with customers.
8. Take action.

DARMESH SHAH – Co-founder and CTO of Hubspot.

Talk topic: “Writing your company’s culture code.”

* Culture is shared beliefs, values and practices.
* Culture is hard to copy.
* It’s essential that it be written down.
* Hubspot culture has nothing to do with marketing.
* Elements of culture:

1. Mission and metrics
2. Obsess over customers, not competitors.
3. Radically and uncomfortablye transparent.
4. Autonomy to be awesome.
5. Unreasonably picky about our peers.
6. Invest in individual mastery and market value.
7. Defy conventional wisdom.
8. Speak the truth and face the facts.

If you’d like to see the full presentation, feel free to go to:

Creating a company we love.

MIKE VOLPE – Chief Marketing Officer at Hubspot MARK ROBERGE – Senior Vice President of Sales and Services at Hubspot.

Talk topic: “Smarketing – How inbound marketing and sales work at Hubspot.” Notice the combination of the words sales and marketing to smarketing.

* Align sales and marketing around common metrics.
* Inbound sales are the keys to inbound marketing.
* Communicate and manage for alignment.
* Clearly define funnel stages; go beyond the traditional sales funnel.
* Create Service Level Agreements for both Sales and Marketing.
* Create dashboards that are frequent, public and transparent.
(FYI – a software dashboard is a way of organizing information so that it’s readily available.)
* Inbound leads are radically different than the traditional cold call.
* Hubspot is aligned around buyer personas, NOT function. This helps to create a seamless customer interface. Most companies are aligned by function, yet customers don’t think or act like that.
* Market your marketing to sales.

More details of these talks can be found at:

Hubspot Inbound Marketing Talks.

My lessons learned from these talks is that successful companies have the following characteristics:

1. Strong customer and strong employee focus.

2. Strong company culture that is communicated clearly to all employees.

3. Excellent communication between all departments. This is most often achieved by setting common goals.

When you have a successful company, you will have successful marketing.

Photo is courtesy of Jurvetson’s Flickr Photostream, under Creative Commons Licensing.