Sarah McIntyre, CEO of BRIGHT Inbound | Top Hubspot Agency 2019

The only podcast you need for your business, let's do this. Welcome to the sales versus marketing podcast, I'm your host, Scott. Join me as we explore and demystify the latest trends, technologies and strategies used to achieve massive growth in 10x businesses. I'll be sitting down with sales, marketing and business leaders. Dissect what's worked for them, dispel myths and deliver actionable insights that you can use to ensure repeatable, sustainable and predictable revenue in your business. Welcome to the sales versus marketing podcast where we interview sales, marketing and business leaders. I'm your host, Scott and today we are interviewing and sitting down with Sarah McIntyre, who is the founder and chief strategist for Bright Inbound Marketing. Now Sarah is a career marketer working for all different sorts of organizations in the marketing field as a communications manager, as a product manager, as a global marketing manager, and most recently before she started Bright Inbound, she was a global campaign and alliance marketing manager for APAC Asia Pacific, excuse me, for Novel. So she's managed global teams and she's managed enormous marketing organizations over the course of her career. She transitioned into her own firm Bright Inbound Marketing and she's successfully built it over the past 10 years. Bright Inbound Marketing has been named HubSpots top digital agency of the year. I'm going to let Sarah speak about her past and I'm going to let her speak about Bright and what they do. But they are a marketing firm that really help bring out or not bring out but help a company understand who their customer is, who their buyer persona is, what their messaging should be to target that buyer persona and once they've built that out, then they tie it into all the other integral pieces of a digital marketing campaign. And that's how Sarah has been so successful. Sarah, I'm going to let you introduce yourself, but give us a little bit of a background about where you came from, who you are and what you're doing now. I'm in a nutshell, that's going to be terrible, in a nutshell, sorry, terrible, terrible jokes. I tell really bad jokes. No, I'm Sarah McIntyre, I'm the founder and she's strategist at Bright Inbound and Bright is a small agency based in Sydney, Australia and we are a HubSpot partner, I've been one of HubSpots very early stage partners. We signed up with them in 2009, so we're here 10 years down the track with HubSpot. And yeah, so I've been running this inbound marketing content marketing business for nearly 10 years and Brighter, that was a B2B marketer for a big tech and a global, well, I've worked with both startups and global multinationals and their pros and cons of both of those things. And yes, we went out on my own in 2009. And what made you, what made you make that jump from working for a company to moving onto your own project, your own company? Yeah, flexibility, I needed, well, I needed, I had children, essentially, into, into child number two, by that stage and the role that I had and the work that I was doing wasn't compatible with, actually, ever seeing my children. So I decided to, to, you know, make a shift into building a business that was, that could work alongside a life, but that's so tough because when you are starting as an entrepreneur, I don't think starting your own business is known for not working, like the people that start their own business when they first start, they're not known for working less hours, right? It's usually the opposite. Yeah, I know, but you can fit those in hours in around the other things that you need to do. And so, so that was better for me, it meant that I could stay, keep doing marketing work, which I love to do, but also keep being around because I was just traveling way too much. I think when you're, when you're based in Australia and my role was across Asia Pacific, which is a really massive region. So, you know, whenever you got on a plane, it was an eight-hour flight. So you'd be gone for, you know, weeks, you know, Japan to India and everything in between. It's pretty massive. So it just, no, it just worked after a while. So it's good fun when you're younger, but it wasn't what I wanted to do. And the other reason was I really, you know, really enjoy putting breast practices in action. And sometimes when you work for a bigger organization, you don't get to do that. You have to do what the corporate team is doing and what they're saying that you need to be doing. So you oftentimes, there's lots of compromises involved when you're working with a bigger organization. So being at, to be an advocate for best practices for clients was really, really interesting to me. Yeah. So really amazing. No, that's a great point because obviously I think anybody who's worked in enterprise knows that there's so much red tape that you have to cross, right, when you're trying to be effective and be agile. For example, I work with a smaller startup, but one of our products is licensed through a larger startup. And just the dichotomy between how quick you can move as a small startup or as a small firm in contrast, and I've also worked in large organizations before so I totally get it. So when you first moved, what was your first iteration of your business when you wanted to move into your own marketing practice, obviously, where did you, how did you first build that out? Well, yeah, really a friend that's consultant. And I walked straight into a client with one of my competitor companies. So I walked straight out of the door of my old job into consulting for their direct competitor, which was great. So the first iteration was yeah, consulting, consulting. And really sort of being an extra marketing resource for that team. Did you find that like what type of lessons learned, like from moving from obviously huge corporate to working on your own and obviously you've been successful at it, which is more than most entrepreneurs can say, so what were like the best practices lessons learned when you first started that allowed you to continue to maintain this consulting and turn it into an agency, really? Yeah. Well, I guess I want to stop you there because I've been through, I've been a consultant and I've grown an agency and then I've stopped growing an agency because I think the agency model is broken from a profitability perspective when I started to scale up an agency and looking at the skills that are needed to support, particularly in-bound marketing. It's this incredible raft of skills that you need to cover in inbound, you know, any content producers, web developers, graphic designers, you know, it is huge. It is huge, exactly. And so I struggled with different types of models to try and get like hiring in-house, using remote workers, bits of both really, hiring really senior people, hiring really junior people, you know, trying to figure out how this agency could scale and grow and still stay profitable. And I don't know whether I've actually figured that out yet, but I think the key lesson is really finding your niche and that's really cheesy. It says niche, niche, niche, but I think in agency world, what I see a lot of is agencies being we are full service agencies, which means they're just going to say yes to everything and then try and figure out how to do it. And I just don't think that's, I don't think it gets necessarily a good result for a client. I don't think it's good for the agency themselves to be trying to cover stuff that's not their core. So what is, so HubSpot, top digital agency, that's a great title, but what does that actually mean? So what do you deliver for clients? So for clients, I help them with HubSpot. I typically work with clients who have HubSpot already and have made that investment in a marketing automation platform and then have gotten overwhelmed because there's so many moving parts to it, got overwhelmed with it and gone, well, you know, we're not going any results that we need, you know, what's, you know, trying to figure out what to do next once they've gone through the onboarding cycle with HubSpot and then gone, well, what do we need to do next? And when they come to me, they usually frustrated, they think you're about throwing it away. They don't really know where to go next. So I take them right back to the basics of doing their biopassana research, which is something that they normally skim over in the implementation period. They have a little workshop together with all their salespeople and stuff and they make these biopassanas and things and then off they go on to the next thing, next thing. And but if you don't do that, that phase properly, I think the foundations of your marketing are really shaky and built on a lot of assumptions. So you really have to go back to your biopassanas to validate them with some actual customer interviews. And I find a lot of clients haven't done that, that they don't go and actually interview real customers. They just base their marketing on a whole bunch of assumptions, you know, from people, you know, educated guests, educated guests, but they don't check them, like they don't go back and see if that's really who their target biopassana target customer. Yeah. I'm really drawn down into having it in quite a detailed interview conversation with the customers on, you know, firstly how they came into that world. Yeah. So how, you know, because you don't actually learn anything, okay, so you don't really know the top end of the funnel as a marketer. You know, you know, the middle stage of the funnel, but you don't know the top end of the funnel. You make guesses about the awareness piece, so you know, where did they find you, how they actually find you. What was the sales process? You work with, you work with HubSpot, but you're also speaking about buyer persona, and I don't think, when I think of HubSpot, I don't think of a tool that's really mapping out all those, like buyer persona is so important, but is there a way that they're tied together that I'm missing? Oh, yeah. Okay, so it's a really big piece of HubSpot actually. Okay. So when you, you can like your personas into HubSpot. So once you've done your research, once you've validated it, once you've, you know, decided on which ones are the other key ones you're going to go after, then you load those personas into HubSpot so that you can start segmenting your database of context, so before you load your database and segment them into the types of personas that they are, and then also, when you continue to do marketing things, so if you've created an asset, like a checklist or something, a downloadable asset or something like that, you create a form, and you ask the question, you know, please select which best describes me or I am a, and then you list one of the persona names, and so people will still select into the categories of people that you want to continue to market with, and that'll further, like actually pinpoint like who you're actually dealing with as opposed to just a name and an email address. Yeah, 100%. So because you've built your persona, a detailed persona around that person, you know that if Sarah says, I'm a CEO, then the CEO level messaging that you've, that you've discovered should resonate better with you than with I'm a, you know, I'm a university student. So, and then you can also, you can start weeding out the ways you want to communicate and develop communication strategies that are customized to those personas. That's really powerful, and I think that I know I've used HubSpot and I wasn't even aware and I don't know if that's my ignorance, but I think that a lot of people probably don't implement these technologies to the, to their fullest capacity. All right. And I think this interesting thing, I mean, HubSpot started as a marketing automation system and now it has this really great free CRM, so I think we're seeing a lot of new people coming on board with the free CRM tools and using, using the CRM pieces, which is great CRM's awesome. But yeah, the, the actual foundations of HubSpot is, is a marketing automation platform built around personas. So yeah, the sign is key. So if you're trying to, if you're speaking to a company that poorly defined their biopersonas or, or didn't define their biopersonas, what would be the steps in and properly identifying when, when is there a point where you can say, I've collected enough data to say that this is a biopersona that I can actually run with and build into my marketing automation tool? Is there, is there a process that you go through or is there just, yeah, yeah, so I do a three-step process. Firstly, we will, we will do an internal workshop with all the, with all the people in the organization who actually have an interaction with, with customers, so it can be customers support, salespeople, senior execs as well. So everyone in the room, do that workshop to get out, get all the information, information out of their heads about who it is that they think they deal with, do a, do a survey. So like you just have a survey monkey, do a really short survey, send it to the database, and then do deep dive interviews, both with internal stakeholders and with your customers and loss customers too if you can. So deals that you didn't win, they get incredible amount of information from people from accounts that you didn't win. If they're willing to go that far, I haven't had many clients actually want to go that next step, but I think that's a critical learning phase for the, for the organizations to understanding why they, why they didn't, why you went down the path with them in a sales process and then they didn't choose you. Was it because of the product? Was it the pricing? Why, what was it? Did they did the budget, you know, disappear? What were the reasons for not achieving that sale? Do you have, do you have a strategy to get people to be more responding to surveys so that you can collect that data more effectively? I did. So it's a way, very short. Yeah, no, because I just, I was, sometimes it's hard to collect that data. And that's why, or I guess, you know, if you're not even trying, that's the first issue. But I think over collecting, I was looking at, um, at an employee feedback survey earlier today, and it was something like 20 to 30 questions. And I think that that's a misconception that that's actually effective. And then it just, it's just like information overload for the, for the person receiving and it's just, yeah, they just don't want to, they shut off, right? Yeah, no, exactly. I keep it really short. But those surveys are really only five questions. Yeah. And have a template for that five question survey. And, uh, mainly to, and the, the, the point of the survey piece is also to try and get the people who are super responders. So I also do question, ask questions that are, uh, text only questions are not, not drop downs because then that's also validating assumptions because if you're pre, you know, pre giving them the answers, it might be good for making pretty graphs, but it's not actually good for any kind of qualitative understanding. And what I'm looking for is people who, who are really committed and who really, who write a lot, essentially, a lot of information. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Quite a lot of information. It means that there's, there's some, there's some interest there. You know, there's some, there's some passion there. So they're actually really interesting people to talk to because they're, they've, there's some, yeah, some underlying thing that they want to get out of. So it could be, it could be good or it could be bad, but at the end of the day, um, the information is what you need to actually build these out. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Yeah. It's anything is, any feedback is, is good information to, to get and, and to send it back into, into your organisation. And the thing I love about marketing owning this, this function, it also shouldn't just be a one-off function. I think you should do this, this quarterly, if you can, is that the marketing becomes the voice of the customer and the advocate for the customer inside the organisation as well. So it's not, it's not just sales lead, it's also marketing lead. So, so marketers can elevate themselves a little bit as well in the, in the food chain. Sometimes the fine marketers can be, you know, you're just the people blowing up balloons on the trade stand, stand over there and so, we don't want to, we don't want to be, be doing that. We want to, you know, that be actively advocating for customers and advocating for the right thing, for the salespeople doing the right thing, for the company to do, as we, as we grow, we're all on the same team to increase revenue and grow companies. And you mentioned a good point and it's something that I'm a big fan of and something that I'm a huge supporter of and it's that, it's a collaboration between sales and marketing. And whenever I've worked in organisations, I've worked hard to, if I'm, if I'm owning both roles and obviously it's a little bit easier, but if I'm not, and there is, for example, a VP marketing, then you have to make sure that you're married up and you're, and the campaigns that you're running and I think in too many organisations, I think it's unfortunate because these functions in legacy companies, large companies, they're sometimes very siloed. Yeah. So have you seen over your career as a consultant as well? Are there best practices for enabling these, these two business units to work in tandem and work really well together or is it like a cultural thing? There's no right answer. I'm just curious what you've seen. There isn't any right answer. I think you have to figure it out for yourself, but I 100% agree that there's no room for sales and marketing teams to be not working together. I just, it just doesn't make sense, particularly these days because the line is blurred between what is sales and what is marketing. I think there's, you know, salespeople need to know how to market, marketers need to know how to sell. I used to be a salesperson too, so I think they're also used to be out on the road, you know, doing demos and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, look, I know HubSpot advocates for having joint SLAs, so that you both agree on different things. So, you know, marketing agrees to deliver X number of marketing qualified leads, sales agrees to, you know, promptly follow up on those leads and, you know, and document it. I think the nice thing about the HubSpot CRM is it can be incredibly transparent in terms of both the marketing leads that are coming in and the quality of those leads and also the sales activity. So, you know, when a salesperson makes logs, logs a phone call or sends an email, everything can be captioned and tracked in HubSpot, so you can see exactly how many times they've tried to reach out to that person, what the conversation was, all the emails can be tracked in HubSpot as well. Really, really simply. Automatically, yeah, I've used, I've used the CRM HubSpot, the CRM portion of HubSpot extensively and it can do everything, it can track everything, so that's the business intelligence you can gather is immense. But I think that, you know, to your point, the ability to properly understand a CRM, and I guess, you know, I think I understand HubSpot to a point, but not to the same degree you do, I think when you implement a tech into an organization, you should focus on making sure that you understand it completely because if you don't, that's when I don't think you get that adoption of the CRM, which is, you know, you're spending all this money and nobody's using. Yeah, 100%. And I think the HubSpot CRM is such an easy one to adopt for companies that it really should be a no-brainer, you know, because you can hook it up to your Gmail for business or hook it up to your Outlook account and just simply log, you know, it's a no-dad, there's no data entry needed for sales people unless they go and start putting deals and things in, which is great, but there really shouldn't be any extra data entry. You don't have to go and, you know, type in contact names and account names and that kind of stuff. You just click the button as they add it to HubSpot, you integrate it, and then you just click the button and add it to HubSpot, you can log every single email in HubSpot. You can use pre-built email templates. I've set up a whole bunch of email templates for my clients as well, so they can, they've got like a pre-written template for cold outreach. They've got a template for someone who downloads a piece of content on the website that got, you know, all these different types of templates pre-written, which all you have to do is customise it a little bit and then send it, you know, so they're doing a lot of emailing out of the system. No, I think I want to hand it in there about that. No, no, it's good. It's good. It's just a really easy to use CRM and I find, you know, I used to work with companies at HeadSalesforce.com and, you know, huge, amazing CRM, but they only ever implemented it poorly and then only ever used a fraction of what it was good for. The thing I like about HubSpot is it's not as functionally deep as something like Salesforce .com, but it's broad enough and does a good enough job of getting the information in. And I think that's where traditional CRM's fall down is that garbage gets put in because no one likes doing done entry or HubSpot takes that pain away and makes it really simple. It's built for salespeople more than sales managers, I think. Yeah, that could be. And there are other tools that sales managers can use. So I think that CRM is probably one of the most critical tools in an organisation. So if you can get your salespeople to use it properly, I think you can subsidise a lot of other tools. As opposed to getting a very complicated CRM that nobody adopts, but has all the tools and functions you could ever want, yeah. But when you work with companies, let's go back to Bright for a second, so Bright Inbound. When you work with companies, you're helping them implement the core of their business, but there's so many other functions that are tied into that. What point do you hand off a client to somebody else, or are you able to help them end in terms of crafting a marketing campaign because you're talking about cold outreach and you're talking about. So where do you fit in? What's your sweet spot? What do you like to work with? Yeah, well, I actually like to train them up or recruit internally so that they're self-sufficient and they feel confident building their own team. I think over the years when I've implemented HubSpot and in our marketing strategies for companies, the ones that have been most successful, long-term have the ones who have invested in developing the skills in house. And then, of course, they can bring in specialised talent if they need a Google AdWords person or a Facebook AdWords person, but the fundamental skills of marketing strategy and content creation need to be done in-house and understanding the tools that you have in your toolkit, understanding HubSpot, need to be really learnt and embedded in-house and the responsibility taken for it in-house. I think if you outsource all that stuff to an agency, then invariably the wheels will fall off. One thing or the agency and the relationship breaks down or it happens with all, even with the best relationships, after a few years, I'm like, okay, we're going to be done with that. So, yeah, the best thing I can do for companies is come in, spend six months or so with you getting your foundations right, both from a strategy perspective, getting a content plan in place, auditing a new tech stack, and then looking at where you've got recruitment gaps. So, in your marketing team, so who do you need to hire? And then helping them secure those key hires, and then I can nurture and coach those hires into continuing to execute, and I can transition off. I never really want to be with a company for years and years. And I think that's another way, a traditional agency is a bit broken, like you must sign you up for a year-long retainer or these year-long, multi-year contracts and stuff. No one really wants to be handcuffed into that. If it's not working out, you need to be able to go, okay, it's not working out. It's just, you know, there's this, we have for both of them, I think for me, an agency. A great deal. So, it's the agency and the customer. A hundred percent. You need to be able to go, look, this isn't working out, one reason or the other, and so I deliberately package services in a way that with the expectation that I'm not going to be here forever. Well, that's good of you, and that's ethical of you, because I think that what you mentioned is people chasing after revenue for the wrong reasons, and then it just ends up in a broken relationship and a bad experience for both, which actually leads me to what I was going to bring up. What are some of the, let's first speak on the agency side. What are some of the worst practices that you see from marketing or ad agencies when you discuss with your customers, like past experiences, that people should try and avoid if they're looking to hire someone or bring somebody on? Okay. I guess I would be just aware of contractual things, so things like locking in for longer term contracts. I'd also look at the agency's core skill set. I think with a lot of HubSpot agencies that I've come across and they have a web development background. That's great if you want a new website, but if you want strategic marketing advice, it's not necessarily so great, because a lot of HubSpot agencies have started and has web design agencies or SEO agencies and have grown out from there. I've come at it from the other way, from a holistic marketing strategy perspective, where a website is a critical thing, but I actually don't want to build your website. I will partner with other agencies or if you've got an internal web developer, and HubSpot has a whole bunch of really great website templates as well. You could build a beautiful looking site using an existing, just by buying a template and updating it. I'm a big booker in making things as streamlined and easy as possible. I don't think there are many, many organisations that need 100% custom-coded website, I think you're just sending yourself up for a head-hate. Not me. I'm basically going to hire a web developer in-house, and I'm going to do that. I agree with you. I think that a lot of people fail to, I think they try and over-complicate very simple tasks when it comes to their marketing campaign. I've done a couple of podcasts with marketers, and it sounds like you work with not enterprise or small-to-mid-size companies, but not mistaken. I think that these companies are the most susceptible to just buying into, perhaps, poor practices or the latest trends, and they're really not, they don't do enough due diligence, so they don't have the right support or guidance. Right. That's a lot as well. I go into an agency, and they've been working into a client, and they've been working with a Facebook agency over here, and an SEO agency over here, and they're doing all the shiny and new tactics and things, lots of stuff, but they haven't really put their foundations in place, and they haven't started building an ecosystem of marketing partners that they work with consistently, and a foundational marketing structure that will be resilient to any of algorithm changes and that type of thing. That's not just talking about in-bound marketing, so what I mean by that is that who are the partners? When they're mid-size company, and you're going to market, who else can you go to market with who can speed that journey? I know when I worked in the startup world, we partnered with a much bigger enterprise, South-South company, because our product complemented theirs and allowed us both to go higher up the food chain quicker, so that was a really great partnership. That's the type of thing that I talk to founders, other founders about, it's like who else could we be talking to? Should you be in the Microsoft partner program? Should we be doing Amazon web services? What else is there in your world that you currently use? I'm talking about take background, because I'm 100% tech-dangered. I am too, and I think it's funny that you mentioned that you're acting as firm as a marketing firm, but when these founders realize any small-time mid-size companies that realize your background, they leverage your experience to just understand how best to do business in general, which is going to tie into the fact that I think, and I'm sort of speaking on, I guess, insights that I would normally give over, and I don't mean to take over the podcast, but I think that the ability to bring that educational subject matter expert experience to the business relationship, regardless of your industry, is going to close you business 10 to 10 times. If you can, if you can, if you can add extra value as more than just a transactional. Yeah, and it's more than, it's more than tactics, so I'm not just talking about, and I talk about random acts of marketing, and there's a whole bunch of tactics, you know, escalating as a plan. So I see a lot of this, you know, people are just doing, now they're doing like, they'll do a trade show, they'll do kind of an email thing, or they'll do, they'll dabble in lots of different things, and then get, what I'm talking to found is they get really frustrated, there's nothing's really working, they're not really committing and being consistent either, so that's an only, but they're trying lots of different things, and spinning their wheels and not really getting, you know, was just not really, and there's plenty of money too. Yeah, they spend money, and they lose confidence in the whole marketing thing, and they go, I'm not kidding. Yeah. So I try and bring them all back to a place where the marketing is based on a really deep understanding of who their customer is, and it's also aligned to their business goals. So if they've got some really aggressive revenue targets, which most of my customers do, how are we going to get the fastest, and it's probably not by doing Facebook ads, you know, it's about, I believe, building partnerships with other organisations in your industry to get those deals in the pipeline quicker, and to, you know, and to raise your own profile in the industry quicker. Yeah. I think that's a great point. I think it's the thing that a lot of people, we just kind of touch on this, but a lot of people don't think about the ability to leverage these partnerships. I've seen that before where you can leverage a larger sales force to get your product to market quicker. Why do all the work, again, you know, it's better to even own a portion of something than a hundred percent of nothing, so yeah, exactly. So what are some of the, what are some of the worst marketing practices that you see propagating the industry, that you really hate that you hate the worst marketing practices? Hmm. I don't know. I think it's a lot of the shiny and used off. You know, there's a lot of people out there who are gurus in one particular tactic. And so they make overly large claims about about the effectiveness of that, of that particular tactic. So that would be one thing. I also see people using LinkedIn really badly, and that really annoys me, you know, just that I think that for B2B marketers, LinkedIn is an incredible, incredible tool to you. But I see a lot of people who maybe they've done some like LinkedIn training or whatever and they, you know, they reach out randomly to people and as soon as you accept their connection requests, they just spamming you. With all these ads for by this, by this, and yeah. I know. It's like, well, you know, I, it's just not the way to use LinkedIn, you know, I typically I don't accept people that haven't actually spoken to, and there can be an email conversation that have to be like a face-to-face one, because I think that's the power of your network on LinkedIn is of people that you actually know and like and trust and would recommend rather than just everybody. And yeah. So I mean, LinkedIn, it's a great resource, but it's also, it's just really easy for people just to spam you and abuse it and abuse it and then it just kind of makes it not fun for everyone. No, those are good points. Back to you, because we've really covered like, I got through what your opinions on marketing work. So I want to sort of just bring it home a little bit. If you were going to speak to your 20 year old self and one professional lesson that you have learned that could be in marketing, it could be in just your general attitude towards doing business, what would that, do you have an idea of what that would be? I think trust you got because I personally looking back at some of the things that I did as a junior marketer, not really, not really knowing what I was doing. I started my first job with a startup and there was seven of us and so someone had to do marketing and that was me. So I started doing marketing things and then I looked back on some of the things that I did at that point and went, actually that was pretty good. You didn't know what you're doing, but actually that was actually a good idea. Yeah, the knack for you instead of feel. Hell in knack for it. Yeah, real feel for it. And I think it's the empathy from empathizing with who your customers are. That came through and some of the decisions that we made with this startup. So trust you got and I was going to say, you know, don't be afraid to fail, but I think that's still, I was still going to give myself that advice now. It's good advice, but it's tough. It's tough to actually action it, right? Because it's failure. It's the one thing that no matter what you're going to be afraid of, I think much do try and overcome that. When, okay, so another question for people that are listening that are sort of younger in their career for resources, where do you go to learn new things, new strategies, it could be a mentor, it could be a book podcast, what's your go to? Well, I mean, HubSpot training is incredible. There's hapes and hapes of free training up on HubSpot Academy for anyone starting their new careers. When I hired juniors, I also did usually hire journalism students who have got, you know, really great into being really good writing skills, really good at deadlines, they're like tick tick tick. Anyhow, but then I go make them do the HubSpot Academy program because they're inbound of course, certification is free and it gives you a really good overview of all the elements of a modern marketing strategy, you know, from blogging and keywords all the way through to emailing and CRM, it's a great kind of crash course in modern marketing. Yeah. And it's all free. That's free. 100%. Yeah. It's impressive. I would totally, I'd recommend my, and I make my new hires go do that. That's the first one. And then I mean, I'm just, I'm a massive avid reader, so I'm always reading and learning his new things, I've got hundreds of books that I keep referencing. And the one I go back to, and when I'm going back to a bit lately is Donna Miller's story brand. I haven't read that. I haven't read that one yet. No. No. It's just a for smaller meeting businesses. It's just a really succinct way of, of figuring out what your messages from a, and telling it like a story. So it's not, and flipping that switch in your head to be talking all about yourself to talking about your customer experience. That's important. I'm going to get it. I'm going to, if I can audible it, I'll go, I'll go audible after the call. But yeah. That's important too. And handly as well. If you like content marketing stuff, and handly is, is my girl crush on content marketing. She's incredible. Her book, Everybody writes is fantastic. I read, I've read that over and over again as well. Very good. It's a great book about writing. And anything that I didn't ask you or didn't cover about bright and bound, what you're doing now, what you're up to, things that you want people to know when they listen. No, not really. I think it comes back to me when I'm looking at setting up a business, is just keep iterating it and figuring out what works for you and what success looks like for you, and not to be comparing your souls to it. I mean, I spent a lot of time thinking, I have to grow my massive agents. I have to grow an agency. Absolutely. Success, success is a really big agency, but it's actually not. And it's not for me. I've got a small and mighty team, and we get a lot of stuff done, and we remain flexible. We work remotely, and we're profitable. So you know. That's all you can ask for. That's better than most businesses. That's what success looks like for me. That's a congratulations. That's good. If you want to find you reach out to you for bright for yourself, where can they reach? Well, I'm on LinkedIn. Okay. Sarah back in time. It's Sarah J. back in time, actually on LinkedIn. And I have a website, brightinbound.com.au. Awesome. So if you want to reach Sarah, go hit her up on LinkedIn, or you can go check out Bright Inbound Marketing. They're an incredible firm, Sarah's an incredible person. She's super experienced, and I'm so happy that she sat down with me today. As always, if you like the sales versus marketing podcasts, hit like, hit subscribe, share it with your peers, your colleagues, co-workers, friends, family, anybody who you think would enjoy this and learn something. If you haven't already, please leave us any rating as long as it's a five-star rating. And if you have a suggestion for who can speak on the podcast, you can reach out to me, your host Scott directly on LinkedIn at LinkedIn.com slash in slash S Douglas Clary, or you can email me as Douglas Clary at gmail.com. I welcome you to recommend any sales marketing or business leaders that we can sit down and speak with. So that's another episode of sales versus marketing. I hope everybody has a great week, has a productive week, and we'll talk again soon. Bye now. Welcome to Scott's Thoughts, where I dissect some of the main points that we just heard from Sarah in the sales versus marketing podcast. So Sarah was a wealth of knowledge. Her agency has been killing it for the past 10 years, being named HubSpot's Agency of the Year. But there was two very important points that I wanted to extract from our conversation and drive home with our listeners. The first point that I wanted to speak on is the importance of understanding your customer, your customer persona, your buyer persona. Sarah's entire agency has been successful through helping companies understand who their customer is. She helps the companies understand their brand, what they are, what their messaging is, and who their customer is, their customer persona, and using that customer persona, that buyer persona to build out their entire marketing campaign to understand the way to speak to your customer is probably the most important thing that you can do as a company. You're no longer just putting information out there, you're tailoring it to the kind of customer that you want to buy your products. I'll give you an example of a way that I've seen used effectively in my past life. So in past lives, when I've worked for different organizations, one strategy that I've implemented is to send out a quick survey, a one question, when a customer signs off on a deal. So when you have a closed one deal, you send it a survey, and you give the customer the opportunity to answer one simple question, why did you buy from us? And that will open up, first of all, the reason why you're doing this when your, when the customer buys something from you is because that was a meaningful event in the customer lifecycle. Obviously, they like your product, they like your company, and they're more likely to respond. They're in a great mood about their good, their new purchase. So the chances of them responding are much higher than if you just shot out a survey and hoped for an answer back if you do it at the right time. So you ask the customer, why did you buy from us? And the customer is going to write why they bought from you. And what's really interesting is to compare and contrast the customer's answer against the branding or the messaging that you have in your marketing collateral on your website, that your sales reps and sales force speak over to the customer because if your customers are buying from you for a certain reason and it doesn't align with the messaging that you are, that you are putting out into the world wherever your company's putting it out social media website or whatever, obviously there's a disconnect. So what you can actually do is you can take the verbiage, take the direct words or the features that the customers highlight when they do these surveys, and then you can build it out into your pitch, into your messaging, into the, into the, into the verbiage that your sales reps use when they go speak to customers at the very strong strategy. Sarah takes it a step further, obviously, which you should and build out a buyer persona for different types of buyers, which can not just be used for buyers that are in great moves, but get different sentiment from buyers who have purchased from you, who haven't purchased from you, who've canceled your service, who are still in the thought process. So if you have all these different sentiments and insights from these buyers, that's how you build it a strong buyer persona. And she actually has a systemized three-step process to map out a buyer persona. So this ensures that you're getting enough data points to properly and accurately define different types of buyer personas. So is it a CEO, is it a VP level, a director, is it a gatekeeper? What are the different types of buyer personas who are looking at your product and how do you speak to each one of them? And she does that by speaking to internal stakeholders. And then finally, at the end of her process, it's getting all this data from all your customers, a wide range of customers and different stages in the customer life cycle. And this brings me to my second point. What she does now is she takes all that data and the customer and buyer personas and she puts that into HubSpot, which is her CRM of choice. And what HubSpot can actually allow you to do is you can respond to forms or inputs based on certain buyer personas. So if a potential customer as part of your inbound funnel responds to some of your marketing collateral, you can actually program HubSpot to segment them into a specific campaign based on what their buyer persona is because you've figured out what that persona is. You've tailored some marketing collateral or a certain campaign to that type of persona. So now that persona is in a certain nurture campaign that's targeted and optimized for them. It's a very cool feature HubSpot has. But I think the more important takeaway from this using this feature within HubSpot is the importance of properly understanding and implementing your CRM so that everybody uses it. So the CRM you use in your organization should not be the most complex one that has the most features. It should be the one that you understand completely that you can onboard all your sales reps, all your other stakeholders completely so that they understand it. They use it. They buy into it because if they don't buy into it, it doesn't matter how many features you have, they're not going to be putting in the data. They're not going to want to they're not going to want to put in the data. And then if it's garbage and garbage out your CRM is useless, your dad is useless. You can't properly have line of sight against any any piece of data that's in there. If it's not being up to date and maintained properly. So how do we how do we get quality data? Well, we have to understand the behaviors and the psychology of the people that are using it. And obviously the type of people that are using a CRM primarily sales people who hate data entry want it as easy as possible. So if the CRM is not easy to use, the sales people are not going to use it effectively, which impacts the entire organization. So for a CRM to be effective, you want to get your sales force engaged with it. You want them to use it properly. And she was saying that HubSpot may be not be as feature rich, but it is one of the CRMs that allows a lot of the data entry to be automated, which enables your sales force to enter information into the CRM, keep the CRM up to date without much effort at all, which again, optimizes all your data across your organization because now there's all these things being injected into it that allow you to have line of sight as to your customers, your deals, your pipeline, et cetera, et cetera. So the most the most useful CRM is one that's implemented properly, onboarded properly, and actually adopted by your entire organization. So those are two really, really great points from Sarah that I really wanted to double down on. This has been another Scott's thoughts where we cover main points from the sales versus marketing podcasts. I hope you enjoyed. As always, have a great week, have a productive week, and we'll talk again soon. Bye now. Thanks for listening to the sales versus marketing podcasts brought to you by R.O.I. Overlook, delivering strategy, technology, and insights to both sales and marketing leaders and teams globally.