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Recorded: Wednesday 19 January 2022 | Published: Friday 28 January 2022
Welcome to our first episode for 2022.
The end of 2021 was an exhausting race to the finish. I hope you had a good break with time to relax, reflect and recharge.
Obviously there’s been significant global events (Omicron, earthquakes, typhoons, fires, stock market declines) and it would be easy to focus on the challenges we’re all facing. It’s hard to know what to say…
It’s easy to be down about the situation we’re in - however, I’ve found it useful to remind myself that when considered over decades, this is actually… normal.
Here’s two minutes where I chat about perspective:
I took a break from socializing and social media during the holiday. As regular readers will know I’m hardly ever on LinkedIn these days, and haven’t been on Facebook for years. Most of my social media has been on Twitter. But I’m currently on a break from Twitter as well. I’ve found the break to be really healthy - in particular I’m less distractible now.
At the end of last year I felt my attention span had dropped to almost zero - I could hardly concentrate for more than a few minutes on reading books or listening to interviews. But over the past few weeks I was finally able to remove distractions and get back to reading a bunch of books. Being able to just sit and read for hours on end, and not get bored was wonderful.
I’d love to be able to avoid social activities entirely, but I know that’s not realistic - I’ll no doubt be sucked back into it shortly…
This could almost be our tagline for the show.
As Ian and I have been planning HubShots for 2022 we’ve been thinking about the mix of ‘tips’ versus ‘strategies’ and how to get the balance right for you.
We like to provide value in both snack and meal sizes.
Part of our thinking has been to consider these in terms of efficiency and effectiveness:
(Technically, efficiency is about reducing waste - but for most people this is about saving time)
This is where we share tips and tricks for using HubSpot - with the goal of saving you time. Bonus: a common side-effect of these kinds of tips is they reduce errors as well (e.g. automating a simple task often reduces errors).
Doing the right things with HubSpot. It’s no good doing the wrong things efficiently.
This is where we chat more with our strategy hats on. The goal is to guide you on the direction to take in your business (based on our experiences working with clients over the years).
Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:
We’ll be covering a few of these in the shots below, and others in more detail in future shows.
A reminder in case you’ve forgotten about version control (or didn’t realise it was there).
You can easily revert to previous versions of pages, using the version history tool. Simply click on the ‘Last saved’ link at the top left of pages:
This is available on emails as well.
HubSpot is continuing to roll out attribution reporting throughout the product, with Campaigns being a recent update.
As well as the Revenue Attribution widget on the main Performance tab, there’s now new Attribution tab that breaks down the contact details.
One of the key issues this highlights is ensuring you have attribution set up correctly.
In the above attribution panel it immediately highlighted to me that something wasn’t correct (since I knew we’d had more sales). So I started investigating and was able to identify that tagging wasn’t flowing through fully to the Shopify site (that this campaign relates to).
I wanted to share this example - because even though I setup campaigns all the time it shows how easy it is to miss things. Having reports like these are super useful for highlighting issues.
I also discovered that not all the ad campaigns had been added as Assets - another item that was easily fixed.
Here’s the Attribution tab page - notice you can select multiple attribution models to compare the results:
Being able to add custom object properties is a very useful feature that HubSpot added recently.
Here’s an example of a form with Custom Object properties - in this case the custom object is for Product registrations, and the form simply combines standard contact object properties, with the product registration properties:
This is so cool. Ian alerted me to some new Latest Source properties now available in Contact properties.
They are similar to the Original Source properties (but obviously relate to the latest source of visit). You can add them to Contact Views and Lists:
In our portal we’ve added a dedicated attribution Section into our Contact sidebar layout:
And they can be added to Reports built in the Custom Report Builder as well. Here’s an example of a report Ian built for a client. Notice the Ad network field as well (he’s joined the Contacts and Deal objects with the Ad Activity object as well):
Top right is your friend!
One of the quickest ways to save time in HubSpot is to use the global search:
This will instantly give you a quick set of likely results including contacts, deals, companies, tickets and even Custom objects - eg here’s me searching for Ian in our portal:
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen people search for a contact by:
Which takes probably 10-15 seconds, compared to simply using global search (2-3 seconds).
Setup your columns in an All Contacts view and then based all your future views off that one.
If you’re using the HubSpot add-in in Outlook and find it slow things down, try turning off the ‘Show Contact Profiles’ option in settings:
Your mileage may vary of course, but we’ve had clients who were about to chuck out the HubSpot add-in in frustration, but were saved by this option.
This is a handy timesaver for when clients and prospects need to reschedule at the last minute. Avoid all the last minute back and forth, and instead they simply click a link and reschedule (at a time that is available from your calendar).
It also helps reduce the no-shows (I’ve had a few) who will hopefully just cancel instead.
Further details on using Meetings are in this KB article, and we also discussed Meetings in depth in episode 261.
Notifications can be awesome, and they can be annoying. Getting the mix right is important for your efficiency. It can be easy to get overwhelmed with too many notifications.
Here’s a few notifications I untick so they don’t clog up my inbox and distract me:
HubSpot has been rolling out enhancements across the survey tools.
Before diving into some of the updates, a quick overview of the types of surveys you can create:
Specific to the Custom Surveys, are two nice enhancements, now in Public Beta:
You can now add multiple steps to Custom Surveys, to break a longer survey into multiple steps.
They are easy to add using the Step Module:
There’s also a list of previously used questions that you can drag onto your survey (another time saver!)
Here is an example of how you can enroll a contact in a sequence from a workflow. Note you can also unenroll a contact.
More details on how to enroll and unenroll contacts in a sequence here.
If you’ve read Antifragile by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, you’ll be familiar with the idea of antifragility. In a nutshell it’s the capability to grow stronger when put under stress (eg think of bones that heal after breaking). It’s different to being resilient - which is more about resistance to stress, or bouncing back - it’s about being better than you were before.
When it comes to our own lives, one way to think about being antifragile is to be a constant learner. Learning is perhaps the only way you directly control to prepare for the future.
When you are faced with immense challenges (eg marketing and sales is constantly changing and throwing us curveballs) you know how to adapt and improve. Compared to the old guard who oppose change and get swept away.
In our firm, our best team members, and our best clients have a growth mindset. They are always learning.
Continual learning is the tonic to career decay.
Speaking of learning…
A few months ago I updated my LinkedIn profile to remove any promotion or CTA, and instead just set it to say “I am always willing to learn”.
Amazingly, since the change I’ve had almost zero LinkedIn spam emails (aside: you may recall a year or so ago - see Shot 7 of episode 241 - I added the waving hand at the start of my name so that I could easily identify the automated spam emails).
Seems no one wants to connect with someone who is keen to learn :-)
One thing I’ve reflected on over the break is the importance of having mentors.
I’ve been lucky to have an experienced CEO mentor me most weeks - providing feedback, challenging my ideas, and guiding me on how to build successful teams and go-to-market approaches.
One of the (perhaps surprising) areas he advises me on is marketing.
Does it seem strange that I - an experienced marketer - would get regular advice from a mentor (who isn’t even a marketer)? If you think so, then you’re similar to me a few years ago when I thought I had a good handle on how I should be marketing our business. Hell, we even do a podcast about it :-)
But this isn’t about knowledge, this is about perspective.
A mentor provides the bigger picture, the alternative view, the exposure of your blind spots. Often, the very questions my mentor asks me are the same ones I ask and go through with our own clients. But because I’m too ‘in the weeds’ I can’t see my own weaknesses and lack of clarity. A mentor unlocks this.
Why do I mention all this?
Because, perhaps - as you enjoy your well earned break - you can think about what would unlock productivity and growth for you in 2022. Whilst knowledge is important, perhaps it’s perspective that you need.
There’s probably no better example of this than psychologists seeing other psychologists for help.
Is it a lack of knowledge of therapy techniques? No. It’s not about knowledge. It’s about perspective. Getting another’s perspective - ideally someone experienced in your situation - is the key.
And as well as the perspective, there’s the accountability of having a mentor meet with you regularly - they want to see you improve and grow.
To use another example, consider a personal trainer - often their main benefit is just keeping you focussed. We all know how to do a lunge or a pushup, but we struggle to maintain momentum and focus. That’s what mentors (and coaches) do.
“A good mentor hopes you will move on. A great mentor knows you will.”
Source: Ted Lasso S2.Ep12: Inverting the Pyramid of Success
HubSpot Reports Tutorial: Measuring Marketing Success With Revenue Attribution Reports - 3 videos that should take you under 30 minutes to complete.
Connect with HubShots here:
Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn
HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems and XEN Solar.
HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.
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