In this recap of a recent episode of RevShow, Rob and I discussed HubSpot and how you can amplify your HubSpot work by using Dubb’s HubSpot integration. If you would like to learn more about Dubb and how you can use our software to supercharge your work on HubSpot, click here.
Bridging The Gap Between Sales and Marketing
There are plenty of persisting problems in business. For instance, we are all trying to figure out ways to develop products or services that surprise and delight our customers. We all want to design the perfect pitch that can attract new clients and get the venture capital funding that we want to get. Business is a contact sport and there are inevitable problems that we need to overcome.
However, tell me if this sounds familiar. Think about your business or organization. In one corner of the room, there is your sales team. Your sales team can be the best performing sales team in the world or it may be one that has significant room for improvement. In the other corner of the same room, there is your marketing team. Once again, that marketing team can be absolutely stellar or can be one that is struggling.
While both teams are in the same room, the unfortunate reality is that there is a big fat wall between the both of them. They may even be able to communicate with each other. They may develop plans on how to supercharge the organization’s path and have it better serve its customers or clients. That being said, the metaphorical wall still prevents close collaboration. Even if both the sales team and marketing team want to break down the wall separating them, that wall is essentially insurmountable. Communication breakdowns lead to frustration and frustration leads to a poorer experience for customers and clients.
Unfortunately, this problem has not been completely solved. But at the same time, there is a company that is diligently working on this problem.
The company is HubSpot and it has made fantastic strides in helping salespeople and marketers communicate with each other. In fact, HubSpot invented the term “smarketing” (as you can guess, it is a combination of the words “sales” and “marketing”). A smarketing strategy can help you eliminate internal friction, increase your odds of surprising and delighting your customers, and generate more sales.
In this post, I want to help you see how both HubSpot and Dubb can help you accomplish everything that smarketing has to offer. Whether you are just getting started with HubSpot or have been a HubSpot user for years now, you can use the tips and advice here to accomplish your sales and marketing goals.
So are you ready? Let’s take a hard look at HubSpot, Dubb, and how both of them can make your life significantly easier.
This blog post is a recap from a recent episode of RevShow, which is Dubb’s YouTube channel discussing sales, marketing, video, and everything in between. Our entire team would love it if you would subscribe to future episodes of the show. You can do so by clicking here.
HubSpot’s Adoption to the Modern-Day Buyer
One of the big things that we discuss on RevShow is why you should use a customer relationship management (CRM) system and why you should add video into the mix. CRMs can help you stay organized, reach out to your contacts in a thoughtful, strategic way, help you generate additional sales, and more.
As far as video, you don’t need to be a longtime reader of our blog to know how much we love the medium. Video can accelerate the course of your business because it relies on human connection. It helps you build trust and authentic connections with members of your audience, whether they are prospects, clients, or someone else. It lets you leverage the power of storytelling and communicate in a way that is more engaging and memorable. Finally, video is simply more efficient and more fun. Instead of typing out a lengthy email, you can pull out your phone, start recording, have fun with the recording, and send the finished product to any type of audience.
But back to CRMs and HubSpot. HubSpot is all about building out its ecosystem to help its users achieve their sales and marketing goals. It is a leader in CRMs for a reason. Countless numbers of customers have used HubSpot’s CRMs to build strong relationships with their customers and generate more sales.
To better understand how HubSpot can create value for you and your organization, Rob and I were extremely excited to speak with Scott Brinker. Scott is the vice president of ecosystem at HubSpot and an extremely knowledgeable voice on smarketing.
As he told us, the digital movement that we are currently experiencing has led to the empowerment of buyers. Over the past two decades, it is safe to say that buyer expectations have increased. Most notably, buyers want to easily see what their choices actually are. Rather than being shoehorned or pigeonholed into buying a particular product or service, they want to look through a broad universe of options before making their decision.
Simple canvassing isn’t enough, however. Buyers today want to see how that particular product works. For starters, they may want to read about the product or watch a video about it. They may have questions that can only be answered by another human. In a good number of situations, they may want to get their hands on the product or service being paying for that product or service. This is quite common for digital products, which is why many companies (including Dubb) offer a free trial of their premium products before customers are asked to pay. Even beyond that, companies like Dubb and HubSpot offer free versions of their products, which lets prospective customers really get a sense of what they are investing in.
Ultimately, there are many different ways that customers can get from point A to point B. Scott said that there may also be plenty of cases where customers would prefer to self-service the entire transaction. They would rather do all of the independent research that they want and close the transaction themselves, rather than speak with one of your sales representatives. This is especially true amongst Millennials and other younger buyers. They expect an extremely simple and easy way to research your product or service and then make a purchase—all without talking to a single person.
Ultimately, smart companies are recognizing that we are living in an era of the buyer’s choice. Those companies are making it as easy as possible for customers to pick the path that is most appealing to them, whether that means making the purchase themselves or having their hand held throughout the entire process.
As a result, Scott and his colleagues are seeing a ton of innovation in the self-service or semi-self-service paths. Along with this, Scott said that video has a really cool way of making the sales process human—even if the customer decides to take the self-service path. There are plenty of ways to make the process easier and simpler for the customer, so HubSpot is constantly trying different tactics and strategies to create the most value for its huge audience of prospects and customers.
Marrying CRM and Video
If you are a sales leader or even an entry-level member of your sales team, chances are that you are thinking about your ideal client profile. Your ideal client profile includes the people that could potentially buy from you. Essentially, these are your contacts and the individuals that are going to help you reach your sales and business goals. While you certainly aren’t going to convert every single contact into a paying customer, this universe of individuals can help lead you to the promised land.
So when you think about a CRM system, you initially think of where you can house your contacts. This is where you get to wear your sales hat. Every contact represents an opportunity to create mutual value. For your contact, it comes from the fact that your product or service is improving some aspect of their life. And as for you and your colleagues, every contact represents an opportunity to hit your sales and business goals.
However, if you are on the marketing side of the room, you are probably thinking more about campaigns or even automation. Really, this just means being able to broadcast a large message to a large group of people. You are contemplating ways to both construct your message and get your message out in front of the biggest and most relevant audience. This is easier said than done, but if you can execute well, you and your company will be in business.
What is amazing about modern CRM systems like HubSpot is that they combine both of these things. They bring together sales and marketing, contacts, and campaigns. In my opinion, this is the ultimate way to run your smarketing. It is allowing both salespeople and marketers to physically and metaphorically be on the same page. Using a CRM as a hub, the wall separating sales and marketing teams can start coming down.
As Scott said, once you use a CRM system, you can see what resonates. You can check out your conversion rates and try optimizing them through different tactics and strategies. If you really think about it, the whole field of conversion optimization grew up in that new empowerment of experimentation in a digital medium. Along with this, your sales and marketing teams can work together to determine the best way of communicating with prospects. By following the data, they can get more aligned on strategy, thereby increasing the chances of hitting their department objectives and goals.
Along with the power of CRM, there is video. Scott added that what is exciting now is that technology has become much more sophisticated. There are so many examples here, but one that immediately comes to mind is how easy it is to record and distribute video content. With just a few clicks of your smartphone, you can create a valuable and compelling video that generates sales.
Simply put, video isn’t going away anytime soon. As Scott argued, video puts so much power in the hands of marketers. They can say things like, “Okay, I have this idea that I want to implement. Let’s give it a go.” If it doesn’t work, it’s fine. From there, these marketers can go on to the next idea. That next idea may really resonate and the marketers can then go from there and quickly scale that idea to customers and clients. The speed and decisiveness that video provides is game-changing for small and large businesses alike.
As Scott argues, there isn’t a better time to be a marketer. The current ecosystem offers so many different possibilities for salespeople and marketers to reach their goals. All they need to do is get started by taking advantage of these smarketing tools.
How You Can Leverage Smarketing Through HubSpot and Dubb
With this understanding of smarketing in mind, I want to take a deep dive into how you can use HubSpot and Dubb to accomplish your sales and marketing goals. To be clear, what follows isn’t everything that you can do with both HubSpot and Dubb. That being said, here are a few ideas on what you can get when you use both platforms to accomplish your sales and marketing objectives.
Understanding Contact Management
One of the first things that we recommend doing (whether or not you are a HubSpot user) is to get a deep understanding of contact management. Contact management involves the profiles of your specific contacts.
When you think about your contact profiles, you can think about them as a mine that continues to mine data. The longer that people are in your flow, the richer the data becomes. This data includes things like the customer journey, the actions that they are taking, and (my personal favorite) how they are consuming and interacting with your video content.
To get more context on what you can get out of contact profiles, Rob and I also spoke with Jake Morgen. Jake is a senior partner manager, platform ecosystem at HubSpot.
As he said, all of his teams are working together to highlight the app marketplace on HubSpot. The company is consistently coming up with new APIs (like Media Bridge), which lets HubSpot partners come in and uplevel their experience. In other words, it provides for a deep, integrated experience so that HubSpot partners can get more value from the platform. Not only that, but HubSpot partners can get strong pricing alignment. Overall, HubSpot is laser-focused on helping its new partners get onboarded extremely quickly.
Jake and his colleagues know that HubSpot’s partners can easily pick and choose their tech stacks. Those partners want to choose products and services that they are familiar with. Because of this, having the options and ease of functionality is core. I would argue that one of those options and features is the ability to mine your data and get fascinating insights that you otherwise would not get.
Before CRMs, sales and marketing involved a significant amount of guesswork. We would have to guess when we should follow up with a prospect or why a certain cohort of individuals would slip through the buying cracks. However, with excellent CRMs like HubSpot, we can better understand what is actually happening. With this understanding, we can then offer a more personalized and customized experience for each prospect. Wherever the prospect is in your sales cycle, you can rely on granular data to increase your chances of making a sale.
Sending Personalized Videos Via HubSpot
Many people don’t know this, but you can actually connect your Gmail account or Outlook account directly to HubSpot. The value of this is that you can send and receive emails directly through the HubSpot platform. This can save you significant amounts of time, as you are doing all of your work within one overarching system.
There’s something even better, though. On HubSpot, you can actually add videos to your emails and SMS messages simply through the Dubb integration. You can find the Dubb integration in the HubSpot marketplace. You will also need to get the Dubb Chrome Extension (which you can find by clicking here). The installation is extremely easy (if you have any questions throughout the entire process, I encourage you to contact our team).
Once you do install the Dubb integration, your whole HubSpot account is lit up. You can now leverage video as you are communicating with your contacts via email or text. Think about that for one second. You have the freedom to send a selfie sales video to a new prospect. You can send a screen share video to a customer who may have questions about your digital product or service. Your video can even be a combination of these. Whether you want to send a 30-second follow-up video or a more lengthy video describing your company, you have the freedom to do so through your HubSpot account.
If you really want to get creative with these types of videos, you can grab the Dubb mobile app. With the app, you can then record your video and then instantly add it to one of your emails that is in HubSpot. It really is that simple, so if you would like to try it out, you can download the Dubb mobile app for iOS here and for Android here.
An Example of Using Data, Video, and Contact Management
So like I said, one of the coolest things about combining HubSpot and Dubb is that you get useful insights about the customer journey. This is especially true today, as we can use data to make smart decisions. In turn, the data lets us know where we are going to go.
Within HubSpot, when you are using video to reach out to your prospects and clients, you can follow the data to know when to intelligently follow up. The client journey is led by the data, and that data will almost always give you the right way to move forward.
Now, let’s engage in a quick thought experiment. Imagine that you just sent a specific sales video to a warm prospect. You strongly believe that this prospect is a great fit for a new digital product that you created. Now, you are looking at your HubSpot account. By using the Dubb integration within HubSpot, you can now see how much of that video the prospect has watched. Whether it is 20%, 50%, or something else, you will see all of that information from the data that you’re getting within HubSpot. From there, you can make an intelligent decision on how to follow up with that client or prospect.
For instance, if the prospect didn’t watch your video, you will want to act in a certain way. You may want to follow up with her to see if she received your video in the first place. If she received the video, opened the accompanying email, and didn’t watch that video, you’ll also probably want to reach out and see why that happened.
On the other hand, if that prospect watched the entirety of the video, you will want to react in a different way. You may want to see what she liked (or didn’t like) about the video and react accordingly. If she really enjoyed the video, you may want to consider taking the next step and seeing if she would actually want to purchase your product.
Ultimately, you are going to want to follow the data through HubSpot and the Dubb integration. While the data may not lead you to the right decision every time, over the long term, it will go a long way in helping you build better customer relationships and generate more sales.
Sending Campaigns With HubSpot and Dubb
Finally, if you are a volume thinker, you are really going to love this discussion. I want to spend some time talking about campaigns and how you can use Dubb and HubSpot to deliver more effective sales and marketing campaigns.
As Scott told us, HubSpot is a platform for the front office. HubSpot’s CRM system is really the core of the experience. Over time, Scott and his colleagues have discovered that there are many different capabilities that companies want in marketing, sales, and service. The core of HubSpot’s strategy is being that stable foundation upon which people can build. Understanding that, the HubSpot team is focused on its ecosystem being a rich source of so many different types of specialized innovation. This empowers customers to basically say, “I’ll choose the pieces that are best for my business.” Through that approach, HubSpot hopes to generate a win-win for both its customers and itself.
Now, using platforms like HubSpot and Dubb, we can make smarter decisions for our sales and marketing activities. We don’t necessarily need to follow the traditional methods of selling (like cold calling). For instance, what we can do now is send a video email newsletter to a targeted list. Then, based on the data we receive, we can implement smarter follow-up actions.
To do this on HubSpot, you will want to go to the campaign section. From there, go ahead and add a video. The video can be one that you are recording now or one that you have already recorded. Once you are done adding your video, you will then see that Dubb adds an animated GIF to the body of your email. That animated GIF is automatically generated from the video that you chose. If a person clicks on that GIF, they are then taken to a video landing page.
Dubb video landing pages are extremely powerful. On that video landing page, you can include all types of customizations, including your logo, brand colors, and more. Your Dubb video landing pages can also include calls to action below your specific video. As you probably already know, calls to action are so important because they help you get conversions. They help your prospects get from point A to point B. At Dubb, we are proud to offer so many different types of calls to action, including reply with video, booking an appointment directly on your calendar, communicating over Facebook Messenger, and more. No matter the type of video that you are creating, you will definitely want to include at least one call to action below that video.
When you are ready, you can also embrace automations. Automation is the mastery of sales and marketing. If you can add video to any of your automated workflows, you are on a different level compared to most salespeople and marketers. This is because you are releasing the strongest, most visual and emotionally impacting content (video) into your automated workflows. Then, based on actions (or inactions) that people take, you can have automated follow up actions. This all comes under the umbrella of drip sequences (at Dubb, we like to call them “trust sequences”). Not only that, but automations let you clone yourself. Even if you are sleeping or working on other important tasks, your videos and automated workflows are working for you. They can build relationships, answer questions that your prospects have, and even generate sales.
If you want to add video to your automated workflows in HubSpot, you can start by building out your email templates. Once those have been built out, you can add them as workflow steps.
What is great about this is that you are going to get contact-level tracking. Even if that video is sent to an automated group of a large list, you are going to get the same type of tracking and data. As you can guess, this is extremely powerful. If you can understand what people are doing in your customer journey, you can smart call, which is much more effective than a traditional cold call. It’s a way to be much more tactical and drastically increase the chances of making a sale.
Moving Forward with HubSpot and Dubb
In the end, we are extremely proud to have a strong partnership with HubSpot. HubSpot offers one of the best CRM systems on the planet. We’re happy to both have an integration with HubSpot and to closely work with them as we help all kinds of companies leverage the power of video.
Whether you are just getting started with video or are looking to get more out of your HubSpot experience, I encourage you to go to the HubSpot marketplace and search for Dubb. The integration is totally free and it will amplify your HubSpot account. And if you haven’t yet used HubSpot? Go ahead and give it a try. When you do so, make sure that you are installing the Dubb integration so that you can get the most out of the strategies and tips discussed above.
With HubSpot and Dubb, you can break through that seemingly-impenetrable wall that is separating your sales and marketing departments. You can be more efficient with your work, build stronger customer relationships, and generate more sales. What’s not to like?
If you want to learn more about how to integrate Dubb into HubSpot, you can find some of our articles by clicking here and here. Along with this, if you are loving the Dubb integration and are finding major value from it, we would love it if you could leave a review in the HubSpot marketplace. Any questions? Feel free to contact us by clicking here and click here for a free 14-day trial of our premium plans.
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