What is HubSpot, and why do over 95K companies in 120 countries use HubSpot?

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Blog Hubspot Start-Up Tips

Whether you are just starting a business or company, planning the growth strategy for your business or want to streamline your processes and interactions with customers, a customer relationship management (CRM) solution can promote your business and help you achieve your goals.

In a modern organization, agility and flexibility are the greatest asset of any business. Implementing a CRM system in an organization is the first step towards winning over customers and providing a service that meets their needs.
HubSpot is a CRM platform that incorporates marketing, sales and services, which provides you with all the tools you need to build an amazing customer experience, and not least for your business’ leverage.


7 HubSpot Facts Not Everyone Knows:

  • Using HubSpot increases lead generation by 78%
  • Using HubSpot reduces the cost per lead by 44%
  • Using HubSpot results in a 48% increase in contacts creation
  • Using HubSpot results in a 24% increase in sales
  • Using HubSpot creates a 74% increase in website exposure
  • Using HubSpot results in a 40% increase in organic activity
  • Using HubSpot Increases Your Target Audience by 81%

Impressive, right? And that’s not all!

These are just some of the reasons why today, over 95,000 customers in over 100 countries use HubSpot’s award-winning services and support software to change and enhance customer interaction, providing them with a quality experience.

Some frequently asked questions I come across:
⦁ Why, now more than ever, does my business need a CRM system? How can a CRM solution make my business more productive and profitable?
⦁ Which CRM brand should I choose? And is HubSpot the right system for me?
⦁ How can HubSpot affect my business, and who in my business may benefit from using HubSpot?


Why, now more than ever, does your business need a CRM system?

At the start of 2020, we all had different and varied plans, some of them even grandiose. Among others there were those who wanted to increase their amounts of leads and sales, planned meetings, conferences, business flights, etc… But then, sometime in March, when the Corona came into our lives, everything changed. We had to adapt our business activities to the new reality, and marketing of the INBOUND strategy became uniquely relevant, as businesses were required to turn conferences into webinars, frontal sales meetings into ZOOM calls, and this is where most companies faced the question – where do we go from here?

The conclusion is simple: now more than ever, in the face of a changing reality, it is time to invest and find a CRM system for your business; not just a system for your sales team, but a system that can help all departments – marketing, service and support, management, and of course – sales.

While marketing and sales can be done using the INBOUND strategy using a Frankenstein-like combination of WordPress, Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Moz, Outlook, personal logs, and lots of post-it notes, which are often inefficient, and quite exhausting. In some cases, it can even endanger you, and may cause you to miss opportunities since you will not be able to understand what works and what doesn’t.

By using a CRM system, we can understand how our customers find us? What channels bring us more potential customers? We can monitor the interaction with existing customers and potential customers, see what activities on social media and the internet interest and motivate them to action, what makes them want to learn more about the services and activities your business offers?
Using a CRM system will help you test yourselves better, and can measure whether you have met the goals you have set, and how much money is spent on marketing efforts and their results – ROI? Can we understand what actually works and does not, and what yields results for the business?


Which CRM Should you choose?

To answer this question, one must first understand the customer’s journey.

Unfortunately, many business owners believe the customer’s journey amounts to 3-4 points of contact and interaction before he closes a deal. It could be an internet search, a social media news feed item, an email sent to a customer after filling out a form while downloading free content – and boom! Many think he is ripe for the decision and willing to close the deal – it would of course be ideal if that were the case, but it is far from reality.
In reality, the customer’s journey amounts to between 14 and 40 points of contact and interaction before closing a deal.

Understanding the customer’s journey helps you figure out where to focus your resources in order to bring better results to your business!


In conclusion

HubSpot is a marketing, sales and service platform that makes the sales and marketing system easy to manage, by providing tools for building websites, publishing content, managing social media, sending emails, automating lead cultivation processes and more – all in one platform that combines everything the various teams in your business do.

Want to know more?

Contact us today!

Why defining the right persona is so important for your business success

Blog Branding Start-Up Tips

Who’s your ideal buyer persona? Now that’s a question marketers usually ask (and they should) at a kick off meeting with a new client.  So why is it so important for us marketing execs to understand the buyer persona and how do we break it down into pieces to really understand it?

Buyer personas are a major component of any effective inbound marketing strategy. Truth is, you have to know who you’re marketing and selling to before you can make a sale. Today’s customers only pay attention to marketing messages that are highly personalized, and highly relevant to their unique experiences and pain points – the things that tick them off and make their life hard, the things that eventually will move them to take action and contact you for a demo or a call.


So how do you go about defining your buyer persona? 

1. Research

Make sure you understand who it is you want to target, what’s their role, what geolocation, are they the end-user for the product you sell or only the decision maker?


2. Current clients

It’s always easy to start with what you know, by analyzing current clients.  Some of the questions you may be asking yourself are:

  • Who at their company contacted you first?
  • Were they the final decision maker?
  • What does their job look like?
  • Are they your company’s primary point of contact?
  • Do they manage people or processes?
  • Do they make most decisions alone or with a superior?

3. Your competition

Are your competitors seeing success in a certain segment you’d like to penetrate into? You can check out their website.  They’re probably developing specific content and sales offers that speak directly to the same market segment. You can learn a lot about those ideal buyer personas by looking at your competition.


4. Analytics

If you’ve done some marketing in the past (or current) take a peak and analyze your traffic.  Who’s visiting your website, where do they come from, what pages do they consume and what type of content was it.  Did they download any assets from the website? What type of content and messaging was used in those assets?  This will help you understand who’s consuming what you’re trying to sell.

So to reach a definition of who your buyer persona is, you need to define things like: buyer persona characteristics, buyer persona segmentation, how to use buyer personas, buyer persona research.  

Once you define your persona  you’ll be able to attract high-value visitors, leads, and customers to your business who you’ll be more likely to retain over time.

More specifically, having a deep understanding of your buyer persona is critical to driving the correct content creation, product development, sales enablement, and everything that relates to customer acquisition and retention.

After this research, I suggest you move onto what’s called buyer persona segmentation.  If your company serves different verticals/industries make sure you start segmenting by industry.  In B2C, segmentation is usually broken into gender, age, hobbies, whereas in B2B we look at parameters like; vertical type, job title/function, seniority, skills, geolocation, size of organization, and annual revenue (ARR).

Sometimes, especially in B2B, if you offer a variety of solutions, you may have to break it up by solution as well.  R&D job function may be the persona for one solution, whereas a Strategist may be for another!  Don’t be shy to sit and ask questions.

We’ve seen many times where the product user is not necessarily the decision-maker and vice versa.  When going about creating content and materials, you have to take this into account and create your materials with this distinction in mind.  Different materials and different messaging, different case studies that speak specifically to their motivations, pain points and business needs. To give you an example, In some organizations, the agent at a call center is the user of the product but the call center manager is the one who will recommend the CFO/CEO to buy your solution.  Hence, you have three (3) different users you need to impact with your marketing activities. 

Lastly, try and map it out in  a simple chart or document where it’s easy for you to visualize which persona is the right one for each vertical or solution.  Some people like to write it in the form of a paragraph, like writing a short story.  That way you wrote it and you understand it.


5. Roles & Goals

Another good way is by focusing on roles, goals, and challenges of the buyer persona you’re after.  This answers the question of how to use buyer personas?  By understanding the different roles and the goals to be achieved, you can now implement a plan and execute it properly.  

Once you know who your buyer personas are, and you’re familiar with their roles, goals, and challenges, you can develop marketing strategies tailored to just those people who you know are an excellent fit for your company. 

You can now use them in the following ways:

  • Familiarize your sales and marketing teams with each persona
  • Create ad campaigns that correspond to each persona
  • Develop content that speaks to the specific pain points of each persona
  • Monitor ongoing results and test your messaging.  See which ones “hit the spot,” and which ones failed; eliminate the ones that failed

To summarize and leave you with something to take away, I strongly suggest you take all the time you need to understand your personas and understand how to match the solution/s to each one.  If you get this right, the rest will fall into place.  if you get it wrong, you’re doomed to spend a lot of time and waste your budget.

Contact SAGE Marketing for professional advice on how to nail your personas right from the get-go. 

We’re just an email / phone call away   

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