Ask GM of Marketing Hub Nicholas Holland Anything!

[lalexander]

For our second AMA, we're glad to have Nicholas Holland, General Manager of Marketing Hub, here with us to answer your questions on HubSpot's marketing tools.

EDIT: This AMA ran on January 30, 2020 and is now closed.

Questions should be focused on how recently introduced features are or aren't making a difference for you, why they were built, or his long-term vision of the product.

Examples of great topics:

• Recently announced additions to Marketing Hub Enterprise
• How revenue attribution can help your teams prove their impact
• Scaling your HubSpot portal with partitioning, increased tool limits, and more granular permission capabilities
• His vision for Marketing Hub in 2020

[davecriswell]

I'm a little late here but it's still Thursday in Colorado 

I'd love to hear perspectives about a couple of attribution related topics. We love the new tools but are seeing some challenges. For a little background, we are a seasonal business that sells exclusively to consumers and it's 98% a self-service sales process where we get both new and returning customers season to season.

An important element to pull out from that with our challenges is that we don't have what I think is a typical B2B sales cycle (sales reps creating prospecting, managing a pipeline, creating opportunities, etc). A significant number of our transactions come from first-time visitors to our website.

All that said, we are a Marketing Hub Enterprise user but currently just use Sales Hub for Deals to access attribution reporting (though we are admittedly very early in our journey with attribution reporting). So...

• We're interested in learning how business is generated from new AND returning/repeat customers. What are some best practices to accomplish this?
• We've considered using the Deal Type property to tag new vs existing deal revenue as is suggested in the knowledge base. I *think* we need Sales Hub Professional to use deal workflows to make those deal property assignments and make full use of the revenue attribution reporting available to us in Marketing Hub Enterprise. However, the other tools in Sales Hub Professional aren't needed in our business so the cost is tough to justify only for Deal automation.

So, in addition to any new vs existing revenue attribution reporting, I'd love to hear if we can take full advantage of the revenue attribution reporting without upgrading to Sales Hub professional.

Thanks!

[nicholasholland]

Hey @davecriswell , apologies for the late reply here.

We’ve definitely been hearing feedback similar to yours from other B2C/ecommerce customers around returning/repeat customers. I’m not sure this is an attribution reporting problem so much as a data problem, a problem we need to solve by capturing recurring business in HubSpot more comprehensively. In the meantime, your best bet is to use existing properties like Deal Type, as you mentioned, and filtering attribution reports by those properties.

On your second question: to assign those deal properties automatically, yes, you’d need deal workflows, and automating things would reduce time pressure on your team and ensure the property was kept up to date. However, you still have the option to manually tag deals without upgrading to Sales Pro, and depending on how you identify recurring business vs. net new, you could bulk update those following this guide.

Please keep this to the Power User Community for now — but we are focused on expanding the amount of filters/segmentation available in attribution throughout 2020, so more flexibility is on the way.

[davecriswell]

Thanks so much for the options @nicholasholland.

Agreed that the new/returning challenge is more of a data problem. Happy to be a sounding board if needed as your team works through solutions.

[lalexander]

Tagging in a few folks who I know are using Marketing Hub in complex cases who might have questions about how the product is supporting your teams/growth & where the product is headed in the future!

@Jmernst, @Amy_Brierley, @KelseyVia, @rachma, @marymartin28, @jtAccusoft, @DSV, @LROADY, @Phill_CF, @davecriswell