[Closed] Exclusive Conversation with Jon Dick, VP Marketing @ HubSpot

[maggiebutler]

Thanks for participating! The thread is now closed; Jon will be back soon for another AMA. If you would like to connect with subject matter experts in #opslife, please post a new question here.

We’re excited to host an exclusive ask-me-anything session right here in #OpsLife with @JonDick , VP Marketing. Jon leads the go-to-market & operations marketing strategy at HubSpot and has 10+ years of experience leading Marketing teams at companies like Klout and Trunk Club. 

On Tuesday 7/28 at 12pm ET, Jon will be answering your questions here on all things marketing strategy and operations, so be sure to leave your questions on this thread before then or UPVOTE questions you want more detail on.

Here are some examples of things to ask Jon about:

• Data strategy
• Cross-team alignment
• System roadmaps
• Annual Planning
• Go-to-market for consumer & enterprise products
• Positioning & thought leadership
• Digital demand generation
• Social & content strategies
• Online & Offline Direct Response Advertising
• Marketing attribution 

[JonDick]

I'm personally really excited to talk with this community next week.

What do you want to discuss?

Alignment & Process?!?

Data & Systems?!?

Scaling marketing teams?!?

[VanessaR]

Jon... hi! Since you're a VP how do you think about alignment across all of your teams? I don't know how many teams you manage but I assume they all do different things

[JonDick]

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@VanessaR wrote:

Jon... hi! Since you're a VP how do you think about alignment across all of your teams? I don't know how many teams you manage but I assume they all do different things

---

@VanessaR Hey Vanessa - just have a million meetings! (j/k...great question). Alignment within my team (9 directors) is hard, and aligning across the other functions of the flywheel is even more difficult. A few ideas for you:

1) Write memos - Amazon made the 6-page memo famous, and we've been using the technique for a number of years. This is esp effective for alignment around future plans. It forces authors to fully articulate their approach, provides an opportunity for others to absorb the information deeply, and creates a powerful collaboration opportunity.

2) Leverage slack channels - I have various private and public slack channels that allow me and my leaders to collaborate and stay aligned. They're great because they enable more formal updates and more casual check-ins. They're also great during times of crisis (like when the pandemic was declared) as they provide more transparent and real time information flow.

3) Create and track only a few big projects - For aligning across flywheel teams, we leverage a process called Compass Planning. Our compass is a few big, cross-team projects that require close oversight. We'll be talking about this in more detail during an upcoming AMA.

[grayton]

How often are you actually meeting with Sales and what is your process? 

-G

[JonDick]

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@grayton wrote:

How often are you actually meeting with Sales and what is your process? 

-G

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@grayton Hello,

I oversee all of our global demand gen, and meet with sales leadership frequently (at least weekly). There are a mix of 1:1s and structured meetings. The structured meetings are:

1) I attend the bi-weekly sales forecast meeting to both understand how sales are trending and also present marketing progress to monthly goals
2) I attend a monthly sales performance review meeting to review the prior month's marketing and sales metrics in detail
3) We have (at least) monthly sales/marketing meetings in each region.

[Lucila-Andimol]

Hi @JonDick 

Love this 3 topics..in that orden! =D

• Alignment & Process
• Data & Systems
• Scaling marketing teams> inhouse vs. outsourced.

Of course if you have content about this, books, sites, though leaders to follow about this topics, please share your knowledge..

[JonDick]

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@Lucila-Andimol wrote:

Hi @JonDick 

Love this 3 topics..in that orden! =D

• Alignment & Process
• Data & Systems
• Scaling marketing teams> inhouse vs. outsourced.

Of course if you have content about this, books, sites, though leaders to follow about this topics, please share your knowledge..

---

@Lucila-Andimol Hi Lucila,

1. Alignment & Process:
There's so much to unpack here. We're going to be covering this extensively over the next 8 weeks as part of this #OpsLife campaign, so stay tuned.

That said, start with easy wins on the alignment front. Are you meeting with the other ops leaders in your company weekly? Do you have shared reporting? Do you have shared priorities? If yes, you're on a great path. If no, that's an easy way to get started.

2. Data & Systems:
Stay tuned for upcoming #OpsLife sessions. These are so crucial to success. We'll be covering them at length.

3. Marketing teams: insourced vs. outsourced:
It really depends on your marketing strategy and your core competancies. I would not outsource anything that is absolutely core to your ongoing success as a marketing team. For example, when I used to do direct mail at a high-end fashion brand, we would outsource list building and printing, but not the actual design. Design was a core competancy for our brand and mattered deply to us. At HubSpot, SEO and content are absolutely core since we run an inbound marketing strategy. We insource those roles almost exclusively.

[J4tes]

Do you see any potential for mobile texting coming down the road? The open rate exceeds email by far. 

[JonDick]

@J4tes 

Hey, yes 100%. We're testing it on our marketing team and I would encourage everyone to do the same. Although not natively built into the HubSpot Conversations product today, there are a number of HubSpot app partners who enable SMS through the platform. 

So far in our testing, the keys are:

1. Set the right expectations

2. Don't run afoul of compliance

3. Understand when SMS makes sense for your buyer

[Sunshine1]

Hi Jon

I am new to HubSpot and the look of the product is very appealing and easy to use

I am an Insurance Agent who needs a secure HIPPA compliant platform

Some has told me that this is not that and to get a BAA agreement signed

Is HubSpot OK with doing that and can someone explain what HubSpot does to ensure HIPPA comlpliance?

Thanks

Nat

[JonDick]

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@Sunshine1 wrote:

Hi Jon

I am new to HubSpot and the look of the product is very appealing and easy to use

I am an Insurance Agent who needs a secure HIPPA compliant platform

Some has told me that this is not that and to get a BAA agreement signed

Is HubSpot OK with doing that and can someone explain what HubSpot does to ensure HIPPA comlpliance?

Thanks

Nat

---

@Sunshine1 good question, and although I am not able to advise you about it specifically, there are a number of writeups from HubSpot certified partners available through Google that provide more details. 

[jennysowyrda]

Very excited to see this chat! 

@KeyWestScott, @GuyTaylor, @dianalcont, @AdamLPW, @Kim_HM, @toricook, @Bryantworks, @Jaimee I thought you may be interested in participating in this conversation! 

[toricook]

Hi Jon,

Thanks for planning to share your experiences with us!

I'm the Director of Sales & Marketing for a B2B SaaS startup. We're currently in the process of implementing a product-led growth strategy at our company. I'm not sure if PLG is in your wheelhouse, but if so, I'd certainly love to hear your thoughts about best practices for implementing a strategy.

Here are some specific questions on my mind:

What types of in-app trigger events should we identify in order to send marketing campaigns to further the growth of our product (specifically as it relates to free trial users)? Examples: Visited checkout page but didn't upgrade, Signed up for a free trial but never revisited the app, x amount of days since last app visit, added x amount of users to free trial. I'd love to identify the most important trigger events that might warrant something like an email nurture or a remarketing campaign. 

Similarly, what types of in-app events should we be looking for when analyzing our customers' usage of the app to help us identify 1) which customers are at risk of churning and 2) which are likely evangelists?

We're planning to use the standard pirate metrics framework for PLG (Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, Referral) as well as tracking LTV, CAC, Time to Value TTV, PQLs, Net Churn, and Expansion Revenue. Are there other metrics that you would deem crucial for growth?

Any tips for aligning smarketing, operations, customer success, and product development teams around a growth strategy where everyone contributes, in part, to the growth of the company (not just sales/marketing)?

In general, I'm really looking for ways to better integrate our product usage with our marketing campaigns. I'm also looking to get buy-in from all departments on a growth strategy and to inspire them to contribute to that strategy.

[JonDick]

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@toricook wrote:

Hi Jon,

Thanks for planning to share your experiences with us!

I'm the Director of Sales & Marketing for a B2B SaaS startup. We're currently in the process of implementing a product-led growth strategy at our company. I'm not sure if PLG is in your wheelhouse, but if so, I'd certainly love to hear your thoughts about best practices for implementing a strategy.

Here are some specific questions on my mind:

What types of in-app trigger events should we identify in order to send marketing campaigns to further the growth of our product (specifically as it relates to free trial users)? Examples: Visited checkout page but didn't upgrade, Signed up for a free trial but never revisited the app, x amount of days since last app visit, added x amount of users to free trial. I'd love to identify the most important trigger events that might warrant something like an email nurture or a remarketing campaign. 

Similarly, what types of in-app events should we be looking for when analyzing our customers' usage of the app to help us identify 1) which customers are at risk of churning and 2) which are likely evangelists?

We're planning to use the standard pirate metrics framework for PLG (Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, Referral) as well as tracking LTV, CAC, Time to Value TTV, PQLs, Net Churn, and Expansion Revenue. Are there other metrics that you would deem crucial for growth?

Any tips for aligning smarketing, operations, customer success, and product development teams around a growth strategy where everyone contributes, in part, to the growth of the company (not just sales/marketing)?

In general, I'm really looking for ways to better integrate our product usage with our marketing campaigns. I'm also looking to get buy-in from all departments on a growth strategy and to inspire them to contribute to that strategy.

---

@toricook Thanks for the question! I'm happy you're leaning into product driven growth. It's been a huge part of how HubSpot has evolved our go-to-market over the last few years. That said, the traditional lead-gen model still works incredibly well for us. I always advocate for a blended strategy.

There's so many great questions in here, it will be tough to write out detailed responses on each. But a few thoughts for you:

In App Triggers:
My HubSpot collegue Kieran Flanagan wrote a great post about what we call Product Qualified Leads (PQLs). Check it out here (https://www.kieranflanagan.io/podcast/how-to-build-a-pql-model-for-your-company/). Generally speaking, we've found that giving users options is really key. In app, we let people chose whether to chat, call, book a meeting, or just notify a rep they want to talk. Increasing options for how people connect has resulted in much higher overall volume.

Customer Data:
Most companies in my experience start with nailing PLG for new business, and only start tackling churn / evangelism once they figure new biz out. That said, we've put a lot of effort into this. As a starting point, you can just have an analyst with a spreadsheet run regression models to find the biggest factors. I'd expect app usage to be highly correlated with both churn and evangalism.

Alignment:
I think the key to success here is a pod with shared goals. At HubSpot, the Product team has Growth PMs who manage the pod. Marketing takes their lead and manages all the automation / comms based on new product features.

[KeyWestScott]

Q1 - will this be hosted on this thread or Zoom or?????

Q2 - Real question....  We are a passenger ferry operation in the SW Florida area (yea, covid central!!)  How to best communicate and convince those to travel, Florida residents only since we don't have any tourists  .   Purely B2C, no groups.

Scott

[maggiebutler]

@KeyWestScott on this thread! Jon will be back on Tuesday. 'See' you then!

[JonDick]

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@KeyWestScott wrote:

Q1 - will this be hosted on this thread or Zoom or?????

Q2 - Real question....  We are a passenger ferry operation in the SW Florida area (yea, covid central!!)  How to best communicate and convince those to travel, Florida residents only since we don't have any tourists  .   Purely B2C, no groups.

Scott

---

@KeyWestScott Hey Scott - it must be a really tough time for your company, I'm sorry the pandemic is hitting you so hard.

My advice when it comes to communicating about COVID is:
1) Shift from selling to educating - the hard sell just doesn't work during times of uncertainty. Educate your customers on how you're addressing operations during the pandemic.
2) Focus on empathy and understanding - express how you understand the concerns potential customers could have.
3) Ask to hear from people - try to start a dialoge with potential customers so you can learn more about what precautions you'd need to take to help them feel confident and safe on a tour.

[AdamLPW]

I'm a one-man sales and marketing team (and de-facto social media manager) for a small SAAS company with a niche market.  I'm constantly reading about how I should be working on cross-team alignment, social strategies, establishing myself as a thought leader...

In an ideal world, I'd have time to do important things like properly consider buyer personas and develop well-conceived strategies to help me move forward.  At the moment, it's basically all in my head!  Using HubSpot has resulted in significant efficiency savings; however, I still find I don't have the luxury of time to do everything that (in an ideal world) I would/should be doing.  

So I guess my question for @JonDick is this: if you were starting again from scratch, how would you prioritise?  If you had to balance all the work yourself, where would you invest your time and energies first?  At the moment I probably do a little of everything, but not enough of anything.   Just interested to hear your thoughts.  

[toricook]

@AdamLPW  #SOML!

[JonDick]

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@AdamLPW wrote:

I'm a one-man sales and marketing team (and de-facto social media manager) for a small SAAS company with a niche market.  I'm constantly reading about how I should be working on cross-team alignment, social strategies, establishing myself as a thought leader...

In an ideal world, I'd have time to do important things like properly consider buyer personas and develop well-conceived strategies to help me move forward.  At the moment, it's basically all in my head!  Using HubSpot has resulted in significant efficiency savings; however, I still find I don't have the luxury of time to do everything that (in an ideal world) I would/should be doing.  

So I guess my question for @JonDick is this: if you were starting again from scratch, how would you prioritise?  If you had to balance all the work yourself, where would you invest your time and energies first?  At the moment I probably do a little of everything, but not enough of anything.   Just interested to hear your thoughts.  

---

@AdamLPW Hey Adam - I see this all the time (and have felt it a number of times in my career).

My biggest advice is to focus on impact instead of activities. It's easy to get caught up in just "doing stuff" every day, and not making any progress on the big things I need to acheive.

Chosing what the most impactful things are depends a lot on your biz model and market. But given you're a one-man sales and marketing team, I'd imagine you need to make a lot of progress on lead gen. I'd focus a bunch right now on figuring out the strategy that works for lead gen - product led growth, content marketing, paid advertising, etc. Once you have that, just focus, focus, focus and say no to other things until you make real progress against it.

[LPetherick]

I would love to join this event but I cant make that time - will the session be availible recorded? 

[maggiebutler]

@LPetherick You won't miss a thing! Jon is doing a text AMA, and will be here Tuesday answering questions live on the thread. You can leave him a question (or several questions) now and he'll answer it on Tuesday.

[jannika_otte]

Hi Jon.. I was looking for some creative input here and you are highly recommended by your very own HubSpot @maggiebutler ! 

From your experience, what where good attributes or milestones that identify a SQL?Thinking about how to optimise a Lead Score and got all the regulars covered already (such as asked for a demo/ wanted to know about prices/ contacted sales..)

[JonDick]

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@jannika_otte wrote:

Hi Jon.. I was looking for some creative input here and you are highly recommended by your very own HubSpot @maggiebutler ! 

From your experience, what where good attributes or milestones that identify a SQL?Thinking about how to optimise a Lead Score and got all the regulars covered already (such as asked for a demo/ wanted to know about prices/ contacted sales..)

---

@jannika_otte This may be the first time I've ever used the words "SQL" and "Creative" in the same sentence, but I like it!

Can I ask a follow-up question? When you say "SQL" do you mean Sales Qualified Lead or Services Qualified Lead. At HubSpot we call Service Qualified Leads SQLs, and use them as a way for our CSMs to identify customers who might need additional features / products to achieve their goals. We over-optimize for quality on SQLs instead of volume, as we want to ensure all convos with our customers are adding value.

[jannika_otte]

Interesting! Didn't know about that!
We use SQL for Sales Qualified Leads.. the way we work (now, nothing remains the same 🙂 we are not so much involved in the nurturing of exisiting customers.
I like your approach a lot.. but am still looking more into how to identify a person who wishes to buy..

[Daniel_Bleich]

Hi, sounds great, I would love to hear your take on:

1. Nurture processes
2. To gate or not to gate content
3. Dealing with leads that go to sales and are not qualified at the moment for opportunities

[JonDick]

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@Daniel_Bleich wrote:

Hi, sounds great, I would love to hear your take on:

1. Nurture processes
2. To gate or not to gate content
3. Dealing with leads that go to sales and are not qualified at the moment for opportunities

---

@Daniel_Bleich Hi Daniel,

1) Nurturing:

This continues to be a BIG area of investment for us. The most recent areas of investment in nurturing are:
a) Building more "trigger" nurturing, that sends smaller nurture flows based on actions someone takes on website or in product
b) Expanding from marketing nurturing --> sales nurturing --> customer nurturing
c) Expanding to new channels (WhatsApp, SMS, bots)

2) The Great Gate Debate:

It depends on your business model and marketing strengths. We use a mix of gated and ungated, and advise most of our customers to do the same. We leverage conversational marketing on all website pages for real-time engagement, but still drive a lot of business from converting people on lead gen forms. Just remember...you have to add value before you extract value. So only gate high quality content.

3) Non-Sales Ready Leads

We tend to put these into email pools to drive ongoing engagement, but I think we could invest more in tailoring sequences for them.

[jnix284]

Hi Jon -

I'm the Marketing & Design Director for a regional homebuilder (B2C) building about 400 homes/year - and fully manage our sales technology & implementation.

I have a very small team with 1 admin, 1 sales & marketing coordinator and 1 design coordinator to keep the day to day going so I can focus on projects, product launch and alignment. On the sales side, we have a much larger team with about 15 people at all levels.

Our team uses HubSpot CRM, Sales, Marketing (about 4 years now), but everyone on our team uses it to different degrees and at different skill levels.

Here are my questions - thanks in advance!

1. What are the 3 top metrics or KPIs you think are the most critical for sales & marketing alignment that executives without a marketing background can gain value from?

2. How do you get buy-in from every member of the team to learn the various tools & resources HubSpot offers?

3. Any advice for Sales Enablement and Smarketing for high tech marketers & traditional sales teams?

Thanks again,

Jennifer

[JonDick]

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@jnix284 wrote:

Hi Jon -

I'm the Marketing & Design Director for a regional homebuilder (B2C) building about 400 homes/year - and fully manage our sales technology & implementation.

I have a very small team with 1 admin, 1 sales & marketing coordinator and 1 design coordinator to keep the day to day going so I can focus on projects, product launch and alignment. On the sales side, we have a much larger team with about 15 people at all levels.

Our team uses HubSpot CRM, Sales, Marketing (about 4 years now), but everyone on our team uses it to different degrees and at different skill levels.

Here are my questions - thanks in advance!

1. What are the 3 top metrics or KPIs you think are the most critical for sales & marketing alignment that executives without a marketing background can gain value from?

2. How do you get buy-in from every member of the team to learn the various tools & resources HubSpot offers?

3. Any advice for Sales Enablement and Smarketing for high tech marketers & traditional sales teams?

Thanks again,

Jennifer

---

@jnix284 Thanks for the context and for being a customer!

Top three metrics for alignment:
1. Marketing QL "SLA" - Marketing's commitment to provide each sales segment with pipeline
2. QL Work Rate - Sales' commitment to work QLs within x period of time.
3. Growth rate in actual revenue from QLs vs. growth rate in overall revenue - want QLs to contribute more and more to rep quota each month

Tactics for buy-in / tool usage:
1. For tool adoption, leadership needs to pay attention to cleanliness of data and accuracy of pipeline. Leadership attention drives behavior.
2. For learning / resources, consider building it into onboarding, and also hosting professional development / certification days using HubSpot Academy.

Enablement advice:
1. Invest more in enabling buyers to buy than enabling sellers to sell. 🙂