The Digital Utopia Podcast Episode #12

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About the podcast

The Digital Utopia Podcast is for SMB Marketers and Business Leaders looking to align their Marketing, Sales, and Service departments so they’re part of one powerhouse growth team.

Each episode will dive into the strategies, philosophies, and tools that will change your approach to organizational growth, give you renewed focus and clarity, and allow you to build a brand that not only helps you stand out—but win.

The Digital Utopia Podcast is produced by Digitopia and hosted by Frank Cowell and Joseph Freeman.

Episode transcription

Frank
what you're after when you take a revenue operations mindset is to create a culture of revenue and maximize your revenue potential.

DJ
You're listening to the digital utopia podcast, a resource dedicated to helping b2b leadership and executives gain clarity and focus in a chaotic marketplace.

Frank
Hey, gang, welcome to the digital utopia podcast episode 12. I'm your host, Frank Cowell, I'm joined by my co host,

Joe
Joseph Freeman.

Frank
Let's have some fun today. We're gonna talk about something interesting from what I'm told.

Joe
platforms, platforms are fun. Yeah

Frank
I'm excited about this. I heard we were talking about platform today. And I was especially giddy, because this is such an important part of bringing your, you know, digital utopia to life. And I'm pumped on this.

Joe
Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I think a lot of our listeners are struggling to find an effective growth plan, kind of amidst the, you know, never ending tactical chaos of their business. You know, one way that you can actually kind of the only way that you can, can get to the bottom of this is through this, this thing called revenue operations, right? revenue operations is kind of an emerging term, you may have heard of it, rev Ops, it's, it's starting to pop up in the business world. And it's really everything we've been talking about the digital utopia methodology is actually a way to put in place a rev ops program. And so what that really means is having the right process platform and people across, you know, your your marketing and your sales and your service teams, once that's all in alignment, you have full revenue operations, and you have a system to actually inspire growth, real business growth. So today, we're going to talk about the platform part. So process platform, people, we've been talking about the process, which is our digital utopia methodology. It's, you know, taking visitors for your website, actually, one step before that is taking strangers making visitors and taking them all the way up to raving fans. And so we've been talking about a lot of the process to make that happen today is all about platform, which is really just technology.

Frank
Yeah. And, you know, it's important to note, when we talk about our methodology, it's really like, you know, revenue operations is that the generic definition is the alignment of marketing, sales and service, cross process, platform people so that way you can operationalize your revenue and maximize your revenue potential. Right, if that's the general description, the methodology we've been talking about is how you can make that happen.

Joe
Right

Frank
is a playbook for process. It's a playbook for platform. And it's a playbook for people. And to your point, platform is mostly about the technology that empowers what you're doing in the process, right.

Joe
So today, we'll cover three things right alignment, how to use technology to align your marketing, sales and service teams. We're going to talk about some insights, how to get those actionable insights and not just have data come out of your analytics, but actually some good insights that you can move on and enablement, how to use technology features to increase efficiencies and personalization at scale. So these three things we will cover. Well, let's just dive in.

Frank
You know, I think those three things are important, though those to me are the three most important attributes of platform

Joe
alignment insights and enablement

Frank
yes, those are the those are the three kind of things you're after,

Joe
right,

Frank
you know, kind of the the things you need to achieve when he looking at your platform and ensuring that you have a platform that supports this idea of revenue operations, and certainly within our methodology.

Joe
Right, right, right. So let's talk about alignment. When we talk about b2b businesses looking to build their platform, there's really kind of five core areas that we usually talk about with them, right. And that's relationship lifecycle tracking, that's marketing, attribution, contact, engagement, history, data standardization, and analytics. So you know, some big words in there. Let's let's break that down a little bit. So relationship lifecycle tracking, when you have a platform in place that can allow you to do this, what does this mean?

Frank
Yeah, so whether you have one platform for marketing, sales and service, or you have three or 10, throughout the journey that your buyers go through with your brand, they have different relationship life cycles. And it's important that those life cycles are unified across all those systems. So if you can't, if you can't employ one system for all of this, it's important that you put in the work to get them aligned. So when they're being serviced by your team, and you know, whatever software you're using there, whether it's your core CRM mixed with your pm system, or you have erp or whatever it is, it's important that that lifecycle stage talks back to the sales software and talks back to the marketing software. So all of those contact records in those systems get updated. So that way those systems know "this lifecycle stage of that current contact", because oftentimes what will happen is contact will move from system to system, and then that new system kind of becomes the dominant system, it becomes the system of record for that contact. And if and that's fine. The The idea is to make sure those other systems where that contact has history is updated. And the reason that's important is because, you know, we'll talk about it in the in the next point, but you need to make sure that people are communicated with appropriately. So while they're a client or customer, and they have a different lifecycle stage with you, you need to make sure if the marketing team is going to communicate with that contact, that they know the current status, the current life cycle of that contact. And so a lot of those life cycles we've talked about in previous episodes, right, they might be a lead, they might be a marketing, qualified lead or sales, qualified lead, they might be an opportunity. They might be a customer, they might be a fan, whatever those lifecycle stages are, it's important that all the systems are up to date.

Joe
Yeah, now you're seeing systems and I want to clarify something here. So we are talking about CRM, which would be like Salesforce, you know, I guess you could use Zoho there's a bunch of just rod right HubSpot. We're talking about marketing automation systems like Marketo, like Eloqua, like part out like HubSpot, all of these things, you know, are software's that you would purchase and you would deploy or, you know, put on a server uses a SAS software. But there's also other technologies out there like Facebook, there's, you know, obviously LinkedIn and Google and even though you don't have full control over those, and they, you know, don't sit on your server or you don't own them, they do actually communicate with these other software's in a way that they can actually see the different lifecycle stages as well. Correct.

Frank
That's, you know, I, I didn't bring that up. But that's wildly important to make sure that wherever your audiences live, even if it's in a LinkedIn or a Facebook to make sure those systems are up to date on what the current life cycle is as well, because last thing you want to do is be spending retargeting dollars even though retargeting is cheap, right? last thing you want to do is be spending retargeting dollars and communicating with one of your contacts as they travel throughout the internet in a way that's irrelevant to the to the relationship they have with your brand at that moment in time, right? That's just a waste of money in it. It's it's just not taking the intelligent path by leveraging the data, right? So when we talk about platform, it's really literally any digital software that you use as part of your lifecycle. Correct? You know, journey, right? Correct. Okay, so relationship lifecycle tracking, that's important. So at minimum, you got to have that. Okay. And then we've got marketing attribution, right? What is this? So marketing attribution can get really complex. And this isn't going to be an episode today to talk about the complexity of marketing attribution, because there's many different ways you can make different approaches you can take when it comes to marketing attribution. For those listening, who don't know what marketing attribution is, that's understanding when a contact comes into your world. What where did it come from? What gets credit? What originated that contact? At minimum? That's a generic way to describe it. But there's many ways to look at attribution, you could say, Oh, it was the first contact. And we're going to give that source the credit for this contact. The first touch? Oh, no, it was the last touch it was the last thing that influenced this person. And that's the thing that's going to get credit. That's another approach and other approaches, you can go linear and say all things that touch this contact and turn them into a customer, they all get equal credit. You can say, no, it's linear, it's degradation. There's all these different things. So you don't have to worry about the complexities of that, at minimum, you really want to answer two questions, which is which campaign or effort originated the contact, and which campaigns or efforts influenced the contact? At minimum, you want to know that what regardless of which model, attribution model you're going to use, you want to be able to answer those two things. So what do you mean by influenced, influenced meaning, like, for example, you might have a campaign running on LinkedIn. And that campaign originates a contact, and that campaign is responsible for bringing them into your database,

Joe
meaning they clicked on the ad, or whatever it is, you post in the came, and they filled out a form and they became a new known contact in your database as a result of that action.

Frank
Correct. So because of that ad on LinkedIn, they click they took an action and ended up in your database, and it was because of that, so knowing the origination is great, but often times and more times than not, it's actually the norm. That contact won't become a client or a customer right away, often times at Kleiner, contact mace, or that prospects will sit in your database for months. And sometimes years, while that person is sitting in your database, they will have other touch points with your brand. They may be receiving email campaigns, they may be seeing retargeting ads on Facebook, they may be seeing retargeting through the Google Display Network as they travel around the internet, all of those touch points are in influencing that contact. And so to look at attribution, and only give credit to the originating source, is really not an accurate way to look at it. Because we see this time and time again, when we pour over the data, that there are many touches by many of the other campaigns that certainly influenced this person. And if anything, entrenched the awareness and the positioning of the brand, which helps make the decision for that person. Yeah, or contributes to their decision making. Yep. So that's really important that you understand marketing attribution. And at minimum, again, you don't have to get real crazy and some of the model modeling can get real complex. Just answer those two questions. Can you know, of your contacts? What originated it? And can you know, which campaigns and efforts influenced that contact?

Joe
Got it? Okay,

Frank
if you can't get that from your systems, you're flying a little blind. And your spend is a little thrown over the wall and kind of hope for the best.

Joe
Right? You might see an uptick. So you know, it's kind of working, you just don't know which part of it is we're correct, right.

Frank
So that's why it's important to know this,

Joe
right.

Frank
And for those that are listening today that have a marketing team, I would encourage you to talk with them and ask if they understand this. And if they can provide that, for example, a simple thing to ask for would be, hey, for the clients that we've gained here today, can you give me a report on the originating campaigns in the influencing campaigns for the customers we've generated this year?

Joe
Right,

Frank
simple. And you should be able to get that

Joe
which by the way, even though there are many complex and actually really cool attribution models that can be found in different systems that you can pay for. There's also the ability to get this for free with Google Analytics, right? So we're not talking about pouring huge dollar, you know, amounts into this effort, you can literally put Google Analytics on your site, which it's probably there already. And you can go pull that information for free.

Frank
Yeah, as long as you have mechanisms to indicate that you know, these particular events, or pages visited mean, customer and right, so on and so forth. Yeah, you can absolutely get that.

Joe
And actually, we should clarify that you can't get that part out of Google Analytics, you could see where they came from, correct. You can't see once they came, what then helped push them along their journey?

Frank
Correct? Yeah, Greg, yeah, you need, you need to make sure that whatever marketing system you're using. And that's why the first point is important. You have to keep your lifecycles up to date, because as they get passed on to the sales system, and as they get passed on to your service system, your ops system, your marketing system needs to know that that progression is happening. So that way, when you say, Hey, give me the report of the customers, they'll know which ones are the customers because the lifecycle is being kept up to date, right? Then you then you can start to look at the customers and say, Okay, what was the originating campaign? What were the influencing campaigns?

Joe
Gotcha. Okay, so then next on our list here is contact engagement history. What is that?

Frank
So this is, this gives your operations team, your service team, and your sales team, especially and less so as you get down to marketing. It gets more important as that person progresses there, the journey with your brand. And that's the ability for your team to see the history of each contact and what they've done with your brand, not just in terms of which emails did they click and open? That's basic marketing intelligence. We're talking, what pages did they visit? What campaigns brought them in and influenced them? As we just talked about? What products did they buy? What, what tickets exist around this particular person support tickets, and so on. So that way, you can see the entire history, what calls were logged against this person. And the reason that's important is because in today's world, buyers expect nothing less than you to know everything about them and to service them accordingly. We talked about in a previous episode, how the on demand technology that we have with a lot of consumer applications like the Domino's Pizza app on your watch, that trains us to expect certain things from the brands that we deal with, even if you're a b2b brand. And you think, well, we're not a, you know, click the app on the watch kind of company. That doesn't matter. People, humans are just getting free to have certain expectations about how they're dealt with. And so having this entire contact history is really important. It allows you to service the individual client, not the, in the specific client, not the generic client. And so this is really important. So that way, everyone in the company who's going to be touching the client can see what's happened with that contact from the beginning of the relationship.

Joe
Right, right. You know, one of the most annoying things to me, and this is a bit of a tangent, but when I go on to whatever, at&t and I fill out the either the chat form and say, here's my phone number, and here's my contact information, or I call and they say, Hey, give us your account number, and I do and then the person jumps on and says, Hey, can I get your account number?

Frank
That's the worst. That's the worst. I want to like jump through the phone. And like, put my hands around somebody. And like, what the hell? Why did I punch it in the 16 digit number? Why are you asking me for the information I already entered? Yep. Why?

Joe
And I say that, because there is a lot of information that you can collect. And even though it might sound a little big brother ish and creepy that, you know, we're collecting this information, it becomes very helpful when it's actually time to talk to the prospect. Because you don't have to ask a lot of the basic information, you don't have to waste your time asking questions you know about their name, and their email address, stuff like that, like you will have that already.

Frank
Yeah, imagine how that can be a competitive advantage, to then service your clients in a way that's delightful. And is more than expected. Imagine in the sales process, when you cater to somebody in ways that your competitors aren't. Because you're taking the time to look at the individual and understand the information they've consumed that will clue you into what they're really after. Right, that becomes a competitive advantage. There's a book called never lose a customer again, by Joey Coleman. Read the book, I didn't like the audio personally, it just, I don't know if the author read it, or they paid somebody read it. I wasn't a fan of the audio version. But the book in its concept is about creating frictionless experiences, and how do you create experiences that are frictionless and delightful? It's a great book, I highly recommend you read it. But it's kind of what we're talking about here. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And then next, we have data standardization. Yeah. So this is really important. If you don't agree between marketing, sales and service, what various things mean, then the data is less actionable. And you open yourself up for erroneous and incorrect engagements with your contacts. So for example, if you don't have an agreement on what mq l means between marketing and sales, which is marketing, qualified lead, that is a huge problem. Because one market is going to get credit for things that they are shouldn't get credit for, to sales will be handed leads that they find that aren't worth following up with. And so that not only damages the internal relationship, but that means you're going to be less efficient, you don't have accurate numbers. As people progress into opportunity. What does opportunity mean? What are the qualifications for opportunity? It's really important to define what these things mean, if someone is a fan, and you're going to elevate them to fan, what does that mean? And everyone has to agree on what the criteria for all of those lifecycle stages are. Right? So above and beyond just agreement on definitions of some of the stuff, which is very important. I think there's also an opportunity to standardize how data is input, right? So, you know, one thing that we come across a lot is job title, if you just let somebody fill out a form and write their job title, you now have, you know, 76 different versions for the head of a company. Yeah, you have, you know, 14 different versions for the head of marketing, because everybody's got a different thing. And oh, by the way, these days, people come with some really creative stuff. So having a system that allows you to help predefined, what those things are, and allow people to choose from them, rather than just type them in however they want is also really helpful. Yeah, you can have things like dropdowns that where people identify their role, and then they can put their job title, right, that would be a way to start to understand who these people really are from a categorization standpoint. But we talked about lifecycle stage criteria being important. The other one that's important, and you're touching on this right now is, what is the minimum contact criteria? Like what's the minimum amount of data for the contact come into the database? What's the minimum contact criteria for it to be handed to sales, what's the minimum contact criteria for it to be handed to service and everyone has to agree on that. So when you agree on that, what that means is no longer will sales hand operations a client, and then there's just like two fields of information filled out. So agreeing on that and creating alignment on that is really critical because it creates harmony, it creates efficiency. It means people don't have to go back and ask for the information. But again, we're talking about the client experience. And so the experience or the buyers experience that have to the whole journey is going to be relevant because people can then use that data and address them accordingly. And then finally, triggers for contact ownership. So, context moved from marketing to sales to service, those three teams need to agree on when the contact then is no longer owned by marketing, and it's owned by sales. And when it's no longer on by sales, when it's owned by service, or Ops, it's important for the organization to agree on that. So that way, that internal organization knows which one is taking the lead on the communications,

Joe
right? In our fifth thing that we're looking for here is a system that can provide you the right analytics. So this might be a little self explanatory, but we're talking about wire analytics. So important,

Frank
while analytics are critical, because you have to be able to tie all the data from these three systems together. And if you can't tie these three systems together in one set of cohesive analytics, then you can't get to what you're really after. Because you really don't want analytics, what you want are insights. But you can't get insights unless the data is together unless it's relevant and accurate, right all in one spot. For you to be able to start to then ask the right questions, and develop hypotheses and test your theories. Right, which actually moves us into the next point we wanted to make. We've just talked about alignment across these these, the platform. What about the insights? Let's talk about that. It's not just about the data, it's not just about seeing how many people came to your site, or how long they spent on there. But we need to understand what does that mean to us? Right? Those are the insights we're talking about? Yeah. Which which of these people are our best customers? Which of these channels are our best channels? You know, which topics? Are we really great at which ones are really effective, which ones resonate with people? Those are the insights that you're after. Because the analytics can tell you can tell you things like your your most visited pages in here or your you know, your your most profitable clients, they can tell you those things. But in those things are important. But those things need to lead to the questions. And the questions are why,

Joe
yeah,

Frank
how can we? What if we, and those questions, then give you the insights?

Joe
Those questions also help you understand which metrics to even look at? You know, I can't tell you how many times I've seen reports for social campaigns where we, you know, see reported on how many pokes you got on Facebook, which is cool, if you got a million pokes, that feels cool, that feels good, feels like you're getting a lot of engagement. But what are those pokes mean? And if you ask the question, did that, you know, lead to a sale? Did that lead to a conversation? And the answer's no, then to me, that's not a metric you even need to be looking at. So asking these questions through insights, really helps you understand what to even pull in terms of reports.

Frank
Yeah, I like to say that insights. Without insights, analytics are a lot like a lamppost, which means they're just good for leaning on.

Joe
That's wise. Yeah, a tweet that. Alright, so who should be responsible for reporting on these analytics across the entire customer lifecycle not just on, you know, social campaigns, but who takes the lead here,

Frank
typically, marketing takes the lead on analytics. But in a revenue operations mindset. When you look at the methodology that we teach and preach for how to employ revenue operations, in my opinion, it's an IT needs executive ownership. Someone at the highest level, someone who is, you know, partnering with the CEO, if you will, to be a revenue operations analysts. And that person is going to bring the data together, and ensure that the teams are accurately reporting the teams are contributing the data in ways that they need to on a regular basis, because sometimes the data is manually recorded, there are bits and pieces that need to be manually recorded or manually reviewed and trued up. But that person ensures that that reporting is happening. The systems are maintenance, because I will tell you, when setting up, this kind of reporting systems need to be maintenance, especially when you're bringing the data and you're aggregating it into one place for this kind of analysis. The systems will need to be maintenance, need reviews to make sure things are still reporting accurately. Any manual recording that teams and people are doing that that's happening and checked up on so you need someone in my opinion at the executive level, who's partnering with the CEO or the GM, depending on who's the who's the the general in your business, in partnering with that person to pour over that data. Start to ask those questions.

Joe
And this is across all customer lifecycle stages.

Frank
Yeah, the whole buyers journey. So that person brings together the data from marketing, sales and service, and does the analysis on the types of things that we're talking about. So each of those areas should have a mission. And then their mission is, are measured by KPIs and supporting metrics. And so when you take each of their areas, KPIs and supporting metrics, you can put that all together into one dashboard, or one set of revenue operations analytics, if you will.

Joe
And quick reminder of what revenue operations is, it's really just alignment,

Frank
the alignment of marketing, sales and service cross process and platform and people so you can operationalize a culture of revenue,

Joe
right

Frank
to maximize your revenue potential. That's it. Like that's ultimately, what you're after, when you take a revenue operations mindset is to create a culture of revenue and maximize your revenue potential.

Joe
Okay, so in order for someone to be empowered to do this, and to take the reins here, what platforms do you think they actually need in place to make this happen?

Frank
Well, obviously, each of their marketing sales and service teams need their own respective software's for executing what they need to execute. And in some scenarios, in some situations, you might be able to find a software that does all three, you know, I'm a huge fan of HubSpot, because it can do all three and help facilitate that. Now, when I say service, I'm not talking about necessarily product delivery, or actual service execution, I mean, more. So the servicing side, the facing side to your customer, where you might have things like knowledge bases, and support tickets and, you know, emails specific to customers. And in doing surveys like that kind of service in, you can kind of think of it as Customer Success side of your operations. And so HubSpot is a platform that will do all three of those things. But at minimum, you need to check the box in each of those areas. And then, if you don't have them all unified in one system, you need some sort of analytics software that can bring all those software's together. Again, HubSpot can do that, since it's if you're going to use it for all three than it's already there. You can use the analytics in that package, to then start to gain these kind of revenue operations insights, right, if you don't have them in all the same system. then going back to HubSpot, as an example, if you use it for one of those, you can then get your other systems to talk back into HubSpot to get it in one spot. So that's another option. Finally, if you just if you just have three disparate software's, you can get an analytics package like Zoho analytics, for example. I'm toying with that right now. And working with that, that's a pretty cool, powerful platform to be able to just take disparate systems bring the data into one spot. And then you know, just do all these like data mashups that are pretty cool.

Joe
So usually, when we work with companies, they don't have none of this stuff. But they don't usually have, you know, one software to rule them all like HubSpot. Often, the marketing, it's something like, you know, they'll have, again, I mentioned before, pardot, Eloqua, they might have Marketo. In the sales department, they're usually using something like Salesforce, right? A lot of them don't have something for service, although some people use, you know, online software's like Zendesk to help to help, you know, do support tickets, and maybe send out surveys survey monkey is something that we use. So a lot of companies actually have bits and pieces of this, what would you say to a company that already has an investment in some of these softwares, but doesn't have everything? And in order to get everything, they're going to have to actually spend quite a bit of money to cobble it all together? What do you do?

Frank
So at minimum, just getting an analytics layer, okay, at minimum, get an analytics layer that can pull the data from all those systems

Joe
above and beyond Google Analytics, which almost every company has.

Frank
Correct. Yeah, Google Analytics is great for like, your web marketer, your internet marketers, that's great. But if you want to see like, true, like business lifecycle analytics, customer lifecycle analytics, and you want to start to bring in revenue, and you want to start to bring in churn, and you want to start to bring in, you know, products and all these things, you need a real analytics back. Like, just because analytics is in the name Google Analytics, like, it's analytics for your, like your website stuff, for the most part. But a true analytics package is is more of like a data analysis tool where you can bring in data from any system, right? And bring it in into a minimum that's necessary. I'm a huge fan of using HubSpot for at least one of those three areas, because then you can start to integrate the data into that system. So not only can you get the power, let's say if you start using it in marketing, for example. So not only can you radically improve your marketing system with a tool like HubSpot but then you can bring the data in from sales by integrating Salesforce. And then you can do an integration with whatever your service team is using to indicate lifecycle stages, lifecycle stage changes and whatnot. Or even in Salesforce once they become a customer or client, you can update update that back into HubSpot. Does that minimum that kind of pairing is in bringing a HubSpot into your system is really cool. Because it empowers you to do so much, right? You get enablement, with that software, both on the marketing and the sales side, depending on if you buy one or both. But that's another approach you can take without going to a really advanced analytics package.

Joe
Yeah, and you just set it that's the third thing we want to cover here is enablement. So what is enablement?

Frank
So, enablement are, it's a kind of it's a word that describes software features that enable your teams to be more efficient and more powerful with their efforts. For example, in sales, a way you can use enablement features in sales is by giving them tools that are like snippets, and templates, and meeting links and some of these things that allow them to be much more powerful and efficient with their, with their jobs, and reduce the time they're spending on you know some of the menial activities.

Joe
Gotcha. So, what are examples of typical enablement technologies? I mean, is can HubSpot do all of this can can, you know, Salesforce do all of this?

Frank
Yeah. Again, as we've said in past episodes, total disclaimer, you know, our company is a HubSpot partner. So we've referenced HubSpot a lot. So yes, we're biased in that regard. Full disclosure, HubSpot can do all this. But let me just talk about those features generically. So because you may not need everything. So from the market, from a marketing standpoint, one of the cool enablement features is something like live chat, and bots. So those two things together are really, really cool because you can put a live chat on your website and pair it up with a bot. And as people engage with your brand on your website, if they have a question, someone can staff that live chat live, or you can have your bot that you program in, engage with that person that visitor and answer some questions and get them serviced in for commonly asked questions that they might have. You could also use it to facilitate lead gen. Yeah, right. So there's some really cool enablement features there in marketing that you can use. And then some of your standard basic stuff like landing pages and blog, like publishing tools and things of that nature are really powerful, segmentations and automations. But a couple of the ones most people don't think about are like live chat and bought really cool enablement features in marketing.

Joe
You know, one of the benefits of having it all under one roof again, going back to HubSpot is that if somebody engages with a chatbot on your site, or if somebody fills out a form, or if somebody simply just visits and then goes and clicks on an ad, it's nice to have all of that information tracked into one single contact record and not have to export it from three different systems and and marry that data up.

Frank
That that's kind of why I was saying at minimum, if you didn't want to go to a really advanced analytics package and kind of kind of try to find a data scientist, if you will, to help you with that a data engineer. That's why I like HubSpot as like putting it into one of those areas at minimum, because then you can like take advantage of all this stuff. And you can start to aggregate contact history in one spot. Yeah, yeah, it's one tool that can really like open you up for a lot of what we're talking about here.

Joe
You know, you say data scientist, I think it's worth noting that both you and I started as programmers, yeah, right. We we love to build systems. We love to work in systems. We even created some, you know, basic versions of a lot of what the tools are we use today, you know, 10. 1214

Frank
20 years 20 years ago,

Joe
and and the reason I say that is because I think it's important to understand why we like HubSpot so much. We like HubSpot so much because we have worked in virtually every system possible. Maybe that's not entirely true. But a lot of them

Frank
worked in the majority of the majority of them ones.

Joe
There are a lot of good things about a lot of systems. But when we finally you know some years ago found HubSpot, we realized that they were bringing all of the best into one suite of products. And it just continues to get better. So this is not us speaking as marketers. This is not us speaking as salespeople This Is Us speaking as programmers who tried to put together all of what we get to use in HubSpot today. We've been trying to put that together for years and finally decided let's just let HubSpot do it.

Frank
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's that's some good background. Some good context context for our listeners is that you know, you and I are very much data driven analytical geeky software kind of guys.

Joe
geeky guys play d&d though,

Frank
which we do, which we haven't done in a while, but we need to play d&d. So for those of you who are listening in your d&d fans, hopefully these episodes are rolling, rolling 20s for you guys.

Joe
Right? And for those of you who are not d&d is Dungeons and Dragons.

Frank
Yeah, we shouldn't explain that. Like, if you're not in the know, like, you should just be sitting there with the question mark,

Joe
just google it

Frank
d&d. There you go. So yeah, so that in sales, you know, there's some really cool technologies around meeting links, for example, like some of these software's have meeting links to where, you know, when it's time to then set an appointment with somebody, instead of going back and forth? Like, does Thursday have to work for you know, well, how about Monday at four? No, how about Wednesday at, you can just provide your meeting link, and then get that booked right into your calendar, whether it's Google or, or whatever else outlook. There's some other cool features, such as, like sequencing, you can use in sales, which allows you to set up a sequence of not only tasks, but emails to court to communicate with an individual contact. And so for example, you can have a sequence that says, connect with this person on LinkedIn, then send them this email Three days later, send them this email, and then three days, maybe seven days later, send them a different email. And then finally, there's a task at the end to do something. So you can set up that sequence. So as a salesperson comes across a contact in their database, they say they get notified about a new SQL, and they're like, wow, this person would be great for the sequence that I've set up, which is all about, you know, catering to in showcasing our expertise in biotech or whatever it might be, you can deploy that sequence, you'll get the task, the email, you'll have a chance to modify and personalize it. And then it'll go out. And if that person replies, if your prospect replies, the sequence will shut down so that they don't start getting the other emails, like that's a really cool feature. And it saves sales people time. And you can set these up in a number of different ways, right? Like, you can set them up for persona and say, okay, you know, this is for my, for this persona. And that means it's, it's a president of a company in the biotech space, but then I've got another sequence. And it's for this persona that is a VP, and in the medical space, and you can set these up to where now your communications are tailored. And all you have to do with each one of those as you spin them up on a per contact basis. Again, we're talking about sales, where it's one now one to one communications, then you can like, tailor it before it goes out. And you can say, these are three emails, and I'm gonna just go through each three, email each of these three emails right now and just tailor it and boom schedule. And so that that's really powerful, and allows you to be really efficient with your time, but also to the recipient. It's very personalized. And it's still very one to one.

Joe
Well, speaking of personalization, you can even click a button and record a video right there within the software, and it will embed it into your email for you.

Frank
Yeah, ridiculous, right?

Joe
That's huge these days, right? With everything that's changing, and everybody using zoom and zooms, becoming, you know, a common household name, just like Google, right? It's important to have video involved in all of your communication, right?

Frank
Yeah. And so you can do these things with this is an enablement tool. So yeah, that's important. If we talked about service moving on to service, there's some really cool things you can do with like service, ticketing, automation, even like automation throughout all of these areas as a possibility. I'm not even talking about automation. That sounds so funny to think like automation today is kind of like table stakes. And it's kind of like, just taken for granted. But like you can have automation. And all of these areas. By the way, for example, in a go back to sales, one of the things that we do is we create deal pipelines, and we create multiple deal pipelines. Based on the the goal of what we're trying to accomplish with the contacts. So one of the pipelines, the only goal is to take a marketing qualified lead and see if we can create a sales conversation. And that's a pipeline with its own success column of just being yeah, we were able to schedule a sales conversation are no dollars associated with it. But it's tracked as a pipeline, nonetheless. And so what we're able to do with these various pipelines is as they hit different stages, you can build an automation to say, Okay, once they hit this stage, change their life cycle, once they hit this stage, pause them from all marketing automation. Like you do some really cool automation things. And so you can do automation across all of these. I bring that up because it's funny again, I often take automation for granted now it's like, oh, yeah, automation, no big deal, but it's actually a very big deal. It's really cool. And in service, you can do the same thing. So imagine if you have someone come in for a support ticket, and you know now all this data about them, you can say Oh, based on the persona or based on the type of client they are based on the products they've purchased, route them to this person, put them in this queue, employ automation that then communicates with them in certain ways or tasks, people with certain things based on what you know about them. So, automation is cool. You can have queues in service to support people, you can do things like knowledge bases, right? And so a knowledge base is where you kind of set up an FAQs, database that you can almost think of it like a blog for your, just, just your existing clients, but it's there to just answer all their questions and.

Proactively support them. So you can use tools like that. And you can also know when your clients actually visit those pages. I mean, how wonderful would it be for your team to get an alert that your best clients visited a particular FAQ page, which was maybe a question about billing? Right. What if you knew your clients visited a page that had answered questions about billing Whoa or cancellation or can't, how do I count?

Whoa, maybe we should get on the phone with this person. Right? Right. Imagine you knowing that. And try and having at least the opportunity to cut that off at the past, these are the kinds of things that we're talking. 

Joe 
Yeah. And not to mention two survey tools and the ability to actually track NPS right there. I mean, it's all under one. 

Frank
Yeah. So these are the kind of features that when we say enablement, these are the kinds of features we're talking about and you may not need all of these features. Okay. You may not need all of these features. Certainly within this topic today, there are a lot of things you could be doing, but as we mentioned, the minimum things are what we talked about earlier.

So alignment life cycle tracking, marketing attribution, contact engagement, history, data standardization, and having analytics, which then enables you to have insights. Remember insights are not just. Having the data insights are the ability to ask the right questions and ponder the right things. So that way you can make decisions.

And then finally enablement using technology to enable your team to be more efficient, more effective, but more importantly, provide the most delightful and relevant experience for your customers as possible folks. That's all we have time for. But if you'd like to learn more about what we've talked about today, make sure you visit BuildingYourDigitalUtopia.com, where we have more information.

We have other episodes. We have some things to download for you where you can continue learning about the things that we talk about in this podcast. And if you'd like advice on the kind of form you need in your business, Hey, we're always here to advise you with a no sales pitch kind of offering. and we just do that because it's the right thing to do.

It's how we show value in advance. You've heard us talk a lot about that. Visit our website, buildingyourdigitalutopia.com. There's a spot for you there to get in touch with us. If you'd like to have a, a no strings attached kind of conversation. And again, don't forget to subscribe. Give us a, like a thumbs up, leave us a comment and a review.

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