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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
So now at the macro level, you could say, which products are responsible for the most support tickets? How about we go back further? Which marketing campaigns generated the clients at the most trouble ticket issues? Is there something about the way we're targeting in the marketplace that are generating clients that are having more troubles than others? You can actually answer those questions.
Intro
You are 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 32. I'm your host, Frank Cowell. And I'm joined by my co host,
Joe
Joseph Freeman.
Frank
Today, we're going to talk about something that's come up on the show quite a bit. And it's time we kind of get it out there and acknowledge the elephant in the room.
Joe
Oh, goodness. Suspense.
Frank
Yeah. So you know, oftentimes, we bring up HubSpot on this show. Mm hmm. And so I just want to use this episode. Just talk about why do we talk about that so much and just get it out there. So that way, our listeners are always wondering like, What is it with these guys? Are they like shills for HubSpot? And the answer is yes, kind of in a way, we're gonna explain what that means. So, hmm. All right. Let's talk about that.
Joe
Let's dive right in. Okay, so why does digit topia use HubSpot? Well, let's talk about what the pain points are. That kind of drove us to looking for a solution like HubSpot,
Frank
specifically for, you know, revenue operations, right.
Joe
Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, and even before that, but but right now, as it wrote ropes into revenue operations. I think this matters. So sales teams, we heard for years that sales teams just don't really know what touchpoints got them got the customer to a sales call. They don't know what blog articles they looked at. They don't know what ads they saw. They don't know how many times they came back to the website, even though there has always been software to help with that situation. For some reason, marketing teams and sales teams can never really align on that the data usually does exist at the company in some sort of software. But no one really knows how to pull it together in such a way that it makes any sense to anybody. So time and time again, we would run into companies where the sales team just didn't know. And the marketing team said, Well, we've got the data. And then the sales team says, Well, we still don't know. So when we found HubSpot, we were pleasantly surprised that all of that data is under one hood, right. And so all of the customer journey through the marketing lifecycle stages, and then through the sales lifecycle stages, and then even through the service, the customer lifecycle stages. It's all there on the contact record. And that was awesome and delightful that everybody can see what this contact did from the day they were born, kind of till the day that they are, you know, singing praises for the company. So that was one reason that that sold us on HubSpot. Because it all lives together in one software,
Frank
cradle cradle to grave, so to speak, right? Like they like they say in the business world.
Joe
Is that what they say?
Frank
Yeah, meaning you kind of own that journey from beginning to end. You're the provider, you're the relationship, and you aim to make sure that that's the case. Yeah, that's how you build your
Joe
Yeah. Now on the flip side, we ran into, you know, countless marketing teams that understood their cost per clicks. And they understood which campaigns got the most engagement, they understood, which forms where, you know, creating the most downloads and creating the most contacts. But for some reason, it was really hard to pull full, you know, lifecycle reports that were showing people that touched all of these different, you know, downloadable pieces or premium content, and actually became customers. Now that data was available. And with some, you know, roll it up with the sleeves, and some real elbow grease, those reports could be pulled that most companies we ran into, were doing it maybe once a year, because it's kind of cumbersome. And it really wasn't set up to do that. Now, I understand. We're going to hear all kinds of moving parts that can do that. And Marketo can do that. And they can do that all of them can do it. But we never found a marketing sales team that figured out how to do that. Until we started working with companies that were already on HubSpot. And they were doing it and they were doing it without any special setup. And that was impressive.
Frank
Yeah, without any of the magician's kind of tricks on the back end. And then manual reporting and running pivot tables and all sorts of craziness.
Joe
And in some cases, custom programming was scraped to make that happen and correct. So that was a real breath of fresh air. So we started our journey. How many years ago with HubSpot,
Frank
it's about six or seven now
Joe
six or seven, and it's been a journey. There's been a lot of evolution with HubSpot, and we've learned a lot and you know, just like any software, when you jump in with it, they promise it can do everything and you get in you're like it's gonna Do everything. And the truth is it can do everything.
Frank
But I think the interesting thing that I learned is, you know, when we first started, I had the expectations that not only was our program going to be up and running in 30 days, but our offering to the world, or service offering to the world would be up and running in 30 days. And that was very arrogant and naive. Because I saw how easy the tool was to use now comprehensive and how, how much it it did tie everything together across the whole continuum. But the thing that's always missing from that formula is strategy and execution. Right, right. So right, but but the platform is there ready, ready to go. And to do all of that.
Joe
Yeah. And that's exactly where I was going is that it can do it all. But you still need to have someone who knows what they're doing it, it's not going to be you know, the silver bullet or the magic wand without the magician. There will be wielding wielding the magic. So let's break this down a couple things. We like it, because we think the tech is better. And we like it because we think it's easier to run rev ops on it. So let's start with the tech. What do we like better about the tech, Mr. Frank,
Frank
but just and I want to be really clear, like, the main nugget here is, is the ability to see the entire journey from stranger to fan, to not only know what's happening with those people, specifically in specific contact records, but then at the macro level, to be able to analyze that and do closed loop reporting,
Joe
which is critical, at least in our view, is critical to running RevOps properly.
Frank
That That is, if that's not easily done, rev Ops, and any closed loop, closed loop reporting efforts stand a chance to fail, because when it's difficult, things are gonna get missed data and won't be accurate. Someone's gonna miss a report one week, it's just, it's not as seamless. And so to me, that's the nugget. Like, that's the big why. So now when we talk about tech and features, and you say, Okay, well, what kind of data can can live in that contact record from stranger to fan? Like, what are we talking about? So let's talk about that, from a tech standpoint of the things that are going to be kind of gobbled up and sucked into this system. Yeah, you've got things like before, they're even a contact in your database, web page views, web page, view history, right? advertisements that they've clicked on social posts that they've clicked on,
Joe
right, that starts collecting the day they visit, whether or not you have their email address or their name, it doesn't matter. It starts collecting that on them.
Frank
They're a stranger, they've become a visitor. But at the visitor stage, you still don't know who they are. They're unknown people.
Joe
anonymous visitor
Frank
anonymous people, right. And so you're collecting that information. Let's say during that anonymous period, they end up having a chat with somebody on your website. And hey, noticed, you're looking at this pricing page, there's something I can help you with, or chatting back and forth with you. Well, the moment they become a contact, that chat history is there. So now when you're in the sales process, you're trying to figure out like, okay, I really want to find out, like, what is this person really after? How can I serve them best, you have all of that information, your web pages they've looked at, you can look at their exact chat history, you know, what emails they've opened, so really critical, to be able to see all that in one place. So on a one for one basis, that's wildly valuable. And then again, on the macro level, to be able to run an analysis and try to understand who's buying our who's buying our offerings? And why. really critical and all that data is in there. Because now when you get them in the sales process, you can do things like identify the line items, or the products that they're buying. Oh, wow. So now do you want to know which products are you know, tied to specific campaigns or topics or content? Do you want to know which blog post is responsible for more leads in your company and in more clients in your company, you can know that. And these are the kinds of things that aren't knowable in most of these other systems where you either do some third party integration, or scripting or you do these other things, or you do back end reporting. It's just you don't know that to that level. You know, like which social campaigns were responsible for the most clients, right? And then now you can take that out even further, let's say now they're a client. And they're interacting with your knowledge base. interacting. Let's say they submit a question they have there, they want some support. And so HubSpot has knowledge base and they have a ticketing system. So now, if you want to, again at the macro level, and say, okay, which products are responsible for the most support tickets? How about we go back further, which marketing campaigns generated the clients had the most trouble ticket issues? Is there something about the way we're targeting in the marketplace that are generating clients that are are having more troubles than others, you can actually answer those questions. That capability is pretty mind blowing. I mean, from the tech standpoint, if it's in one system, I get it, I get how that relational data works. But for a company to actually have that capability is pretty mind blowing. And that's what we're talking about is those kinds of interactions. It's not just like, you know, what was the lead source. And we're going to record that in the sale system. And so like, Hey, we know lead source, and we can do a report on lead source for all the sales when we're talking about all the metadata around that particular person. So not only can look at the entire history of their interaction and dig into one particular client, how can we serve them best? How can we make sure that we're addressing their needs? And then at the macro level, how do you analyze what's creating your wins? And what's creating your issues?
Joe
Yeah, that's huge. If that didn't sell you right there that, you know, I don't know what will because from a business standpoint, from, you know, an executive level, that is everything that you're missing, that every executive that I talked to you, that's what they want to know, they want to understand attribution in ways that are actual human speak. And HubSpot gives you that and you can slice and dice that data any way you want. Without programmers involved, you can do it without having, you know, super, super talented HubSpot people involved. I mean, that helps. But anybody can pull these reports and bundle them together. They want the way they want to. And yeah, it makes it really easy.
Frank
So it's funny, you mentioned that human speaker remember years ago, this was a long time ago, this must have been 15 to 20 years ago, I've been doing this a while, there was this analytics company that was trying to rival the analytics companies of the day, this was before, you know, Google Analytics was like, free and was a thing. This was back in the days where urchin was their own company was their own company, that software was very expensive, or that service was very expensive. And there were some other analytics packages, you could buy and download. And you would analyze it on your own computer and stuff like that. There was a company called click tracks, I don't even know if they're still around, I doubt it with, you know, the evolution of the analytics industry. But what was interesting is they kind of referred to themselves as people analytics, because what they would do is they would, you would go in, and you would identify people in cohorts, or like what we call, similar to what we call buyer personas. And so this way, you could look at people and their behavior in terms of in context of these buyer personas. And they were onto something really special, because now you can have like you just said, conversation, conversations about humans, and your buyer personas, and their wants and their desires. It's not about just the numbers, if you can put it in context of the people, the insights you're going to glean are much more meaningful, and much more impactful.
Joe
Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think above and beyond just, you know, everything you talked about, there's also the obvious benefit that all of the different tech you currently subscribe to is under again, one hood, right, you've got your blogging software there, you've got your your landing page builders there, you've got your email deployment, their website,
Frank
hosting,
Joe
you can have your website hosted there, which is awesome. If you've got it there, then you really got closed loop reporting all the way around. You've got your your ticketing system there, you've got your knowledge base there, you've got your chat bot there, literally all of the different sales, sales, pipeline management, sales, pipe,
Frank
sales, scripts, sales snippets, document repositories. Oh, by the way, when you send out a proposal in a PDF format, or some other you know, Doc in the sales process, and you want to know how long your prospect has looked at that PDF, you'll know that
Joe
right, right, so you no longer do you have to have Salesforce and pardot or MailChimp or autopilot and Zendesk and WordPress, you don't, you don't have to have all these software's some of which you're paying monthly for. It's all bundled together. And obviously that comes in a little bit of a premium with HubSpot. But when you do the math that actually pencils out in your favor,
Frank
I would say if it's not equal to let's say it is a little more with HubSpot, I would say the convenience that you'll have the usability in ease of usability that you'll have. And then ultimately the insights you can get from that macro level reporting and then at the micro level, knowing about your customers in the most intimate way possible. That far outweighs any cost, in my opinion, in any difference of cost. Yep.
Joe
switch it to rev up. So that's all kind of the you know, the tech reasons that we love it and that's the general You know, when it comes to lifecycle stages. That's why we love it. When we talk about rev Ops, we often talk about the fact that you're looking for bottlenecks in the life cycle journey. Right from being a visitor to lead to marketing, qualified lead and sales qualified lead, which we kind of bundled as qualified to opportunity to customer to fan, the easiest way to identify revenue opportunities is to understand where they're getting stuck right along that journey, because there's revenue to be had when they go from qualified to opportunities to customers, obviously, that's an initial sale, there's also revenue to be had that's being left on the table from your current customers. And this allows you to see where they're getting stuck, where they're not moving forward, where they're not being delighted, where they're not engaging, so easy to see when all of the data is under one, you know, in one software in one database, and you can pull it up and look at it standardized.
Frank
And I'm going to make an assertion here. And I'm going to throw it down for the entire rev ops community that the magic that is missing, to seeing rev ops to its fullest potential for organizations to realize their full revenue potential. The Magic that's missing is an obsession with the existing client base. Because if you go there, what you're going to find out more often than not, is there are ways in which your product sucks. If you obsess about what's happening with your existing client base, not only will you improve retention, increase upsells, increase mix, you know, share of wallet, you're going to improve your product. And guess what, when that happens, you have more customer success. What happens when you have more customer success, you have more testimonials, you have more reviews on review, websites are going to lead more people to your site, you're going to get clients who are happy to participate in case studies that are compelling that are going to do what bring more people to your brand. So that is the magic that's missing. And that's what when we talk about uptown optimization, that's the gauntlet I'm throwing down as I'm challenging everyone on the Reb ops community to force the executives that you interact with, to focus their lens on the existing customer base and stop being so obsessed with the new. Yeah, the new is important and you got to go, you got to be marketing got to generate the leads, I get that. But the existing customer base is your economic engine. And most companies completely neglect that. And they don't obsess about and if you did, I promise you it's the economic engine, not the front end. Yeah, you make the front end a hell of a lot easier. If you obsess about what's happening with your existing base
Joe
love that. I do. You know, regarding rev Ops, and HubSpot, and how they pair so well together, we do create dashboards that are specific to a rev ops kind of bottleneck assessment. HubSpot, of course, comes with dashboards just out of the box sales and marketing service. But then we go and build some custom ones that really pull all that data together in one kind of fluid. lifecycle journey view.
Frank
I mean, who just think here, Joe, who the hell wouldn't want this kind of visibility? Oh, goodness. I mean, this is never a rhetorical question. I know some real
Joe
owners.
Frank
It's a rhetorical question I get it's not meant to be answered. But But really, like, that's what we're talking about. We start we started at the top of the show that the nugget is this continuum of data. But that visibility, like where else are you going to get that who wouldn't want that? I came across it at a company recently, I kid you not this is what this actually is happening in this company, pretty decent sized company, the CEO was unhappy with all this marketing spend that they were doing on all these Pay Per Click campaigns. And so what they made the marketing team do because they weren't using one system for everything. In the marketing system, they made them create individual workflows, well, they didn't make them do this. But this is what ended up having to happen. They had to create individual workflows for every different ad variation that they had in their Google Ads panel. So we're talking like, you know, at 100 120, different workflows, so that way, contacts could then be individually tagged, like a custom field in their contact record be updated, so that we when it got transferred over to Salesforce, they would know which ad campaign, you know, generated the lead, like, craziness.
Joe
Smart for figuring that out. But that is a lot of work.
Frank
It's a ton of work. And it's unnecessary. And if we go look at the root systemic problem there is because the CEO didn't have visibility, the CEO didn't have trust. And so now the marketers are doing this bullshit work of creating 80 to 120 workflows, but to satisfy the CEO, because again, the CEO doesn't have the trust, doesn't have the visibility. This is what they're having to do to answer that question. The question was, how do I know all of this ad money is generating leads and opportunities and clients for us? How do I know? The only way they could know that if they had to do all of this crazy, crazy manual work, and they're starting to report on it? But that's not a good use of anybody's time? No.
Joe
I think last point under the rev ops umbrella with HubSpot is that all of the content lives in one house. So again, with this, this theme of everything Things all together is really important when it comes to understanding how to push people through the different maturation of each lifecycle stage. So the fact that you have your blog articles, and you have your ads, and you have your knowledge base articles, and your sales, Docs and your support docs, and literally everything that the every piece of content that the customer ever needs to engage with, whether they're a visitor or whether they're a fan, it's all there. And it all ties in to the systems that HubSpot has built in, like the chat bots, if someone comes in chat, you can easily and automatically in an automated way, serve them the right type of content that they need to answer their questions, regardless of where they are in their journey. And that's awesome. Because it makes the marketers job a whole heck of a lot easier to have all of that in one repository, easily accessible and easily searchable. You can serve it up real easy, right? And because marketers often are the ones who do a lot of the tactics to make rev ops come to life. That's just a real dream come true.
Frank
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point is and we've I think we've talked about that another episode is that, you know, Reb ops is full lifecycle, and it needs to evolve the executive team. And we've talked about a people matrix before, like, what are the different roles on a Reb ops team. But really, the marketers are the ones usually doing the heavy lifting, because it leverages their skills, more so than the skills that exist in the other areas of the business. And so you don't want your marketers doing 80 to 120 workflows to you know, update custom fields that just to get the data. And oh, by the way that maintenance on that is a nightmare. You want to add a new campaign, you want to change a campaign, you want to remove a campaign night mare.
Joe
That is a nightmare. Okay, so we talked about how that we think the tech is better, we think Reb ops is better under tech world. It's just amazing how it allows for closed loop reporting, how it supports the journey from, you know, stranger, all the way up to fan, we talked about under under the tech umbrella that it bundles up the marketing sales and customer service tools that you're probably paying, you know, different companies for right now put them all under under one hood. And then under, under the rev ops category, we love that the data is all in one place and standardized so that your rev up specific reporting, your lifecycle reporting can be made very easy point and click it together. You don't have to, you know, connect data from different databases and put it all up into a dashboard that a programmer had to put together. That's just awesome that it's easy to put together. And then I think the last thing under rev ops was, you know, the fact that all the content exists under one roof, and you can serve it up through many different tools, always tracking back to the timeline that's recorded on the contact record. So you can literally see every touchpoint that that contact has ever had with your company.
Frank
Yeah. Just to know, to know what that person's done to know which assets which campaigns which efforts are driving the results. I mean, that's what that's what you're after. And so, to wrap this up, why are we such big fans? Why do we keep talking about it in various episodes? Why do you hear that come up so often, not because we intend for it to be a commercial. So we decided to dedicate this one episode to just fully answering that. So once and for all you our listeners will know why we bring that up. We are an affiliated partner our company did utopia is an affiliated partner with HubSpot. So full transparency there. But again, we chose HubSpot for the reasons we talked about today. Folks, this was super fun. Can't wait to talk to you on our next episode Episode 33 Sherman have some amazing stuff in store for you. Until then, stay safe. Stay happy, stay healthy. Talk to you soon.
