Discussing Google's Helpful Content Update – Episode 82

There are some aspects of HubSpot that we don't use, but there are people out there who are paying a lot of money for HubSpot, who are hardly using any of the fantastic tools that are in there. So having outlined, um, that we love HubSpot, the software works. Why are we seeing people coming to us with a, almost a, a distressed purchase, as in HubSpot is an absolute mess. Can you help us fix it?

Partly it's do with them processes. Just because you've got HubSpot, it's not going to solve all your problems by itself. You have to make it work for you rather than you trying to work for it. So you have to set things up to reflect your processes, because if you have to change your processes to match the software, it's just never going to work.

Okay, we are recording. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Considering it's a long time since we actually did a podcast, it's been a while. It has been a while. Yeah, it shouldn't have been a while though, because we've actually recorded two podcasts, which we thought were shit. So we never put them out there, didn't we?

Yeah, we saved you from having to listen to a load of nonsense.

Yeah, we did, because we use this conversational style. We, we were aware that we'd recorded well, we recorded a couple of podcasts and they kind of wandered around a bit and weren't adding any value. So we kind of regrouped. So we're not sure yet how long this is going to be. Well, maybe mention at the end when we know.

I'm not even sure if it's gonna make it. It might not make it at all. It might not.

Make it at all. In which case they won't hear any of this.

Yeah, we won't drag it out though. If we've if we've told you everything there is to know, we'll stop at that point rather than trying to, um, keep talking just for the sake of it.

We will. So there's the background as to why we've been quiet for a little while. We've been having a little think, you know, interestingly, one of my favorite podcasts is from the guys at Exposure Ninja. Is that what they're called? Exposure Ninja dot com. Tim Cameron Kitchen Brilliant podcast and their most recent podcast, which I listened to while I was out for a jog the other day. Um, Tim introduced it, uh, on his own and said, right, we're actually going to experiment with a conversational style. I, I think it's Jess who works there. Uh, obviously a very good content marketer. Um, and I thought that's nice because like, that's what we've been doing. We kind of, we like that conversational style as well. So, you know, it was nice that he was doing it because his podcasts up to now, the ones I've listened to and love are very sort of bang, bang, bang information, information. And they are, they're brilliant. I love them, I really like them.

Like a news bulletin and a podcast.

Yeah, that kind of thing.

Or a more a how to sort of tutorial almost.

I certainly recommend anyone listening to go and grab the Exposure Ninja podcast. I mean, they'll try and sell you stuff. Um, because they're a very successful digital marketing agency, etc. on the back of all this great content that they produce. Um, but.

If anyone knows Tim, we'd love to invite him to have a chat with us.

As.

Well. He might not when he listens to this, because one of the things I thought, oh great, a conversational style. I'm a huge fan of the podcast. And then this they started talking about the current events. So they started talking about Twitter, obviously, um, uh, and Elon Musks takeover of Twitter and all the, you know, all the nonsense around the blue badges and all the rest of it. And, um, and then they kind of descended into like, oh, but he's doing all right. In fact, it wasn't, it wasn't Tim that was saying this. Uh, but he's doing all right considering how old he is. And then it kind of descended into a kind of just for a short while. It was a bit of a rant against older people. Now, you know.

That offended you, did it.

Well, do.

You.

Want to speak to us then?

Well, no, it's not that. It's just I just thought, why would they do that? Why would they alienate fans and listeners because of their age? As if like, oh, well, you have to be like thirty to be any good at digital marketing, which is ridiculous.

I think it's just the danger of this format though, isn't it? You can easily wander off and not really realise what you're saying and end up kind of. Yeah. Yeah. You say.

Forget there's people listening and just think you're actually just having a.

Chat. Relatively mean things about people. Yeah. I mean, we, to be fair, we do it all the time. We probably alienated lots of, lots of, lots of other agency owners listen to us ranting about bad agencies. And they're like, oh.

Yeah. I mean, like I say, I can't sing their praises high enough. Their podcasts, their content outputs. Fantastic. It just seemed a bit off off. Um, what I'm looking for the term off pitch.

Off brand.

Off brand maybe, uh, it was just odd. It was an odd thing to say. So like you say, it was maybe a victim of the conversational style and they just kind of went, oh yeah, old people are shit at digital marketing sort of thing, you know? Well, okay. Fair enough. Um.

I mean, Elon Musk is definitely not shit at digital marketing.

So yeah, he may have other feelings, but that's maybe not one of them.

So the subject we're gonna have a little talk about today. Um, well, the, the title, if you like, of the podcast is the Problem with HubSpot. Okay. So.

But Dave, don't we sell HubSpot and we love it.

So the premise of the, um, of the discussion, which will get going now is that businesses buy it, play with it, and then don't use it. Mhm. Um, so I thought what we'd do is talk a little bit about how we use it when we started using it and how we use it because we don't use it as extensively as we could. I don't think we do, do we?

We don't we don't use all the bits, but we use enough of it to make it, you know, valuable to us, I think.

Yeah. So who wants to start us off about how we use HubSpot currently?

Silence. Well, we.

We use HubSpot. I'll just get it going because I want to obviously, if you want to contribute to this. So basically we don't use HubSpot for our website. We're thinking about doing that, using it for our content management system. The bill, our website is built using Joomla, which is an open source system, um, like WordPress and one or two other Drupal things like that. So we use Joomla for our website.

But we do use HubSpot to build websites for other people. So it's, we do use it just not for ourselves.

That's right. And it's just cobblers bands more than anything else we haven't got around.

It's a big website. So yeah, it would be a big job. And we've got clients wanting websites.

However, we do integrate HubSpot with our website. So all the forms on our website, for example, are HubSpot forms. Now, HubSpot is clever. If you can just have a form on your website and tell HubSpot, if anyone fills that form and intercept the information and stick it into the customer relationship management.

System, great.

It is. Um, it's not infallible, I don't think, but it's okay. Um, but.

We pretty bulletproof.

Well, maybe. Yeah, maybe, I don't know. I like the native HubSpot form sitting on the website. I think that's cleaner. I think that's less prone to. So we've got HubSpot forms on our website. When somebody fills a form in, what happens next? Julie.

Their data, whatever they put into the form turns up in our CRM. We also get an email saying somebody filled in a form. We also get a notification in Slack saying somebody filled in a form. So it kind of appears everywhere. But we we have information about the person filling in the form. We have the question they've asked, and we have a notification that it's happened so that we can get straight back to it. We can then reply to them within Hubspot's CRM so that, um, the reply gets logged and anyone else can see it, but we can also reply by email and it still goes into HubSpot CRM anyway, so the data's all staying the same place. So if somebody phones up and the person that dealt with them is not there, we. The other, another person can log straight into the CRM and see exactly what's been going on, what conversations have been happening. You know what stage the whole thing's at? Okay, that's a start.

It is. It's quite a start.

That's a good start.

We can also, uh, see what the people were looking at, so.

Yeah. That's great.

I love form tells us, like when they actually decided to get in touch with us, what page they were looking at, for example, which is really useful information because if somebody fills in a form and we can see they were looking at website management, then we know that they're interested in website management.

So but it also tells us as soon as they fill in a form, it tells us what happened before that, which is really clever. So it says, well, actually three days before they came on the website and looked at something, and then they looked at something else, and then they came back and then filled in the form. So as soon as they they fill in that form, it kind of seems to retrospectively tell us how they got there in the first place.

So once we, once they fill the form in, we then use, uh, HubSpot for all the comms with them. We don't tend to do comms with clients Through HubSpot, we tend.

To move away from a project management system to use for that. So.

So the other thing that I do straight away, if there's an opportunity, I should just say at this point that Alex has got a cold.

In case you hadn't noticed, Alex has got a pretty bad cough.

I try and not cough.

You've done you've done quite well. It's fine. Don't worry about it. You've got a cough. Um, we use the HubSpot sales tool to create a deal. Yeah. And we've created customised deal stages. So, you know, it might be they've made contact. We've had conversations, they've asked for a proposal, they've asked more questions. They've bought something off us or they decided not to buy something off us. And we've got we've got all that in there as well, which is useful. It's nice.

Yeah. It's good to see if you're sort of trying to schedule work and see, you know, how busy people are. Then you're like, oh, actually, look, there's a few things that are, you know, in the pipeline and could come along. So it helps you sort of plan ahead.

So What from your perspective, because you're Alex, you're less maybe involved in CRM doing all your content work and all your fabulous stuff that you do what you know. What else are we using it for that maybe touches you?

So the blog is entirely in HubSpot, which is super useful. Um, I think, you know, certainly from a blogging perspective, as in I want to write something and put it on the website quickly. Um, that's probably mostly what I use HubSpot for to be honest and measuring ads performance. That's the other thing that I think probably we don't do it so much anymore because we're not currently running any PPC campaigns, but it certainly is very useful when we are to be able to see all of that data in one place as well.

Yeah, we're not running any PPC campaigns for ourselves at the moment.

Yeah. Well, yeah. Um, but certainly with clients and stuff, it's really nice to have one kind of source of truth, I guess, where you can go and see kind of all your ads data for every different platform that you're running ads on and see how it's performing, um, how it all stacks up. And as Julie was alluding to earlier, you can see very quickly with HubSpot. When an ads customer turns into an action, you know, when somebody makes an enquiry from an ad and that kind of thing. So it's really good from a conversion tracking point of view.

Okay. And what about the reporting? Have you had much exposure to reporting bits?

I've dabbled. I'm certainly not kind of gone in and made fancy custom reports. I've seen some of the things that people do in there that is insane. But certainly in terms of just extracting information about which pages generate the most enquiries, what channels generate the most enquiries, that kind of thing.

Yeah. And we have which blog posts are most popular? You know, this month and you can compare that to last month and yeah, also that sort of thing. The other thing kind of related to blogging are the, the CTAs or the call to actions. So, um, it's really easy for non-techy people to sort of create or edit a call to action. And there's these amazing things called smart CTAs. So you can say that if somebody's already downloaded something, then don't show them that CTA, show them a different one. So things like that are really clever. Um, and then you can automate sort of follow ups. If people download something, you can automate the, you know, the follow up or people even send a form in if you, if you know, you're not going to be able to reply really quickly, you can just send an automated sort of thanks for your enquiry and, you know, we'll get back to you or ask them more questions within that. And we've used that to to some extent.

Remember, the subject is the problem with HubSpot. And all we've done so far is tell how wonderful it is.

Yeah. But yeah.

Can I, can I just can I just say, what are some of the parts of it? Julie, what are some of the parts of HubSpot that we don't use effectively?

Um, we probably don't use the workflows as much as we could, but, you know, we're a small team and we, you know, we don't have loads of clients. So to an extent, we don't need it. Um, bigger companies, you know, we can automate things because it's taking a lot of their time. But, you know, we, we don't need it that much. Um, what else are we not using? Um, we.

Don't use the service hub, which is another.

Oh, we don't use that bit at all. That's right. Because if people need support again, they just get in touch. We don't have that many clients that we can't, um, cope with them. So we know them all by name. So we don't really need complain either. So obviously not. But they do need support. Sometimes they do.

Okay, so we've outlined, um, that we, uh, HubSpot partners, we.

Remembered some of our social media, we schedule all our social media posts from within HubSpot as well.

Okay. So we're using it extensively, but not there are aspects of it that we don't use. Yeah. Um, and I think this is, is sort of part of the issue. Um, there are some aspects of HubSpot that we don't use, but there are, um, people out there who are paying a lot of money for HubSpot who are hardly using any of the fantastic tools that are in there. So having outlined, um, that we love HubSpot, the software works. Why are we seeing so much disdain? Why are we seeing people coming to us with a almost a distress purchase? As in as in, um, our HubSpot is an absolute mess. Can you help us fix it?

Partly it's to do with them processes it. Just because you've got HubSpot, it's not going to solve all your problems by itself. You need to actually all be using it in the same way. So if everyone's sort of dabbling in their own way and they've not had any training or they, um, you know, they're not all using it in a set way, then it becomes because it's got a lot of moving parts, it can become messy very quickly.

Well, it's even stuff like as simple as you were alluding earlier to the pipelines and how valuable they are for us in the sense that, you know, when somebody sends in an enquiry, we can say, okay, you know, let's create a deal for that because we think it's going to turn into a project and we can put it in a pipeline and then move it along. But that's only because the pipeline is set up properly. That's only because we've been through a process of saying, okay, what does our deals process actually look like and what is it useful and meaningful for us to create and then say, oh, somebody at this stage or whatever. And if you don't do that exercise of actually thinking, this is how we do things, this is our internal processes, and this is how HubSpot can best kind of track and monitor that, then it all just is fairly meaningless. I mean, I think the main advantage that HubSpot gives you really is visibility, right? Visibility over what's happening, but it can only tell you what you've told it to tell you. That's right. Can't magically know that, you know, this deal is probably going to come off and this deal probably isn't. So you should sort them accordingly. Yeah.

It and you have to move the the projects in the in the deals dashboard. You have to move them from one stage to another. HubSpot can't tell that actually. Now you've sent a proposal and it's, it's moved to the next stage. You have to remember to keep it updated. Okay.

So what I can hear a phone. Nobody's got the phone down here, have they? We can hear it in my headphones. Just, you know, that phone handshaking thing. Sorry, what should be happening? Um, to avoid this situation where people are paying a lot of money for HubSpot and they are not getting value out of it. They're not using it.

I think at the onboarding process is not consistent. Um, people get different quality of onboarding depending on how they do it because you can do onboarding with HubSpot, or you can do onboarding with an agency, you can have to do it, but companies seem to either bypass it or do the bare minimum. And we've had a client before who just said, oh, yeah, I know we're supposed to do onboarding, but I didn't bother. Um, and then they kind of do as little as possible, maybe because they're busy or maybe because they, you know, their partner agency isn't sort of forcing them. That's the wrong word, but making sure they, they see the benefit of it, I guess. So the onboarding process is just really, really inconsistent. I think.

There's also, I think, quite a common too many cooks kind of problem with HubSpot isn't there, where people have. I think certainly people we've spoken to in the past have got like a sales team. They've got like a marketing team and the sales team want to use HubSpot to do one thing, and the marketing team want to use it to do another thing. And they all have their own ideas of what like pipelines and stuff like that should look like. And it just ends up as a kind of strange mess. And it's funny because one of those buzzwords that's been going around a lot at the moment is that whole idea of like revops and uniting marketing and sales. But I think one of the key problems with HubSpot is that if you don't do that and you try and use it as both a sales and a marketing platform independently, you end up in a right mess because it's not really designed for that.

Yeah, I think companies need to sort of have almost have a HubSpot champion, the person that decides, you know, kind of manages it. And if, if, if that's not happening, or if there's more than one person sort of trying to lead it, then it, it can kind of grow arms and legs and go off in different directions rather than pulling everything together, which is what it's actually good at.

So anecdotally, we have heard people say things like, um, whatever you do, I do not want HubSpot reps calling me.

Yeah.

We've heard. I mean, we have, I mean, you know, we're not making this up. We've heard this. So. Yeah, it, it seems that one of the problems with HubSpot is that the reps are very good at selling it.

Yeah. Um, I think selling and basically Hubspot's job is to sell the software. Whereas if you're an agency, your job is to sort of build a long term relationship and retain that client. And the two can be at odds. You know, just selling somebody something to beat your, um, sort of meet your quarterly target is very different from selling somebody something so that they stay with you as a client for several years.

It shouldn't be though. I mean, just to point out, HubSpot is a subscription model. And generally, if you've got a subscription model. The idea is that you want kind of long term revenue from that person who's going to keep using your software. It's very short sighted of them.

It is. But it does appear that the short term sales are winning over the long term customer retention at the moment.

It's certainly the case that with their tearing system, that they weight much more heavily in favour of people who sell the software, as opposed to people who help retain customers on the platform by helping them get great value out of it. Yeah, I, I can kind of understand that because once somebody buys the software, they're tied in contractually.

For a year.

Yeah. For a year. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if I don't know if they do longer term contracts than that, but they certainly tie people in for a year. But when it comes up for renewal and you let the renewal roll over, I think that's you in for another year.

Contractually, it seems to be.

So they're big on contracts, so maybe they're less concerned about the retention and people actually using the software. But speaking to people that I speak to who are closer to HubSpot, the product than I've ever been. Um, people in America, there's a big problem potentially brewing up for them there. So for example, this week, um, we got an enquiry and I can't remember the exact words, but it was along the lines of, we've bought HubSpot. We can't make any sense of it and we're already regretting buying it. This is a brand new customer. They've already regretting buying it, um, another existing customer of ours, because we're talking about maybe extending their HubSpot subscription to cover some of the, some of the tools they don't pay for at the moment because of limited functionality we might ask to. And they again said, like, we're very reluctant to do this because we had such a nightmare with HubSpot previously. Now, I don't know, it could be in both of those cases that HubSpot But, uh, um, you know, what they've done has been impeccable. And it's the clients that are to blame.

They don't know.

Don't really know. But this is, these are the anecdotes that we're hearing because, you know, we're trying to drill into, uh, to remind yourself the problem with HubSpot and this, and the reason I think this is an interesting subject for us is because we've been using it since twenty fifteen. Like our customers who are subscribed to it, we pay for it as well. We spend a lot of money every year on that software, and we get great value out of it. I think we do anyway. It's fair to say that when we first bought it, we did the enthusiastic look at all this stuff it does thing and then let it gather dust for six months.

Yeah. The sales side in particular, um, we, we didn't really get the benefit of that straight away, but, but we are now. Um, but yeah, and I think you have, you have to make the effort to set up that part and make it work for you rather than you trying to work for it. So you have to set things up to reflect your processes. Because if you have to change your processes to match the software, it's just never going to work. So it's, it's making sure that you get the software set up properly. So it actually helps you rather than gives you another job to do to use.

Um, what do we call it when we talk about cars?

Would that be an analogy?

Yeah. To use an analogy about cars.

No, there are other types of analogy really.

I have never heard one on this podcast.

Podcast. Yeah.

To to use an analogy, it seems to me that people buying HubSpot are doing the equivalent of either buying a gym membership or setting up a home gym in their garage. Yeah. But by virtue of doing that, they somehow think that by osmosis they're going to get fit.

Yeah. Oh, totally.

When in actual fact, it's just gonna stare at you.

Joking? You're joking. I've been paying my gym membership all this time, and that's not enough. I've actually got to put a bit of effort in as well.

Psychologically, it's enough, damn it. Physiologically.

Yeah. Oh, well. Halfway there.

Part of the problem is that HubSpot market themselves and sell themselves as a solution. It's not a solution, really, is it? It's a tool. It can do something very good, but it can also do absolutely nothing. And I think this is yeah, like you say, you know, the ideal scenario, if you really want to get fit is you go to the gym, you get a subscription and you hire a personal trainer. But if you miss the bit where you get somebody to help you or even ask a friend to push you through it or whatever, you are going to stop pretty quickly.

The very least, get someone to show you how all the machines work.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is kind of on board that actually, to take this analogy a bit further. Get your onboarding is like somebody at the gym showing you how all the machines work. So you can kind of at least dabble.

It really, it really is as well because.

Finished my analogy and getting a partner to work with you on a monthly basis is like having a personal trainer to, to keep you at it and make you better at it. Is that good? Yeah, that makes sense. Now you can do your.

Well, I was just going to say, but it goes back to what you were saying earlier about the quality of onboarding as well, because you can, and I'm sure we've all been to the gym and the instructor has gone around and said, that's a weight machine. That's a rowing machine. You roll on it. That's very different to somebody taking the time to show you, you know, what proper form looks like, how to lift safely, how to how to actually use the machine. And that is, I think what happens with HubSpot onboarding, isn't it? There are people who, you know, sit down.

Show you the machine.

And say, this is this bit, this is that bit. It does this by. And then there are people who take the time to sit down and say, okay, this is how you might think about using this. This is how it works. This is how, for example, you could set up your pipeline based on what I know about.

Let's get it set up the way you want it. Let's, you know, let's set this machine up to the right weight. Let's, let's get it working for you. And so that, you know, next time exactly what to do and it's ready for you.

So Alex, do you think HubSpot are glossing over the hard bit of digital marketing or inbound marketing?

Yeah, ironically, because they spend so much time talking about inbound marketing and nurturing and helping people to understand the value that you add to their organisation. And this is their whole kind of like pioneering approach to marketing. But when it comes to their own product. They just don't really do that. I mean, there's a wealth of information on their website. There's the HubSpot Academy and stuff like that. But again, you have to know to go and look for it. You know, if somebody says to you, well, here's your sales pipeline, here's your CRM dashboard, here's your email workflows by I mean, you're not going to know to go and look for HubSpot Academy video on how to effectively use email workflows to nurture customers. Because where do you, where do you even start?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, there, there should probably be much more focus paid to that initial stage. Okay. You sold somebody the software. Now explain to them how to get value out of it because like you say, I mean, I think the thing is, the honest truth is with a lot of business people is they have a very, very low patience for things that aren't kind of rewarding or that they can't see the benefit of. And if, if you've started using something and you're a week in and it's not really helping you, then you're not going to keep going with it, are you.

On setting the time aside to get it set up properly? If you're busy and you're not really sure why you're doing it. And you don't you don't see that it's going to actually, you know, make your life easier or get you more customers, whatever it is, then you'll put it off and maybe get someone junior to have a look at it and, and not really dig in.

So what do you think is the minimum requirement in house? Julie, what do you think is the minimum requirement in house for an organisation to get good value out of, say, for example, the marketing pro product that we that we buy?

By minimum requirement, do you mean in terms of onboarding or in terms.

Of minimum buy in terms of resource in-house resource to get actually get value out of HubSpot?

I think, I think somebody has to be the, the HubSpot guru and there has to be a, this is how we are going to use it. Everyone's going to use it in the same way. So some sort of, you know, procedure and, um, and we're going to stop using all these other things because sometimes the problem is that people start using it, but they're also still using MailChimp or something, or they're still using the thing they really liked before. So you've got to get everybody, everyone on board with HubSpot so that they stop using all the other bits and everybody. Everyone's using it and everyone's using it in the same way.

So do you.

Think answered the question or not?

Yeah, to an extent. Do you think when HubSpot are selling HubSpot to a company that they are not only glossing over the hard bit, the inbound marketing bit, but they're also glossing over the kind of resource that organisation needs to have at its disposal in order to get value out of the software.

I think they're just really wooly about the onboarding and what it means. Um, companies don't really understand what the onboarding involves. And so they, they find it very easy to cut corners and they can just go for a sort of cheapy onboarding because they have to do it rather than a proper onboarding that's going to work for them.

Okay. So if we look at marketing Pro with one of the things that you're going to need to do is create content. Yeah. So if you can't create content in-house straight away, you're going to fall flat on your face with HubSpot because HubSpot does not create content. It gives you a platform to post it, to optimise it, to make it look great. But again, make it look great. You're going to need somebody who's creative, who can do graphic design in order to make it look great.

Yeah.

Yeah. And you do get exponentially more out of it the more resources you put into it. I mean, I'm just thinking, for example, earlier on, I said, you know, I exclusively use the, um, blog bit of HubSpot for our blog. You know, I'm on there all the time putting content in. But until we got Diana, our designer, involved in making some of them look prettier, there was a kind of a natural kind of threshold, a limit to what I could do with the system because I'm not a designer. And that's exactly it. If you're not willing to invest a lot of different resource in it, it can't really do anything. It can facilitate and it can kind of amplify, but it can't design for you. You can't go and build a CTA and have it done automatically. You have to actually know what you want out of it. You have to have a designer on hand who can make something pretty. Yeah. I mean, you just need a lot of different skills.

You don't necessarily need much in the way of development, to be fair. Um, but you need designer and you need people who can write content and lots of it to make it work.

So you mentioned something about having an in-house champion more than once. We've come across people who are paying for but not using HubSpot, because the person who set it up has left.

Yeah. That's true. So yeah.

I think what that speaks to is that it's not being adopted company wide.

Yeah, it's not embedded. It's not. Yeah. Well, this is what we do. We just use HubSpot.

Yeah.

That's not happening.

It has to be embedded. You have to do all your client comms for, you know, pre-sales, client comms, perhaps through the CRM. You have to use HubSpot for doing your mail. So all the different parts of HubSpot are being used by different people in the organisation. There's no single point of failure. Oh, the HubSpot guru left.

Yeah, an.

Engineering company we work for who were paying a lot of money for sales Pro and that's and that's exactly the situation they were in, in that, yeah, the person left, we didn't really know what to do with it.

Yeah. That in which case they had a champion. But the champion hadn't done their job of actually championing it and getting everyone else involved. You know, they, they just were obviously just kept it to themselves. And that's not the point. It has to be sort of just ingrained in the way the company does business every day.

Okay. So in order just to wind this one up, how, how would we evaluate need if we decided that we were going to. Well, no, let me stop there. Let me stop right there. Do you need a tool like HubSpot in order to generate business from your website?

No. Absolutely not.

It just helps you.

At quite a considerable cost.

Exactly.

Yeah. Even though, you know, what I've heard is like Pardot, because there are other tools like HubSpot, Pardot is way more expensive.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's plenty of much more expensive alternatives out there. And let's be real. Like what? When we say it's helping, it's it's simplifying everything. It's giving you a single source of truth that's providing incredible visibility. I mean, if it is used properly, it does help a lot. It's just ultimately going back to the original question, what is the problem with HubSpot? I think the problem is that it is just a tool. It's as good as the work and the effort and the energy you put into it, right?

And so yeah, you don't need it. You don't need it to do inbound marketing. You can do it. You can do it without any of these, these tools or systems. If you want, you can just do it, um, using lots of other pieces. But we have also seen people fall, fall apart using that system as well with lots of other tools that they are kind of integrated or trying to speak to each other, which ultimately is a lot more complicated.

Mhm.

Okay. But you don't need it.

So evaluating need comes down to almost, you can do it without HubSpot, but it just kind of makes everything you do easy, easier. I know that the HubSpot sales reps would say it amplifies all of your efforts. It makes all your efforts more effective. Yeah.

I'll get hit with the naughty marketing stick afterwards.

Um, and I think that's probably true. Yeah, it's just more joined up.

It is. Yeah. It's, it's really, it's a really smart system if you're using it properly. But I think, you know, just going back to the whole like kind of needs assessment thing, like I'd probably spin it on its head and say it's not really a case of whether or not you need it. I mean, anybody, everybody could probably benefit from using it. It's more a question of whether you've got the resource, the time and the willingness to actually adopt it properly. Yeah.

And what are you doing at the moment? And would it be better than what you're doing at the moment?

Yeah, exactly.

Which in a lot of cases it is.

If you get HubSpot because you think it's going to solve a problem that you're having, I think it's probably every chance that it won't realistically magically solve the problem unless the problem happens.

What the problem is. It depends what the problem is. If the problem is that that your team is all a bit all over the place and not speaking to each other, then it's not gonna help because you you need to get everyone on board with it. But if your problem is that you, you don't really know what's happening because you've got lots of different systems running, then it is going to help.

Yeah.

Just to, um, add some more confusion. There are well, first of all, if you've got it, if you've got HubSpot and it's basically not getting used, but you're still paying for it. Um, there are agencies like us that will help you re-implement it, wipe the slate clean, sort the data out, look at what you've currently been doing with it, wrestle it down, put some process in place, and actually help you start to use it effectively. Yeah, yeah, I'll say that again. Help to start use it effectively. Yeah. Um that's fine. That's one thing. Yeah. If you're considering using it, I actually think you're also better speaking to an agency like us. There are plenty of other good agencies like us that do this and they'll help you properly evaluate whether or not you're going to get the value out of it.

Yeah. Rather than speaking directly to HubSpot, who will obviously just sell you it without maybe evaluating as precisely.

However, there are also agencies, independent agencies who will do more or less the same as HubSpot because they make all of their money pretty much from the kickback they get from HubSpot for selling it. They don't actually use it. So if you're speaking to an agency, I think to offer some advice, if you're speaking to an agency who are trying to help you evaluate whether or not to buy HubSpot, then ask to speak to some of the customers of theirs who are using HubSpot, perhaps, or ask to see some of the things that they're doing with HubSpot on an ongoing basis. You know, if the answer is, well, we don't really, we just help people implement it. We just onboard them and then we walk away. They're not the right people to help you figure out whether you want it, because they're making their money from just simply selling it. Would you agree?

Yeah. I mean, HubSpot train agencies to sell it. So it's big business business. So yeah, I think that's a very valid point.

I mean, HubSpot might hate us for saying these things.

Maybe we're about to lose our partner status.

I don't care. I still think it's great software and we'll continue to use it.

Yeah.

And, but at the same time, you know, decent agencies are in the business of building long term relationships with customers and helping customers do the right thing, helping customers adopt tools, find the right tools that the ones that are right for them, they're not just in the business of building up their monthly HubSpot check. Agreed.

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. So if you are using HubSpot and it's not going so well, feel free to get in touch with us. Um, we'll have a chat and see if we can offer you some advice. We might be able to just give you some advice and send you on your merry way. Or you might decide you want to work with us. Who knows? Uh, if you're evaluating HubSpot and trying to decide whether it's right for you, there's some great content out there. I think we've blogged on the subject. And again, if you want to reach out and chat to us about it, that's absolutely fine as well. Be delighted to do that. In the meantime, any closing thoughts? Alex?

I don't think so.

Okay. Julie.

No, I think we've covered that.

Okay. That's good. Um, thanks for listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, and we'll hopefully back up and running now on a regular basis. After a bit of a hiatus, I think it was we'd put eighty episodes out, hadn't we?

We did. We did quite a lot in quite a short space of time.

We did actually. Yeah. And it's been a, you know, an absolute blast doing it. But, um, I think it was nice to have that little pause and, um, hopefully come back with, um, maybe some, probably on a regular basis, shorter podcasts, but on very specific subjects for now. But if you've got any questions as a result of this podcast or anything else related to digital marketing or business development in general, don't hesitate to get in touch. Red evolution dot com or from the office dot com. In the meantime, it's goodbye from me and goodbye from me as well.

And for me.