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Recently, I conducted some research on the demo experience for one of my clients. They were looking for a "mystery shop" for their demo process from a marketing point of view. So I thought it would be interesting to do this with a number of other Saas organizations to see what the market is like and how the competition stacked up. I chose some well-known Saas brands including, Salesforce, PandaDoc & Hubspot.

The results were very surprising. In the end, none of them provided, in my opinion, a world-class customer experience, however, I got a lot ideas and insights from the process so I thought I would share my learnings with you here on the blog.

Last year we looked at the possibility to integrate Microsoft Teams meetings with the Hubspot meeting scheduling tool. At that time, it was possible to automatically have a meeting that was booked through the Hubspot automatic meetings scheduler sent to your Microsoft Office365 Calendar, but it was not possible to automatically include a link to a Microsoft Teams meeting. 

We have been keeping an eye on this feature ever since we first wrote about it because we have heard that many people are looking for this integration. Spoiler alert, there is still no native integration that allows us to use the Hubspot meeting scheduler tool to send out invitations with automatically generated Meeting links for Microsoft links. But we expect that this will become available very soon because Hubspot has confirmed that they have been working on a solution for some time. So, let’s explore where things stand one year on.

We regularly get questions from our clients about web development, website migrations and website redesigns. It is a very important - and often very scary part of their marketing activities. The main cause of all the fear around these projects are:

• They tend to cost a lot of resources
• They take a lot of time to complete
• It is hard to get a good result that works for everyone

It is often difficult to understand where to start when you are a faced with a web design or redesign project. There are many different approaches that you can use and a huge amount of options, possibilities and the complexities that arise when you think about redesigning and implementing your business website. It is tricky to translate design choices that make good marketing sense to the right technical implementations. We often get questions about how to use Growth Driven Design to drive better value, so we decided to write a bit of an introduction to explain what Growth Driven Design is and how it compares to traditional web design methods.

What Is Growth Driven Design, and What Can I Use It For?

Traditional web design projects are typically time-consuming, costly, and are often delivered long after the estimated deadlines. With a conventional design strategy, the website will typically receive major updates after at least one to two years. These methods are clearly outdated since the business will not fully maximize the lead generation and performance of their website. 

Growth driven design is a web design methodology that was developed to make the process of redesigning a website more clear, more affordable and to drive a higher quality result. It's been gaining popularity over the years and fits well with other modern digital marketing principles such as Inbound Marketing.  

Hubspot CRM is often feels deceptively simple but is getting more powerful every year. It is the datastore that has powered the entire suite of HubSpot's extensive product range for many years. It holds and segments information for all parts of the buyers journey from visitors, interactions to customers and companies. It can power Inbound and ABM strategies and can exchange data with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and many other platforms and tools through its extensive API and integrations marketplace. In short, it is very much at the core of Hubspots functionality. Without Hubspot CRM, none of its other products would be of much use. During Inbound 2020 Hubspot also announced a lot of new features for Hubspot CRM. One of them is the ability to create custom objects. This brings Hubspot CRM on the same level as many other paid CRM platforms in terms of customization possibilities making Hubspot more useful as a full end to end platform and making it easier to use it to replace other CRM products such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This brings new opportunities to organizations that use Hubspot and a third party CRM system. Removing an additional CRM product from your product stack means a reduction in budget and and less integration headaches. The extra functionality in CRM can of course bring extra complexity and this makes it even more important that you manage your Hubspot CRM processes, data and segmentation correctly.  

Note we wrote an update about Hubspot meetings and it's integration with Teams meetings in September 2021. Click here to read our latest update about this topic.

It's September 2020 and most of you are probably scheduling virtual meetings with your clients, contractors, consultants, friends and possibly even family members like never before. Since COVID started hitting our lives globally about 6 months ago many organisations are scrambling to figure out how we can transition many of their interactions with their prospects and clients to online meetings and collaboration. At About Inbound we consider it important to constantly test and try new business apps  so that we can provide the best advice possible to our customers about what software in conjunction with Hubspot might best fit their needs. As Microsoft has recently been making huge progress in their Teams and Teams Meetings functionality we decided it was time to test if it was possible to integrate Teams Meetings directly with Hubspot meetings to replace our link to Skype. In short, the answer is no. Right now it is not possible but it might be in the future. While looking into this, my IT consultant past kicked in and I decided to snoop around and see why not and if there were any workarounds and what would work best. These types of challenges are great reasons for me to dig around and learn about what is happening with the different Marketing tech and IT tools. After some research and testing I've put together a post around Hubspot meetings and Office 365 Teams meetings. I will discuss their uses and why integrating them or using Hubspot meetings with another online meetings tool would be super powerful. 

In this blog post we’ll look at the general operations tasks that you should focus on as part of your marketing efforts. We'll explore the different types of marketing operations tasks and provide you  with examples of tasks that are often missed. We will illustrated what happens when these are neglected. we will also provide you with a checklist to see if you have got your marketing operations under control.

How do you make your online meetings, training or events work best for all your attendees?

It is very important to ask yourself this question before diving in and selecting this tools. If you don't give this enough consideration before you make the switch to online meetings, prepare that webcast or create that online training, you might find it very hard to satisfy your attendees and reach your goals. It could mean the difference between a temporary experiment where your efforts are only appreciated because there are no other in person alternatives and then quickly abandoned when it becomes possible to replace all of the technology by in person meetings and the chance to really embrace the possibilities that all the technologies we have access to bring and move you and your organisation forward.

I am not advocating that we should replace all our personal interactions with online events and training when you don't have to but merely to combine these ways of connecting so that you can create a diverse and comfortable set of channels to connect with people in many situations and make the best use of everyone's valuable time. 

This is part 2 of a 3 part series where we try to ask and answer the higher level questions  about how approach meetings, training and webinars using online tools.  In part 1 we had a look at what the major features of connecting online are and what there benefits are. In this part we will look into how to optimise these advantages so they enable you to be as successful as possible from the start. 

If you are a Marketing Hub Professional/Enterprise or Sales Hub Professional/Enterprise user, your Account Based marketing tactics in Hubspot just got a whole lot easier. Hubspot launched a set of ABM features that will allow you to get started with targeting your best fit companies and create a ABM strategy with just out of the box tools. In this post we will have a quick look at what an ABM strategy is, what Hubspot has changed to make it easier to implement and how you could go about implementing it.

It has been a while since Hubspot has added a new product to its SAAS suite. The last product to be added before CMS Hub was Hubspot Service Hub , which Hubspot added in 2018. Compared to Service Hub though, CMS Hub seems much more focused on attracting new customers with this product release. Many of Hubspots existing marketing product customers already have access to most of the features sold as part of CMS Hub. So, what is part of CMS Hub exactly? What makes CMS Hub interesting as an entry point to Hubspots SAAS product suite and what are the use cases and benefits that Hubspot can offer with CMS hub?

Hubspot started was started in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. They created the company around their concept of Inbound Marketing in 2006. The concept of was turned into a methodology to help marketers change their approach from the heavily outbound focus that was dominant at the time (outbound meaning advertising & cold calling etc.) to a more organic, content driven approach where brands can win customers by supporting their search for solutions and their decision making process and leading them to their brand only if they are ready to buy. They named this approach “Inbound marketing”. Fast forward to 2019 and Hubspot has gone through massive growth and indeed change. Their tool set involved from a smart way to build landing pages, SEO optimised blogposts and get better reporting on your visitors to a full blown SAAS ecosystem of Marketing, Sales, Service and CRM tools that are all tightly integrated.  So how did they get here and where are they headed in 2020? That’s what we will have look at during the following paragraphs