Last month Nextiny Marketing was invited to Boston as part of HubSpot Partner Day 2015, an amazing 3 day event reserved for Gold, Platinum and Diamond Partners. The night I returned to Sarasota I was so pumped up that, at 2 a.m., I started writing this blog to summarize my experience.
Related Blog: 5 Reasons Digital Marketers Should become Inbound Certified
Aside from learning once more that HubSpot is growing dramatically, experiencing the awesome speakers, the great energy, the waffles, and amazing new products to make sales people happy, Partner Day 2015 was all about education and networking.
Here are the top 8 things that I learned at #PartnerDay15:
#1 - HubSpot loves Partners
HubSpot really cares about its partners. We are not only the key to helping HubSpot grow, but we make sure that our customers use these amazing marketing and sales tools to the fullest, helping them get more qualified leads and closing the loop on their efforts to prove ROI. This is definitely a WIN-WIN-WIN.
#2 - Partners love partners
I received more actionable business advice in these three days than during my thirteen years of business. I heard amazing stories from new agencies which are just scratching the surface and just became Gold, to bigger agencies currently managing 50 to 75 employees. There was a diversity of folks who came from the development world, the SEO world, print and PR, so their stories were all different and everybody had something valuable to share and contribute.
#3 - All this love creates HAPPY CUSTOMERS
I've heard hundreds of inspiring customer success stories and shared my own. When we all share our stories and learn from each other, this helps us find better talent, become better managers, better owners, and better educators. All this translates into better results and happier customers!
#4 - It's all about the people
Culture is not a word that people just use, or a slide-show presentation that nobody reads. If you believe in it and you live through it, then everybody wins.
In the corridors at HubSpot I could feel that their employees ARE GENUINELY HAPPY! This company runs like a very smart group of friends with great common goals.
How do they do this? Simply put, they find the best people. One of my favorite classes was the one about "Using Inbound to Source, Interview and Hire Talent" by Patrick Biddiscombe from New Breed Marketing. He explained how to use inbound marketing to continuously keep your hiring funnel full of people and how to use HubSpot as a tool to identify the best candidates.
#5 - ValueBased Pricing is the future!
Paul Roetzer from PR 20/20 talked about point pricing and how he used it to migrate into a ValueBased Pricing Model. Even though topics like Agile and point pricing sound too intense for smaller agencies, I believe having these conversations help us all since the hourly model is going away and ValueBased pricing is the future. You can learn more about ValueBased Pricing here.
#6 - You CAN make sales people happy
Brooke Freedman and David Weinhaus showed us how we can help sales teams with simple and easy to implement tools. This is ground-breaking since marketing and sales usually don't really talk much to each other and most tools out there are too complicated and take too much time.
Salespeople spend 59% of their time on management tasks.
By implementing Sidekick and HubSpot CRM you can help Sales teams get better at sourcing, nurturing, and closing leads. Learn more here.
#7 - You don't have to do it all
There are thousands of ways to use these amazing tools and you can create the perfect value combination for your agency and for your customers.
Most people think that being a HubSpot partner means that you have to do it all. What I realized during Partner Day was that every successful agency is different, and they are experts on a specific market, product or service.
#8 - These people know how to have fun!
#WaffleWednesday was awesome, the event was packed with info but fun all the way and the people, well... I already wrote about the people.
My take on Partner Day is that it does not matter whether you work at HubSpot or whether you are a partner or a customer, being part of this big family is AWESOME!
I can't wait for Inbound 2015 to hang out with you again. See you soon.
