Boosting Efficiency and Growth: Leveraging HubSpot for B2B Success

Hey, hi everyone. Now, welcome to your show, E-Coffee with experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. And today we have Adam Lewis, the founder and solutions architect at BBD Boom, a UK-based HubSpot elite partner and B2B specialist. Hey Adam, how is it going?

It’s going very well. How are you doing? It’s lovely to be joining you.

Great pleasure to have got the opportunity to host you today. Adam, before we jump into the conversation and take your insights on HubSpot marketing and automation, why don’t you talk us through How was it like in the early days? Talk us through your journey. How did you land up in this space? How did you build the agency? How is it going? What are the early challenges? Then take it up from there.

Yeah, absolutely. I love reflecting on the journey that we’ve gone through with Boom. If I go right back in the beginning, when I think about myself as a child, I used to love technology. I used to love playing with computers, and I very famously once made my father’s computer. When he first got a PC, I made it by playing around with the operating system. But I always had that fascination with technology, and that’s been with me all through my career. Things really changed for me when I went to the inbound conference in 2016, which is the HubSpot conference, for those of you who don’t know. I’d heard about HubSpot, and up until that point, I’ve been doing marketing and I’ve been doing digital work. My frustration with all that was when you get asked the question, what impact is all this lovely marketing doing? What impact What is it having on the bottom line? I could never really answer it. I found that really frustrating because we lost the commercial connection between marketing and business and results. I’d heard about HubSpot fixing this. I went to the 2016 Inbound conference. I walked into the hall, for those being a huge 40,000 people, and I was just blown away.

It was hot, it was bright, it was noisy. There was a buzz about it. There was this energy, and I thought, This is my tribe. These people are digitally enabled sales and marketing professionals. They use automation, they use technology, they attribute things. I thought, This is where I want to be. After that, I came back to the UK. I said, I’m going to buy some HubSpot shares. I’m going to set up HubSpot partner agency, which I did with my business partner, Emma Lynch. That was the origin of the business. We’ve been going seven years now, and I’m really delighted with where we’ve got to. We service businesses across Europe and in North America. We haven’t yet got to India. Maybe that will come in terms of supporting people to get ROI and to get value out of their HubSpot instance, which we can go into in more detail. But so today we’re a team of 25 people. We help businesses accelerate their growth with technology, which is obviously underpinned by HubSpot. We work across marketing, sales, and CRM, service, web integrations, and integration into other software tools as well. That’s how it all got started, really.

You have in this space for quite some time now, right? As for you, what are some of the biggest advantages your business is gaining by leveraging the HubSpot platform?

Yes, and obviously, I’m going to talk about HubSpot, but it could be any type of CRM and marketing automation tool. But obviously HubSpot is a game changer for quite a lot of businesses. What it enables them to do, I think, is a number of things. The first of all is to have a single source of truth about their customer data and their prospect data. We work with a lot of businesses who come to us and they have some data in a spreadsheet, they have it in one CRM over here, and they have a marketing tool over here, and they have a customer service tool, and none of it talks to each other. You can’t possibly provide the best service that your business can without really knowing who they are and where they are. They’re duplicated all over the place. You don’t have that single view. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that it gives you efficiency and cost savings. When we’re using automation, we’re able to, let’s say in the marketing space, we’re able to run email campaigns. You build out that workflow through automation, you tweak it, and then you turn it on.

You can put thousands of contacts through that sequence. You’re not sending individual emails. You’re not worrying about if it bounces because if it bounces, it gets taken out. If they do a certain action, maybe it gets taken out of that workflow. All of that thinking is a one-time setup. When I think about the sales side of things with HubSpot CRM, we’ve got all sorts of efficiencies about meeting tool bookers, AI email writing tools, all these sorts of things. They are all about efficiency and getting more out of your day. I think the third element then is some of the tools then really to allow you to grow fast and grow better. So some of the really clever stuff around segmentation, A/B testing, multivariant testing, all these things that are built inside HubSpot. You’re going to do better marketing, you’re going to be more personalized and more effective. And then finally, the big one for businesses, especially where the CEO or the C-suite, they want to understand what’s going on in their business, how effective are they at generating pipeline, how effective are they at generating leads, how much of that is converting, what’s the value of that, what’s the forecasting, is the reporting side of these tools.

Making that investment in something like HubSpot is going to have a whole range of quite transformative benefits to most businesses.

And you know what? Businesses got to understand that this is not going to read benefits overnight. This is a process. You have leads coming in from all the channels and automation takes its own time. And then probably a quarter, a couple of quarters down the line, depending on how your operations look like and how spread is your marketing and sales teams are. And then probably once it is automated, maybe a quarter, six months down the line, then you actually see the forecasting side of things like you mentioned in terms of absolutely penetrating top-down understanding what is happening at each department or a functional level.

A hundred %. I think you’re right. Implementing a system like this is an upfront investment, and some of it is quite technical. I think you touched on something there which is it doesn’t give you overnight results. When I think about the challenges for B2B businesses of using automation, things like HubSpot, one of the biggest problems that customers can run is not investing enough time in the planning of that implementation. Designing what is the customer journey? Actually, what do we do with leads that come from paid search compared to direct traffic to a landing page? What do we do? Is the nurture journey different? And so understanding and diagramming out what that looks like helps us to build a better system for them. I think the other thing then is integrations where customers don’t necessarily integrate HubSpot into their other systems. You’re missing out on the opportunity to sync really valuable data.

Absolutely.

I think the third one that is always a challenge for any software and for any transformation is adoption, is making sure that There’s enough emphasis and time spent on training people and ensuring that they understand hearts and minds. The hearts around this is going to help them do their job better. This is going to be a benefit to them. Then the mind side of it, understanding which buttons to press and how to use the system. As you say, it’s not an overnight fix.

There is a change management there in terms of understanding, helping your employees understand that this is going to benefit you. Otherwise, if they’re doing the work on Google Docs and the spreadsheets, then if they have to feed in the data on a CRM, they almost are taken back immediately. Hey, what’s happening? Getting those notifications, those reminders, is someone looking at me all the time and all that stuff, right? Like you mentioned, we talk upon a very important point there. Training and educating your resources, your team on the tool is, again, absolutely important for getting 100% out of the platform because it’s going to be with magic only when the transition and the acceptance across different functions is there.

Absolutely. Sometimes we are dealing with buyers of HubSpot who are maybe IT decision-makers, and they’re very much making a decision and deciding what the implementation budget is based on the technical side of it and missing the point that you’re talking about, which is, Hey, but what about the end users? For some people, they might not be very technical. They might have been using the existing system or the existing processes for a long time. There is definitely, over the seven years that we’ve been going, we realized that we have to walk quite slowly on that with certain people, help them understand the benefits and give them confidence. Then there’s other times where, let’s say, salespeople, they are biting your hand off to move to HubSpot. I remember a really famous client that I had, example that I had was I said to him, Why are you looking to move to HubSpot? He says, I’ll tell you exactly why. I had a sales opportunity. I got in my car, I drove for five hours. I got to this opportunity. I went to reception, got led through to the meeting room, and in the meeting room was my colleague pitching to this company.

I didn’t know he was going to be there. He had filled in. He had a spreadsheet and he was managing his opportunities over there. I didn’t know anything about it. We both end up in the same place pitching to the same people, and it was really embarrassing. That for them was That’s the camel, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Absolutely. You are into the space, you’d understand. There’s multilevel decision making involved in the adoption of a CRM. It’s very critical organization-wide. In a lot of cases, and you relate to this, the actual end user of the platform is not someone who has a final say on it, like the IT involved, the management involved. They’re looking at the L1 proposals and all of that. But the actual user of the platform, I’ve seen at a very few organizations, and they’re mature enough to do a trial with the actual users and take their voting irrespective of how senior, junior they are. That is, again, an important point there in terms of having that dry run being done by the actual users and understand their point of view in terms of how the adoption will look like in case you onboard the tool or the platform.

Absolutely. I think we’re finding that more and more as HubSpot goes up market. We’re now finding ourselves routinely competing against Salesforce, NetSuite, Dynamics. Those are big systems where, as you said, there’s an IT generally owned by IT. For marketing people who are really driving the adoption of HubSpot, they want HubSpot because they’re not happy with some of the alternatives, they’re having a battle of share of voice with the other decision-makers, and we see that the whole time. Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Good. Coming over to talk about the challenges picking it up from there, what are some of the most frequent challenges you encounter when working with B2B businesses looking to optimize their HubSpot set up?

People that already have HubSpot, that’s also a big part of our business because they’ve been running HubSpot for maybe a year. Let’s say maybe they didn’t set it up properly. Maybe the people who set it up have left. Maybe there’s been a lot of changes in the business. Sometimes we use the analogy of the bird’s nest. What’s happened is it’s all become very… It works. It’s still a bird’s nest, but it’s very tangled, and no one really knows what workflow does what and why we have that form and what’s connected to that form and those sorts of That is actually, it goes back to, I think, a principle of CRM, because we’re talking quite a lot about CRM here, is that it’s an organic thing. When I’m talking to customers who are setting up for the first time, it’s not, Hey, there’s an implementation, then we can all pack up and go home. It needs to evolve. It needs procedures, it needs documentation, it needs governance. When these organizations that we work with, they haven’t really spent enough time on that because they’re busy doing their jobs, then things get out of control. Where we We normally start with that, as we normally start with an audit of their hubs, for instance, and we start to list out key things that we would recommend need to change.

We prioritize those things based on the complexity, the commercial value that would come from fixing it. Then we build out a program with the customer about how are we going to make those changes. Unfortunately, sometimes we actually end up agreeing with a client that we need to start again. We have had that a few times where it’s got so out of control or so neglected that we say, Do you know what? Let’s just start again. Let’s keep the data in there. Let’s clean the data up and let’s build out some of the processes that we really want for the business going forward. It’s a fresh start.

Absolutely. Adam, you have been in this space, like you’re near to mention. You started quite some time back. Looking back at your 20 years in the B2B space in particular, how have you seen the landscape of B2B marketing and sales change the most.

It’s got more and more technical. It’s more data-driven, it’s more technology-enabled. When I think about my career back 20 years ago when I was using fax machines, it’s crazy that I have actually used the fax machine. Some people listening to this, I’m sure, have never used the fax machine. We were doing that. As this technology has come along, we’re starting to see people. To me, there’s a spectrum now. There is people that are doing things very manually, and then they to move on to doing things in a more automated way. Now we also have AI, which potentially is going to, I think it might potentially leapfrog automation. We have this thing where the transition has been all these data-driven tools, technology-driven tools that can provide better customer experiences. We’ve seen the move away from cold email, cold outreach. That’s getting harder and harder to do. It’s harder and harder make that breakthrough. We’ve seen the move, the growth of inbound marketing, which is very content-driven, which obviously HubSpot has been really big on. I think where we’re going now is just, I think the next level is highly hyper-personalised content using AI I. I would send you content, I would send you emails, you’d come to a landing page and it would be completely customized for you based on all the data points we might have about you in our CRM.

Are you a customer? What country you’re in? What things you you’ve been interested in before? What else do we know about you that we can scrape from LinkedIn, et cetera? Then in the blink of an eye, giving you that content that’s highly relevant to you. I think that’s coming next, and I think that’s going to be a good thing.

Absolutely. I’m sure with the evolution of AI, a lot of stuff that we did earlier manually. Obviously, the manage has reduced in terms of how fast we can get those information these days, those manual check that we used to do.

Yeah. Credit to HubSpot, actually, because they have embedded AI into their system very well in the last 12 months. I think one of the challenges customers face now is the explosion of AI tool s. Which one do I use? Which one do I back? If you’re in sales and marketing customer success, you just need to go with HubSpot. We have AI chat bots coming in, innately. We have AI forecasting, which is an incredible tool. It’s built in, it’s part of the package. It’s not an extra thing. We have AI We have image creation, content creation, blog creation. We have AI insights. Now we’re getting to the point where we have AI workflow generation tools inside HubSpot. Their investment in AI is doing a lot of heavy lifting and taking a lot of headache away from customers. It’s like, Hey, we thought this through. We’ve got it built into HubSpot. Hubspot is the place where you have all your customer information and you can access these tools layered on top as part of your license. I think that is going to be absolutely incredibly useful for customers, but also huge commercial advantage for HubSpot versus some of the other players.

Lovely, Adam. Great, Adam. This was a brilliant conversation. For our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, Adam, how do they do that?

Just email me at Adam@bbdboom.Com or follow me or connect with me on LinkedIn.

Great, Adam. Once again, thank you so much for taking our time to do this with us. Really appreciate it.

It’s been a pleasure. Hopefully, it’s helpful.

Absolutely. Thank you.