HubSpot Partner Program Launch Webinar

1. Welcome to the official launch webinar of the HubSpot Partner Program V 1.0. My name is Pete Caputa, Partner Program Manager at HubSpot and (MIKE: my name is Mike Volpe) 1

2. You are invited to participate on Twitter. Use @hubspot to address any questions for feedback. If you want to follow along go to http://search.twitter.com and search for “@hubspot”. 2

3. I’m going to hand it over to Mike to talk a bit about what HubSpot is. We’re then going to go through the following agenda. 3

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12. So, David Letterman style, here’s what you probably know about HubSpot. Want to kick us off, Mike? Of course, many of these things are true like the fact there are way too many MIT geeks here. But, many of things are not true: We are not your competition. Some of these things are situational… we’ve proven that some small businesses can successfully generate lots of leads and business online by themselves. We’ve also found that many need help from an agency. So… NEXT 14

13. They helped us deliver more value to our clients more cost effectively, by automating data- gathering, research, analysis and reporting we used to do manually. They helped us expand our service offerings teaching us how to provider inbound marketing services, and increase our recurring revenue. They referred us to our newest best client just because we were doing such a great job using the software for our clients. They sent us a check in the mail every quarter because we’re actively making our mutual clients successful. 15

14. Paul Roetzer was the first company that was brave enough to partner with us when we were just getting started. He now works with 20+ HubSpot customers an an ongoing basis, many of which he brought to us, and a bunch that we referred to him. He’s an extremely intelligent guy with a dream to make the PR industry a bit more accountable to results. He now calls his firm an inbound marketing agency. Watch Paul’s case study. You’ll see that he thinks there should be more people doing what he’s doing. As evidenced by his growth, there’s room for more. 16

15. Like Paul, we believe that “Inbound Marketing” is a movement that is much bigger than just one company. We can’t do it alone. We believe that our software + services inbound marketing services from agencies is a killer combination that delivers much more value to businesses trying to figure out how to use the web to strategically grow their business. 17

16. Our plan is to open up our virtual doors and provide partners with the opportunity to learn from us and leverage what we’ve built: our software and our training. We’ll be providing you with the opportunity to start your own extended free trials for yourself and your clients. We’ll be giving you access to our customer-only training program. If you think our marketing webinars are great, wait til you watch the 13 week advanced social media training program that Kyle James just produced for our customers. That said, we’ve hesitated building a partner program for so long, because we don’t have the resources to support 100s of partners on a 1:1 basis. We also plan to provide you with opportunities to learn about how to price, package and deliver inbound marketing services through a series of virtual workshops. You’ll use the product to learn how to build sites on our cms, deliver ongoing SEO, ppc services, maximize ROI from social media campaigns, and become a true business partner for your clients generating a high quantity and high quality stream of leads for them. ---------------- We also need to forewarn you. The biggest reason that we haven’t created a partner program until now is because we do NOT have the resources to support you 1:1. There were almost 700 people registered for this webinar. Our sales team is not equipped to help you with your needs. There are two of us full time on the program to support you. But, you must help yourself first. 18 We’re expecting about 100 new partners to step up in the next 100 days and prove to us

17. If you are willing to put in the time to learn and use HubSpot on an ongoing basis, there will be benefits. Many of these benefits are intrinsic to our service. Like leveraging our software to serve your clients better and more efficiently, and to generate revenue from services that HubSpot’s software and training can enable you to deliver. We will ALSO reward the partners who achieve the best results for our mutual customers… with exposure to our audience, sales opportunities, and direct compensation. That said, it’s important that our priorities are aligned. Our number 1 priority is the success of our customers. Our success and we believe, your success, is derived from that. If you’re signing up to be a partner because you just want a cut of our revenue or you have your hand out for referrals or leads on day one, you shouldn’t partner with us. The partners who get referrals and other benefits from us have earned these rewards. 19

18. There seems to some very common things that marketing agencies encounter when growing their business. 20

19. Based on talking with 100s of agencies, having run a small agency of my own, my experience says that there are some very common traits and challenges that marketing agencies and freelancers share. Whether they’re web designers, seo consultants, PR or branding firms, all seem to have some similar challenges. I’m sure that all of these criteria don’t apply to every one of you. And some of you probably have licked these issues. 21

20. As a result of these things, cash flow is often uneven for many agencies. It’s difficult to hire and retain talent this way. Since it’s difficult to bring on new clients without having the staff or relationships with the right people to execute the plan, agencies are often caught in a catch-22 of growing and shrinking. 22

21. In our experience, companies that deliver inbound marketing services don’t have these challenges. 23

22. Offering Inbound marketing services enables agencies to overcome many of these challenges. Instead of selling to the marketing manager, IM agencies sell to owners and ceo’s and even sales VPs. Instead of project or campaign based revenue, IM agencies generate retainer revenue. Instead of an expenses, online lead generation is seen as an investment. Instead of short term contracts, companies sign up for year long engagements and they renew, enabling agencies to generate recurring revenue. With HubSpot, we plan to share a margin, enabling agencies to build some passive income. Instead of always prospecting, inbound agencies generate more referrals and inbound leads. 24

23. Paul Roetzer recently shared some insights with us about how these changes have enabled him to grow his business. 25

24. IM drives company growth CFOs will demand that you be retained. Since performance can always be improved, you will always have a role. When you truly deliver value that’s measured in revenue generated, you are irreplaceable. 26

25. When an agency generates recurring revenue from each client, this is what their growth rate looks like. Companies increase their budgets and rarely cancel. 27

26. At HubSpot, we plan to provide guidance so services providers can transition to inbound marketing services. 28

27. Here is what a typical starting engagement looks like for inbound marketing services. Mid sized companies are investing $2500/month to starth. Smaller companies are typically spending a little less. We have some customers who are paying our partners $5- 10k/month. 29

28. In order to really generate these kinds of retainers, partners must create packages and proposals. We’ll be supplying you with some sample material from proposals that we’ve developed based on best practices. Also… We’re happy to co-market inbound marketing services packages that leverage our software. You just have to create them and publish them. 30

29. Talk through the points. 31

30. Educating your client is job #1. Their business goals determine your action plan. It’s almost impossible to completely outsource inbound marketing, as it requires ongoing content creation and social media participation. To be authentic, the client must be involved. You should coach them, but they’ll have deliverables too. And the biggest thing is that you must start selling the value of these services based on the value that is important to your clients and prospects. 32

31. The value of inbound marketing is the leads and sales that it generates for your clients. Of course, making their lives easier helps too. But, we suggest you start by helping them set goals that the CEO, VP sales and CFO will be happy about. CMOs, marketing managers are heros when those guys or gals are happy. For smaller companies, small business owners care most about their top line too. Start selling the value of this to generate an ROI. 33

32. We’re here to help you. Our software makes a lot of this stuff easier. Our training gives you best practices to follow. 34

33. Learn how HubSpot can help you develop a solid set of inbound marketing services, deliver them to your clients, and grow your services revenue. By starting a free trial, devouring our customer only training material. Once you’ve mastered that by doing it on an ongoing basis for yourself or a client or two, take the exam and start marketing and selling these services. 35

34. Your trial gives you access to the methodology located at success.hubspot.com 36

35. You’re invited to start trials for yourself. Please do not advertise the availability of these trials. Typically, we offer only a 7 day trial. 37

36. We’ll be putting on several virtual workshops in the coming weeks. Once you start you start your trial, you’ll receive invitations to these workshops. We’ll talk about how deliver ongoing seo, ppc, blogging, social media and lead generation services. We’ll help you devise a really compelling small business package that includes website and internet marketing management functionality. 38

37. Once you get started, you’ll begin to see the benefits of HubSpot’s software first hand. We’re also going to walk you through it at high level. This certainly isn’t an exhaustive review. I’m still learning about capabilities of our software after being here for a year. And our development team rolls out new functionality on a monthly basis. 39

38. We all know that there are lots of tools that you can pull together to try and deliver a full set of inbound marketing services. Everyone knows about wordpress for blogging; drupal and joomla for content management systems. Most good SEO consultants use atleast 5 different keyword research, link detection and rank checking tools. Google analytics, etc. But, HubSpot pulls the functionality of all of these pieces of software into one interface. If you haven’t used HubSpot, you won’t understand the value of that. But, customers report that it gives them ridiculous efficiency gains. It also enables them to quickly discover insights that they wouldn’t have detected before and do things that would have been very time consuming. For example, we recently launched a feature where blog posts are automatically posted to your twitter and facebook accounts. On the surface this seemed really obvious and simple to me. It’s also something I do using some free tools. But, this morning I realized that everytime our system posts our blog post to my facebook account for me, our analytics tracks the visits, leads and sales generated as a result of that tweet! To do this manually would be ridiculously time consuming. And now we can quickly determine which HubSpot employees, blog topcis and social networks give us the best ROI. 40

39. Has little time to do anything because she’s busy doing trade shows, direct mail, managing the pr agency, the seo agency, a new graphical website redesign and 3 interns. 41

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43. Historically, SEO consultants used 3-5 different services/tools to do what HubSpot’s keyword tools do. HubSpot’s keyword grader pulls the functionality of all of those tools into one interface, so you can focus more on creating content and less on analyzing data. 45

44. Link grader helps you determine which inbound links are supporting SEO, as well as lead generation. It also detects and identifies the best links that your client’s competitors have, so you can get them. 46

45. Since every page is an opportunity to rank for a given keyword, page grader helps you analyze each page. Instead of creating spreadsheets, Page grader helps you identify the best keyword for that page, what links to improve to improve rankings and a lot of other stuff that you’ll know how to change in order to increase organic traffic. 47

46. Historically, SEO consultants used 3-5 different services/tools to do what HubSpot’s SEO tools do. 48

47. The blogging software is integrated with the SEO tools to enforce the use of the right keywords in articles. 49

48. Blog analytics helps you determine which blog posts are the most successful at generating links, comments and engaging your visitors. This helps you instruct your clients what content they should produce more of, what blog posts they should promote more. 50

49. The social media monitoring tools help you identify places to engage your client’s prospects. The social media publishing tools make it automatic for you to publish your client’s blog posts to the social media sites. 51

50. The reach analytics tools help you measure the reach that you’re helping your client generate in the social mediashphere, blog and through lead generation. 52

51. For SMBs that have fairly simple website development needs, the CMS is a great solution, as it includes all of the functionality they need to do seo, blog and capture leads. 53

52. The landing page wizard helps your non-technical staff create landing pages on the fly. 54

53. Then measure the conversion rates, so you can improve offers, landing pages and send more traffic to the ones that convert visitors to leads. 55

54. Lead intelligence helps you arm your client’s salespeople with information to inform their first sales call and time follow up calls. This information helps salespeople focus on the leads that are most engaged with your site. It shows the pages they view, how often and when they visit. 56

55. The analytics tools help you measure campaign performance very easily for ppc, seo, blogging, email, pr, social media and whatever you use to attract more traffic to your client’s sites. 57

56. For SEO and ppc, the software helps you determine exactly what keywords produce leads and sales. 58

57. For any traffic source, you can see what generates visits, leads and sales, helping you demonstrate the ROI to your client, as well as improve it every month. 59

58. So, assuming you see the value of the software, we’d like you to become a partner. We’d like to give you some additional benefits when you do the right things for our mutual customers. 60

59. We will be launching a directory of inbound marketing services providers soon. Anyone will be allowed to join. Your “inbound marketing agency” score will be determine by your ability to use the software effectively… to help our mutual customers increase traffic, generate leads and sales. The partners that are the best, will get the most visibility, traffic and leads. And of course, direct referrals. 61

60. Learn how HubSpot can help you develop a solid set of inbound marketing services, deliver them to your clients, and grow your services revenue. READ the list 62

61. We also plan to share margin with our partners. We’ll be sending a quarterly check to partners based on the criteria here. There’s two metrics. The number of customers you referred or are managing, and how successful those customers are. We have an internal metric that measures how successful each customer is. We plan to share that score for your clients with you. It’s determined based on what we know makes a successful customer. It measures how well the product is being utilized, how regularly they (or you) are using it and whether they’re seeing increases in visitors, leads and sales each month. We’re firm believers that our software + your services = customer success and that equals our mutual success as partners. 63

62. There are a variety of ways that you can achieve high customer scores. As this becomes important for you, we will address it more thoroughly. You can use these things as your guidelines. 64

63. It’s slightly different for Marketer and Owner customers as it should be. There is no advantage to using one product over the other. There is only an advantage if you use the right product, use it well and generate value for the customer. 65

64. We’re big believers in eating our own cooking. It’s been our pursuit to make our customers successful. It’s also been our goal to lead by example. We don’t tell customers to do anything we haven’t proven already works. We expect a similar attitude amongst our partners. We will make room at the table for you. 66

65. To get started, once again, here are your steps. Start a free trial. Or a few free trials if you think you’re ready. Take advantage of the training. Develop some offerings, sell them and do a really good job. But, please keep in mind that we can not speak with you ALL 1:1 tomorrow. Our sales team is not equipped to helo you. The partner program consists of two full time resources right now. We will certainly help you, when you need help or are confused about something. Please use the free resources we’re making available to you, to help yourself first. Thank you for your participation today. You can connect with us on Twitter. Let me know what you think and how we can help. I look forward to seeing you successfully leverage a partnership to help you grow your business. 67