The Growit Chronicles: Our Partner Summit Summary

Last week I was part of one of HubSpot's partner days in Dublin.

 It was a two-day event where all agencies with a Gold status or higher get to meet each other to network, learn, and talk about inbound and HubSpot's plans. In case you missed it, I have created this summary to describe the highlights of the event.

The event kicked off with a welcome message from HubSpot's CEO, Brian Halligan. He declared his love for the partner community and how important they all are to HubSpot's growth plans. He added some insights into some future software changes, which will open up new revenue streams for agency partners.

"You've got to match the way you market, sell and service to match how human's buy."
–Brian Halligan

Next, David McNeil, head of the Agency Partner Program, and Christian Kinnear, Managing Director of EMEA, shared their story about the progress of the Agency Partner program over the past nine years. They presented a list of initiatives that they are rolling out to improve the program over the next year, from communication to leads. It was an impressive list. I definitely look forward to hearing more about them over the coming months.

Natalie Kelly, VP of International Operations and Strategy, presented the extensive work HubSpot has done to take the product around the globe. Her commitment to localisation and languages was clear. This massive globalisation project continues to grow. Stay tuned for more developments.

After a short coffee break Chris O'Donnell revealed a whole array of new features and products that, unfortunately, none of us can share. All I can say is they were well received and, if you get to Inbound 2017 in Boston, you will hear all about them there.

Nick Jefferson from Monticello gave us his take on what it takes to run a successful agency. He called it The Magnificent Seven.

After lunch there was a choice of three different sessions to attend:

1. Selling, Pricing and Packaging Full Funnel Retainers: This session discussed something most of us come across in our own agency. We can all identify with it: You start working with a client and you are delivering great inbound marketing campaigns that are bringing in leads. Then you find out that they have no sales process to follow up with the leads. So, what do you do? You take the opportunity to introduce the client to the HubSpot CRM tool and run a workshop to help your client create a follow-up process with their leads in an Inbound way, from MQL to SQL.
   
   
2. Leveraging Freemium to Accelerate Client Acquisition & Retainer Growth: Rich Wood from Six & Flow along with Adriano Tagliarina from Trialta led this session. The way people purchase has changed; they need to see value before purchasing. Free trials, for example, are a good way to sample before investing money. Consumers are prepared to invest their time to learn if a new product will work for them. In this session, we learned how to develop selling motions for your client–a strategy hook, then a software hook. First, you plant a seed with the free HubSpot software. Then, you water the seed by providing help setting up the client (you can charge for this per hour). Then grow into a marketing starter and, finally, position a paid engagement.
   
   
3. Advanced Smarketing - Putting the Q back in MQLs: In the session by EMEA Partner Marketing Manager Eadaoin Murphy, she shared how HubSpot is using advanced Smarketing strategies to connect interested prospects with a representative to qualify themselves and then book a time straight into the calendar of the sales person. It was a very detailed session and, if you would like to learn more, there is a special webinar for Agency Partners called Inside HubSpot Marketing.

There was a lunch break after these sessions.

The Big Shift by Nicholas Holland was one of the best sessions of the two days. It discussed how online content has changed dramatically and how, as agencies, we need to think about content in clusters instead of keywords. He also presented the importance of website speed and how Google gives preference to fast websites. This lead onto all the reasons why HubSpot's COS platform is ideal for clients.

HubSpot increased organic traffic by 50% once they started clustering content by topic and optimising old blog posts.

The Next Wave of Social by Marcus Andrews and Jani Aaltonen was an insightful session about how video is an important tool you must use in your agency. Jani shared some great ideas; check them out on his YouTube Channel. The message is very clear: social media is now a lifestyle. Your agency must have a strategy around it. Marcus shared the following tips: be more complete, more visual, more mobile, more accessible, and more scientific in your strategy.

DID YOU KNOW 60% of marketers are planning to create more blog content in 2017? Are you, agency owners, helping them?

Steven Loepfe from Storylead and Ilyana Stareva presented Nailing Client Delight. They walked us through the importance of customer delight and client lifecycle mapping. The big message, which of course we are delighted to hear, is it all comes down to processes and how important they are to delight customers and keep them.

It is 25 times more expensive to acquire a new
customer than to retain a new one.

–Harvard Business Review

My favourite session, by far, was by Perry Nalevka from Penguin Strategies and Camiel Freriks from Webs. They talked about how they carefully selected the industries they wanted to work with and how they sell to them.

All in all, the two days were packed with information for us to use in our agencies. It was a great opportunity to connect with other EMEA agency partners and share some challenges and stories of success. Next time we get together will be at Inbound 2017 in September. We received the announcement that the Monday before the event will be a dedicated Partner Day, which is great news.

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