Marketing with Mike Volpe

We have an internal wiki that we use for almost all communication and collaboration at HubSpot.  I talked about it in my Atlassian Starter Day Presentation (we use their wiki product, called Confluence).  Recently, I got a question from someone who had seen my presentation that I thought was worth sharing here on the blog.

How did you get your sales team to use the wiki?

It wasn't easy, but here are some of the ways how we got our sales team to start using our internal wiki.

1. Get sales management buy-in - We were able to get the sales managers to agree that sales should be using the wiki, and that they would help get everyone in sales to use the wiki.
2. Put lots of valuable information on the wiki - We now have all of our sales scripts, sales tips, product info, competitive info, promotion info, marketing campaign info, and basically all the useful information a sales rep might need on the wiki.
3. Email sales links to wiki pages, instead of full emails - If you update information on a competitor, email the link tot he wiki page.  The wiki is richer since it has threaded discussion and links and videos and files, it is a better place to post and discuss information, but you can use email to drive people to the wiki content.
4. Use the wiki for projects involving sales - If you have a team of people doing a cross functional project (perhaps entering a new vertical), use the wiki to document and report on that project.  If the project involves sales, then you almost force them to start using the wiki and become familiar with it.
5. Talk about the wiki in every meeting - We mention that all the resources we are discussing in meetings are on the wiki, and tell people to go to the wiki after the meeting to get the meeting notes, slides, etc.
6. Use the wiki in new hire training - All new hires need to use the wiki to document what they learn each day in training, and also to follow along with all the training class presentations.  This helps make the wiki a part of the daily lives for the newest employees.

Today, our sales team uses our wiki for all sorts of things and are very actively engaged there, as much as other groups in the company.

Have you gotten your sales team to use internal collaboration tools in your company?  How?

I found this post "The Marketing Hipster Dictionary" by Craig Rosenberg (aka The Funnelholic) and enjoyed it.  (Yes, I found it through a vanity search since he mentioned me... but Craig is a good guy, already in my RSS reader and I've done a webinar with him before.)

Craig mentions a number of concepts in this post, but one intrigued me because it hit home - "Maven Marketing".  Craig says:

"Maven marketing: I just made this phrase up too, and I'm hoping it sticks. Today's marketer does two things with mavens:  (a) Courts and/or works with mavens to create helpful buyer materials that don't necessarily ever mention their product - that's right. Mavens get more downloads than you and are TRUSTED. Today's buyer trusts two people: their peers and their mavens. Those two groups far outweigh the vendor.
(b) Creates mavens from their organization. Here's one for all those people with social media budgets. Start by creating an internal maven. Here's an example from the marketing industry: Mike Volpe (@mvolpe), VP at Hubspot, has 15,872 people who follow his every move on Twitter. They read him, respect him and re-Tweet him. That's hipster marketing."

What I find interesting is that is isn't just me at HubSpot that we use as a maven to build community.  That would not be scalable, and would not be a smart way to build the company.  We're developing lots of people in the company as useful (not salesy) resources for the marketing community.  Some examples (and I left out a LOT):  Dan Zarrella, Kyle James, Rick Burnes, Ellie Mirman, Beth Dunn, Karen Rubin, Peter Caputa, Jeanne Hopkins, Rebecca Corliss, Prashant Kaw, Pamela Seiple, and many, many more.

What do you think?  Does your company develop mavens for your market?  Leave a comment...

I am judging a fun elevator pitch contest run by the folks at The Bridge Group.  I am helping to choose the winner from the 4 finalists.  (I have already sent in my votes, but they are secret for now.)

What do you think?  Who should be ranked #1 to #4?  WHY? (leave a comment below)

I enjoy a lot of the content on public radio and public TV.  But, everywhere I have lived  - Massachusetts, California, Maine - both public TV and public radio spend a lot of time on air with their fund raising drives, basically interrupting all the great programming I love in favor of advertising for themselves until they meet their donation goals.  It's pretty annoying.

I was thinking that maybe we could help them do less interruption based advertising and use more inbound marketing to generate the donation revenue they need.

So, any ideas?  Leave a comment below!

Here are some of mine to start:

1. Membership. Offer online memberships that include copies of shows in online archives or DVDs, and the ability to connect with the stars of your favorite shows in chats and other means.
2. Fashion.  Sell some sort of "honor badge" that people would want to display to seem cool for having supported public broadcasting - maybe a bumper sticker, laptop sticker, pin or something.  Run a campaign showing celebrities wearing these pins - maybe it could become like the Lance Armstrong yellow bracelet and millions of people would want to buy it.
3. Training.  There is a lot of demand for media production skills, since inbound marketing and using the Internet requires a lot of publishing skills.  Maybe they could leverage their expertise and offer classes (online or in person) on how to produce a good TV, radio or print story and charge for that.
4. Collector's items.  Maybe you could take items used in the shows and auction them on eBay, like autographed shirts or even the chairs people sit in, etc.
5. Custom news.  Maybe you could figure out a way to record a 10 minute news segment to be posted online each day, but it would feature on person (who paid a bunch of money) in the news cast somehow.

Every Saturday, my wife and I start our day by going to the gym.  I don't workout as often as I should (who does?) but this routine is valuable.  I know what I am doing every Saturday morning, I never make other plans.  The result? My success rate on working out on Saturday is 99% over the last 6 months.

To make inbound marketing work, you also need a routine.  Think about setting a schedule for your self to spend some time each day, and I bet the benefits will pay off a lot over time.

Inbound marketing in 10 hours a week:

• 15 minutes per day to spend on reviewing analytics and reports 
• 45 minutes each day to write a blog article
• 30 minutes each day to read other blogs and news in your industry 
• 30 minutes each day to converse with people and make new friends in social media

I promise you'll get a lot more out of your inbound marketing routine than Patrick Bateman gets out of his. (The clip is from American Psycho for those of you who do not recognize it.  One of my cult favorites.  Shout out to Mike Miller in case he is reading this.)

Do you have a routine?  Does an inbound marketing routine make sense to you?

Marketing has always been about experimentation.  The old methods get crowded because lots of people are lazy and like to copy rather than innovate.  You need to find new marketing methods.

So I am trying something new this month for this blog.  I am going to write something everyday for the month of February.  A lot of the articles will be short.  Some might not make sense.  But if Seth Godin can write short articles and be a huge success, maybe I can write short articles and be a little success.

I'll report back at the end of the month about how this has or hasn't changed the stats of this blog.  For now, I'll share that I get about 1,000 visitors per month, and January was 1,300 visitors (I had a minor success on Reddit that drove a couple hundred visitors).  About 1/3 of my traffic comes from SEO with Google and another 1/3 from Twitter.  I only have about 90 regular subscribers to this blog (so you are really special if you're reading this).

Let me know over time if you like the content and frequency or not.

I did a short interview with Matthew Mamet from Permission TV at the last WebInno event.  We chatted about some of the things to think about when using video for marketing.

We use a lot of video in our marketing at HubSpot:

• Lots of marketing webinars
• A live weekly marketing video podcast 
• An iTunes channelwith archived HubSpot TV and our webinars
• Viral videos on YouTube
• Our blog features video interviews
• We also have product demo videos on our website

In the video we talk a bit about how to think about using video in marketing.

UPDATE: For anyone having trouble with the video, here is a link to another version you can try.

I had a chance to speak with Dan Schawbel today for an interview on his blog.  Read the full article "Build Your Company's Brand and Your Brand Will Reap the Rewards."  Some quotes that Dan made me think of because of his good questions:

• When it comes to branding your company as a “cool place to work”, I think it starts with authenticity. We really do think we’re a cool place to work, and we all like working here. If that is true, the next step is just sharing and publishing.
• I think most blogs fail for two reasons. First, I think most companies write blog articles that they want people to read, but it’s not what people actually want to read.  Second, most companies will start a blog for about 3 months and then stop because “it’s not working”, when it can take a while for the bigger effects to kick in.
• Not everything works, so with inbound marketing you just experiment a lot, learn from your failures and keep working hard. 
• I think companies should rethink every aspect of their marketing and ask why they are paying for advertising and could they build their own channel instead.

• If you're doing your job right, as an inbound marketer, you'll end up building a personal brand naturally as part of promoting your company.

Read the full article "Build Your Company's Brand and Your Brand Will Reap the Rewards"

Photo credit: mharrsch

I had a chance to chat with Sean Daily about inbound marketing.  We talked a lot about the ways marketing has changed, what inbound marketing is, how to use social media and SEO as part of inbound marketing, and some marketing tips for startup companies.

Take a listen to the interview about inbound marketing - if you like it, subscribe to the show in iTunes.  It's pretty good.

If you're looking for other podcast content, you can subscribe to HubSpot TV in iTunes as well - we broadcast live at www.HubSpot.tv every Friday at 4pm EST, but we also load the archives into iTunes along with some other content - webinars, videos and more.

This morning I attended a breakfast meeting for the marketing VPs at the portfolio companies of General Catalyst (they led the HubSpot A round investment).  The major topic of discussion was what was on our minds.  The GC folks were trying to get a feeling for what speakers and panels would be good to include in a marketing event aimed at helping their portfolio companies.

The general consensus around the table was the following top topics:

• Getting more with less - What are best practices on using viral marketing and internet marketing to generate more inbound leads at a low cost?
• Getting more out of your database - How can you use lead nurturing and other practices to convert more leads into opportunities?
• Finding good vendors - How can you easily get honest reviews and pricing information on services companies for web design, PR, advertising agencies, etc.?
• Product management for web 2.0 and Saas - How do you find good people and what are the best practices for product management for software as a service and web 2.0 products?

What's on your mind?  Leave a comment below.