As committed HubSpot Partners, we always want to make the most of the opportunities for ourselves and our clients. So when our CEO, James, had the opportunity to attend the LION Bootcamp in Dublin, he jumped at the chance.
Here are his thoughts on the experience...
The bootcamp, held over 2 days, was hosted by Dan Tyre and David Weinhaus. As Dan is employee number 6 at HubSpot, I knew we were in good hands.
One of the key elements of the training was how sales and marketing have changed over the last ten years - and how 'SMarketing' (a term for the two areas working together) is key to success.
Having been in business, and therefore sales, for over 17 years, I've experienced a lot of change myself. But there is something powerful about hearing it all laid out at once. At SpiderGroup, we're constantly learning and developing ourselves, so this kind of training is extremely beneficial.
One of the things that was especially interesting was "The Power of Pause". In the old days, the adage was that 'who speaks first loses', and the aim was to end with a pause so that your prospect would fill the gap and essentially talk themselves into the sale. This has now flipped on its head to the start of the call or meeting, to take control of the conversation and draw out the prospect.
From a marketing perspective, we talked about how inbound is different to outbound marketing. Interruption is out and personalisation and preparation are the key to an effective inbound strategy. Attracting leads that want what you're offering is the aim, and doing that with high quality, personalised content is the best way to engage prospective customers.
On top of the event being a fantastic learning experience, that will allow us to better service our customers as well as our own teams, it was an opportunity to meet a load of other great partners and learn from what each of us is doing.
It's amazing how much HubSpot invest in developing their partners, and we'd highly recommend taking up any training on offer - I got a huge amount out of the experience, and took back masses of insights, tactics, and techniques to share with our sales and marketing teams.
HubSpot offer a whole bunch of different training options - check out our guide to HubSpot Academy if you want to know more about their free online training. It's not quite the LION experience, but there's a tonne to learn.