HubSpot's annual Inbound conference—which it positions as a must-attend event for marketing and sales professionals in general, and not as a HubSpot user conference—is underway this week in Boston with a reported 19,000 in attendance. That's up 5,000 year-over-year, which is a dramatic uptick even considering how red-hot the inbound sales and marketing software startup has been of late.
Co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah took the keynote stage on Wednesday and over the course of 90 minutes painted their vision for the future of sales and marketing. Here's a rundown of the key highlights.
Ten Years Is A Lifetime: Halligan's section of the keynote was notable for the many quotable quotes he managed to put together. Describing how commerce has changed so much in just 10 years, he noted: "In 2006, you battled for inches on a four-foot shelf. In 2016, you battle for millimeters on the infinite shelf of the Internet.”
He repeated the 10-years-later theme when describing how today's buyers learn. In 2006, they mainly read, but today video, particularly coupled with social media, is much more prevalent, he said. Video itself has had to adapt, since prospects used to like watching longer videos but now are hooked on short ones, he added.
Halligan touched upon the big changes digital advertising has undergone as well. In 1994, the common model saw advertisers pay per website impression. Google came up with the dramatically preferable pay-per-click model in 2002, but the next big thing will be lead generation-based ads such as Facebook's Lead Ads, he said. "This is the next major shift all of your buyers are going to be using over the next couple of years.”
Death of the (Traditional) Salesperson: Returning to the 10-years-later theme, Halligan ran through some examples of how some selling techniques of old are D.O.A. today. Take cold calling. In 2006, caller ID services were already helping prospects dodge quite a few sales calls. Today, many workers don't even have phones on their desks, said Halligan, who sketched out his take on the "seven stages of cold call grief."
First there's shock that the phone is even ringing, followed by feelings of denial ("They won't leave me a voicemail, will they?"). Anger comes in third ("Who leaves a 1:47 long voicemail?"), followed by guilt over not wanting to check voicemails. The bargaining stage emerges next ("I'll just text them back"), followed at last by acceptance.
“The cold call is dead," Halligan said to applause.
Email for sales isn't a dead concept—but caveats apply: Ten years ago, you'd walk around a typical corporate office and see employees practically living in their traditional email inboxes, Halligan. Today it's becoming more common to see tools like Slack serve as the focal point for work, with email in the mix but not the primary focal point.
Halligan used data from a set of real-life purchases and traced them back to their origin points. Fairly often, he found, a successfully completed sale had begun with an email. "But it was a good email, from a rep that sent 10 of them a day, not 100," Halligan said. "What I couldn’t find is a single sale that started with one of those crappy emails we all get with no context [about who we are].”
All about those bots: Shah, who serves as HubSpot's CTO, demonstrated GrowthBot, a bot which works inside Facebook Messenger and allows users to interactively ask questions and get answers back based on information in HubSpot's back-end data repository.
Bots are going to be the next big thing for sales and marketing, said Shah. Much like companies originally built websites to help customers get information, they will now build bots, he predicted: "The shortest distance between a question a customer has and the answer they seek is going to be a bot.”
Machine learning will transform other areas in sales and marketing, such as predictive lead scoring and content recommendation, Shah said. It will also shake up traditional approaches to sales team structures, such as territories. Machines instead will get better at matching the right lead to the right salesperson, he added.
For example, perhaps one comes in from a venture capital-backed startup. Future systems would automatically know which salesperson on a team has the best track history selling to that customer profile and direct the lead accordingly. "We should have a Match.com for leads," Shah said.
POV: Some of the presentation covered fairly well-worn ground, such as Halligan's urge that attendees align sales compensation strategies with customer success, and his advocacy for recurring revenue models. But overall, the executive delivered a lucid set of messages to the sizable throng in attendance, one that went light on HubSpot product pitches and focused instead on the top trends the company sees shaping its space.
HubSpot is far from the only sales and marketing software vendor making noises about topics such as bots, better content, smarter sales and the evolution of sales. But by focusing on high-level trend analysis, the keynote avoided squandering the interest of the already well-engaged audience, many of which are entrepreneurial types on the ground floor of their relationship with HubSpot. That's some pretty good marketing right there.
Inbound 2016 continues through Friday in Boston.
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