HubSpot Flywheel: engage phase ... is building trust crap?

It's INBOUND week, y'all, and as you may remember from last week's episode, your HubHeroes crew are beyond excited for what's to come over the next few days. But for today's episode, we want to take you on a trip down memory lane to INBOUND 2018, when HubSpot rocked everyone's world with the introduction to the Flywheel:

Image Credit: HubSpot

For those of you who were in the HubSpot world at the time, you know what a shake up this was, as it was a radical departure from the traditional ATTRACT > CONVERT > CLOSE > DELIGHT FUNNEL model we had clung to as the cornerstone of the inbound marketing methodology for years.

However, to this day, this incredible innovation in the inbound space is still mystifying some. So, we're breaking it all down for you in this episode with a deep-dive into the Flywheel – specifically the engage stage – as well as what it really means to build trust as a business ... or is the idea of that crap?

WE ALSO TALK ABOUT ... 

• What inbound is today – no longer a marketing strategy, but an overall growth strategy for a business.
• What the engagement phase really is, and why it's the necessary pivot toward a more human approach in your business strategy.
• Unpacking the mythologized romanticism that's been built up around the concept of creating and earning trust as a business with prospects and customers.
• Devyn also lights it up with this gem: "Be prepared to nuke your whole system. That is usually my default (when giving advice) advice." BOOM!

Are you ready to dig in? Let's do this! 

RESOURCES FOR THIS EPISODE

Some of these we talked about, others we're adding because they're only going to make the episode that much sweeter for you ... 

• What is growth strategy? with Troy Sandidge (HubHeroes, Ep. 6)
• INBOUND 2022 prep, a trip down memory lane, and a pop quiz (HubHeroes, Ep. 5)
• Attraction: What makes great content? (HubHeroes, Ep. 2)
• Join The HubHeroes Podcast community!
• Wait, what the heck is The HubHeroes Podcast?!

YOUR ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE

I don't care if you write this down on a post-it note, print it out and make it a poster, or scrawl it across your mirror in lipstick. My man, Devyn, laid down an incredibly powerful truth in this episode, and if you remember nothing else, you can't forget it:

"What you should do is focus on being a good human being and just helping. And if you do that well, and you're good at problem-solving, then you're gonna make money."

Being a helpful human, that's what this is all about.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Speaker 1: Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by silo departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge.

Never fear hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub heroes, it's time to unite and activate your your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that both Devin and Max are currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording.

This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer.

Speaker 2: Yep. Yep. Yep. I love that intro. It doesn't matter how many times I listen to it.

I'm like, yeah. I need to dance or fist pump or whatever. But today, I'm super excited, gentlemen, because we are going to dive back into this thing that is really the flywheel that is the inbound We started a couple weeks ago where we talked about attract, what the hell is good content anyway. We deviated a little bit because inbound, which by the way is days away, not weeks away. My goodness.

I can't wait. And then we had last week our special first cohost, host, whatever you call them, Troy Sandidge. And man, talk about just a a massively valuable gross strategy conversation. Devin was dropping bombs and mics through the episode. Troy was killing it.

I was just along for the ride. I was like, buckle up, giddy up. Let's go. Now today, though, we're gonna talk about engage phase. It's building trust bullcrap.

Again, I always love when we start these out because I don't know where this is gonna go. But I do wanna have a little history lesson because if you're listening to this, which you are, because you hear my voice. Let's just get that out of the way. You're listening to this. If you have joined inbound and HubSpot in the last 4 to maybe even 5 years, there is no history to what it used to be like versus what it's like.

Meaning, if you came for the ride and it was initially the flywheel, and it was attract, engage, delight, that's all you know. You don't have the historical seasoning of what the inbound methodology or the buyer's journey used to be. Because here's the thing, what I want people to to realize, if you look at the flywheel and I've never heard anybody talk about this, there was a dramatic change. Because inbound 2012, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, whatever, it was this 4 step thing where it was attract, it was convert, it was close, and it was delight. And all of a sudden, through the magic of an inbound stage and a big huge flywheel and Brian Halligan, we went from 4 things to 3 things, and nobody explained how the 4 became 3 and what the frick that meant for marketing, sales, or other folks.

And so today, as we think about and talk about funnel versus flywheel, friction versus force, historical inbound versus the you know, what we're doing now, we have to have a little bit of a conversation of how attract, convert, close, and delight morphed into attract, engage, delight. And so what does that mean for the convert close that is now the engage for your sales, marketing, and service teams? Anyway, that's our history lesson. Gentlemen, when I bring that up, there was nodding of heads. Where does your brain go?

What are your thoughts?

Speaker 3: The thing with engage, I personally like it a lot more because it's more I guess you could say it's more holistic as far as your approach. It's not like you're thinking going into it. It's like, convert. I won. Or, yeah.

Now I'm gonna sell them to close. That's a bit too dialed in, too drilled in into task and not about the buyer itself and the buyer's journey. That's that's just where my head's at. I have, strong feelings and opinions on engage. All positive, though.

All positive.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I agree with you. I'm much better, like, the idea of engage, especially when we start to think about the idea of the inbound strategy being like an all encompassing business growth strategy versus just a marketing methodology. I think, like, when we talk about convert close, it very much kind of sits it very specifically within the realm of sales and marketing, and and service has, like, almost nothing to do about it until you get to the light at the end. And it puts, like, too much of an emphasis.

I think the other thing too, like, when you really think about it, all parts of a business can attract, engage, and delight in their own ways. Service teams can attract in certain ways. You know, marketing teams can delight. You know, like, there's sales teams can delight. There's everyone can kinda do everything.

So it's cool because it kinda takes that framework and it it makes it a little bit more flexible for all areas of the business to kind of have a hand in and think about how they're applying momentum, not just in their specific area, but how they can apply it all around this sort of growth cycle. Yeah. And I just like how it makes it a little bit more flexible because, again, all businesses are very different. Not everyone has the same exact sort of tightly defined definition of converting and closing somebody. When you open it up a little bit more and make it kind of like a sturdier framework that can apply to more businesses, I think it makes the utility a little bit better there.

Speaker 2: I love that we are actually very all aligned on this, because I too am not complaining about the change. But I think you have to mentally have history in your brain so that you can understand what the future is to bring when you start to talk about this flywheel, this inbound methodology. And I love engage for two reasons. 1, it is very much more a human term that you can wrap your brain around, I'm supposed to engage. And to what you said, Max, the second thing, it becomes now a very holistic business holistic thing where it doesn't matter if you're the janitor, if you're the support rep, if you're the chief marketing officer, if you're the business owner, it all still comes down to in your job, in what you're in charge of, you are in that kind of engage phase.

Now so the listeners know, if you haven't listened to the attract episode, go back, do that. That will be in the links in the show notes. Also know that moving forward, because I tried to count, Max, but I lost count the amount of times you said delight in your last segment. We are gonna have an episode that is about delight. That's gonna be coming up next.

Delight, happy customers, happy life. We all know that's probably true if we can make that happen. But I have found that there is this interesting question that I've started probably 57% of the episodes with that I felt like, you know what? That's what I'm gonna start with again. And because both of you have been historical trainers, I wanna know when all of a sudden, Engage showed up on the scene and convert and close were like, poof, you're out of here, brothers.

Fired. When engage came on the scene, how did you start? And even now, how do you teach people or explain, engage across sales, marketing, or just general business?

Speaker 4: When that change happened, you know, a big thing I always try to do as a as a trainer is try to take something that was, like, a little more abstract, which, let's be honest, the flywheel is sort of an abstract idea. Right? Because you can define a lot of those stages very differently depending on how your business works. I tried to take that and make it, like, very literal. So it's super easy to kinda understand.

So when I think of the engage phase, you can look at this in a couple different ways, I think, because I think it's kinda good that they got rid of the idea of convert being its own stage. Because in this new sort of age of inbound where you know what? Maybe we're not gating all of our content. I know we're gonna do a whole episode on that in the future. Maybe we're not trying to get people's email addresses off every ebook and thing that we do.

Like, maybe we're making a lot of that stuff sort of free and open. The divide or the gap or the transition between attract stage and engage stage kinda blend a little bit. If we were looking at more of the traditional sense, however, where you're gating your content to capture someone's information. For me, that's kind of where the classic way that we look at engage, like, starts. You attract folks by putting content out there that people are looking for.

They read enough of it to trust you enough to give you their information. So this crucial engaged phase, like, starts when they literally give you a way to get in touch with them. They give you their email address. Maybe they follow you on social media. Whatever.

In the classical sense, we're kinda saying you've captured their email and maybe some information about them. So the question now is, like, how do you get them to a point where they're ready to talk to a salesperson? We also gotta think about the sales process too because the stage after engage is delight. So at that point, we're kind of assuming not all the time because again, I think you could translate the flywheel in a lot of different ways. But if we were to give it a little bit of rigidity, we would say, you probably start delighting someone after they've become a customer, which means the sales process also happens in the engage phase, at least the first one or the first time someone becomes a customer.

So if you need a very rigid way of looking at it, the way that admit that I tried to make it make sense to me and anyone I kinda like taught the concept to, is a rough way that you can look at it. Is it starts when you get their email. Halfway through, you get them to a point where, hopefully, they wanna raise their hand to talk to a salesperson. And then the second half of that engage phase is the sales process. And they leave that engage phase and move into the delight phase once they become a customer.

If I had to give it a very rigid prescription, that's what it would be. However, don't all have to live by those definite it can kind of blend a little bit more. All parts of the businesses can engage in different ways. But, like, that's kinda how I made it make sense to myself. And whenever I was explaining the flywheels like a new concept to someone, that's kind of their rigid frame I sort of gave it so they could kinda understand quite literally what's happening when it starts, as you're going through it, and when it ends.

Speaker 3: For me with engage, when it came, it really, for me, shifted my mindset in operations and allowed me to be more fluid in how I operate. Like, when I when I teach people, I basically teach people how I personally operate and then do my best to make sure that how I operate aligns with basically how Academy has taught me. But, when I'm thinking of engage first thing, engage does not mean sell. Engage doesn't even mean talk to them. Let's just get that straight out the gate.

Engage means what do you do when you have their intention? That can be something as simple as tailoring the messaging that they're already receiving. If you have a cookie on their machine, that can be something as simple as using smart content, HubSpot CMS, to segment how they see things and what they see. And it's basically starting a conversation when it's not even, you know, clear that you have started a 1 on 1 relationship as far as information's concerned, and these are all things that can be automated, which is fantastic. The second part is that when you do get involved and start engaging, it's that you are being very intentional with meeting them where they're at, not with where you want them to be.

One of my favorite things that I love talking to people about is that, like, when you're engaging them, find out where they are in their own journey. Don't just come out like, hey. I got a demo. Let me feature drop on you, and look. It's this thing.

No. That's that's not engaging correctly. When someone is and I always bring this up, because it's always going to irk me. If someone is in my LinkedIn and the very first thing they send me is, hey, look at all the things I do. You should talk.

Can I get time on your calendar? And it's like, I'm gonna block you. That is how you don't engage with someone. Also, just as a side note, if anyone has gotten this or if the person who does this is listening, don't try and send me images that you say your 5 year old made because I know they didn't. That I'm I'm I'm not stupid.

Stop insulting my intelligence. Your your child did not do this. It it looked like an adult who was just really bad at Canva. Finally, engage can just be as simple as having a conversation. It's, like, just as simple as that.

Like, there's this one person who sent me a LinkedIn message and said, hey. How are things going in your neck of the woods or your side of the pond or something along those lines? And I almost answered. Then I looked at their profile, and then it's like, you're trying to sell me something. That was good.

I wish they had been, like, a little bit more authentic in the interaction or at least as a BDR gone through someone else or done something that made me feel like more than just some prospect or a number they're trying to hit. Taking all the way back to the engage raise versus a convert and close, I think Max put it beautifully. It's a spectrum. They blend together. You can go from attract into what would have been traditionally convert into what would have been traditionally closed.

You can do all that step by step as it pertains to your business and culture using the engage face.

Speaker 2: See, I love so much about what you both have been talking about, and and I wanna spin back around here in a hot second, Devin, because even the picture that you were painting, when we think about engage engaging as a good human or engaging as a maybe not so good human. At least you might be a good human in real life, but your marketing, your sales, your business tactics are allowing you to lean out of what should be happening on that good human portion. And I wanna circle back around here in a minute to the idea of setting goals for what would be successful successful customer engagement. And I am using the word customer because one of the things I wish more companies would do is just treat their prospects like customers. There's this mental thing that happens that a customer is of value, and a prospect is just somebody that I'm trying to cram through a historical funnel or throw onto my Whirleyboro flywheel.

And if we would just have this idea of, nope, they're all customers. I'm gonna treat them like their customer. All humans have value. I do wanna circle back to this setting goals of what the successful customer engagement or successful engagement look like. But the other piece of this is, Max, and you talked about this, if I had to create a rigid explanation of said engagement phase.

This is how I would tell you that. The first time when it was inbound and Brian was standing on stage and he spun the flywheel.

Speaker 4: What a moment.

Speaker 2: The thing to me that was fascinating that I don't know if everybody paid attention to is if you watch the flywheel, it was blurry. Now I want you to think when you're a kid, you had the pinwheel. The wind would blow, you could hit it, you spin. Red and silver and purple turned into, like, almost a solid color, And so for us to give a flywheel a rigid set of rules is kind of weird. Yeah.

And I almost wish there was a way, not in a funnel way, but a way that we could flatten out the flywheel for a hot minute and realize, gosh dang it. We're gonna be engaging during awareness. We're gonna be engaging during consideration. We're gonna be like, all the historical four steps that we talked about, we're gonna be engaging in delight. All of those.

And if we even come down to the flywheel, we're gonna be engaging in attract. We're gonna engage and engage, and we're gonna engage in delight. So it becomes this like blurry map, which by the way, I can delight people the first time I meet them. It is a possibility. I don't have to have 37 actions to delight you.

You could watch one video and be like, that dude is dope. You're delighted.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 2: And so I want people to think about this flywheel as it does get blurry. It does overlap. It probably shouldn't be rigid. And again, we go back to that blurry, but in a beautiful way, holistic, all teams, and focused on it's where, like Devin said, where are they at? Let me do what they need there.

Speaker 4: I think what you're talking about is a really good example of it's not marketing's job to attract, it's not sales jobs to engage, it's not services job to delight. Everyone can do it. I'll use me as an example. I work in sales yet I do a lot of attracting by creating a lot of content as a salesperson. I engage people by having conversations on LinkedIn, working with customers throughout the sales process, supporting my sales reps so they can have meaningful conversations with people.

And I delight folks by ensuring they're buying for the right reasons. They understand the different avenues for support and help they can get in the future, checking in with folks, and even talking and engaging with customers already out there in the community and making this a good but everyone can touch every single piece of it. If you're a marketer, it's not like you stop sending educational content to folks once they become a customer. You're doing all this stuff. We're creating video and blog content and doing all your search engine optimization stuff to attract people so you can talk to them in the first place.

But then as you're nurturing them with continuous educational content that's relevant to them, you're doing a great job at engaging with them. You're giving them avenues to raise their hand at the right time to talk to sales when they need to, continuing that engage motion. And then after they become customers, look at HubSpot Academy. That is part of the marketing team. We are helping There there's one thing I wanted to circle on what Devon was saying about, like, where engaged kinda started, and it's not necessarily just, like, when you capture their information.

I think as folks continue to have the conversation around demand gen versus lead gen, it's not so much I I think it can it sure. It can start when you capture their l, or maybe you're a gate everything and really do the the super traditional way we understand it, or you're something in the middle, really doesn't matter. It could be that it starts when you capture their information or when you capture their attention. And you haven't really captured their attention if you haven't really put the work in in the attract phase anyway. The methods I think in which you go about engaging if we capture their email, great.

We'll use email as a tool. We'll do it the right way. We'll use their information, not abuse it. But engaging when we're not capturing emails at the top of the funnel and we're more so working on capturing attention that has everything to do with community building and engaging through through social and the dark social stuff that a lot of people are talking about and video content and and, you know, more experimental stuff too as well. Today, you don't have to capture the email to engage.

You can. You don't have to capture their attention.

Speaker 2: Now, Max, you get a ding ding ding on this episode. I literally went to our notes section and I added demand gen versus lead gen because that has to be a conversation that we have on a future episode. And, Devin, before I kick us off into a new direction where we start to talk about successful engagement goals, that type of thing, is there anything that you wanna unpack out of your brain on on what we've said in the last couple sections?

Speaker 3: As usual, on point and aligned, we definitely need to find something that we disagree on at some point. But right now, now we're we're all basically saying the same thing. Engagement isn't just about trying to sell, and it's like the job isn't done once you capture the email address. And the job doesn't just start when you capture the email address. It as with almost every part, like Max said, you can attract no matter where you are in the organization.

You can engage no matter where you are in the organization. And you can not only delight no matter where you are in organization, but you can delight at any point during the buyer's journey. Your goal should be to delight at any point in the buyer's journey. The engage phase is important because at the end of the day, every goal in your interaction should be solving for the customer. And Yeah.

Even if you don't close them, ideally, you want them to pay you to solve their pain point. If the information that you're giving them or the conversation that you're having isn't getting them closer to the goal that they need to accomplish, you're doing it wrong. That's the mindset you should have and engage, which I guess leads us into our successful goals.

Speaker 2: And we'll get to the successful goals here in one second because I do wanna take a little bit of break. Again, because the title of this episode was engaged phase is building trust bullcrap. You can't listen to a sales or marketing podcast. You can't read a sales or marketing blog article. You can't really turn around left to right without being and the keyword is trust.

Well, okay. Is it? Like, we'll talk about goals and trust and if that's crap. But I'll tell you, there's a couple people that I wanna mention because, obviously, they're starting to trust us. See what I did there, ladies and gentlemen?

Oh. 1 is JR Tuttle. And what I'm talking about is there are people who are starting out of the Hub Heroes community to let us know what they think of the podcast. They're leaving raving just amazing reviews on their favorite podcast app. So JR Tuttle, thank you very much, sir.

He says these 3 are bringing some really high level insights with each episode. They're all veteran HubSpot pros that know their stuff. Oh, man. We could stop right there, but it goes on. You can read it if you go over to the app.

Also, Mike Alton, I wanna thank you, brother, for your kind words. This is terrific, by the way. There's an exclamation mark after that. So it was great. This is terrific.

I'm so excited for this show. George is a tremendous host and is clear the entire crew. Yes. That's right. Max and Devon are amazing too.

Amazing wealth of HubSpot knowledge that I can't wait to learn from. And so ladies and gentlemen, if you are enjoying the show that we are putting, the Hub Heroes podcast, please let us know on your favorite podcast app. And, of course, we'll give you a shout out on the show like we did JR and Mike. Now let's get back to the conversation of setting or goals or just this idea of successful engagement. When you think of digital marketing, inbound marketing, content marketing, inbound sales, ABM, all the words that we could throw at it, What does successful engagement look like?

And why? My god. Why is it so important?

Speaker 4: Uh-huh. I feel like we're I feel like we're about to get into the the very controversial MQL discussion. I mean, like, I I feel like this is especially since I've been getting into, like, the the b to b content creation space, where kind of a lot of the b to b marketers and the b to b sales people are kinda clashing together is this whole controversy and conversation around marketing is just making MQLs. And that's, like, the thing they're hanging their hat on. And the problem is is everyone's defining MQLs differently.

But also, you kinda have to because everyone's process is different. Whether an MQL is for one business is gonna be totally different for another. But I I do think you're probably seeing a lot of folks saying, if I'm a marketer and I capture the information and I send it over to the sales team, my job is done. And it's like, no. It's not.

And I think that's where you're seeing a lot of friction and controversy around that acronym, marketing qualified lead. And, you know, that's probably gonna happen. Because again, it it's just it's defined so differently. But we should maybe try to broach that subject, I guess, of or or I'm wondering if it's even, like, fruitful, because again, everyone's gonna have a different definition. But I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna show for a second.

No. No. No. No. Trust me.

Yeah.

Speaker 2: Trust me. It'll it'll be direction

Speaker 4: you wanted to go, but I know we we we were gonna land there eventually. Right?

Speaker 2: Well, here here here's the thing. In my life, I never really planned to arrive anywhere. It just ends up taking us there. This is the life that I live. So, Devin, Max brought up MQLs.

I really am curious as the historical sales dude on the show, you know, your your brain power and thought because trust me trust me, ladies and gentlemen. Oh my god. Do I have thoughts on this? But, Devin, as the sales guy, what are your thoughts when it comes to this life cycle stage, MQL, SQL bullcrap battle that we typically end up in?

Speaker 3: I think that they're highly necessary for scalability, for 1. For 2, it becomes a moot point if you have an SLA in place. If you have an SLA, then you have clearly defined marketing qualified leads, and what they attributes they need to possess in order to become a sales qualified lead. The other reason why they're important to me is because the life cycle stage is not a one way street. The thing is is that people are going to be buy ready and then no longer be buy ready due to circumstances beyond their control.

And you need to have some way of segmenting them that lets marketing know that they need to be, put basically back in the machine and work with some more. They're they're not ready to come out the oven. The thing is is that if your organization is set up correctly where there's sales and marketing alignment, then yes, it needs to happen. If you're in a small organization where you're not getting very many leads, and so, basically, you're gonna try and squeeze the water out of whatever rock rolls into your yard, then, hey, go for it. Feel free to funnel the form right to the sales team.

Good on you. I personally recommend investing a little bit more in your conversion path development process, but that's just me. The thing is is that if you are putting your value in your specific phase of the pipeline. My job is to generate MQLs. All I can say is I hope to god that you have a manager who sees the bigger picture.

I really hope that you have somebody who is looking over the entire pipeline and is saying, okay. This conversion path is set up, but this conversion point is struggling, and it's anemic. And so then we need to change the definition of what is a MQL versus an SQL versus just a lead that has no business wasting people hours on. That's just my take on it. It's not for everyone because they don't have the foundation and the fundamentals in place to do it correctly.

Speaker 2: I fully understand the next words out of my mouth are either going to open up a hornet's nest of hate mail, or I'm gonna have a 1,000 tulips or rose petals at my feet. I'm not sure which one, but ladies and gentlemen, George atgeorgebthomas.com, feel free. Here's the thing. For all of you marketers out there that thought when Max and Devon were talking about this of like, yeah. Yeah.

My job is done. I made MQLs. My gosh. I don't know whoever put it in the world that your job was based on an individual property inside of a SaaS software. Because that's what life cycle stages is.

Life cycle stages is a property inside of a SaaS software that is oh, here we go. Hang on. Hang on. This is what people do. Oh, well, the life cycle stage is the vertebrae of my marketing process.

Yet on the other side of the room, you've got a sales team. Oh, life cycle stage is the vertebrae of my sales process. No. No. No.

It's the vertebrae of your business process. The vertebrae of your business process is what I'm gonna tell you. And here's the thing. It's a property with options you can pick, which means you should do list segmentation. And based on that, what it is all about ladies and gentlemen is understanding where they are so you can automate the right communication at the right time to the right people based on the vertebrae of your business.

Not that you did a good job because as a human, you should be engaging as we said in awareness, in engagement, in delight. In other words, we should always be talking and creating relationship with humans so that we can sell them or help them with the products and services that we provide. Let the hate mail or love mail begin. I'll step off my podium.

Speaker 4: Being a implementation specialist and training people, this was always the funnest part because as soon as we got the idea of the flywheel down or the inbound methodology down, then we got the idea of the buyer's journey down, and then came along this fun little thing called life cycle stages inside of HubSpot. And then it was just like, oh, we gotta do to have this conversation now. And it's a tough one because for the longest time up until very recently, inside of the HubSpot tool, you have 8 life cycle stages, Subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, opportunity, customer and evangelist and other. Can't believe I remember them all but I've had to explain them that many times And you could not change them. You can now, which is a little known fun fact.

You can actually customize those which is super cool. But since they had such sort of rig rigidity, if you will, in the way that they were set up. I feel like I had to do not a lot of mental gymnastics, but I had to come up with a way that I thought it made sense, you know, whereas, like, pretty easy. Right? Subscriber.

Someone subscribed to your blog, that's it. Awesome. A lead. Someone filled out any form. Great.

MQL, SQL. There's nothing automatically that moves them because everyone defines them differently. So a lot of the times I had to, like, tell people, hey, you can kinda define marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead kinda however you want. You just gotta think about how you're using them. There's a conversation of, hey, maybe if your marketing sales team gets together, you take a look at how many MQLs either turned into SQLs because they were further qualified, or maybe you're using SQL for something completely different.

Whenever I thought about the marketing qualified lead and what that means, I feel like there has to at least be, like, a minimum. When I think marketing qualified lead, a lot of people will define these as, oh, they filled out a a landing page to get an ebook. Send them to sales, marketing qualified lead. No. Stop.

Don't do that. At a minimum, you can define marketing qualified lead. I kinda think within your own parameters, but I think at a minimum, it means someone would have had to have taken an action where they implicitly know they're about to talk to someone kind of in a sales role. If they said, request a quote or talk to sales. Like, they know what they're getting into when they fill out a form that says that.

When they say request a consultation or, you know, get a demo. They kinda know that they're starting off the sales process. The reason that's important is because as a marketer, to get someone to that point, you've done enough either directly or indirectly to get that person not to trust you with their children, but to trust you enough to take that step. You've done the work. Whether it's the content you've created, the brand you've built, the delight that's happened, and people have spread your name through word-of-mouth.

You've done something to get that person to be like, yeah. Maybe I'll take this little bit more of a serious step. That's way different than downloading an ebook. So for me, when you think how am I defining a marketing qualified lead, when there's a hand raise that's very much high intent, I know I am maybe not high intent as some people would describe it. But they know at least I trust you enough to talk to a salesperson.

I think that should be the floor of what defines a marketing qualified lead if you're using that as one of your life cycle stages because who knows? Now you can call it whatever you want. You can call it a banana. It really doesn't matter. Come up with metrics that kinda make sense, but just make sure those stages have utility.

Whether it's from a reporting standpoint or just someone looks at that stage and they understand what's going on of that you know, in that particular life cycle of that customer or potential customer. Just make sure it has utility. And to me, that's what very much separates a lead in the classical sense that we understand life cycle stages from a marketing qualified lead. So you got them to take that important step, and they wouldn't have done that if you hadn't done somewhat of a job as a a marketer in some way.

Speaker 2: Dang it, Max. Now I'm hungry for a banana. Why did you have to call it a banana?

Speaker 4: I I use that example for everything. I don't know why it's my go to fruit. So yeah. The banana.

Speaker 2: Devin, what are your thoughts on this? And, again, we can either continue to hammer out about MQLs, which by the way, don't even get me started on the conversation of MQL to SQL is like a blip on the radar screen, fractional seconds that could be actually happening. Don't get me started on lead status and how that works with life cycle stage. Anyway, those are probably whole other conversations. But if we circle back around to what does successful customer engagement or what does successful engagement look like?

Do we wanna keep hammering MQL, or is there something else that comes to your brain?

Speaker 3: My first thought is as far as what successful engagement looks like, the simplest term is to drive them towards their goal, not what you want them their goal to be. You want their goal to be to give you money. That's not their goal. You don't go out every day thinking, Who can I give money to? Who can I hand my hard earned dollar to to do a thing that I may or may not need?

That's not the way it's gonna work. Sorry. If you're good at what you do, your company is good at what it does, and you are well versed enough in what the company does to understand the problems that the company is solving, then good engagement is helping people understand problems that they may or may not be aware of, and helping them get to the goal of solving them, which is the whole reason why they were attracted to you in the first place. Good engagement is offering value and not doing the call to action to close. The idea is to get little, give a lot.

That is good engagement. Being a good human being in general means giving more than you get. And or or or more importantly, giving more than you take. And what you should do is focus on being a good human being and just helping. And if you do that well, and you're good at problem solving, then you're gonna make money.

Speaker 2: God. I love that so much. I mean, anybody who has listened to me over the last 9 years has heard me say, be a happy, helpful, humble human. I mean, come on. Be a happy, helpful, humble human.

You reap what you sow. You put good into the world. Good's gonna come back to you. Max Yeah. What are your thoughts on success here?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Okay. So I think we gotta separate there is the tools and the levers you can pull. And then there's, like, the overall strategy of, like, what are you trying to do? What are you what are you doing in the engage phase?

Try to, like, make it as general as possible so you can then take your business and and get more specific with it. I'm a firm believer that this framework can apply to almost any business. You just kinda take it and make it more specific like what you're doing. When we when we think about the tools, think about what you got at your just, you know, your disposal. Content again is always gonna be the most important piece because you can't really engage anyone if you don't have original, helpful, educational, valuable content that people actually care about.

Okay. Bar none. You're still focusing on your content here. Your delivery methods that you have, email, social media, some sort of community engagement, video, all the same stuff that you have available to you in the attract phase. You've got all these tools.

You can figure out how to use them. A lot of that's gonna be experimentation. But in terms of, like, overall, what are you trying to do in the engagement? 1, use their information. Don't abuse it.

So a lot of a lot of what you do in engagement is, like, what do you not do? You don't immediately send them to salespeople when they're not ready to talk to salespeople. K? You don't spam them and bombard them with every piece of content you have thinking that's gonna magically get them no one wanna buy something from you. And it's just gonna annoy the shit on them.

So don't spam people. Send them if you are gonna send content to someone, make sure it's actually going to be relevant to them. And it makes sense about you know, it makes sense to send it to them based on what you know about them. So, like, ask good questions on if you are using forms, if you are getting content, if you are doing anything where you're capturing information, make sure every question you ask is going to provide value to you as a marketer. You get value as a marketer when it's something that you can use to hone that experience that's gonna happen after.

Make you market to them better. Not just a phone number and an address and the Social Security of their first child so you can give it to the salesperson. No. You wanna make sure you can continue crafting a much better experience to them so you continue to engage them well and you give them a good experience. Why is it important to provide a good experience?

At the end of the day, this is what's gonna happen. People that are engaging with you are either gonna eventually buy from you or they're not. There's gonna be way more people that don't buy from you. Again, marketing is still a numbers game. So what do you wanna make sure you're doing with those people that aren't buying from you?

We still wanna make sure they have a good experience because maybe they just engaged with your content after you captured their attention or captured their information, like, whatever. Maybe they just engaged with your content. Maybe they started to engage with your sales process. For some reason, they didn't get all the way to the end. You still wanna make sure those people either feel like they can come back later because maybe they didn't get to the end because it wasn't the right time.

Or maybe you want them to go, like, recommend your content, your services, your product to someone else because maybe they know someone else that would be a good fit, even though they're not. So you wanna make sure whether they buy from you or not, they go through that experience of learning and getting more educated on their topic, going through a delightful sales process, or even just engaging with more of the content that you're nurturing them with. However you do it, social, email, video, or whatever. You wanna make sure even if they're not buying, that they're having a good experience and they're telling other people about it. Or they're either seeing you favorably.

So if someone else comes across them and they ask you about them or they find themselves in a conversation, you can still create promoters of your content. And that's great. Even if they're not paying you money. Those are free marketers. Honestly, it's gonna take a lot of experimentation to figure out how your audience likes to be communicated with.

Some are gonna love email. Some are gonna hate email. Some are gonna be super active on social. Some are not gonna be super active on social. Some are going to be in very specific communities online and you have to go to them.

For example, like, when I did my new hire presentation at HubSpot, I got all my traffic from posting in very specific places on Reddit. That's where I got a lot of my blog traffic. You gotta go meet people where they're at. It's a combination of a lot of those things. But tactically, at the end of the day, you're trying to once you have their attention, you have their information.

The next place you have to get them to is you wanna get them into the sales process and make sure that sales process is a delightful experience.

Speaker 2: Oh, my god. It's probably another episode. But what's funny, Max, is when I listen to you talk, then that last section, my brain went to, and I wonder. I wonder how many people out there are asking the humans that they're helping, how do you best like to communicate? Email, phone?

I wonder how many people out there asking, how do you best like to learn? Text, audio, video? How many people are paying attention to who the human is and how they like to go about their day? And then again, as we said earlier, meeting them there. So we're gonna close it up.

We're gonna give them some action oriented tips or tricks or hacks. They've listened to this whole episode on engagement and trust, which by the way, ladies and gentlemen, I know we're gonna probably circle back around and have a complete episode just on the word trust pertaining to your business and things that you can, should, could, whatever do. But what are some actionable takeaways? We can do 1 or 2 each, whichever, probably 1 each, but actionable takeaways that the Hub Heroes listeners can take with them and move forward next week.

Speaker 3: Be prepared to nuke your whole system. That is usually my default with whatever advice. Be ready to look at your entire process. See that it is broken. See that it is toxic.

See that it is doing more harm than good, and get ready to scrap it and start over. You can iterate your way out of crisis, but sometimes it is just all you're doing is polishing a turd. Sometimes you just gotta flush that bad boy. Be ready to nuke your system of engagement and restart from scratch, if you evaluate what you got going on and see based on the conversation that you've heard today that it ain't it, then it's time. Then it is time that you just need to get rid of your stuff and start over.

Speaker 4: My actual takeaway is gonna is gonna just hit on a trust thing for a second. There's this concept that I'm seeing people talk about now called marketing romanticism. People kinda get caught up in the idea of, oh, we're just like building trust with people, and we want people to to trust us. And it's this very, like, altruistic just idea that marketers are here to make the world a better place. I think making the world a better place and all that kind of stuff can be a byproduct of doing a lot of the stuff right, and I think that's okay.

When we think of this idea of trust, though, I kinda said it earlier. When we talk about building trust with your customers, we're not saying they trust you with the life of their child or they trust you with, you know, something huge. What we're talking about is they trust you enough to do something specific. So like when we say build trust throughout a lot of this stuff, it's more that I trust that you know what you're talking about because you've proven it through your content and expertise. I trust that you won't abuse my information because you're not selling it to people.

I trust that you won't try to hard sell me and send an army of sales reps down my throat and burn my phone with all the cold calls. I trust you enough to give you money. I trust you enough that you're not gonna screw me and that you're gonna deliver on your end of the bargain. I trust that you can support me and help me reach my goals as a business. Again, we're talking about building enough trust to get to the next step of the relationship.

We're not talking about trust in this very brouhaha, very, you know, fluffy kumbaya sense. So just don't overthink the trust thing. Little bit to trust that you earn along the way if you're doing this the right way.

Speaker 2: I mean, I might have just teared up a little bit. I'm gonna throw that out there. That that was like Max was preaching. And I may preach a little bit here towards the end too because my action item, my tip is that I really need everybody to break this idea, this methodology of singularity. And what I mean by this is when we get a conversion typically as a sales rep or a marketer, we think of the conversion as Max Cohen or Devin Bellamy or George b Thomas or John Hancock or Betty White or whoever that single human being is, but we all know that there's this 6 degrees of separation.

We have to understand that Max's cousin's sisters brothers ex fiance actually owns an automotive shop, which by the way is who you actually help with your products and services, automotive shop. So while somebody converted and we have this singularity mindset instead of this audience mindset. As a professional speaker, I know when I communicate, I'm communicating to many, not communicating to 1. And if we could start with our sales and marketing to realize all these years we felt like we're talking to 1 individual, but we're talking to an ecosystem of families and friends, that would be what I would want people to do. Change this mindset of singularity conversions and singularity conversations.

Okay. Hub heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will lord lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hub heroes dot com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes.

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