Pete Caputa

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    Have you ever watched a 90 minute commercial?

    Posted by Pete Caputa on Mar 7, 2014 10:06:00 AM

    Before you answer, I bet you already have. 

    Curious yet? Read Marcus Sheridan's post about the Lego Movie

    Oh and if you haven't watched it, you should. It's an amazing movie. My wife, son and I went. We all loved it. 

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    The 2 Main Reasons That Larger Companies Don't Do Inbound Marketing

    Posted by Pete Caputa on Mar 7, 2014 9:37:00 AM


    2 Big Reasons: 

    1. The right roles have not been defined.  Phil Harrel, VP Corporate Sales, asks, "The way your buyers purchase products today is fundamentally different than it was 10 years ago.  Has your marketing playbook changed as well, or does it look very similar to how it did 10 years ago?" 
    2. Resources aren't invested in the right spots. Wordstream reports, "Outbound marketing is harder to track and less profitable than inbound marketing, yet ironically, organizations still spend as much as 90% of their marketing budgets on outbound marketing."

    Read other reasons in this ebook or slideshare presentation

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    Wouldn’t it be nice to see potential customers raise their hands and ask you to engage?

    Posted by Pete Caputa on Mar 7, 2014 8:25:00 AM

    I recently listened to a call between a competitor's sales rep and a prospect. At the end of the call - when the prospect said he wasn't interested and he was choosing HubSpot - the competitor's sales rep said, "Ok. With your permission, I'll stay in touch. I'll put you into a drip campaign. (Chuckle. Chuckle.) We'll see how that inbound marketing thing works out.... When you guys get more serious about growing your sales, we can talk."

    Besides being fairly rude and presumptuous, this was one of about 4 comments during the call where he implied that the superior way to get new clients was by emailing purchased lists, meeting prospects at trade shows and "reaching out" cold. I was especially surprised to hear a sales rep from a marketing software company dismiss the idea of attracting prospects via online marketing.

    But, then I remembered that most of the world's salespeople still get most of their business by interrupting prospects with piss-poor pitches.  Most CEOs are still just stacking salespeople and dividing territories in order to get growth. Not enough marketers have convinced their CFOs to invest in modern marketing yetNot many organizations have seen the light or believe the evidence

    Some have, though. Here's two great examples from Jim Hopes, a 30 year veteran of sales and sales management, a CEO (for 22 years) and an inbound marketer for the last few: 

    "Recently a prospect downloaded an eBook from our website about the secrets to setting high-quality appointments, a big need in the marketplace. We promptly followed up with him to make sure he got the piece, answer any questions, and to find out how helpful it was for him.
    The call led to a good conversation about his particular needs, and within the week he became a customer.  

    Last month I got an email from a sales manager of a California TV station wanting to discuss and learn more about our inbound marketing services. It turns out, he had been following our posts on the topic for some time, and he raised his hand when he was ready to learn more. 
    These are examples of good leads because the prospect already knew a lot about our company and our capabilities, and determined for themselves that they were prospects." 


    "Wouldn’t it be nice to see potential customers raise their hands and ask you to engage?" Jim posed in his article. Of course it would. (That's one of those rhetorical sales questions that is supposed to make you realize how silly you are for not asking yourself the question before.) But, why aren't salespeople and marketers making it happen more often?

    Perhaps we need to share more stories like Jim's? What's your inbound story? Have you acquired a client through inbound marketing?  (Share your story in the comments below.)



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    Topics: inbound sales

    The Timing Isn't Right

    Posted by Pete Caputa on Nov 11, 2012 8:05:00 AM

    I originally wrote this article in March 2008. It's another article that got stuck in the draft folder. It's still very relavent, so I'm publishing now. 

    I make a lot of calls to business owners and marketing professionals. Most business owners have a long list of lines they use to get salepeople off of the phone. I love getting this excuse: "The Timing isn't Right".

    First of all, it's probably important to note that I do about 1.5 hours of free consulting and coaching for my prospects. So, anyone talking to me, given my years of experience at internet marketing, should be pretty damn grateful. My time is spent diagnosing their internet marketing and website mess, starting keyword research and competitive research for them and recommending how they can leverage SEO, PPC, blogging, social media, etc, etc to drive more traffic as well as use marketing analytics, lead capture tools and lead intelligence to convert more of their visitors to leads and sales.

    Bottomline: they're going to learn a whole hell of a lot from me for free.  No obligation.

    So, when someone tells me that the timeing isn't right, they're really missing out. 

    Maybe the Timing Truly Isn't Right. Now, of course, sometimes the timing truly isn't right. Maybe they do not have the time to dedicate to online marketing. Maybe their time would be spent better elsewhere. Maybe they have a family or human resources emergency. Maybe they need to tighten up the operations side of the business. Maybe they have bad sales recruitment problems. There's all kinds of problems that would prevent an organization from stepping up their online marketing. 

    Maybe You Just Think the Timing Isn't Right
    But usually, they think the timing isn't right because they think they know what they're talking about when it comes to online marketing. For example, the most common reason someone thinks that the timing isn't right is because "they're redoing their website right now". They think, and I can understand the logic, that you should worry about driving traffic after you launch a site. However, that's a big mistake.

    Why? Well, keyword research and tracking should govern a site design or redesign: keyword research will help you find the keywords to use in your content, as well as affect what pages you have, what the name of the pages are, as well as what your navigation links should be. These are pretty important factors when it comes to launching a site. Also, if you really want to do SEO, you should launch a blog on your own domain  and be able to add and edit pages on your site without technical help. That's less about "building the site" and more about "building the site on the right platform". Further, if you want to do PPC advertising down the road, you should have a system in place that lets you launch and tweak landing pages. Further, before you do any kind of relaunch, you should study how people arrive to your site and interact with it. You don't want to screw something up and take a hit on traffic because you didn't understand what search terms, referers people were coming from OR because you eliminated a page that almost every visitor read upon their site visit. 

    Another reason people think it's the wrong time is because "they want to figure this stuff out" first. They're doing their "homework" and "investigating" how to do online marketing. WTF? Why do you think companies like HubSpot have salepeople? Because we know this stuff. We are your cheat sheet. We've figured it out. It's our job to diagnose. Once someone's a client, we give them the curriculum.  For some reason, when it comes to internet marketing, people feel they need to write the curriculum themselves.

    What "The Timing Isn't Right" Really Means.
    All of that said, I understand that people make this mistake of thinking that they should talk to me after they do "something". That's normal. And I understand they think I'm going to pitch them something they don't need. They've dealt with many bad salespeople. However, they should know that I won't sell them something unless I can solve a problem that's important to them. 

    I don't make prospecting calls anymore. In fact, it's hard to get me on the phone without going through someone else these days. But, this article is certainly true of anyone on my team. We task our salespeople to be helpful first, and sell only if we can help someone. The next time you tell a salesperson that the timing isn't right, you should realize you're probably missing out on learning a better way of doing something.... especially if the salesperson is calling from HubSpot. 
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    My Website is A Better Salesman Than I Am

    Posted by Pete Caputa on Nov 10, 2012 6:21:00 PM

    I originally wrote this article in September 2008. For some reason, I never published it. It's still pretty relevant, so I'm putting it out there.

    Every week, I generate one or two leads from my website. I've closed several deals from it. Every week, HubSpot's website generates a few thousand leads. I, and the other 11 inbound marketing advisors at HubSpot, close more than a few deals each week as a result of those leads.

    In my case, If HubSpot's amazing marketing team wasn't generating leads for me, I could certainly work through my leads fairly quickly. Most companies can work through their internet generated sales leads very quickly.

    But, at HubSpot, we have an entirely different problem. We have to figure out who to call first.

    There are 3 really amazing things that HubSpot's software does that help me be a lot more efficient and helps me spend my time talking to the right people.

    Before I get into it, I know that many people are suspect of salespeople. However, given that I have a Chemical Engineering degree, have run my own business, am a moderately successful internet marketer and can hack code with the best of them, I'm hoping you realize I'm not just a "sales guy". Most importantly, my philosophy in sales is to just "help people solve their problems, assuming I can". In other words, I'm not just pitching products. I'm doing my best to help people identify appropriate solutions to their problems. 

    That said, I do better when I am helping people who want my help. HubSpot's software helps me maximize the time I'm helping people. 

    Here are the things that the software does that enable me to do this: 

    • Leads are prioritized based on engagement with our website.
    • When a lead revisits a site, I get notified.
    • Track what pages a lead has viewed on our site. This helps me start a conversation by asking a question that I know interests the prospects. For example, if a lead has visited a bunch of seo resources, I know to start the conversation with a question like, "Are you trying to figure out how to improve your search rankings in order to attract more qualified visitors to your site through SEO?"

    HubSpot's lead scoring, lead revisit notifications and lead intelligence work differently these days. The software is significantly slicker. But, the way we use them on the sales team has stayed the same. Don't have this capability? How are you prioritizing and timing your sales efforts?

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    The Web Design Business is Dead

    Posted by Pete Caputa on Aug 16, 2012 12:04:00 PM

    There's too much Competition.

    I know that "the web design business is dead" is a pretty dramatic statement. For the record, I don't think it's dead. I think it's going through a major transformation that most web design companies won't survive.

    I did a search a little while ago on a yellow pages site and there are 28,402 companies categorized under "web site design" and 41,498 companies categorized under "web sites". This, of course, doesn't include the many small 1-5 person web design businesses who are too cheap to list themselves in the directory or smart enough not to waste their money on it. Then, there are the marketing and ad agencies that have gotten into website design, but still call themselves agencies.

    There's a ridiculous amount of companies doing website design. Further, if the number of web designers that download HubSpot's free internet marketing resources are any indication, there are probably 100s of thousands of people or companies that call themselves web designers in the US. A full 15% of our leads are some kind of web or marketing agency.

    The industry is completely saturated.

    Most of them won't admit it in public (many have admitted it to me in private), but websites that used to get built for $100k are going for $50k, $50k for $25k and the standard $5k small business website is now getting built for $2,500 by someone's nephew, someone in India or a low cost high volume web site shop. And many are not that much different. The high cost providers are not always the high quality providers anymore. There's too much competition.

    Website Design, alone, does NOT Provide an ROI.

    The only thing that differentiates the average web designer right now is their design skills, which is highly subjective. And it's hard to correlate the effect of good design to the bottomline.

    Unfortunately, graphic designers are a dime a dozen and attractive web design doesn't necessarily translate to online lead generation success and ultimately: dollars. Does a $10k graphical website design generate more leads than a $5k one? Not usually.

    Hosting isn't a Business Web Designers Should Rely On.

    Many web designers, historically, also provide hosting. Some of them manage their own servers. Many of them just have a reseller plan with a big hosting company. This provided a nice recurring revenue stream for web designers for a little while. More importantly, it set them up to charge their clients for site edits when new content needed to be published or existing content needed to be revised. However, any web designer that is relying on web hosting to generate revenue is fighting a losing battle. In fact, I think it's already lost. They're more like Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole resisting the inevitable. Website hosting is a commodity business if there ever was one. And low cost virtual assistants can edit websites now that most people have basic html skills. Long gone are the days when someone should be paying $50/hour to add a new press release to a website.

    Web Content Management Systems Will Not Save the Web Design Business

    Most web design companies have had to get a lot smarter about how they build websites too. There are still way too many web designers that build websites from the ground up, instead of on a content management system (CMS). (They're also still the ones still charging clients for hosting and site edits, who are afraid to give up that revenue stream.)

    But, the good ones use a CMS.

    However, even CMS implementation is not a strong differentiation source anymore. When a web design company is proficient with a more advanced CMS like Joomla, Ektron, Sitecore or Drupal, they're able to command higher dollars.

    But, open source software like wordpress has made launching a website on a CMS easier, faster and much cheaper to launch for most small and mid-sized businesses. There's no software to buy and there's plenty of really smart low cost hep who are geniuses at configuring and customizing a design on top of the open source CMSs.

    Just like design, CMS implementation skills alone are NOT a really big differentiator anymore either.

    But, the biggest problem with web designers, is that they are busy building websites instead of delivering ROI to their clients.

    Most web developers, once a site is launched, are done. They made their $5k, $50k or $100k. They need to get their next job started to make payroll. The average web site designer knows how to lay out graphics, write html and has someone on their team who can hack php and install server side software like the CMSs listed above. That's it. These companies rarely have internet marketing skills and experience. Or they say they do, but they're learning on their client's dimes.

    Even worse, by putting the cart before the horse and building websites before an internet marketing strategy is established, they are making mistakes that they are going to have to charge their clients to fix.

    "But, I'm a web designer and I'm learning internet marketing as fast as I can get clients to pay for it." Sorry! That's not fast enough.

    Have you read the Innovator's Dilemma? How about the Innovator's Solution? If you haven't and you're in the web design business, and want to stay in business in the next few years, I recommend you go to amazon right now and order both.

    The premise of the books is that to really win in business, you must destroy a convention. If you are already winning in business, you might have to destroy your own conventions.

    As you can imagine, that's really hard. And doing it seems really stupid, I am sure, when people embark on it. But, history demonstrates that the ones who do it, succeed amazingly. For example, the NYT is now one of the top news destinations on the web because so many people link to them as stories break, which drives a lot of direct traffic and helps them increase search engine traffic. Do you remember when you had to pay to access their site? They walked away even though it was a $10M business. The most successful companies in the world followed the same disruptive technology path, atleast when they started. The Innovator's Solution is why Microsoft beat IBM with an easier to use OS; why DELL revolutionized the PC business; why Google beat Yahoo and Microsoft on the web with a more targeted advertising system selling clicks at a time for pennies each; why Salesforce.com is growing faster than SAP.

    How many guys do you know that used to build and sell PCs? How many of them are Dell resellers now? Who do you think is doing better... Salesforce.com implementation consultants or ACT! consultants? How many web design companies built their own email marketing system, only to shut it down and transition their clients to Constant Contact, AWeber or Exact Target two years later?

    Web designers are now competing against software as a service. All websites are is software. There's something about Software as a Service that is hard to compete against.

    Most web designers and developers are designers first. Some are great software configurators. But, very few are great software developers.

    Just like agencies tried to build their own email tools, only to move to reselling SaaS solutions, agencies will need to choose a marketing platform. There is no open source alternative, nor can there be given the complexity and integration requirements for modern marketing.

    They can't provide powerful SEO tools, analytics, lead capture, lead intelligence, blogging, marketing automation, marketing contact databases and social media publishing tools that are integrated with each other, that companies like HubSpot provides. Not to mention all of the 3rd-party marketing apps that instantly integrate with the software like HubSpot for call tracking, chat and content sourcing, to name a few.

    Previously, most small businesses would have to pay $500-$10k up front for just a website on a cms. Now, small businesses pay that for a full inbound marketing system with ongoing support and training. Larger companies who usually pay a $50k to get a custom web site developed are shifting those dollars to more sophisticated marketing software too, like HubSpot professional and HubSpot Enterprise.

    Sorry to rain on web designers parade. That's not HubSpot's intention. Remember that thing about destroying conventions? Business is about creative destruction. It certainly doesn't make sense to have 100,000 people manufacturing cars in their garages. Websites aren't as complex as cars. But, the brains behind business websites are getting much more complex. Should we really have 100,000 people in small offices around the country creating websites?

    Software as a service and streamlined processes enable HubSpot and our partners to provide a full inbound marketing platform to businesses at a lower cost than website and CMS development alone.

    Websites are no longer brochures. Websites are platforms that are increasingly connected to the distributed computing power, structured information and rapidly expanding social networking community of the web. Standards will arise. Platforms will win.

    Just like Amazon and eBay won in ecommerce. Like Zoho and Salesforce are winning in project management, crm and other business productivity solutions. Just like Google has won in search and ad targeting and delivery. There will be web marketing platforms that provide an ROI to small businesses who want to do measurable marketing. These platforms will provide more value for a lower investment than Bob & JoJo's web design business in Albequerque, NM ever could or will be able to do.

    It's not all doomsday, though. The platform needs operators. Business is still about relationships. People will still want to work with people - face to face. HubSpot will never have a maningful physical presence in New Mexico. Social media, SEO, blogging, PPC, content creation... none of these things are easy to fake. It takes skill, creativity and refined proven processes to implement an internet marketing strategy that supports a business's growth strategy. There are very few people that are excellent at these things.

    And that's the opportunity. I think very few web designers will make this transition. The ones that do will be rewarded. The agencies who already made the decision are growing rapidly. But, I think in the next few years we'll see a massive shakeout...

    The web design companies that transition themselves to online marketing services companies will win. The ones that still exclusively generate revenue $5k or $50k at a time by building websites from scratch won't. Web design companies must transition to charging retainers based on a demonstrable ROI for their clients.

    Here's the rub. As web designers transition, so do PR agencies, marketing agencies, ad agencies, copywriters, seo consultants etc. Anyone who wants to be relevant needs to transition, or atleast broaden, their offering to include ongoing internet marketing services.

    Paul Roetzer declared the Dawn of the Inbound Marketing Agency a few years ago. Today, inbound marketing agencies are thriving. At HubSpot, we're working with hundreds of agencies who have transitioned to providing inbound marketing retainers. They're doing very well. Meanwhile, most web design firms are die-ing.

    Do you run a web design or creative firm? How are you transitioning? Or are you still in denial?

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    Topics: internet marketing services, web design

    Google in the Software Sales Business Now

    Posted by Pete Caputa on Jul 7, 2009 1:59:00 PM

    This is a really big move. Google just officially launched their Google Apps software product.  At launch, they already have 1.75M companies using the software. Who knows how many of those are using the free "standard edition" vs a paid one. Regardless, that's a ridiculous install base which will upsell themselves when they add new employees.

    This is aimed squarely at Microsoft's sweet profit spot. No doubt Google will continue to add capabilities to the suite. Unlike Microsoft, Google has no monopoly on desktop software to protect. So, while Microsoft continues to tell themselves that people want some strange integrated version of desktop software + online services, Google will eat their shorts.

    The lesson for any business (not just software businesses) is that Google started with a free version of all of these products for consumers. This drove massive adoption. They, then launched a freemium version of Google Apps which again drove massive adoption. Now, they're launching the paid version in full. This process lowers the barrier to trial and the time between trial and satisfaction. This reduces so much friction in the marketing and sales process.  

    This is a model for business building.

    Their cost of customer acquisition (COCA) must be next to nothing. Their lifetime value (LTV) must be through the roof. And their cost of support is probably minimal.

    Although this is classic Innovator's Dilemma product management (entering the established market), I think this is the smartest move Google has made since they cloned and improved their Overture with Adwords.

    What I find really interesting is that they actually let people contact sales reps. (In the screenshot above, you can see it says "contact corporate sales". (It's notoriously difficult to ever get a person on the line at google, even if you're spending thousands of dollars per month on adwords.)

    Not that Google has a reputation for rewarding sales professionals as much as their developers, selling Google apps is probably one of the few jobs I'd consider other than the one I have now.

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    Topics: google, freemium

    Are You Tapping the Collective Wisdom of Your Users for the Rest of Your User's Benefit?

    Posted by Pete Caputa on Apr 19, 2009 7:48:00 AM

    You should insert customres, clients, etc for "users" in this article. It's easier to apply these lessons to your business if your a software provider. But, I'd argue that every company should be thinking about how to create or use software to capture processes between customers and your company. In short, everyone should be thinking like a software company. I bet there's a software company in your industry that is thinking about this stuff. 

    I've been thinking a lot lately about how software that faciliates a processes by lots of people can be used to extract massive amounts of data that can be used to further improve a process or make reccomendation for other users. 

    In other words, as we move our processes to web based software that is used by 1,000s or Millions of people, can the data be used strategically?

    As an example, Google has a really interesting new solution to Captcha (Definition of Captcha.). Whenever, you're completing a form on the web and you're asked to enter a string of letters that are usually very difficult to read, that is Captcha. Lately, those strings of letters are becoming harder and harder to read. In fact, I've given up several times lately, as some have become nearly impossible to read. 

    Google has a really interesting solution to that. They've taken their vast libary of photos and ask people to orient them upright to prove that they're a human. This alone doesn't seem all that genius. It's kind of a natural obvious idea. But, what's really interesting is that they are quickly creating a library of photos with directional information attached. Again, not too crazy cool. Most people probably publish photos upright when they publish them to the web. However, what google has discovered is that with many photos, people don't always agree what is upright. For many photos it's impossible to tell which is upright. So, Google is tapping the collective wisdom to determine which photos have obvous orientation and which don't.

    Again, this might not be all that useful beyond the purposes of creating a very cool and easier to use Captcha system. But, it certainly demonstrates the point about how data from user input can be aggregagated from a large number of people and used to make an application easier or more powerful for the next person that comes along to use it. 

    This isn't too far from what Google has done to rank websites. They take the liknks embedded in the web by humans to determine what web pages are most authoritative.  But, with this system, they are building data that isn't available to anyone with a crawler, like links are. In fact, just like their ad network that determines what ads to display based on click through rate, this system takes user data to improve the system.  This creates a competitive advantage for the system. It could even be called designing "lock-in" into a system.

    I believe that data aggregation of user behavior and the lessons extracted from that data to improve the system will be a significant competitive advantage in next phase of web based software.

    Do you have any interesting early proof of this in other systems? 

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    ROI on My Time

    Posted by Pete Caputa on Feb 23, 2009 7:10:00 AM

    I'm still alive.

    This might be the longest stretch of time that I haven't written on my own blog. 

    I've been writing over at the HubSpot Online Marketing Blog pretty much weekly. Not that I don't love all of you, but the audience is much bigger over there: 10,000 readers. And no matter how bad my articles are, they usually get a handful of comments. Since I love the attention and the instant feedback, I'll continue blogging over there.

    The real reason that I haven't been blogging over here is because I'm trying to maximize the ROI of the time I spend.

    I've taken on two new roles at HubSpot. I'm still in the sales group, but I'm our first sales engineer; helping our 25+ quickly growing sales team when they need technical support, as well as making sure that we're properly setting expectations before passing a client over to our customer team. I'm also managing the creation of our partner program for internet marketing agencies, which involves working across our customer, sales and marketing teams. Both of these activities represent high potential for me and HubSpot. And both are pretty much full+ time gigs. 

    Although I'm itching to do something on my own again (I have a really good idea about a book), HubSpot offers too much opportunity right now. Not only are we adding customers and growing our team, we're really helping small businesses generate an ROI from their online marketing activities

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    Should You Bother Accepting Referrals If They're Not From Clients?

    Posted by Pete Caputa on Nov 3, 2008 2:02:00 PM

    I was thinking about this the other day. Recently, I've been getting a bunch of referrals from people who are not my clients. For one reason or another, they haven't become a client yet. However, they are in love with what we do at HubSpot, recognize the value we provide and continue to refer people. I'll call anyone that has expressed a need or interest in my service.  However, these referrals are rarely as qualified as a referral I receive from a client.

    A note that Rick Roberge wrote to a prospect about "referrals from clients" caught my attention: 

    You asked yesterday how you could help me. Honestly, you can't. We met through an introduction, but the intro came from my client. Client's can refer. If you made a referral and they asked you, "What has Rick done for you?" What can you say? "Nothing. I don't need him." "Nothing. I can't afford him." "Nothing. I don't like him." I refer my clients and they refer me. I become an integral part of my client's business. We over-help each other and we deserve it.

    It's very true. People who aren't your clients aren't really equipped to refer you the right prospects.  Why do you think that is?

     

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    Topics: sales, referrals

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