It's a shame how many people aren't constantly learning new skills, letting their competitive advantage slip away. It's also unfortunate how many companies don't have a system in place for helping their employees learn new skills.

I was reading some old articles of mine and ran into this old story:

I received a call from a gentleman the other day whose first words were, "I received a Website Grader report from my client that you sent him and instead of reading your site for an hour to try to figure it out, I figured I'd just call and talk to a human. Can you tell me what you do?" He also told me he was an SEO consultant, so I suggested he just go to Website Grader to read the report. He then insisted on me telling him what we did. So, I explained how our software helped people attract more traffic, convert more traffic into leads and leads into sales, and then measure and analyze each step of the process to enable continuous improvement.  After I asked him a few questions about what software he used, which turned out to be nothing besides some SEO tools, I told him how our software helped agencies more efficiently deliver value by providing an integrated suite of tools that talked to each other. Then, at his prompting, I explained what the different tools did. He cut me off in the middle of that and said, "I guess I'm just going to have to read your site. I'm sick of all of you companies making me read your sites to figure out what you do."

It was fairly obvious to me after this conversation, that this guy was mad that a) his client was questioning whether he was doing a good enough job, b) that other companies have different (and possibly better) ways of doing things and c) that he had to learn something new.

What are you doing to prevent your agency from getting this far behind? Do you require that your employees continuously learn and experiment?  Are you pulling your clients into the state of the art of marketing -- or are they pushing you to do basic research?

This guy obviously missed the memo that learning doesn't stop after formal education.

This past Friday as part of my weekly webinar for marketing agencies, I invited Mark Kilens (HubSpot's Manager of Customer Training) to come and get some feedback about some top-secret new stuff he's working on.

We also reviewed all of the training available to our customers and partners. Mark formed his team in the not too distant past and has made some amazing strides in training a big swath of our customer base. Mark's team delivers every one of the small group classes below every week, usually more than once.

We've also invested a lot in our agency training. Kate Walsh, HubSpot Services Director, and her team run agency classes every week.

Both the customer and partner training are live classes. There's tons more training available that is recorded and written.

At HubSpot, we're committed to creating software AND training that helps marketers transform their marketing. This wouldn't be possible unless our employees were constantly learning. We are able to provide so much training because our team is constantly experimenting and learning. We have a culture where we reward employees who take the initiative to learn something new on their own. We encourage people to experiment and report results, whether the experiment succeeded or failed, so that we're all learning. We also hold employees accountable to learning skills that they need to master their job; even our top employees are required to continously be learning and improving skills.

Our best agency partners share this cultural trait in common with us. At PR 20/20, I know that the employees spend 3 hours per week taking some class, writing up what they've learned and sharing it with the team on their internal social network. I met a new IMPACT employee this week that told me, "Pete Caputa is required reading at IMPACT."

What does your company do to ensure that your team is constantly learning?

Business Insider just published a brilliant deck titled, The Future of Digital. A lot of "experts" talk in theory about the future of the internet or digital marketing. This one has data to back up the theories.

(You need to click on the link to see the deck. It looks like BI doesn't allow someone to embed a powerpoint presentation. It's worth the click over to their site.)

HubSpot's marketing team had a record performance last month. See the screengrab below.

I don't know many B2B marketing teams that generate 60k+ leads per month. Do you? Does yours?

Impact Branding & Design just published an excellent infographic about how to more effectively leverage the HubSpot software to generate more traffic, leads and sales. I've embedded it below. 

From: IMPACT Branding & Design

There aren't many companies who leverage the HubSpot software as effectively as IMPACT does. I've written about their results previously in an article titled, "How an Agency Acquired 5 New Clients from Inbound Marketing". If you want to learn more from them on this subject, I'd recommend downloading their "Essential Guide for Mastering HubSpot Software".

I recently finished reading a 2-part blog post by Mary Planding, owner of Inbound Marketing Squad (@inboundsquad) and my editor for this blog. I think you'll find the articles useful as you try to determine which marketing strategies you should implement in your business.

Her first article declares that marketing strategies are a dime a dozen—finding lots of choices isn't hard. But picking the right strategy for your business can be very difficult. Mary's point of view is that a marketing strategy should help you filter out the thousands of distracting (yet enticing) ideas that can keep you from reaching your goal. And she uses a really cool analogy about racing in the America's Cup to explain marketing strategies and making choices. It's a great analogy because in both situations - your marketing and the America's Cup racers - there are limited resources and unpredictable conditions that make it hard to 'cross the finish line'.

Here are some excerpts:

• The world will always be filled with endless possibilities. But in the end, you want to focus on the most effective marketing strategies that help you achieve your desired goal.

• Sometimes Mother Nature can surprise you and then you're scrambling to improvise, drawing upon your experience, knowledge, the conditions and your resources to help you win the race.

• Whenever you try to sail directly into the wind, you're not only dead in the water, you can even be pushed backwards. 

• Regardless of which leg of the course you're on, the more often you tack, the more time and distance you have to make up. And you can't change that dynamic. Physics, after all, is physics.

In her second article, which I found even more useful, Mary and her guest experts, share 5 tips for how to sort through and then choose the marketing strategies that are right for your business.

Here are some highlights:

• Understanding why you're marketing is the key to defining a successful path to your goals. (Jeff Mason, Hero Design Studio)

• You can't pick a strategy if you aren't specific about what the strategy is supposed to help you achieve. (Mary Planding, Inbound Marketing Squad)

• You want to pick a marketing strategy that allows you to acquire new customers and still remain profitable. (Dan Swanson, Exit Rich) 

• Think about "no" as a personal lifejacket. Taking on certain projects can be like taking on water as you sail. (Ilene Rosenthal, White Space Marketing Group)

• Often people choose a strategy that's cool, neat, hot, but instead of playing to their strengths, it draws unwanted attention to their weaknesses. The result is their efforts negate any potential gains they've made. (Mary Planding, Inbound Marketing Squad)

Go read the articles. It should help you create a stronger marketing plan for 2013.

Mark Gibson wrote an excellent article about a company who was on the fast track towards inbound marketing success. Then, hope died. See the graph below. If they had kept on their path, Mark predicts they would have gained 12,000 visitors.

Can you guys guess why it happened? Hint: It's a sales and an account management problem.

When I talk to businesses who are using inbound lead generation, but who aren't seeing the sales that they want, I usually start with questions that identify what they're doing wrong (or not doing) at the top of their sales funnel. If the top of the sales funnel isn't predictably full, sales usually falter at the bottom. Maybe not right away. But, someday, they'll dip if they don't have the ability to predictably find qualified sales opportunties amongst the leads they've attracted.

I've only ever spoken to one person who was doing everything right. So, don't feel bad if you fail the test.

Here's the list of questions I usually ask:

1. Do you call leads as soon as they complete a form on your website?
2. Do you call leads as soon as they revisit your website again, ideally while they're still on your website?
3. How often do you sit down and prospect? Do you have time blocked off every day? Do you do it every day consistently? How much time? How many leads do you call per day? Why that number?
4. What is the cadence you use to attempt to connect with them? Do you call them once and then wait awhile to call them again?
5. Do you try to connect live first by calling them? Do you also follow up with an email? Does your voicemail and email say the same thing? Do you leave them both at the same time? 
6. Do you connect with them on social media? If you connect on social media, do you just connect or do you respond to something they've posted in order to start a conversation? 
7. Do you have a series of voice-mail and email messages that you leave in succession that reference your earlier attempts and their lack of response?
8. How many attempts do you make in order to try to connect with a lead, before you give up? Do you actually give up or do you try calling them again after a period of time? 
9. Do you use the information they've shared on your landing pages and the information your marketing software collected in order to personalize your message? Is the message about their interests with an offer to provide further assistance OR is it about you and what you want to talk about?
10. Do you work the company or just the lead? If you get a lead, do you determine other contacts at that company that might take your call, who might influence that company buying from you or might have information on how the company operates? Do you ever just call the decision maker even if they aren't your lead?
11. When you get a lead, do you determine if you have any common connections on Linkedin, so that you might be able to get an introduction from someone they trust confirming your expertise? 

Without the dialog, you may not know the right answer to the questions. If you're unclear whether you're doing something wrong or not doing something you should, ask a question in the comments.

Usually, companies aren't doing the first few things right. If you got to question 11 and think you are doing everything you should be doing, please inquire here: I have openings.

Sales experts: What questions am I missing?

I'll be speaking today at BOLO 2012 with Chris Knipper (@ChrisKnipper), Founder of Kuno Creative. We're delivering, "How to Market Your Marketing Agency Using Inbound Marketing". Slides are below.

Here are links to resources we reference in the presentation.

1. What is Inbound Marketing?
2. Business Blogging eBook
3. Lead Generation eBook
4. Email Marketing eBook
5. Closed Loop Marketing Analytics eBook
6. Lead Generation Lessons from 4k Customers (My presentation includes updated data that HubSpot hasn't published yet.)
7. 4 Core Services of Inbound Marketing
8. State of the Marketing Services Industry
9. Content Marketing Manifesto
10. Kuno Creative's Services Package and Pricing

I have a confession to make: It's been 1 Month, 7 days and 3 hours since... my last blog post. Forgive me blogfather, for I have... (That's enough. Sorry if you are a Catholic.)

I'm excited to announce that I've hired Mary Planding to be the editor of the group blog for Co-Grow. 10 marketing agencies have agreed to become members of the Collaborative Growth Network. 20+ others have expressed interest. I'll be streamlining the signup process and officially signing up these agencies in the coming weeks. Before I signed people up officially and they started paying for membership, I wanted to ensure I had someone to [wo]man the blog. Mary will be doing that. Each member will be submitting one blog post per month and Mary will edit and schedule the posts for my approval. It'll be her job to make sure we have a steady flow of content. As we add more marketing agency members, she'll do more scheduling and editing. 

Mary has been a HubSpot partner for 7 months, has gone through our onboarding process and become an expert at inbound marketing, as you can see from her site, Inbound Marketing Squad.  She wrote an article about inbound networking that explained the concept better than I had. She's also been out talking to small business owners about inbound networking and has formed a group of her own. She's been a consistent attendee on my weekly inbound networking calls and I've been impressed with her clear communication skills, both verbally and in written form. I enjoy reading her blog as I believe she breaks down complex stuff into simple terms. When I suggested that I was going to hire an editor, she wrote a well thought out email about why it should be her. When she started quizzing me about the editor role's job, I realized she was thinking about important "editor-type" stuff that I hadn't even thought about.

Please welcome Mary Planding as editor of Co-Grow. You can read more about her, follow her on Twitter or connect with her on Linkedin.  She and I will be in touch soon with our inaugural members and we'll get the content flowing in October. 

Back in early 2008, there were 7 of us meeting in our only conference room. It was HubSpot's entire sales and marketing team having our weekly meeting, later termed our SMarketing meeting. Like we've continued to ask ourselves every day since, we were trying to answer the question, "How can we turn more of our inbound leads into customers?"

During this meeting in 2007, I told Mike Volpe, "It'd be great if they just told us what their challenges were on the forms." To which, Volpe sarcastically said, "Do you want me to sell for you too?". We convinced him to try it out by the end of the meeting. It's hard to say no to Dan Tyre, Chris Johnson and Mark Roberge. The question, "What's your biggest marketing challenge?" is on every one of our forms to this day. It's helped our sales team more effectively and more quickly connect, qualify and close new businesss 1,000s of times now. Last year, when correlating lead characteristics to close rate, our marketing team proved that when certain answers included keywords like "leads", they were more likely to buy our marketing software.  

4 years, 350 people and 7500 customers later, we've made a lot of progress in figuring out how to turn leads into sales. We've bottled up 'lessons like this one' and have baked them into our software and training programs so that our customers and partners can turn more of their leads into sales too. 

Yesterday, one of our customers shared a story about adding a similar question to their landing pages. Their company is Goodbye Crutches, which makes products that replace the need for crutches.

To test the idea, we devised a simple A/B test on some of our most commonly accessed offers and landing pages. Using the Advanced Landing Pages feature in HubSpot Enterprise, we were able to show our visitors one of two versions of these pages. The only difference we tested was the optional open-ended question “What is your biggest struggle?”

You can read about their stellar results at the article, "Proof that It Never Hurts to Ask".

SMarketing Take-Away: Most sales professionals know that people are more likely to buy when they have a challenge they need to overcome, a problem they need to fix, they're frustrated by the status quo, or in the case of Goodbye crutches, they have 'pain' that's impacting their comfort and happiness. As a marketer or marketing agency, if you want to deliver more and higher quality sales-ready leads to your [client's] sales team, ask the open ended question on your forms, "What's your biggest xyz challenge?".