This is a guest post by Kevin Jorgensen. Kevin is a serial entrepreneur and 20 year marketing veteran who drank the orange coolaid in 2008 and hasn’t looked back. As a trained engineer he has a passion for process and reason which is why inbound marketing was the key that finally made marketing reasonable. Kevin and his business partner Joe own Innovative Marketing Resources, a Hubspot VAR and inbound marketing agency headquartered in Shirley Massachusetts and specializing in education, high-tech and small business marketing.
It’s just unnatural. Perhaps it’s years of doing things the wrong way. Or maybe it’s something in the water. Whatever the reason, most of us need help with the transformation process from our broken outbound marketing to a new inbound marketing way of looking at the world.
At some point in our metamorphosis, we come to rely on the help of an expert, a facilitator, someone who goes by the title Inbound Marketing Consultant, or IMC. How quickly you spread your inbound marketing wings depends to a great extent on how well your IMC does her/his job. So the pivotal question is, whether your IMC is a stud or a dud?
Here are 5 signs you’ve got a Rock Star IMC:
1) Quotes from the IMC team meeting bible – somewhere inside Hubspot headquarters they are compiling stats from thousands of Hubspot website interactions and MIT types are doing a pivot table analysis to determine how people can get more bang for their buck out of the Hubspot platform. The results of this analysis are handed down each week to the IMC team the same way that Charlton Heston delivered the 10 commandments to the Israelites. A great IMC quotes from these tomes of wisdom and keeps his pupils up to speed on the latest Hubspot thought leadership on inbound marketing.
2) Has her/his own blog and mentions it often – a really great IMC doesn’t just talk the talk. She or he is giving examples from their own research using their own blog, social media accounts and website so you know the stuff their telling you isn’t just some textbook mumbo jumbo. It’s real. It works.
3) Back channels like a Washington insider – sometimes the answers are not in the book and you can’t call 888-Hubspot, option 3 to get them either. This is when a truly great IMC knows how to back channel deep into the bowels of the development organization to find the answer from “an anonymous source” – or at least a schedule for the answer that is more definitive than “in a future release’.
4) Thinks outside the box – OK. So sometimes even the best back channeling isn’t going to get you a better answer than “in a future release”. A really great IMC doesn’t wait for you to say “that’s not good enough”. They’ve already got a list of alternatives. Other sources – sometimes fellow journeymen marketers on the Hubspot forums, sometimes solutions not even Hubspot related – to help you get the job done. But after you’ve got your alternative, the great IMC always gives the same advice… submit your ideas and needs to ideas.hubspot.com.
5) Knows your business and takes your success personally – perhaps the most telling sign that you have a rock star IMC is that after the second consulting session, he or she is telling you things about your business that you never knew – ways to articulate your value proposition, organize information, and uncover new prospects. These epiphanies of shear genius are only overshadowed when your rock star IMC gets really into a sale you made from a lead from your website or displays personal disgust when you don’t follow through on your commitments from the prior meeting.
So is your inbound marketing education more like a degree from Harvard or ITT Tech? It matters. Your future as a successful inbound marketer is in the hands of your IMC. An IMC is your instructor and like any instructor, there are studs and there are duds. How many of these rock star behaviors does your IMC demonstrate?