Partner Success Workshop 9.20.12: Recap of top attendee quotes, links

Its been a whirlwind in the HubSpot VAR program in the last month.  We had just wrapped up at the end of August the largest, most successful inbound marketing conference ever on Earth, #Inbound 2012 - 2800 inbound marketers gathering in Boston.  

This conference concided with the end of the quarter and the end of our best sales month in the company's history (148% of quota across the sales team on average, I heard).  So, of course all these new customers coming on along with many VARs energized coming out of Inbound 2012 kept us very busy the week of our first Partner Success Workshop!

And yet, despite all the other priorities we were juggling, we still managed to put on a pretty decent 2nd workshop webinar last week.  The VAR speaker, Josh Miles was great, the topics were excellent, and the attendance was the highest yet for any of our new VAR-specific webinars (which I should mention all just launched on 9/1).  

I think we all sensed there a lot of potential in putting the VARs who are going through on-boarding on center stage for a webinar series, and I hope to take some lessons from this 2nd webinar in our Partner Success Workshop Series to continue to improve it both for the more exerpienced/accomplished VARs who come to speak, and the newer VARs who come to learn from and interact with them.

So below are some of the top comments and data from the attendees that I had I'd like to share with you.  

Please review some of these thoughts and share your own feedback in the comment thread below.  I'll be listening I assure you!

Key Performance Stats for 2nd Session of the Partner Success Workshops from 9-20-12:

Attendee Introductions:

1. Who are you?
2. Where are you from? 
3. What are excited about doing in Hubspot?:

• "Douglas Burdett - Artillery, Norfolk, VA - should be getting ungated for HubSpot3 any day now. This is my first of these calls - it's great.  I learn a lot from learning about other VARS"
• "Hi Nick! Charmon from Tempo Creative in Scottsdale. Excited about diving into social media to help clients see success."
• "BroadVision Marketing in Petaluma, CA. Did my first customer IMA this morning."
• "Nick Pandiscio from WolfCom PR in Hoboken, NJ. Looking forward to getting more premium content put together."
• "Hi, I'm Lisa at Boomm Marketing in Chicago and I want to get our new HubSpot client onboarded and driving more leads for my own agency"
• "Scott from Ad Hoc Marketing in Dubuque, Iowa. Adding more leads.  Publishing blogs about once a week."
• "Hi there, Lisa and Ann from Spoke8 in Lansing, MI. We are excited to launch our landing pages next week AND sell stuff!"
• "Mike Klein, Meshy Communications from Saskatchewan, Canada. Excited to help customers get real results."
• "Howdy! Lisa Ellington, Big Thinkery, Charlotte, NC. I look forward to implementing Smart CTAs!"
• "I'm Shade Wilson with Scalability Project. For me it's about trying out the Beta new landing pages."
• "Justine from Pixel Dreams.  Excited to create more ebooks to start posting."
• "Hi Julie George - Stella Maris marketing -excited to blog."
• "Hello from HMC2 advertising in Richmond VT. I am hoping to create our first top of funnel offer, with a landing page and start nurturing leads."
• "Hi… Pingtechgroup… Atlanta…  Gathering more leads!"
• Hi! Sandra from Involution Digital. I'm excited about following up with some strategy session leads we received this week.
• helllllloooooo Nick..:-) Dave Presher, Involution Digital, San Francisco….we are excited about some of our upcoming content…particularly on media

Recognizing Top new content our VARs are publishing in their HubSpots since the last workshop: [Blog Posts, Landing Pages, Web-versions of Email Campaigns]:

• Means-of-production.com's first HubSpot-hosted blog: specific voices to specific personas "Yoo Hoo!"
• Involution Digital Shares, "We published our first hubspot blog post!" 7 Tips on Surviving a Job Loss
• Involution Digital launches their first HubSpot Landing Pages this month.  Check out their favorite:  Free Lead Generation Strategy Session Sign Up
• Meshy Communications shares their recently launched HubSpot hosted-site. They are blogging away at: www.meshy.ca/blog/ - They shared, "It's been awesome results.   18 days, 2 offers, email campaigns via HubSpot.  blogging everyday."
• Anchor Communications & Digital Services this weeks #1 CHI score agency on the VAR All-Star Board after only being a user of HubSpot for for 18 days.  They commented on the webinar, "Excited to help our sister company Anchor Mobile and our clients do marketing that people love - also from St. Louis!"  Check out their progress on their HubSpot-hosted blog here:  marketing.anchormobile.net/blog  

Our top VAR success stories for this workshop:

Key take-aways from the guest speaker: 

Reviews on the Workshop's Book of the Month this month:  Switch, how to change things when change is hard:

• Why does the Hubspot Keyword tool results differ so much from the Google Keyword results?  Answer:  Why do HubSpot analytics and Google analytics not match? , Why does my rank in keyword grader not match what I see on Google?
• What issues/concerns do clients have in the way HubSpot links to their current digital platforms?
• What's the plan to "certify" new partners?
• pricing inbound packages, how to make our first employee hire really count

Survey of Attendees:  "What is an area of HubSpot that you are most eager to get additional coaching on?"

Answers:

• Everything!
• Software and analytics
• social media integration, tracking/reporting
• sales
• Sales Training
• Creating Workflows
• Creating content/Landing and Thank you pages
• Knowing how to create each piece from  offer to Thank You page
• using hubspot to build agency pipeline
• Lead nurturing
• Workflows
• Analytics and showing true ROI
• IM plans and planning
• All new tools for HS3
• path to certification
• Conversions
• how to use it for clients...how many hours to include in an inbound marketing package...
• All of it.
• Just getting started, so right now, everything.
• Design/Implementation
• lead scoring
• Marketing services online
• Post-sign-up Processes
• selling it as part of inbound marketing service
• What to do with these leads

Highlights for our 10/4 Partner Success Workshop:

Heather Sloan of Insurance Copywriters - HubSpot Sales Success Story + Pitch Strategy Examples (http://www.insurancecopywriting.com/)

Heather has been closing an average of 1 HubSpot deal per month.  Hear Heather share an abridged version of her actual pitch she gives to clients to successfully close those deals and ask her for pointers!  Learn from an agency owner who knows how to close deals like the best of them!

Christine Huynh, Senior HubSpot Inbound Marketing Consultant -Overcoming common customer on-boarding objections: best practices + strategy. (Christine Huynh - HubSpot)Christine is the senior-most Inbound Marketing Consultant on the HubSpot services team (worked on over 150 customer accounts) and she is a long-time veteran of HubSpot's VAR team.  Christine is legendary for her "steel & velvet" approach to ramping customers up with HubSpot.  She will be teaching you how to overcome common objections from customers about HubSpot and taking your quesitons on some of your most challenging objections from your staff, your current clients and your prospects about HubSpot.  Learn to be bullet proof!  Christine will show you the way!  

Resources & Next Steps:

• Not a HubSpot Partner, yet?  Interested in learning more?