By Bob Hebeisen

I’m pleased to report that Tubifi just subscribed to Hubspot!

I have been following Hubspot’s blog and twitter feeds for quite some time. They really do an impressive job of not just talking the talk, but walking the walk. Just tons of great, practical tips about “inbound marketing,” SEO, email marketing, content marketing, and lead nurturing. And they are putting these best practices to work in their own marketing.

I’ve seen several sales presentations and demos, and it all looks pretty intuitive and easy to use. I gotta say, our sales rep was really good. The first presentation I saw was conducted by a technical rep, it was a deep dive on some advanced drip marketing functionality. But other than that, the sales rep just conducted the demos herself by sharing her desktop and showing how she and her colleagues at Hubspot use the tools themselves. I think the ability of a non-tech to give a compelling live demo is really powerful for a tool like this.

Here’s why I am looking forward to digging into Hubspot:

• It will give us a platform for drip marketing
• It will tie our website and email marketing to salesforce.com
• It will improve our SEO
• It will allow us to publish website and blog content to social media
• It will roll it all up in a dashboard with analytics to help us measure marketing success/failure
• Overall, it will make me much more productive

One of my colleagues suggested we could perhaps get free or low cost solutions to accomplish the same goals. That may be true, but stitching together a bunch of free/cheap tools to do the job sounds too much like a science project and a recipe for inefficiency. For example, it took me about 4 hours the other day to try to run a batch conversion of leads to opportunities in Salesforce.com using a free spreadsheet utility… Ultimately I failed and, guess what, the same colleague who suggested using free software had to bail me out and do it himself. Our biggest challenge is capacity. Hubspot costs roughly $1K per month, a reasonable investment if it can increase my productivity significantly and function as reliable plumbing to connect our sales and marketing activities.

First two steps were pretty simple:

1. Insert the tracking JavaScript into our web page footer and blog so Hubspot can track all traffic on the site
2. Set up a subdomain where blog articles and landing pages can be posted

I’ll blog about the rest of the setup process…