By Bob Hebeisen

It has been a busy but productive first week getting HubSpot up and running at Tubifi.  Here’s the day-by-day log:

Thursday 4/19:

• First day with HubSpot!
• Added the HubSpot tracking code to our website footer, landing pages, and blog. Simple copy and paste. Since then daily reports of our website traffic have been emailed to me and my colleagues. Reports include company names, how many users from that company visited, what pages they viewed, the referring web page, and what campaign they are tied to if it was a campaign that drove them there. It is not really a lead report because there is no contact info for anyone who is not already a HubSpot lead. But it is pretty interesting and potentially valuable for sales prospecting to see what companies are visiting your website.

Friday 4/20:

• Created new HubSpot user accounts for other users at my company (i.e., sales reps, CEO, etc.)
• Set up SalesForce.com integration. This was pretty easy, thanks to exceptionally good “how to” documentation in the HubSpot Help & Support Center. Even so I had my first call with Tech Support, which was strikingly pleasant.

Monday 4/23:

• First call with my consultant, Leslie. Like everyone I have dealt with at HubSpot so far, Leslie is smart, super friendly, high energy, likes to laugh… they clearly recruit for this personality and it is a great reflection of their brand. Everyone you talk with at HubSpot is committed to making marketing and getting stuff done fun. Leslie reviewed the agenda for our once per week consultation calls for the next 6 weeks.
• With the help of IT I set up a subdomain (web.tubifi.com). The subdomain is where you post all your HubSpot pages (landing pages and blog articles). These pages sit on a HubSpot server. By virtue of sitting on the HubSpot server, you take advantage of all the HubSpot features: tracking, lead handling, social media & email integration, etc. But thanks to the subdomain you would need to look very hard at the URL to know that. And HubSpot automatically duplicates your website’s header and type template, so the pages fit in seamlessly with the rest of your website.
• Set up our social media accounts in HubSpot. Two major benefits:
  1. You can publish updates to your social media accounts directly from the HubSpot console. Still trying to figure out if you can publish directly to your LinkedIn *company* page status update, and if you can publish an update to Google+.
  2. HubSpot uses your social media account info to create a “connect with Tubifi” module. The “connect with Tubifi” module appears on all landing pages and emails. Still trying to figure out if HubSpot can use this info to create a “share this” module.
• Designed my first HubSpot email. I was frustrated at the limitations on the layout for HubSpot emails… I may become a beta tester for their new email program to be launched broadly in June.

Tuesday 4/24:

• Set up my first landing page: “Free On-Demand Webinar: How to Create Affordable Video Marketing and Drive Revenue.”  Essentially I created a gateway that makes people fill out a lead capture form before they can access a recorded webinar that I had already posted. The landing page was really easy to create and customize with HubSpot. I even built a custom confirmation email that is sent to anyone who completes the form.

Wednesday 4/25:

• Promoted my first landing page and saw form submissions start to roll in.

1. Social Media: posted the campaign to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
2. Email Marketing: swapped this offer into a 3rd party email program we have been participating in.

Thursday 4/26:

• Fixed the SalesForce integration with the help of HubSpot Tech Support. The responses from the landing page I set up the previous day were making it into SalesForce.com, but they were stuck in a strange category and weren’t automatically converting to leads or contacts. The HubSpot Tech Support rep helped me understand that the form submissions were blocked from becoming leads because there of a lead qualification rule set up in SalesForce.com. SalesForce.com was requiring that a Lead Source be entered for each of the form submissions before it would accept them as leads. So the Support rep helped me assign the lead source of “HubSpot” to each lead. Then he helped me add a hidden field to my landing page that automatically assigned “HubSpot” to the lead source of any form submission. All set, now all form submissions are automatically becoming leads in SalesForce.com