3 Reasons HubSpot Users Should Be Excited About the Performable Acquisition

Last week HubSpot announced they were acquiring Performable. We have been customers (and big fans) of both companies so I thought that I would give you my 2 cents about the acquisition.

Disclaimer: While I have used both products I have no inside knowledge of future integration plans between the two. What I list below are just things I would hope would make it from Performable into HubSpot.

1. Reverse Funnel Analysis

Following HubSpot’s methodology, we created several webinars and instructional articles. We got pretty good at acquiring leads. But what happened between the time a person became a lead and when they became a customer? What content was most influential in converting those customer? HubSpot couldn’t answer those questions for us. Performable can.

Performable allows you to easily perform reverse funnel analysis. We configure events that we want to track (page views, form submissions or a custom events tracked via their API). We can then view a report for a revenue generating event, like a purchase, and see what key events have “assisted” in the revenue generating conversion. We can see what events were most influential in turning leads into customers.

Here is a Performable report for purchases of our desktop software in May. We can see a list of events we are tracking and what percentage of people who purchased completed each event.

The image below shows the same report, but lists every page visited by the customer, not just the events we have decided to track.

HubSpot would let us see this for individual visitors but Performable lets us aggregate the information across all of our customers. By aggregating that data we can begin to look for trends that will help us better fine tune the content we have that is aimed at turning leads into customers.

2. Lifecycle Reports

If HubSpot’s tag line is Inbound Marketing then Performable’s is Lifecycle Marketing. Inbound marketing is about getting found by customers. Lifecycle marketing is about understanding which stage of the customer lifecycle the customer is in and messaging them appropriately.

To help you understand your customers better, Performable offers Lifecycle reports. One great section of these reports is “Time to conversion”. Let’s look at this same purchase report we viewed above:

The image above shows that 44% of our customers purchase on the first visit to our site. That means that 56% took longer to make that purchasing decision.

Why does this matter to HubSpot users? Understanding how long it takes your visitors to become customers will help you better tailor the content and length of your lead nurturing campaigns. The lead nurturing campaign for a product that typically converts in 1 week needs to be very different than one that is aimed at customers who typically take 6 months to convert.

3. More Powerful Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is a major aspect of inbound marketing and, quite frankly, it is an area where the HubSpot software is particularly weak. Once a HubSpot lead nurturing campaign starts there is no way to alter it based on the lead’s behavior. In fact, if a lead reconverts on a different campaign they are automatically removed from all campaigns.

Here is an example. If a visitor registered for webinar “A” they would be subscribed to a lead nurturing campaign. If they registered for webinar “B” on that same day HubSpot would remove them from the previous lead nurturing campaign and the 2nd lead nurturing campaign. So, because your visitor was really excited about your content and registered for two webinars they now get no lead nurturing at all. It’s not a system that allows for very sophisticated lead nurturing.

Performable’s version of lead nurturing is Engage. Engage is still relatively young but already very useful. With Engage you can setup triggers that are based on user behavior. With each trigger Engage lets you send an email through various email marketing applications or post a webhook. A webhook is a message that you send to a server somewhere (most likely your own). By using webhooks you can get notified about key events or even change the behavior of your web application based on user actions.

In the example below I have a simple Engage setup that posts webhooks when someone has created a ScreenSteps Live trial account but hasn’t posted any content to it after 3 or 10 days.

The possibilities of what you can do with Engage are really exciting. Engage is exactly the type of lead nurturing I had always wanted from HubSpot.

Conclusion

I have just listed three areas where I think Performable will benefit HubSpot users, but there are many more. And don’t think that this is just a one-way street. Performable customers will benefit from what HubSpot has to offer as well. I really think this a great move for both companies. It will be exciting to see how this all shakes out.

Update: Here is a follow-up about how Performable customers will benefit from this acquisition.