HubSpot has executed what I think is masterful campaign at Dreamforce this week. Here is my simple analysis of how they have created awareness, communicated value and, most likely, generated a lot of great leads.

1. Create awareness with something unique

The first thing I heard about HubSpot at Dreamforce concerned unicorns. Huh? I didn’t get the correlation at all. At first I assumed it was just a silly marketing stunt where they would give away stuffed unicorns at their booth. I wasn’t really interested in the unicorns, but I was at least curious to know what a unicorn had to do with inbound marketing.

2. Establish credibility

It turns out that the unicorn thing wasn’t (only) about stuffed animals. The theme of the campaign was dispelling marketing myths (or marketing unicorns – get it?). HubSpot set up a twitter account for the unicorn and had messages posted around the conference that listed marketing facts and fantasy. Here is one few example:

Marketing Fantasy: Tradeshows are a great cost effective way to generate a ton of new leads and customers #HubSpotDF11 #DF11

Marketing Fact: Tradeshows are one the most costly ways to generate leads & customers #HubSpotDF11 #DF11

What do these little bits of information do? They establish credibility. By stating what is fact and what is fiction HubSpot is carving out ground as an expert on the subject. These little blurbs also make each attendee question whether they are living in a marketing fantasy world or are basing their marketing efforts on solid facts.

3. Create the need

Every exhibitor at Dreamforce has a free offer. Some, like the blinking Harry Potter wand I received from a vendor, are useless. Others, like the screen cloth I received from another, are useful. But HubSpot didn’t just give away something that was clever or even useful. They gave away something that was disturbing. They gave away something that made attendees aware of their need for HubSpot’s products and services.

Here is how they did it.

• HubSpot doesn’t really have a booth. They have several areas around Dreamforce with people in bright orange sweat suits and iPads.
• When you walk up to one of them they offer to grade your website.
• They enter your website url into their custom iPad app (which is very slick) as well as any competitor sites you provide them.
• They then show you are report that grades your site on several areas and compares it to the other sites you gave them.
• The orange HubSpot person then discusses the results with you, explaining where you are doing well and where you could improve.
• At the end they capture your email and send you a copy of the report.

The whole purpose of this exercise isn’t just to capture my email. It is to make me aware that I have a problem that HubSpot can solve. My website score was a 90. My competitor’s score was a 99. I’m a competitive guy. I want a 99. So, instead of leaving the conference with a nice little trinket that will remind me of HubSpot I have this voice in the back of my head saying, “You need to figure out how to get to 99″. I’m disturbed and that feeling is more likely to motivate me to action than a free t-shirt will.

Summing up

So to sum up, here is what HubSpot has done:

1. Created awareness – The unicorn thing was unique and piqued interest.
2. Established credibility – They didn’t stop with jut creating interest. They expanded on the unicorn theme to establish credibility.
3. Created the need – They provided a free offer that made people aware of the problems with in their website.

Most of the other vendors I see are only focused on step 1, creating awareness. I have no idea how successful HubSpot will be at Dreamforce but I am guessing that their focus on a more complete communication process is going to deliver great results.

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Wistia just posted a video showcasing all of the pain they can remove from online video. It’s called “Why Web Video Sucks”. When I watched it yesterday I cracked up laughing. Check it out below:

This video is great on so many levels.

1. It is short. It doesn’t drag on at all.
2. They show you all of the problems their service can fix without showing you how they fix them. They are covering a broad scope of information while keeping the detail very low. That is smart. The purpose of the video is to get you to want to learn more, not tell you everything you could possibly want to know.
3. They add in some great humor which means that people like me are going to share it with people like you.

We spend a lot of time at Blue Mango discussing communication and how to give people the right information at the right time. As a promo piece to get people to want to know more about your service, I think Wisitia has nailed it with this video.

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Integrated Email Marketing

As I said in my previous post, Performable’s Engage feature for lead nurturing is pretty amazing. But right now it requires integration with a 3rd party email marketing provider. The integration isn’t exactly seamless. Each email you send with Engage requires you to create a new list and auto-responder in your email marketing solution. If you want to set up a lead nurturing campaign that sends out 5 different emails over a 6 month period then you need to create 5 different lists and 5 different auto-responders. Not ideal.

But HubSpot already has built-in email marketing. If Performable could plug directly into that and allow Engage users to just create the emails for their lead nurturing campaign without having to go through a 3rd party, Engage would be, in my mind, the perfect lead nurturing solution.

SEO Optimized Content Management System (CMS)

Performable offers a landing page feature, but not a full-fledged CMS. HubSpot’s CMS may not be the most feature-rich CMS on the market but it is optimized for what matters most to marketers – SEO. By using HubSpot’s CMS, marketers are able to create SEO optimized content without having to worry about any HTML or programming.

I don’t personally use the HubSpot CMS and never have in production. But I am pretty technical in nature and prefer to hand code our site. Guess what, there aren’t a lot people like me.

For most Performable/HubSpot customers hand coding HTML is not the least bit appealing or practical. By having a marketing focused CMS in place, Performable customers will be able to do a better job of creating SEO optimized content. That’s the key – they will be able to focus on the content and not the technology. And once HubSpot bring’s in the landing page optimization features of Performable, the HubSpot CMS should be pretty interesting for a lot of businesses.

Content, Content, Content

I really don’t think there is a better company at developing great educational content than HubSpot. Content creation is what the preach and it’s what they practice. Performable has provided a few webinars and eBooks but they are mainly focused on introducing people to the “concept” of Lifecycle marketing. There isn’t a lot of content yet about how to best use Performable to improve your business.

With HubSpot’s content creation team now behind them I expect to see a lot more content focused around Performable customer success stories and best practices. As marketers move into the world of Lifecycle marketing this type of information will be really, really valuable. I hope to see more webinars on best practices for using Performable as well as interpreting the data that you get from Performable. That type of information can be invaluable as you go through the process of not only adopting a new product, but a new way of thinking about marketing.

Like I have said before, what the product does is less important than what people do with the product. I believe that HubSpot will be able to highlight great ways of using Performable which will do a better job of ensuring success for Performable customers.

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.

The Current State of Things

Updated 4/25/2011 1:01 PM – Everything was back to normal as of Saturday morning. You can look at the end of the post for the log of updates we posted.

What Happened

Amazon had a failure of EBS volumes across multiple availability zones. Theoretically that isn’t supposed to be possible, but apparently it is. This meant that not only was it impossible get access to the ScreenSteps Live site, but we were unable to start a new instance of the application (or reboot) in an availability zone that was unaffected by the outage since they were all affected.

As a fallback we moved ScreenSteps Live to a new region in the US. This took some time though since as the East Coast Region failed there was a “rush” to start instances in the West which started creating capacity issues.

But even with those issues, in hindsight we can see areas where we could have moved faster and at least saved a couple of hours of downtime. We apologize for this and we will be documenting procedures that will help us be more responsive in the future when a situation like this happens again. We are also making changes to our architecture that will allow us to be more responsive as well.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. Regardless of what people say, there are a lot of people who do “read the manual” and not having your documentation available to you can have a serious impact on your business. The customers that contacted us were very understanding and we really appreciate it. We apologize that we didn’t do better. We will post updates here as the ability to upload and edit content comes back online.

Status Log

Here are the status items we posted starting on 4/22/2011 (Friday) at 10:57 PM EDT.

ScreenSteps Live

ScreenSteps Live content is now available for viewing. We have disabled lesson uploading and editing until Amazon has things fully sorted out but your customers should now be able to see all of their documentation. If you absolutely need something changed in your documentation today then send us an email at support@bluemangolearning.com and we will help you out.

ScreenSteps.me

ScreenSteps.me is working intermittently. ScreenSteps.me is hosted on Heroku which provides a platform layer over Amazon Web Services and they are working to restore full functionality. At the current time the service seems to be going on and off.

Update 4/22/2011 8:28 PM EDT

ScreenSteps Live is still serving content reliably for customers but we have not brought uploading/editing back online. We will do this by the latest Saturday morning.

ScreenSteps.me was back up for awhile but is down again. We don’t have an ETA of when it will be back up.

Update 4/22/2011 10:53 PM EDT

ScreenSteps.me is back up and operational. Everything seems to be normal there.

Update 4/23/2011 12:42 AM EDT

ScreenSteps Live is back up and fully functional as is ScreenSteps.me. Thanks for your patience through this ordeal.

One of the best parts has been meeting so many of our customers as well as the other vendors that we work with.

A little Dreamforce news, Partick Bowl from First Data Merchant Services Corporation will be showing off ScreenSteps during his session “No Train, No Gain: Developing an Effective Training Strategy”. The session will be held Thursday at 9:45 AM in Moscone West 2006. Apparently he is hitting a hot spot in the Salesforce community because his session is already all booked up. But if you get there early you still might be able to sneak in.

Thanks to our Salesforce users that let Patrick know about ScreenSteps. He contacted us after one our users pinged him on Chatter and told him he needed to talk about ScreenSteps in his session.

The events around Dreamforce have really been fun as well. This morning Trevor and I participated in the Dreamforce 5k. It was a fantastic San Francisco morning and a great way to get ready to stand at our booth for 9 hours today :).

If you are at Dreamforce, please come by and tell us how you are using ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live. We can even show you some cool ways to use the new ScreenSteps.me service with Chatter. We would also love to do a video interview with you to learn how ScreenSteps has made your life easier.

Looking forward to seeing you.

How to Find Us

We will have a booth in the Exhibitor Pavilion, or what we like to call “Tiny Town.” Since our booth will be slightly smaller than the Salesforce booth we thought you might like a little help finding it. We are booth #7 in the Exhibitor Pavilion.

Exhibitor Pavilion

The Blue Mango Booth

If you are attending Dreamforce then please come by. We are very excited to meet our existing Salesforce customers and to help some other Salesforce users create beautiful documentation :).

You can get a free Keynote and Expo hall pass to Dreamforce by filling out the form here.

We’ll see you next week!

Learn more about Salesforce and ScreenSteps Live

View the video below or on blip.tv.

Kevin also created a great video on using ScreenSteps Desktop with Zendesk.

Do you have any interesting ways you are using ScreenSteps.me? Please let us know about it!

• Prepare the image in Photoshop or some other image editor
• Export it to disk
• Upload it to MailChimp
• Place it in the campaign

And if you need to change the image you need to go through the whole process again.

ScreenSteps.me eliminates all of these steps and reduces a task that used to take about a half hour down to less than 5 minutes. With ScreenSteps.me I can capture and edit images right in ScreenSteps Desktop as well as add text. Once I am done I export to ScreenSteps.me and I am given some HTML to paste into my MailChimp campaign. That is all there is to it. Here is an example of a campaign we created in MailChimp using ScreenSteps.me.

Watch the video below to see how I used ScreenSteps.me and MailChimp to create the campaign.

Or view the video on YourTube

If you would like to learn more about ScreenSteps.me and how it can save you time in your business then please join us for a free webinar tomorrow on Tuesday, Nov. 16th. You can register for the webinar here.

1. A problem that can be solved by referencing your support resources.
2. A problem that requires a decision.

What is the difference and why does it matter?

Problems That Can Be Solved by Your Support Resources

First, let’s define what a support resource is. Your support resources are resources that are currently in place and can be referenced by the support agent. This might include:

• Software documentation
• Video tutorials
• User forums

Another aspect of your support resources are policies that your organization has established for dealing with specific issues. For example, you might have a refund policy or volume discount policy.

If a question comes in that has already been dealt with in your support resources then the support agent doesn’t have to take time to make a decision. Your customer help desk can easily point the customer to the answer they need or refer to your organization’s policy on the matter. No time is wasted making a decision since the decision was previously made and stored in your support resources.

Problems That Require Support Agent Decisions

Unfortunately not all problems are as easily solved. There are many problems that support agents can’t solve by referring to your resources. These types of problems might include:

• A new, previously unknown bug in your product.
• A customer who wants to use your product in a novel way.
• A customer who asks a “how to” question that is not covered in your documentation or forums.

When a support agent encounters this type of problem they have to make a decision. They may need to refer the problem to the development team, contact their manager or seek other resources for an answer. This takes much more time than simply pointing a customer to a support resource.

Improve Your Support by Improving Your Resources

Time is the most valuable asset you or your customers have. Support incidents that require a decision take more time than those that don’t. Your goal as an organization should be to reduce the number of incidents that require decisions. How do you do that? Improve your support resources.

Your support resources can’t possibly answer all questions your customers will have. You will never be able to predict every situation. But your support resources can continually improve to answer more of your customers’ questions.

Assessing Where You Are At

Take some time to take an inventory of your support requests. How many are being solved by your support resources? How many are requiring your support agents to make decisions? How can you expand your resources to decrease the number of support requests that require decisions? Ramp up your resources and you will improve your help desk.

When I saw this I thought to myself, these companies are spending all of this money to design a beautiful, high-tech machine. They spend time, effort and money to create multimedia education materials, user manuals and onsite training courses. Despite all of this effort and expense, what the user really wanted was a sticky note.

So, instead of spending time to improve documentation tools and media authoring systems, why don’t we try to make the sticky note better. We’re not going to make a better software manual. People don’t read software manuals. We will make better sticky notes. People use those all the time.

And that was when the first idea for ScreenSteps came about. We looked at the key elements of the sticky note:

1. Easy to create – Anyone could create a sticky note.
2. Task based – The notes focused on completing tasks, not describing features.
3. Succinct – The sticky note only had information that was absolutely necessary.
4. Convenient – The sticky notes were available right when the user needed them.

So, when we designed ScreenSteps we kept all of this in mind:

1. It had to be easy to use.
2. It had to create “task based” documentation.
3. It should push users to creating short, focused documents.
4. It should allow users to put their content where they needed to actually use it.

And then we made it better. We added pictures. So, if you want to understand ScreenSteps a little more, realize that it is a documentation tool that is the natural evolution of the sticky note. It lets you create sticky notes with pictures.

If you keep this in mind when you create your next lesson, you will find that the lessons you write are a little smaller, a little more focused in their content, and a little easier for your users to understand.

• The time the person is willing to devote to the communication
• The time the person is able to devote to the communication
• The attention the person is able to give the communication

By being aware of these constraints you can adjust the scope and detail of your communications so that each communication can be “completed” in the available amount of time depending on willingness, availability and attention span.

House Sketch

Let’s look at the process of building a house. The first communication will likely be a sketch of the finished home. This is very high in scope (it covers the entire house) but very low in detail (we have no information on measurements, materials, room size, division, etc.). We certainly couldn’t build a house based on a sketch. We wouldn’t even decide to build a home based solely on a sketch. But it is the first step we take in that decision process. The communication is complete and we are able to decide if we want to move onto the next communication.

Floor Plans

Next we have floor plans. Here we have decreased the scope. We are dealing with just the inside of the home and only one floor at a time. But we have increased the detail. We can now see basic measurements for the rooms, where doors will be, where the hallways will be and where we might put furniture and appliances. Once this communication is complete we will know if we want to continue to the next stage or revise the floor plans to better meet our needs.

Blueprints

Finally we move to the blueprints. This is very high in detail but lower in scope. We no longer have information about furniture, it is all about building the structure to the required specifications.

Are You Starting Out With Blueprints or Ending With Floor Plans?

With each communication you create, be it a blog post, video, screencast or ScreenSteps lesson, you want to keep this idea of scope and detail in mind. Is the communication a sketch of a house? Then it should be very broad in scope and low in detail. Does the communication need to be a blueprint? Then make sure that you lower the scope and increase the detail.

The real mistake happens when your first communication with a customer is a blueprint or your last is just a floor plan. Give the customer too much detail at the beginning and they will be lost. Leave them with not enough information and they won’t be able to successfully implement your product/solution.

In future posts we will look at some real world examples of this principle in action.

In the webinar we laid out a framework for helping you decide when each type of communication is most effective. We looked at several good examples of videos, screencasts and ScreenSteps-like articles.

The real key to determining which tool to use is gauging the users level of engagement. If they are only marginally engaged in the content you are presenting then a screencast is going to be the best option. But if they are fully engaged then a ScreenStep-like article will be much more effective. Check out the webinar to learn why.

The reaction from the participants was fantastic. It was by far our best received webinar yet. You can see the slides below:

You can download the full webinar by clicking on the link below.