3 Lessons from HubSpot's SaaS Marketing Approach

In taking the Marcus Lemonis approach, here are 3 lessons you can take from HubSpot’s marketing approach that will help your marketing organization be more successful:

1. People

HubSpot only hires the best. Along with in-depth marketing expertise, HubSpotters must fit these 5 criteria in order to get hired. 

This is a one of the most important slides from HubSpot’s culture code.

The lesson here for organizations, is you need to hire for both skills and cultural fit. Companies fail when they only hire for skill. You can have the most skillful marketer on your team but if they can’t jive with the rest of your team members, this will create a toxic hole . A toxic hole that will require you to fire and re-hire another team member. 

2. Process

HubSpot’s marketing team is broken up into different stages of the funnel each with specific goals. The funnel team is responsible for generating marketing qualified leads by creating offers, lead nurturing campaigns and more. People on this team are held to a specific goal each month that align with their SLA. The lesson here for marketing leaders is that your marketing team should be organized based their goals of generating awareness, converting leads, nurturing leads or making customers brand advocates for life. Also, each sub-team should measured by their ability to hit their numbers each month. These numbers could be amount of traffic generated, new leads in the funnel, or the ability to push leads down the funnel. Define the metrics to hold your team accountable for your company's success.

3. Product

HubSpot’s marketing team eats their own dogfood by using HubSpot to market their business. This allows the marketers to understand how customers feel when using the software. This is an important lesson in business - the employees marketing, selling and servicing the product need to have a strong working knowledge of the product. This allows employees to better connect with prospects that are seeking solutions as well as connect with existing customers in achieving their goals.

The marketing team also keeps their ear close to the ground monitoring social, forums and other web outlets to understand how people are talking about their product. This feedback is then relayed to the product/engineering team. This is an important and humbling lesson for businesses. Marketers need to search for the honest and sometimes brutal feedback about their product. Though it can sometimes sting, this feedback is only how you can improve your product or service.

How to do you measure marketing success? What are some ways you structure your marketing team to see that success?