The Top 3 Takeaways from HubSpot’s INBOUND 2022 Event

By Ali Lipman

Last week, our president Sonja Fridell and I attended INBOUND – a massive annual business tech conference hosted by HubSpot.

Speakers inspired us like Dr. Jane Goodall, Viola Davis, and Former President Barack Obama, as well as all the marketers and sales professionals we could chat with while sharing booth space with our partner AirCall.

It is difficult to boil down all those conversations and sessions into learnings for our customers, but the event’s central theme was “connection.” You may not be a HubSpot user, but I promise that this applies to your business.

Sonja (right) and me (left) having fun in the INBOUND photo booth.

Enjoy my three takeaways from INBOUND 2022.

1. Create Connected Data

According to a study conducted by Blissfully in 2020, the average mid-market company runs on 137 different SaaS applications. The number is even higher for enterprise companies. It creates SaaS sprawl across organizations – difficulty understanding friction points in the buyer’s journey, ramp time for sales reps, churn risk, and more.

Regardless of how valuable the data you’re collecting is – if your analytics approach requires much combining and combing through data to get to those insights, it may be time to modernize your data strategy.

We heard this repeatedly during the sessions at INBOUND, and we talk about this at BrainSell daily. A Connected Data strategy helps you decide where to dive deeper into your business to fuel growth and scale.

Our Data Plumbing consultants help our customers create strategies that turn data into action. We approach data by outlining first a blueprint that tells us which tools, processes, and people will be most impactful to the metrics that drive your decisions.

We then help our customers by finding technology stack opportunities for improvement, including unifying some or all of their platforms into a singular database. Why? We want to impact your customer experience by enabling your teams with the best tools to drive leads, engage with your base, and keep them coming back for more.

[Take the Test: Is Your Company Data-Driven?]

2. Create Connected Operations

As companies scale – systems become more complex. Departments make application decisions in silos; managers build out narrow processes for their teams. This result is disconnection, mistrust, and loss of efficiency internally. During the pandemic, we lost a lot of human connection and support – so how do we build back alignment internally?

Revenue Operations means creating organizational alignment that accelerates how much value you generate for your customers. Operations teams need to wield data to align and streamline processes to represent your customer experience from the first touch. If they do so, the results are staggering:

40% increase in productivity
18% increase in customer satisfaction
4x increase in revenue
14% decrease in employee turnover

Almost every business owner I talk to is trying to grow. BrainSell helps our customers succeed by applying technology for scale. Scale is about increasing the value you can offer your customers without increasing your costs. We can help you get more out of the tools you have to support your buyer’s journey or help you select tools to get you to scale.

[Get the Guide: Digital Transformation Playbook for Enabling Growth and Scale]

3. Create Connected Community

Digital fatigue is at an all-time high resulting in more emails to spam, less social media reach, less click-through on google searches, far fewer responses to sales emails, and a shrinking blog growth rate. We’re more disconnected from our customers than ever before. And let’s face it, as consumers, it doesn’t feel free to give away our email addresses to our favorite brands anymore.

B2B has a lot to learn from commerce disrupters about creating valuable customer experiences from day one. HubSpot came to the scene with value-led growth: consultative sales, inbound content strategy, and product-led growth. But we learned at INBOUND that the next step is community. As HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shaw recommended, “Create a Growmance. Gaze fondly into each other’s dashboards. Have long talks about reach.”

Puns aside, it may be time to think about how you give your customers a stake in your product and services. At BrainSell, we think of ways to help our customers grow daily. We can also help you grow through community, whether adding community pages to your service offerings, strengthening the bonds between you and your customers, or providing strategies that make you an essential resource in their buyer journey.