INBOUND 2020: Meet Kristen Pulido
TSL Marketing is gearing up for INBOUND 2020, a virtual event Sept. 22-23 that will bring digital marketers together from all over the world. We hope you will stop by our virtual booth for more information about our HubSpot training, integration, and migration services, but first, we’d like to introduce you to some of the faces you’ll see at the event beforehand so you can stop by and say hello.
Today we will speak to Kristen Pulido, Senior Project Manager at TSL Marketing, and learn how she helps B2B tech companies transition to and optimize their use of the HubSpot sales and marketing hub.
What are your primary duties within TSL Marketing’s HubSpot services?
Kristen: My experience and growing competencies around HubSpot involve client onboarding when clients are net new to HubSpot — and especially when we’ll be migrating or rebuilding their website in the platform. I project manage their onboarding, from general account setup to assistance with software integrations and training for internal marketing and sales teams on the various tools, such as contact/company management, lists and reporting, email and landing page builds, and workflow strategy.
One of the main benefits of TSL project managing a client’s onboarding process is that we take on the overwhelming administrative aspects with a clear view of what’s ahead, which helps our clients stay tethered to the bigger picture and strategy — the ‘why.’ Why did they choose HubSpot in the first place? That’s the bigger picture. And it’s often easy to get lost in all the ‘to dos’.
What is your background with the HubSpot sales and marketing platform?
Kristen: I’ve been using HubSpot at TSL for almost 3 years, but prior, my HubSpot experience was pretty limited. I worked for a boutique marketing agency in Tampa years ago, and I used to do some workflow strategy planning in HubSpot for various clients. But the platform had completely changed by the time I got to TSL! It was like learning things all over again. I don’t know how much you can count that previous experience toward the robust platform that HubSpot has become today.
Back in 2011 and 2012, the Tampa firm I worked for was one of the first to adopt HubSpot in the area, so it was very new. It’s become so much more robust. They didn’t have the CMS hub back then and it wasn’t a web-hosting platform at that time. It primarily offered the CRM, social media publishing, and emailing, and you could run some basic reporting. It’s become so versatile and functional for lots of different use cases for B2B and B2C. Analytics and reporting capabilities in HubSpot have evolved into tools that provide relevant insight in a user-friendly way.
“ Without an integrated tool like HubSpot, it’s difficult to glean a true depiction of marketing’s impact on the business, the pipeline being generated, and the win revenue being earned.”
How does HubSpot compare to other sales and CRM platforms?
Kristen: Other platforms are not user-friendly. I’ve heard from clients that many of them don’t have the reporting capabilities that HubSpot does and it’s not as easy to make updates to landing pages, emails, etc. User experience is one benefit that sets HubSpot apart.
You can put many users into HubSpot using the free features, which is something that other CRMs and marketing automation tools don’t offer. You can give your whole team access to parts of HubSpot, whereas it’s either limited to the marketing team or sales team or both if you use a different platform, and you have to pay for each of those features.
I think that the platform is laid out in a way that, visually, it just makes sense. The activity feed will alert you as the last action taken by being the first that pops up. I think that it’s easy to log activities in HubSpot. If you’re a salesperson and taking action to engage with a customer, it’s easy to log those meetings and phone calls. HubSpot will even let you call from the app, and it will log it for you. With an integrated tool like this, you can easily link and associate all the pieces of your business growth flywheel or funnel — contacts are associated with companies, companies and contacts can be associated with deals, contacts can be associated with campaigns — everything sort of integrates together so that you have a holistic picture of how your marketing efforts and investment impact your pipeline and win revenue. That adds a lot of insight for companies that didn’t have that level of visibility with their previous platforms.
How does HubSpot rate in integrating with other tools?
Kristen: With HubSpot, there’s finally a way to accurately articulate how much ROI marketing has generated for the business. HubSpot has really helped in that capacity because it makes it easier to integrate. With the amount of integrations HubSpot has now, you can literally take any sales CRM and there’s probably a third-party integrating app that can connect the two so that information can flow from one to another, and you can at least get closer to having a true picture of marketing’s impact on the business.
Another benefit worth highlighting about HubSpot is how much effort they’ve put into formalizing a list of integrations that plug and play right into the platform. And if you happen to use some software that doesn’t currently have a vetted HubSpot integration, there’s likely a third-party integration that can help connect the dots. This is key because so many companies are running their businesses on multiple platforms that don’t talk to each other.
“ HubSpot empowers me (and clients) to feel confident as marketers who may not have the technical chops needed for various other web-hosting platforms. If you have a small marketing team and no one has the technical knowledge to maintain a traditional website on the back end, why not host your website in a robust and secure platform that doesn’t require you to know those things?”
Can you speak to HubSpot’s website and editing capabilities?
Kristen: I’ve come so far in the last year and a half with HubSpot that sometimes it’s easier for me, as a project manager, to go into HubSpot on behalf of our clients to make updates in lieu of tasking out a production team member to do it, such as swapping out an image or updating some copy. HubSpot makes it so easy to go into the platform, update things quickly, and resave your work.
I think it’s pretty exceptional that without any knowledge of coding, I can use HubSpot’s user-friendly UI to make updates to webpages in real time. HubSpot empowers me (and clients) to feel confident as marketers who may not have the technical chops needed for various other web-hosting platforms. If you have a small marketing team and no one has the technical knowledge to maintain a traditional website on the back end, why not host your website in a robust and secure platform that doesn’t require you to know those things?
What ultimately leads TSL clients to want to transition to HubSpot?
Kristen: Recently, there’s been all this interest in reporting, and HubSpot came out with increased sophistication around campaign reporting for enterprise accounts. This is helpful because we’re always trying to make sure we can accurately attribute the right leads to the right sources and tie them to the campaigns that had the most influence in progressing lead stages.
That’s a hot button with a lot of our clients: they really need help connecting the dots. And HubSpot has done a great job of enabling us to connect those dots for them, whereas perhaps they need help refining internal processes to enable sales and marketing silos to communicate more effectively. Without an integrated tool like HubSpot, it’s difficult to glean a true depiction of marketing’s impact on the business, the pipeline being generated, and the win revenue being earned. Some companies are conditioned to not having a process that helps them figure that out in a seamless, immediate way in real time. Being able to log and account for all sales activities in one place gives marketing the transparency needed to make data-driven decisions.
We hope you’ll stop by to see us at INBOUND 2020. But if you’re ready to get started now, sign up for an analysis of your current sales process and platforms and let us show you how we can put HubSpot to work for you.
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