Hint: It’s probably not product announcements from INBOUND.
For listeners to our podcast, and HubSpot partners like us, HubSpot’s annual INBOUND conference is a highlight of the year.
But for the majority of HubSpot customers that we work with, most didn’t even know it was on.
To them HubSpot is just one app amongst many – a single pond in a raging river of applications – that their business uses.
So, when we met with them in the week following INBOUND and asked them their thoughts, there wasn’t much excitement about it, instead it was more of a ‘is there anything useful for us that we should know about?’ conversation.
There’s an important lesson for us here in our businesses, for how we communicate with our customers, and what they really value.
Chances are they don’t care that Reese Witherspoon was a speaker, or that the keynotes focussed so much on AI, or that HubSpot is trying to describe themselves as ‘a customer platform’ now.
Instead they just want to know what’s going to help them do their job better.
Takeaway: Aim to provide real value to your customers on their terms, not yours.
Thus, speak to specific micro pain points (eg prospecting process reporting, or social post description creation, or how AI can specifically help with ticket responses) rather than generic gushing and the excitement of the event.
(In upcoming episodes of HubShots, Ian and I are going to change our focus – we realised we’ve been talking to ourselves too much, rather than talking to our audience.)
