Having worked on so many businesses and also accounts, I’ll tell you that the tech is never the problem when it comes to inbound strategies failing.
Let’s dig a little deeper. To build any form of business you need multiple components, but today we’ll focus on the 3 Ps.
People, platform and process. You need all three. If you’re missing one, you’ve set yourself up to fail and you won’t solve your business problem. Also foundations are key. Who are you trying to attract? Do you know your ideal client, and if so, have you built profiles, avatars or personas for them?
In no particular order, here are the 3 Ps:
People
We’ll start with people. There are many different personality types in the world and each of us has our own way of looking at things. What kinds of people do you need in your business? Here’s what I think:
1. The visionary: they will lay out the vision of where you want to go and will build the team behind them to deliver the goods. I would generally say these people are more right-brain focused and love high-level conversation. They’re not interested in deep diving – just the facts.
2. The Integrator (COO/General Manager): they will drive and motivate the people responsible for repetitive tasks. And these people must have the right personality type for this type of work.
Process
This leads us to process. Now I have written an article on how too much process kills creativity, but you do need a structure around how things are done. Like I said, you need the right personality types to do those repetitive tasks, and they’re going to need to follow a process. Visionaries don’t work this way – they will end up doing something totally different.
Platform
Here’s the final P – the platform. You need a platform to accomplish your business goals with. Whether it’s accounting, marketing, sales, HR, service, software development or training, today there is a platform that you can leverage to do it all. I’m obviously talking about HubSpot.
How to audit your platform portal
Focus on getting deep into your platform to solve your business problems. Process pops up again here as you’ll need to set up your portal and build process around it, then train the people to use it (and HubSpot’s videos are a great help here).
Here are a few of the tools in the platform, depending on what part of the funnel you are targeting. Have you spent the time setting up these?
Increase Traffic
- Keywords Tool
- Website Pages (COS)
- Pages Optimisation
- Blogging
- Ad Add-on
- Sources Report
- Competitor Insights
- Persona Creation
- Social Media
- Third-party Plugins
Increase Conversions
- Contacts Database
- List segmentation
- Forms
- CTAs
- Lead Scoring
- Lead Flows
- Chat
Increase Sales
- Workflows
- Sales Tools
- Meeting Links built into CTAs
- Email templates
- Sequences
- Lead Scoring
- List Management
- Views
- Sales Process implement the 5 min follow-up on a SQL
Systemisation and integration
- Phone system integration – inbound & outbound
- Webinar Tools
- Service Desk / Support Services
- Chat
- Analytics and data
- Events
There’s even more to this list. So once you have a understanding of 1) what you want to achieve and, 2) what platforms you are going to use, you can find the right people to drive and implement your vision, then you can build processes around it. Once this is set up, hire a team to drive the tools. And you’ll need a team.