I’ve just finished a sales course run by HubSpot. Sales? I’ve done this before in my career, so why should I spend time on another course? And anyway, wasn’t the American exuberance of previous courses enough to last me a lifetime?
Apparently not! And it’s for a good reason: marketing and sales are changing fast, and if I want to ensure that Napier continues to grow then I must keep learning. So, I decided to take the HubSpot “Sales Lion” course.
You’ll have guessed from the title that the course didn’t lack exuberance. HubSpot has all the enthusiasm and energy of a young start-up (despite being a major global corporation) and there was certainly no lack of this energy from our trainer Dan. Yes, it was sometimes hard to deal with all the super-mega-awesomeness, but the truth is that the course was good. Very good.
The premise of the course is that you should sell by helping. You don’t sell by selling, you sell by helping someone. It’s very much like the consultative sales courses that were all the rage in the last 1980s and 1990s, but the approach has been updated to reflect the change in the environment. Today marketing is responsible for much more of the customer journey than it was 20 years ago, with the internet enabling customers, particularly B2B customers, to manage much of their journey without having to talk to a sales person.
The course wasn’t always about fluffy things like “helping”. There was also a strong focus on metrics: something that we’re great at encouraging with clients, but like most agencies we can be less thorough when it comes to our sales and marketing.
The course was useful, and shows the importance of continuing to learn. I find it interesting that marketing moved from pushing products to helping with the introduction of content marketing, and now there is a similar focus for sales. I still haven’t worked out quite how HubSpot seems to help so many people: it could be because I’m just super-mega-stoked by the course, or it could be that the product is outstanding. I suspect it’s a combination of the two.
I’m going to be putting the training into practice. If you’re reading the blog and are not a customer, then maybe we’ll be talking soon. If you do get a call from me, please do let me know how well I’m doing. Hopefully you’ll find the conversation useful and will want to work with us. We’d love to work with you!
