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Nolan Villeneuve

HubSpot (CRM) & Account Manager
Nolan’s role is a cross between Account Manager and HubSpot Genius. He’s our go-to for digital support. Growing up in a family of hockey players, Nolan bucked the system when he had a love affair with soccer and the rest is history. His passion for soccer led him to become a loyal fan of Manchester United and he bleeds red and white. Nolan is thoughtful, creative, and he doesn’t take himself too seriously, constantly joking around with his friends. His biggest takeaway from his lifelong love of soccer is to be confident, but stay humble.
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Most likely to be a finalist on Survivor.
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“You create your own luck.”
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IOI Insider

IOI Ventures Reaches Gold Tier as a HubSpot Solutions Partner

Sarasota, Florida: Today, IOI Ventures announced that it reached the gold tier of HubSpot’s Solutions Partner Program. HubSpot, a leading CRM platform for scaling companies, works hand-in-hand with partner experts to grow their businesses through inbound software, services, and support.

The Solutions Partner Program is an ecosystem of experts that offer marketing, sales, customer service, web design, CRM, and IT services. It’s a global community that believes putting customers first is the key to growth. It enables members to offer a wide breadth of more sophisticated solutions across the entire customer experience.

To achieve status as a gold tier solutions partner, partners must work through HubSpot’s Academy Program to acquire the Partner Certification while maintaining a specific MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) threshold.

 

Over the past year, IOI Ventures has grown its business by incorporating inbound strategies to attract, engage, and delight customers. IOI utilizes HubSpot to align its marketing and sales teams to create a clear and smooth funnel for contacts to progress through from when they first submit a form through the completion of the deal. Notable milestones and achievements include:

  • Doubled employee numbers
  • Acquired another growing company
  • Nearly doubled our existing client base

 

About IOI Ventures:
IOI Ventures partners with small & medium-sized businesses that are looking to optimize their digital marketing efforts and scale their business. Our approach is unique. We connect the dots between marketing and sales with a focus on lead generation and revenue growth through digital marketing best practices.
IOI Insider

5 Key HubSpot Form Features You Aren’t Using

In today’s world, businesses don’t make it very far without some level of Customer Relationship Management software, or CRM as it’s commonly known. Typically, CRM’s come with a built-in form editor that allows you to create and implement custom forms into your website. This allows you a level of control in the questions you ask your leads before you share them with sales. While there are many form creation tools out there in the world, HubSpot’s forms tool provides us with unmatched simplicity and control that other form editors can’t compare with (not to mention submissions also link directly into the CRM, meaning no imports or integrations).

That being said, the power of these simple HubSpot forms should not be underestimated. HubSpot’s form builder has a multitude of features that when used correctly, can really aid in amplifying and simplifying your day to day marketing and sales processes. With so many different features to choose from, we narrowed it down to 5 key features we noticed most of our clients were under-utilizing, or not using at all:

Progressive Fields

So easy to create, and so helpful in the sales process.

Progressive fields allow you to capture more information on a single form without asking the same questions or asking for too much information before you build up trust with them.

For example:

A form is built in HubSpot with 5 questions and 2 progressive questions:

Form Questions:

  • First name
  • Last name
  • Email
  • Phone number
  • State

Progressive Questions:

  • Job Title
  • Industry

If someone were to come to the website and submit on that form, the lead would only see the first 5 questions that are on the form (not progressive). They submit on that form, leave the site, and come back the next day. The second time they go to submit on that form, they see this:

  • First name
  • Last name
  • Email
  • Job Title
  • Industry

Since you’ll always want first name, last name, and email on forms, you can mark the “Phone Number” and “State” fields as progressive fields. When the lead comes back to the site, they’ll then have new questions to answer, ultimately providing you with new information while being less redundant.

In this instance, the first submission allows the lead to be routed to the appropriate sales region using the “State” field, and the second submission helps to further qualify the lead by getting their role in the company and the industry they work within.

Dependent Fields

Picture this:

On your website, you have a form that has a field asking “What are you interested in?” It’s a dropdown field that has pre-selected values and new leads can only choose one. Depending on what a new lead selects as their interest, you then want to ask another 1-2 questions relevant only to that interest.

Enter: Dependent Fields

In the form editor of HubSpot, if you click into one of the questions you are asking on the form, you can head over to the Logic tab to create exactly what we’ve described above. Using simple if/then logic, you can set it up so that if “What are you interested in?” is equal to X, then show questions Y and Z.

This tool is extremely useful when you don’t want a form to seem lengthy or have questions you want to ask that are dependent on a certain response given earlier in the form!

  1. Automation

One of our favorite things to ask a new client’s sales and marketing leadership is, “When someone submits a form on your website, what happens?” Almost 90% of the time, the answer to that question draws a disconnect between marketing and sales teams because the process hasn’t been clearly defined, and neither team really knows how it’s handled.

HubSpot helps bridge that gap between the marketing and sales handoff through their automation tool “Workflows.” No matter what level of HubSpot you have, you’ll have access to simple pieces of automation that will keep everyone on the same page and ensure no lead slips through the cracks. From creating a task for your sales team to review a new lead that submits on the form, to sending out an automated email nurture that includes personalized information the contact just provided in the form, there’s an opportunity for every team to improve their day-to-day and create a smoother customer experience.

  1. List Building

Again, an easy-to-build feature that unlocks various ways businesses can nurture and track specific leads. Utilizing the form automation tool described above, you can send contacts who submit on a certain form directly to a HubSpot list. This list can be downloaded and shared, and will live in HubSpot for as long as you want it to. It’s a perfect situation for when you want to track the number of leads submitting on a specific form, or registrations for an upcoming event. Whatever the reason may be, you’ll have a beautifully customizable list that you can use to nurture leads to take the next step in your business process.

  1. “Block Free Email Providers” Option

If you have forms on your website, you’re almost always wanting to capture an email address when someone submits on one of those forms. Sometimes, though, you may have a form where you only want to capture business email addresses rather than a personal Gmail, AOL, or other Freemail address. This instance is particularly applicable for B2B sales organizations looking to acquire emails of those within a single target company, but could apply in other types of organizations as well.

When you create a form in HubSpot, select the “Email” field on the form by clicking on it in the forms editor. Then, on the left hand side, scroll down to the bottom to the “Emails to block” section. If you want, you can enter in that text field any domains in particular that you are looking to block from your forms. Or, if you are looking to simply block all free email providers, you can check the box below that section that reads “Block all free email providers.”

Boom! Now, going forward, if someone were to use an email address containing the likes of Yahoo, Gmail, or AOL, they would receive an error message asking them to provide a business email address. This is a great way to attract more qualified leads for you and your business, and maximize your time pursuing legitimate leads.
IOI Insider

Proving ROI, the IOI Way

If you remember a few months ago, we asked the question in one of our articles “What is the most difficult thing we face as marketers?” The answer, we found, was that even though we can run all of these extravagant marketing campaigns, it means nothing without the ability to prove Return on Investment (ROI). 

In the article referenced above, we were able to prove a 1,333.33% ROI off of a $3,000 ad spend for one of our clients utilizing Google Ads, Facebook Ads and HubSpot’s slew of great tools they have. This allowed us to track and convert contacts from leads, to opportunities, to closed/won deals. You’ll have to check out the previous article we did to see exactly how we went about doing this, but here’s a quick overview of the process:

  1. Identify ad budget – in this case we had $3,000 Ad Spend
  2. Create a paid media plan – build a plan for the ads (who, what, when, where, and how)
  3. Build the ads – build each ad from the media plan, pushing contacts to a landing page with a form
  4. Create a new HubSpot Campaign to attribute new leads to
  5. Create tracking URL’s in HubSpot’s campaign tool to allow us to track ad interactions
  6. Input the tracking URL’s into the ads
  • Run the ads

Given that this was a few months ago, we wanted to follow up with this in a “Where are they now” kind of story. That means we used the same tools, the same tracking abilities, a greater ad spend, and even greater results. 

Given the success of our first round of Paid Advertising campaigns through Google and Facebook, we decided to build off of that and greatly increase the overall spend. The new budget given to IOI from our trusting client increased from $3,000 to $20,000. This allowed us to optimize the ads that were performing well and create new ads to improve on what we already had been doing well. We went back through the same process outlined above but added some additional optimizations into the sales process.

We added in a nurture sequence using HubSpot’s workflows tool which allowed us to send a series of follow up emails when a contact submitted on a website form after being driven there from one of the ads. 

We also met with the client’s sales team to get a better understanding of how they use HubSpot, what makes a good-fit lead, and what makes a bad-fit lead. By listening to what both sales and marketing had to say about their customers and their internal sales process, it allowed us to target the paid ads effectively and capture information on forms that can actually be used in the sales process.

$20,000 Ad Spend

1,955 New Leads

34 New Deals and 7 Closed/Won Deals totalling $260,000 worth of revenue

Take $260,000 – $20,000 = $240,000 Investment Gain

That’s a 1,200.00% ROI

Which made one happy customer

Now, when you look at this, you may say “This is a 133.33% worse ROI than in your previous article.” While that is entirely true, you could also make the case that these recent marketing efforts have also generated $200,000 more than before. In the previous article, we were only working with a $3,000 ad spend, and were able to generate $40,000 worth of revenue off of that. 

We’ll take the $200,000 improvement. Connect With Our Digital Marketing Experts Today

IOI Insider

Why You Should Choose a HubSpot Partner For Onboarding and Implementation

Before we dive into any of this, let’s set the scene for a moment:

You have just purchased HubSpot for the first time, or you’ve had HubSpot for a while, but noticed you aren’t really using it to the fullest potential (if at all). With an eager sales and marketing team looking to dive in deeper, you want to make sure everything is in order prior to letting your team loose, but don’t really know where to start.

As you look at all of what HubSpot has to offer, you find an overwhelming amount of tools and resources that you know can improve your business process, but don’t know exactly how to set them up. You try to set some of these things up on your own, but ultimately can’t figure out how to best mold your sales process to HubSpot, so you start thinking about pulling the plug on a formal CRM altogether. 

Before you make that final decision, you take a look at HubSpot’s Solutions Directory and come across IOI’s profile. You quickly notice that IOI is offering a CRM Implementation that sounds right along the lines of what your business may need, so you fill out the form on our website to get in touch. 

Enter: IOI Ventures

If you haven’t heard the news already, IOI has recently become part of HubSpot’s Solutions Partner ecosystem which has strengthened both how we operate as a business as well as how we can help our clients. Not only are we able to supplement our existing marketing efforts with deeper knowledge and training on HubSpot’s great resources, but we are now offering new products like HubSpot Implementations and Admin support that have opened new doors for us and our clients.

“What is a HubSpot Implementation?”

In short, a HubSpot Implementation is a 2-3 month long project for businesses looking to get more out of HubSpot. We’ll meet with your sales and marketing teams to dig into the customer’s journey to see how we can mold both teams’ processes into HubSpot’s simple and efficient technology. 

Here’s just a sample of some of the things that are included:

  • Migration of data from your old CRM or contact database
    • We’ll help you export, clean up spreadsheets, and import your leads into HubSpot
  • Configuration of any integrations
    • Want to still use MailChimp to send emails? Want to integrate with Sakari to send text messages directly from HubSpot? Want to connect your current CRM to HubSpot? We’ll help with all of that.
  • Setup of automation to simplify business operations
    • When someone submits a form on your website – what happens? Don’t know? Let us help. We’ll make sure that lead goes to the correct person’s hands, and that the lead receives a follow up email on your behalf.

We want to help you simplify your sales process while getting the most out of all that HubSpot has to offer, without the headache. 

We handle the data. 

We handle the setup.

But we make sure everything is configured in a way that makes sense for your business. 

If you’re interested in exploring how IOI can help you and your business get the most out of your HubSpot subscription, fill out the form below and we’ll reach out!

We can’t wait to help you grow. Let’s Work Together