Introducing the 90 Day HubSpot Challenge

Business man with the text Challenge Accepted in a concept image

I've recently challenged myself to a 90 day HubSpot challenge and today I'm introducing the concept in preparation for Day 1 tomorrow.

One of the things that HubSpot teach you when you become a HubSpot Certified Partner is to be your own best customer. In all transparency I have to confess that I feel I've failed in that area. I absolutely love HubSpot and the Inbound Methodology, and although I've practised it over the two and a bit years with a surprising degree of success, I've been more focussed on implementing Inbound for my consulting clients than for myself.

The Product

Over the last couple of years I've also developed a number of add-ons for HubSpot. These are software integrations that extend the value of HubSpot by connecting it seamlessly to other systems. The add-ons either reduce administrative work (such as Inbound Accounts that integrate HubSpot and Xero or Inbound Member that manages the administration of membership sites by connecting Wordpress to HubSpot), or extend the functionality of HubSpot (such as Inbound SMS that allows you to send text messages from HubSpot).

This year I want to focus on growing the add-on side of the business. This has been growing quite nicely in spite of the ridiculously small amount of marketing time I have dedicated to it, and I've decided to take it up a notch.

And what better way than to go all in on Inbound! Like most businesses, when considering how to grow my business (or a particular part of it), I started to wonder which marketing lever I should pull to get the ball rolling. I started thinking about paid ads, resurrecting my podcast, video marketing and other channels. Some of these are ways of doing Inbound, and others are extensions of it.

The Plan

What I decided to do is spend 90 days doing justice to the Inbound Methodology and the HubSpot application. I'm going to use every bit of HubSpot functionality over the next 90 days and measure my start point and my finish point to see how it performs.

And it starts today (well tomorrow actually, but this is my first post about it so let's not get hung up on details).

Goals

The main goal is to see how much I can grow the add-ons side of my business during 90 days of going all in on Inbound. Here are my plans for the 90 day challenge:

Baseline the current numbers of subscribers to Inbound Addons products
Spend time each day "doing Inbound" with the focus to grow the subscriber numbers of those products
Track, measure, analyse and adjust based on what the data is telling me
Where ever possible, use only HubSpot as the tool of choice to implement Inbound
Share any other tools that I need to use to implement and why
Share my learning and progress on this blog

Ideally I'd like to be posting a blog daily, but that might not be practical. So I'll report back here as frequently as possible to provide the exact steps I'm taking and report back progress.

Do You Want to Participate?

After I mentioned to a few of my clients and followers that I was thinking of doing the challenge, a number of them asked if it was okay if they joined in the fun too.

My answer is - absolutely!

I'd love for you to follow along with me and perhaps even do your own 90 day HubSpot challenge.

I haven't quite worked out what form that might take yet, but if you're interested in receiving updates about my progress or discussing how we might do this together, click the button below to let me know. (See how I did that? I just added in my first HubSpot Call To Action for the 90 day challenge ;-P )

I should also note that I don't consider myself a good writer and in spite of having all the resources available to me that HubSpot offers, I feel just as awkward as my clients when it comes to DOING Inbound in my own business.

So it's time to own up and take action!

Tools

As much as possible I want HubSpot to be the main tool I use throughout this challenge, otherwise what's the point right?!. When I first moved to HubSpot I was attracted by the fact that it had so much functionality that I was paying for in a multitude of other systems. Add to that the reporting functionality and I felt that I would be relieved from my multi-system chaos.

However already I have identified other tools I may need to use to successfully go all in on Inbound and I'll discuss those in later posts.

Next Steps

The first thing I'll be doing is baselining my current numbers of subscribers so we have a clear starting point to report against. Then I'll be creating a new HubSpot campaign for my Inbound SMS add-on. I have a decent enough amount of traffic going to my Inbound SMS page but I am breaking my own cardinal rule and not making any offer when they get there. So Step 1 is to identify an offer, create the campaign and promote it.

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