It’s incredible when you go to hear a speaker or watch a Ted talk and think “That is so right! I have been saying that for ages!”

That happened to me last week. I went to Inbound 2018 this year.  It was my fifth one, and while this is not a review of the conference, it is a recommendation of watching the Keynote address from the co-founders of Hubspot, Brian Halligan, and Dharmesh Shah.

Hubspot’s core message has always been that people buy differently today than they did before the explosion of the internet. This year they reiterated that with a bit of a twist. They are saying that there is another shift happening, similar to their Inbound Marketing shift when they launched the company.

This is what Brian Halligan said during his presentation:

“Trust in sales and marketing is at an all-time low, it’s about 5% on the trust index…this is a sign of the times, nobody trusts anyone anymore… who do they trust? They trust your customers. That’s the only people they trust these days.”

He continued that word of mouth has become a significant source of leads for new business. To maximize word of mouth, you have to make sure that you are delighting your customers.

As a result, Hubspot has added more tools to help businesses to service and communicate with their existing customers.

Dharmesh talked about the new Customer Code that they introduced as a guideline on how to build your company’s focus on “solving for the customer” and keeping your company genuinely customer service obsessed.

I have sung this song for an awfully long time. My previous sales managers would say that I was paying too much attention to existing customers and not enough time “knocking on doors.” I disagreed then, and I feel a bit of vindication now when a company like Hubspot says the same thing. I felt that my long-term success was based on people “wanting to buy” from me and that customer service was the key.

I won’t re-hash the entire presentation here because I think that you should watch it yourself.

 

Customer service is critical to marketing a small business in 2018 and beyond. If you need help implementing some of these in your business, we are more than happy to help.