HubSpot's World Certification Day

Last Friday, the Strategic Piece team took part in HubSpot's World Certification Day. For each certification completed on Friday, HubSpot donated $5 to UNICEF. One of our values at Strategic Piece is that we invest in our personal and professional growth, so joining in was a no brainer for us.

Learning Highlights

Lina

Did you know that sales people only spend about 35% of their time selling? Neither did I. The “Frictionless Sales” course teaches you how to use this framework so sales people can spend more time actually selling.

The first part of the process involves reducing time-consuming tasks like manual data entry and other tasks that provide little value in return. The second part is about aligning your sales process to the way your customer buys a product or service. Lastly, they stress the importance of a culture of learning and coaching in your sales organization and provide suggestions on how to do this. What I enjoyed in this course was that they provided real life examples and stories of companies that have successfully implemented this process.

This was my first completed course in HubSpot Academy and while sometimes online learning can feel like a chore, they clearly put a lot of effort into making it interesting and engaging to ensure that you come away learning the topic at hand.

Matt

I decided to focus most of my effort on social media marketing because it's an area where I have the least direct experience. The course gave me an excellent overview of all the major social media platforms, their pros and cons, and actionable tips for making best use of them. I also learned a lot about the value of social listening. I tend to think of social media as a place for sharing content with an audience, forgetting that it's also a great place to monitor customer and competitor sentiment and activity. Lots of added value to be gained there.

Later in the day, I ran through the course on inbound marketing. This wasn't new to me, but I found it helpful to refresh my understanding of why inbound is the most effective approach these days. I came away with a renewed commitment to helping our clients understand the importance of defining customer personas and buyer's journey maps. In a world where the buyer is more empowered than ever and has product, industry, and competitor information at their fingertips, the days of traditional "push" marketing are definitely over!

Overall, I remain very impressed with the depth and accessibility of content that's available through the HubSpot Academy - one more reason (in case you needed one) to pick HubSpot as your CRM, sales, marketing, and service platform.

Melanie

I could easily rattle off crazy stats about how impactful personalized marketing is - and increasingly so, but one of the most interesting things I learned was in the contextual marketing class. One of HubSpot's useful features is its smart content functionality that allows marketers to change content, calls-to-action, and images based on marketing segments. But, one place that we shouldn't use smart content is in blogs because it messes up in RSS feeds.

How Can You Learn?

HubSpot has lots of great free educational material. When I give advice to marketing students or job seekers, I will strongly recommend they earn HubSpot certifications because they cover skills that are useful at marketing jobs and definitely worthy of featuring on resumes and applications.

So, you too can access the HubSpot Academy. I also learned about a new resource HubSpot has to guide learners through their content: Digital Marketing Strategy Learning Path.

You can also check out Strategic Piece's HubSpot Directory profile to see all of our certifications.