There is something quite satisfying about the end of summer. Not necessarily because the summer holidays are over (although anyone who has spent six weeks trying to work around childcare, cancelled plans, heatwaves and the recurring question of what everyone would like for lunch may have a different view on that) but because there is a sense of rhythm returning.
The out-of-office messages are disappearing from our inboxes, diaries are filling up and those conversations that were politely parked until after the summer are beginning to resurface. Everything is getting back to ‘normal’. Which got me thinking - what exactly is normal?
And perhaps more importantly, why are we always so keen to get back to it?
Because in business, normal is often nothing more than the collection of habits, processes and decisions that have accumulated over time. Some of them will be deliberate and well considered. Others will simply be things that somebody started doing three years ago and nobody has thought to question since.
That doesn't make them wrong. In fact, many of the things that become ‘normal’ in a business are there for very good reasons. But businesses change. Customers also change, along with teams, markets and technologies. And the way people discover, research and buy from businesses has changed enormously over the last few years.
So perhaps now is a good time to ask a slightly different question and that is, ‘What should normal look like now?’
The benefit of stepping away
One of the useful things about holidays, particularly in a business context, is that they interrupt the ‘normal’ pace of business. Decisions that seemed urgent suddenly wait a couple of weeks without the world ending.
And when you return, you sometimes see things with slightly different eyes. We spend so much of our working lives moving forwards that we don't always get the opportunity to look sideways and ask whether we're actually heading in the right direction.
Marketing is particularly susceptible to this as there is always something to do. Another campaign to launch, another email to write, another piece of content to produce, another audience to reach, another report to pull together. Marketing is an area where activity can very easily become a proxy for progress, particularly when the pace of business leaves little time to step back and consider whether all that activity is adding up to something meaningful.
So, having a natural pause in the rhythm of things,a moment to think about what we actually want our marketing operation to look like when it is working well, is a great opportunity.
What if marketing felt more connected?
A prospective customer doesn't experience your marketing in channels. They don't think, ‘Today I'll interact with the company's content marketing and tomorrow I'll move into the email marketing phase of the funnel.’
They simply experience your business.
They might discover you through a Google search, read something on your website, see a post from you on LinkedIn, download a guide, receive an email a few days later, visit the website again and eventually have a conversation with somebody in your sales team. To them, that is one journey.
Inside a business, however, those interactions can easily become fragmented across different platforms, spreadsheets, reports and teams.
And this is where a CRM such as HubSpot becomes strategically interesting. At its best, it gives you the ability to connect those interactions and start seeing the customer journey as a whole. Not because having every conceivable piece of information about somebody is inherently useful, but because context is useful.
Knowing that someone has visited your website is interesting. Knowing what they have looked at, what they have previously engaged with, which emails they have responded to and where they are in their relationship with your business is considerably more useful.
It changes the question from ‘What should we send them?’ to ‘What would be useful to them next?’
That is a subtle difference, but an important one. It moves marketing away from simply filling a content calendar and towards understanding behaviour and responding to it.
The opportunity isn't necessarily more data
We're living through an interesting period in marketing because the problem is no longer a lack of information. If anything, we have rather the opposite.
Most businesses have more data than they know what to do with. There are years of customer information sitting in CRMs, website analytics, email platforms, advertising accounts and sales systems.
Increasingly, AI and other technologies give us even more sophisticated ways of interrogating that information and identifying patterns within it. The opportunity, therefore, isn't necessarily to collect more, but to understand what we've already got and how it can be usefully used.
A well-used HubSpot portal can give you a much richer view of your audience than simply knowing how many contacts are in your database. You can start to understand which subjects generate genuine interest, which audiences respond to particular messages, which prospects are becoming more engaged, which customers might benefit from something else you offer and, crucially, which marketing activity is contributing to commercial outcomes.
Marketing has become very good at measuring activity. We can tell you how many people opened an email, clicked a link, visited a landing page or watched a video. All of those things have their place, but they become much more valuable when they form part of a bigger picture.
The interesting question isn't really whether somebody clicked. It's what happened afterwards. Did they come back? Did they engage with something else? Did they become a conversation? Did that conversation become an opportunity? Did the opportunity become revenue?
When you can start following that journey, marketing becomes less about proving that activity happened and more about learning what works. And that creates a much more useful feedback loop: marketing does something, customers respond, the business learns, and the next decision gets a little bit smarter.
That is the sort of normal I'd be interested in.
What if technology gave people more time to think?
There is another reason I think this is an interesting conversation for marketing teams at the moment.
We're surrounded by technology that promises to make us more efficient, but efficiency isn't necessarily the same thing as effectiveness.
You can automate a poor process. You can build a beautiful dashboard around the wrong metrics. You can use AI to produce more content than anyone could possibly read. You can create increasingly sophisticated workflows that move people efficiently through a journey that wasn't particularly well designed in the first place.
The technology isn't necessarily the problem. The question is whether we're using it to create a better way of working.
HubSpot is at its most useful when it takes care of the things that don't really require human attention, while giving people better information for the things that do.
A form submission can trigger an appropriate response without somebody having to remember to send it. A lead can be routed to the right person. A prospect can receive useful information based on their interests. A salesperson can see the context behind a conversation before picking up the phone. A marketing manager can look at the performance of a campaign and understand not just engagement, but its contribution to the wider customer journey.
Collectively that can create something quite valuable: space! And perhaps that's a better way to think about automation generally. NAsk yourself, 'What would we rather our people spent their time doing?'
What if marketing and sales were looking at the same story?
This is where the strategic value of a CRM really starts to become apparent.
Marketing and sales have always been connected, of course, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have always had the same view of the customer.
Marketing might be looking at campaign performance, website engagement and lead generation, while sales is looking at conversations, opportunities and revenue. Both perspectives are valid, but if they exist in separate worlds, it becomes surprisingly difficult to understand how one influences the other.
A connected CRM gives you the opportunity to close that gap. Marketing can see what happens to the leads it generates. Sales can understand the interactions that took place before somebody became a prospect. Leadership can see how activity further up the funnel relates to commercial performance further down it.
You can start to ask whether marketing generated enough leads, you can ask whether it generated the right leads. You can ask which campaign had the highest click-through rate, you can ask which campaigns influenced meaningful opportunities. You can think about the quality of the relationships within it and instead of treating the CRM as somewhere that information is stored, you can start treating it as a source of insight.
Perhaps ‘normal’ should be less about doing and more about knowing
I don't think the answer to all of this is to create a more complicated marketing machine. If anything, it may be the opposite. Perhaps good marketing should feel relatively simple from the inside, even if there is quite a lot happening underneath it.
The right people receive relevant communications because the data tells you who they are. The right leads reach the right people because the process is designed properly. Routine follow-ups happen without somebody keeping a list on their desk. Campaign performance is understood in the context of the wider customer journey. Sales and marketing have access to the same information.
And when something isn't working, you have enough visibility to understand why. That doesn't necessarily require more technology. It requires better thinking about how the technology, the data, the people and the process fit together.
That’s the real difference between having a CRM and using one strategically.
Ready to create a better normal?
If this has got you thinking about how your marketing, CRM and sales processes could work a little smarter, we'd love to have a chat.
Whether you need to get more from HubSpot or a different CRM, make better use of the data you already have, or simply work out where the biggest opportunities are, sometimes an outside perspective is all it takes to see things differently.
Let's talk about what better could look like for your business - drop me a line, I’ll be happy to chat.