In this episode of B2B Marketing Methods, Marketing Refresh CEO Terri Hoffman sits down with Libby Olson, Partner and COO at Growl Agency, to demystify the power of CRMs, data strategy, and AI-driven personalization in modern B2B marketing.
Libby shares her journey from corporate marketing to leading tech-integrated growth strategies, unpacking how companies can streamline sales, marketing, and operations with smarter systems. Together, Terri and Libby explore how aligning people, process, and technology creates the foundation for sustainable revenue growth — and how HubSpot’s evolving AI capabilities are changing the CRM game for good.
If you’ve ever wondered how to connect your tech stack, clean your data, or get your sales team to actually use your CRM, this conversation is a must-listen.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Why CRM adoption fails — and how to fix it
- The “data therapist” approach to uncovering systemic sales and marketing issues
- Building alignment between marketing, sales, and operations
- How clean data enables accurate AI training and automation
- What HubSpot’s AI-powered agents and workflows can really do
- Developing playbooks for repeatable sales and M&A success
- Understanding data governance and cross-team collaboration
- How leadership, marketers, and sales all benefit from CRM visibility
- The “crawl, walk, run” method for successful CRM implementation
To learn more about Libby Olson, connect with her on LinkedIn at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/libbyolson/
Or, email her at:
To learn more about Terri, connect with her on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terrihartley/
To connect with Marketing Refresh, visit: MarketingRefresh.com
Full Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Terri Hoffman: Welcome to B2B Marketing Methods. I’m your host, Terry Hoffman, and I’m the CEO of Marketing Refresh. Let’s face it, embracing digital marketing is daunting. This podcast was created to make it more approachable. Join me as we talk to CEOs, sales leaders and revenue growth experts who will share lessons learned and tips from their own journeys.
Hi, and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing Methods, I’m your host, Terri Hoffman. Welcome to the show today. Today my guest is a woman named Libby Olson.
[00:00:39] Terri Hoffman: Welcome Libby.
[00:00:40] Libby Olson: Thank you, happy to be here.
[00:00:42] Terri Hoffman: Great. Libby is a partner and the COO at a company called Growl Agency. Growl is one of our partnersthat we work with together on client projects. I’m going to have her talk a little bit more about that, but the fun parts that we’re going to cover today in our conversation [00:01:00] is a lot about CRM, but more specifically, what is the value?
How does organizing your data, organizing your sales and marketing data, into a CRM tool, impact the, the success of your revenue pipeline operation? How does it impact the potential for mergers and acquisitions and really being able to scale efficiently. We’re going to talk about some of the wins, like the actual real life wins that, Growl has worked on and some of the playbooks that they’ve put into place.
We’re going to be debunking some myths out there. I’m so glad I get to use that word. We’re going to be debunking people who are skeptical about CRM because there are a lot of marketers and sales professionals out there who have. Positive experiences, but there are also many who have negative experiences.
And we’re going to debunk some of the myths and talk about some of the ways to overcome, those potential pitfalls and failures, through best practices. So welcome Libby. Thanks again for joining me [00:02:00] today.
[00:02:00] Libby Olson: Thank you so much.
[00:02:02] Terri Hoffman: We are going to start with just getting to know you a little bit better. So I’d love if you can just give us a little bit of background, first of all.
Explain who Growl is, and then let’s talk about where your career started kind of leading up to Growl.
[00:02:16] Libby Olson: Yeah, absolutely.
So at Growl we spend our days helping companies make sense of their tech and really putting the customer back at the center of everything. And you know, most teams have great tools. They have CRMs, they have automations, dashboards, ERPs, a ton of really great tools, but the problem is that none of them really talk to each other. And what we do is we come in, we connect all of the dots, we build connected systems, and not just technology, but also in the people and process side of everything.
So everything just works smarter together. You know, we really focus on finding that friction in systems, in communication, and really those critical [00:03:00] handoffs between marketing and sales, sales and customer service, and also kind of how operations often fits into all of those conversations as well.
[00:03:09] Terri Hoffman: I love that because you know, I, even in the introduction, I talked a lot about sales and marketing, but you just talked about two other groups of the company that really are the other pieces of the puzzle.
And marketing a lot of times just gets stuck over on the side, like they’re, they’re the other group who, you know, runs the trade shows and helps with email campaigns and helps with social media, but healthy organization that is in a scaling mode and in a growth mode is really thinking about how marketing connects into those other parts of the organization because they’re all part of what, really makes a cohesive client experience.
And maybe, maybe there’s even more to it, but that’s actually my point of view, you know? On why, why it’s so important.
[00:03:50] Libby Olson: Yeah. 100%. Yeah. And you know, we were talking with another agency friend of ours that we, we’ve had for a long time, just yesterday, and really talking about that often clash [00:04:00] between sales and marketing and how that’s been going on for decades, like probably since marketing and sales kind of became their own entities
you know, in the corporate world. And we haven’t really, as an industry figured out how to solve that yet. And so that’s really what we come in and work with companies to figure out and how do you have that cohesive conversation? And again, it’s really about putting the customer first.
And if we’re thinking about the customer at the center of everything we do, we can figure out those friction points.
[00:04:29] Terri Hoffman: And I think what’s kind of cool about your background is you haven’t always been at an agency, right? The owner and person who’s running an agency.
You’ve been on the other side of the equation too, so you have a different ability to relate to what your client is going through. So talk to me about how your journey in the marketing world got started.
[00:04:47] Libby Olson: I actually spent most of my career on the other side of the table. I got my degree in marketing and then started the same way a lot of people did, kind of right outta college.
You know, I got ground floor at a [00:05:00] company. I was working in a manufacturing company at the time. you know, I was running trade shows. I was doing the catalogs because that’s what we did back then. I’m going to date myself a lot when I talk about the things that we do. But, you know, direct mail campaigns.
I think we were doing a little bit of email back then and some email marketing and kind of the early days of all of that and, you know, really being a generalist and all of the things that marketing would do. And then throughout my career started to figure out where were the areas that I started to gravitate to?
What are the things I like to do, my talents were kind of connected to, and that really fell towards kind of demand generation, technology automation as that started to come out. And that’s really, you know, I started to kind of company by company started to narrow that down. So I’ve worked for large enterprise manufacturing companies that were global to small, small startups, SaaS companies, software companies in [00:06:00] the retail space, in flight internet.
When that launched and became a thing, and we were all excited that you could get internet in the sky and now we’re like, can I, is there nowhere I can not be connected, but yeah.
[00:06:14] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, so that’s funny.
[00:06:15] Libby Olson: All kinds of different positions, but yeah, a lot of, a lot, on the, on the corporate side, so really sitting in that seat, from, from the marketing generalist all the way up to the director, and kind of senior level marketing across these companies and got to, got a chance to work with a lot of agencies and some really great agencies. You know, that I think I bring a lot of that agency knowledge to our agency, from some pretty amazing peers that I had at that time, but then also have that inside of what is the craziness that it’s like to be inside of a corporation and the things that you get pulled, the different things that directions that you get pulled into every day.
And so when [00:07:00] we on this side get frustrated, like my client’s not getting back to me, you know, I kind of have that sensitivity of, because they’re running around with their you know, head crazy.
[00:07:10] Terri Hoffman: Mm-hmm.
[00:07:11] Libby Olson: Not knowing, you know, being told five different things from the 12 different people that they’re reporting to.
[00:07:16] Terri Hoffman: That is so true. I fortunately, I, I kind of feel lucky that I’ve also gotten to work on the corporate marketing side, and you do develop a very different level of sensitivity. To that, and we’re both business owners, right? And so some of our clients are business owners and we have the sensitivity to that as well.
I think it also puts you in position to kind of predict what they might be looking for, like what would, what would be helpful to them? because for sure we’re going to be waiting for answers. That’s just sort of part of being in a service company.
[00:07:46] Libby Olson: Right.
[00:07:46] Terri Hoffman: But if we know what they’re probably going through, then it might be easier for us to say like, well, how about if I did this for you?
Would that, you know, kind of make it easier for you to get the decision you need? Or what do you need for the people you report to? And [00:08:00] can I help you pull that together so that we can all get a decision to move forward?
[00:08:04] Libby Olson: Yes. Yeah. And I know, you know, we have a very similar philosophy and you know, the clients that we work with really value that partnership and want that person, you know, kind of arm in arm by your side.
And those are the people that we work best with. And I know you guys do too, because they value that partnership and it’s not just, you know, kind of a order taking vendor type relationship. It’s truly a partnership.
[00:08:27] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s, that’s a good way to dig into some of the things that I think we wanted to talk about.
So, I guess connecting your career path back to what you’re doing today, you’ve definitely carved out a niche in more of the marketing technology space of the marketing, umbrella, right. What would you say, was there a certain tool or a certain part of your career where you were just like, I really want to.
I really want to dive into this direction. I really like this. Or was it more that accumulation of a lot of different things that happened?
[00:08:59] Libby Olson: I think it’s a, [00:09:00] I think it’s accumulation of a lot of different things that happened. I think Marketo was my first experience into any type of marketing automation at one of the companies that I worked with and that like.
Opened my eyes and blew open the doors with what we could do in marketing at that time. And I, that was just incredibly exciting to me of, of how we could personalize and understanding that the more, the more we knew about people, the better experience we could give them. Instead of just firing a bunch of information at them via all of these different channels, we could truly give them a curated experience based on who they were, what they cared about.
What part of the conversation they were walking into. Are they, you know, did they just walk in and not know who we are? Or have they been around a little bit doing some research and they’re kind of trying to decide, okay, which direction do I want to go? Do I want to go with you or somebody else and really curating that conversation.
[00:09:59] Terri Hoffman: Okay. And [00:10:00] we’re going to, we’re going to talk about personalization as we get into this conversation. because I love how you describe personalization. it’s way more than just using somebody’s first name and,
[00:10:09] Libby Olson: right.
[00:10:10] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. Or the city that they live in. Right. So let’s talk about what I think, you know, your, your partner at Growl, he, he uses a term that I just absolutely love, data, data therapist.
So,
[00:10:21] Libby Olson: Yeah.
[00:10:21] Terri Hoffman: could you describe, what is meant by that term? Because I think it starts to explain. what you do and how it connects to a CRM tool as just one example of that data therapist.
[00:10:36] Libby Olson: Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah and when you think about going to therapy, you know, in kind of the traditional sense mm-hmm. You typically go for one purpose. You have a problem that’s on the surface, and what you end up dealing with in therapy is not that surface problem. It’s a whole bunch of underlying things that are coming out as that symptom, that’s a symptom of a [00:11:00] problem that you have that’s a lot deeper, and that’s really how we approach a lot of these projects.
It’s kind of like therapy where, we understand that this is an outcome that you have, you know, you have a low conversion rate or your sales team isn’t following up on leads or whatever that problem challenge might be. We get in and we start to ask questions just like a therapist would.
Tell me more about that, and start to dig deeper and deeper and ask questions and ask questions of everybody in the team and talk to me about your processes. Tell me about what you do every day, and understand everything that’s going on in the whole ecosystem. Not just look at the system or even just the data, but talk to us about everything that’s happening around that
and that really tends to highlight where the challenges are and,
[00:11:50] Terri Hoffman: Mm-hmm.
[00:11:50] Libby Olson: What’s really causing that end problem of, I’m not getting the conversion rate that I need. My customer acquisition cost is too high, whatever brought [00:12:00] them to us originally.
[00:12:02] Terri Hoffman: Yep. Yeah, exactly. And that I, I like how you, you put that it, the more, because I’ve been in meetings with you, where you do it, you ask why, why, why, why?
And just like therapy, this is a really tough project to kinda bite into and, and engage with because it can actually reveal some kind of systemic
operational issues that have to be addressed along with the implementation of something that’s cleaning up your data and housing it like a CRM tool.
Yeah. but for brands who really want to grow and scale and grow, you’ve gotta get over that hurdle and embrace it and if you’re led by the right team. It, it’s not as painful as it could be.
[00:12:44] Libby Olson: Yeah.
[00:12:45] Terri Hoffman: If you weren’t working with somebody who had the expertise that you guys have in, in my opinion, I’ve watched it.
I’ve watched the good and the bad.
[00:12:52] Libby Olson: Oh, well, thank you.
Thank you.
yeah, absolutely. And you know, there can be a lot of emotion tied to it when you start to dig in, you have all the different [00:13:00] personalities and complexities and it can be people, you know, we’ve already spent a ton of money on this, or, you know, that’s somebody’s baby project or, you know, whatever it is it’s trying to kinda work through all of those things. And again, putting the end goal in mind and letting everybody. Kind of get their feelings out, but let’s move forward and kind of move beyond all of that and figure out how do we come together and create the best possible solution for every person and every division and ultimately the company.
[00:13:33] Terri Hoffman: Right? Yeah.
So what are, what are some of the common, issues that you do run into when you get into that consultative beginning part of a project? Like what are some of the things that you run into? I’m sure there are a lot, you don’t have to gimme the fullest, but what are some of like the common ones?
[00:13:50] Libby Olson: A lot of big ones and this is another reason I think kind of what guided me into what we’re doing now is, that sales was never involved in the initial [00:14:00] conversation. So processes were built, systems were built without ever having a conversation with sales. And I saw that when I was in corporate, you know, was everything was built without the sales conversation.
Sometimes even built without the marketing conversation, IT would just build it.We can’t shove people into a system, we have to curate a system that meets people’s existing processes, that maybe have an opportunity, to be refined and optimized, but we have to talk through that and kind of convince everybody that that’s the right path to go and do some change management along the way, not just, okay, here’s your new life.
Go to luck. if anybody’s ever tried to do that with sales, that will never happen.
[00:14:41] Terri Hoffman: Yeah.
[00:14:41] Libby Olson: Your best salespeople won’t ever, they just won’t do it. And you’re not going to fire them because they’re your best salespeople. So you’re just not going to get what you need out of that system. And the other people will do it, but they’re not going to be your best salespeople.
So in order to get what you need, the biggest thing is getting sales involved early on in the conversation and [00:15:00] making sure that they’re a part of it. Data governance is anotherbig one.
[00:15:04] Terri Hoffman: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:05] Libby Olson: And we see it almost every single time. It’s a tough one because often when you’re smaller or starting out on a project, that doesn’t come out as a priority oftentimes, and it’s not a priority until it’s a problem.
And you know, until you see the after effects of not having any data governance and having the huge project of having to try and clean up your data. And yes, we have AI tools now, but they can’t do everything. it can do a fair bit and it can human led, it can do a lot, but it has to be AI recognizes patterns. So you still have to know what’s wrong with the pattern in order to tell it what to clean up going forward. Okay. So it’s still a massive project to figure out what’s messy in your data to know what we [00:16:00] have to clean up and know what’s wrong with it? Yeah, those are, those are probably two of the biggest ones that we see.
[00:16:05] Terri Hoffman: Okay. And those are.
[00:16:07] Libby Olson: Not small
[00:16:07] Terri Hoffman: alone are not small. Enough of a reason to move forward with this type of, initiative because the value at the other end of that is enormous. And I want to talk a little bit more about that. Like what are some of the you know, I guess wins or, value points that you’ve seen come out on the other side where I suspect a lot of times a client is like, oh, I didn’t even realize that would be a possibility until you helped us get sales bought in.
And until we had our data cleaned up, I didn’t even realize we could do x, y, and z.
[00:16:47] Libby Olson: So one example. This is really about aligning teams, it’s not necessarily about, a revenue number. But as you have aligned teams, you have efficiency optimization, it’s just going to happen. [00:17:00] we worked with an economic development company. They were utilizing two different CRMs.
They had kind of a sales team that were driving economic development, bringing people into the community, and then they also had a fundraising team. People going out into the local community trying to raise funds through businesses, wealthy individuals, other organizations, et cetera. Two different systems, two completely different paths, and their marketing person kind of stuck in the middle, not really able to access either one of those things to truly even support them.
So then they were relying on the salespeople to export information anytime they wanted to send an email, anything like that. and so they really needed to consolidate their systems one. But not only that, even within their systems, their individual sales reps had their own individual process.
So there was no cohesion again, around process either across the different reps. So it really [00:18:00] was that not only system conversation about, okay, yeah, we can migrate and bring systems together. And obviously they need different things. A fundraising team needs very different information than a sales team.
So yeah, we can curate that, migrate all of that data. That’s a systems conversation, but also having those conversations with each of those people and identifying too, what is the best practice, what is our best opportunity, and go to market plan, whether that’s fundraising or bringing new businesses into the community.
Who are the winner? Who’s winning? Let’s look at our data. Which ones are winning? What are the processes that went into those and which ones are winning? And kind of have a, marry those two things together of what can we see from data and then what also can we have just in a organic conversation of what do you guys feel like is winning when you have those connection conversations and how do we make that a little bit more [00:19:00] consistent across all of your salespeople, because those
people you bring into the community are going to end up having a conversation. Okay. And they’ll be like, well, my, my experience was like this. Well that wasn’t my experience. My experience was completely different. And that can have kind of a brand disconnect after the fact.
[00:19:21] Terri Hoffman: Yeah.
[00:19:21] Libby Olson: And then, you know, even that repeat conversation or existing businesses or businesses that come into the community can then become funders.
you want to make sure you have that really strong, consistent brand message to all of these people all the way through that funnel.
[00:19:39] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. The, the message and the, the kind of experience of that process. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And don’t you, I mean, I think a lot of salespeople get nervous when they hear process because they feel like, no, I have my own style and it’s worked and I know how to do this right. But part of the reason you involve them is to make sure you understand like, what, [00:20:00] what is that? What are you actually doing? Because certainly there’s value in your personality and your ability to build relationships, but there’s steps you’re following that, that are also part of it, that are creating that success, that those steps can be scaled and taught to someone else and they can be trained on those things.
And you can all still have your own style. Your own way that you’re building those relationships can be unique to each person.
[00:20:27] Libby Olson: Yeah. And no matter who you are, there’s a part of your day in your process or you’re dealing with. Headquarters or another team that there’s friction there.
Yes. And it’s hard. Some, there’s hard parts in your day. And is there an opportunity to make those hard parts easier through automation, through systems connection, through ease of access to something, whatever that might be. Is there a way that we can reduce that friction? And that’s really all we try to do is how can we reduce friction in getting knowledge, in getting access [00:21:00] to, to data, in getting approval for pricing, you know, whatever it might be. We’re trying to speed that process up and make it easier for everybody. Definitely not trying to like, you know, everybody has gray suits and going down the single path, you know?
[00:21:20] Terri Hoffman: Right. But I do think that’s what a lot, I do think when, yeah, when,
[00:21:23] Libby Olson: Yeah, a hundred percent.
[00:21:24] Terri Hoffman: a tool is implemented maybe with some.
Misguided approaches. That is what happens.
[00:21:31] Libby Olson: Yeah.
[00:21:31] Terri Hoffman: And that’s why a lot of salespeople don’t like CRM tools and they won’t use them and they’re like, Nope. Don’t, don’t need it. Don’t want it. And they run the other direction when they hear that acronym. there has to be a healthy approach to it with the right, with the right mindset and outcomes in place.
So I think, I think that was a really good description. I think, you know, typically don’t you find that leadership teams are interested in like accessibility to the data they want to see like, what does the [00:22:00] pipeline look like? How close are we to closing deals? What I want to be able to plan around this?
Do we need to, you know, open up a second shift in our, facility? Like those are the kinds of things they’re mindful of. Do I need to hire more? Do I need to set more cash aside to be ready to go out and pay headhunters, or go out and pay recruiters? And they’ve gotta be able to plan around that.
So do you find that leadership is typically interested in that? As kind of a driver to your type of project?
[00:22:28] Libby Olson: Yeah, absolutely. And especially on the sales side, because a lot of times what they’re getting is inconsistent numbers. They’re getting one number from their sales team. Finance might be telling them a different number, even from a pipeline perspective.
if they do have a CRM, it might be saying a different thing. And so they might be getting three different data points that are all coming from systems or an ERP, which might say yeah, a different thing from orders and what’s there and which one do you believe, which one’s the truth. And that’s what they’re really looking for a [00:23:00] lot when they’re coming to us, is just frustration of I don’t know what’s the truth. I feel like we’re doing a lot of things three different times or manually because I have to look at this system and this system and this system and combine my spreadsheets together and figure it out, and because I don’t get everything in one beautiful dashboard the way that I want it.
[00:23:22] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. Oh, I mean, I’m sure a lot of business owners listening to this can relate to that pain. It’s a very real pain. It doesn’t matter the size of your company, but when you have a larger, like a mid-size company and certainly larger than that, the ripple effect of not having that information correct is
pretty massive. What is the marketer looking for? You know, what are, what is that person in the, marketing management role who might be the only marketer on staff or, you know, there might be a couple people, but somebody owns that system.
[00:23:56] Libby Olson: Mm-hmm.
[00:23:56] Terri Hoffman: You know, what are they looking for out of a project?[00:24:00]
[00:24:00] Libby Olson: You know, it depends on where they are. If they have never implemented a CRM, they’re really looking for, they’re looking for data of where to spend their marketing dollars because they don’t know how well their dollars are converting. So everything’s a little bit of a guessing game.
They know they’re early on conversions, they may know how many people turned into a lead, but did those leads turn into sales? that can also happen if they do have a CRM, but sales isn’t putting in the data that they want. If they’re not getting that feedback back either from a sales team or an ERP, whatever their system might be, or whatever they’re selling, if they’re not getting that data feedback of what closed, that’s a lot of times what marketing is looking for.
Like, I know how many leads I gave you, but what did that turn into from a revenue standpoint?
[00:24:52] Terri Hoffman: Right. Oh my gosh. I think you hit the nail on the head. What did it turn into? And if it didn’t turn into anything, why? What happened? Why, yeah, what did they, [00:25:00] what was not right about the leads that we generated your way?
So that, I think it maybe sounds a little trite when a marketer says this, but we actually can adjust things. in order to make that more right or to get it further on track, like that is actually a real thing that marketing teams can adjust, pretty quickly.
[00:25:21] Libby Olson: Yeah, absolutely. And it can affect, you know, depending on the type of your business. I worked for a direct to consumer company and it was a type of company that had a relatively higher churn than a typical type of company. And, It was just that kind of an industry and you know, being able to even identify where leads came from and identify churn rates, not only what became a customer, but how long did they stay and understanding the total customer lifetime value because, yeah, I might get 5% more customers out of say, paid search ads, but they’re staying longer if I get them from [00:26:00] direct mail.
Direct mail costs more, but if I get more money out of them outta the end of the day, then I’m better off and exactly that I can adjust my marketing spend. Not that I would ditch paid search altogether, but how do I adjust that to make sure that we’re getting that optimal customer acquisition cost. If you are in that more kind of high volume type of a business.
[00:26:22] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, exactly. and sometimes the in-house marketing person may not know how to, they’re going to be really great at gathering all of that data together. And our company can step in and help with, like, how do you analyze that now? How do you look at that and decide, well, okay, I see what the data is telling you, but I’m not exactly sure what to do about that.
You know, somebody in a more strategic seat can say, well, here’s the action you should take, or Here’s how you could reallocate your budget. But without that data,it’s a guessing game. Like somebody on my team likes to say, you’re just constantly playing whack-a-mole.
[00:26:53] Libby Olson: Yeah, totally.
[00:26:55] Terri Hoffman: And that’s to fun to plan an arcade, but not with real money.
[00:26:59] Libby Olson: [00:27:00] Exactly.
[00:27:01] Terri Hoffman: Let’s talk a little bit about, AI training. So,
[00:27:05] Libby Olson: yeah.
[00:27:06] Terri Hoffman: that’s a pretty hot topic right now. And so, you know, we haven’t really talked about the name of the system, but like HubSpot as an example.
[00:27:14] Libby Olson: Mm-hmm.
[00:27:14] Terri Hoffman: HubSpot is the CRM tool that I think you, our company and your company really has the strongest belief in and work around. So let’s talk a little bit about, how a tool like HubSpot and the data in HubSpot can help effectively train AI and what you mean by that.
[00:27:31] Libby Olson: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:27:33] Libby Olson: Yeah. And so, I mean, you know, true for any, optimized system, but as you said, you know, we, we hooked our horse to the HubSpot cart years ago and you know, we used to be agnostic, but in order to know something really deeply, you have to kind of pick one these days because they are really deep technologies and we chose HubSpot.
And you know, the thing with HubSpot is that they are one, they’re, they’re really [00:28:00] leading a lot when it comes to AI and, you know, a kind of popular term now, agentic workflows and workflows, just meaning that, you know, agents and whatever that means is, I know what it means, but whatever, whatever that means for everybody else in your own workflow pattern.
They’re really leading a lot of that. And one of the founders has really been pushing forward for, with that, building his own HubSpot specific agents and digging into that and creating his own ecosystem there. They’ve really been pushing forward into figuring out.
Let me back up a little bit. Actually, HubSpot, you know, my journey with HubSpot started long ago when I was in the marketing corporate world and I was not a HubSpot customer, but I followed HubSpot and got every single newsletter they have because they were the best content marketers out there.
[00:28:49] Terri Hoffman: Yep,
[00:28:50] Libby Olson: and we just followed everything they did. They are, when they pick a path, they dig into it really hard. [00:29:00] And one of the things that they have always been successful on is understanding that the customers first and should always be at the center of the experience. And they understand the sales conversation, whether that’s B2B or B2C, and there’s definitely niches they play better in some than others, but they really understand that. And so they’re building those tools focused on that. So some of the key things that they’re working on are things like, the customer agent, which
[00:29:35] Terri Hoffman: mm-hmm.
[00:29:36] Libby Olson: pulls in everything. You know, you can train it on all of your company information, building that knowledge base of everything that you have ever created from a customer service standpoint, and pull that into a customer agent to really help from a self-service standpoint and not to, I mean, I don’t, maybe HubSpot has this mindset, [00:30:00] but not to replace your customer service team, but to really respond to a lot of those quicker self-service types of questions or the type of user that’s never going to call you anyway.
[00:30:14] Terri Hoffman: Mm-hmm.
[00:30:15] Libby Olson: They want to self-service, they want to figure it out themselves and they don’t want to talk to another person. And so the more you can help them figure that out, the better chance of you have of retaining that customer.
[00:30:28] Terri Hoffman: Yep.
[00:30:28] Libby Olson: On the other side of the conversation, they’re building the prospecting agent, you know, really trying to help on the original sales conversation, and again, not in any way to replace a salesperson, but how do you, what is your biggest challenge as a salesperson? It’s knowing the customer. What’s their pain point?
What’s their challenges? What’s going on in their world? What’s going on in the news in their world? If they’re big enough prospect that they might be in the news, or putting out content anywhere that’s [00:31:00] published online. Being able to find that, aggregate it, read it, understand what’s all there, know what matters based on the conversations you’ve already had.
Imagine how many hours that would take. But if you have AI that can go find that, scour the web, find all of that, aggregate it, summarize it for you. Oh, by the way, here’s the top five points based on what you’ve already put in as the information from the real life conversations that you’ve had, how much time would that save and how much would that help you going into that next conversation?
And so that’s the kind of things that where we really see, AI partnering with a lot of these CRM tools and, you know, HubSpot specifically, but the key thing with all of this is that, like I said before, one AI recognizes patterns and it learns like a person, whatever you teach it, [00:32:00] it’s going to spit out.
[00:32:02] Terri Hoffman: Mm-hmm.
[00:32:02] Libby Olson: So if we’re feeding it bad data, because our data in our system is bad, the information we have on our customers is bad or old, then that’s what it’s going to spit out. So if we’re not keeping our data up to date
[00:32:18] Terri Hoffman: mm-hmm.
[00:32:18] Libby Olson: It’s not going to have a very good. Picture of who it is that we want to target, who’s our ideal customer profile?
Where, how many do we have? And then what’s our opportunity to close some of these people? we’re not doing the AI justice kind of in a way. Yeah. and you mentioned Greg, the other thing he likes to say is AI can be like a drunk uncle that, you know, he can be a lot of fun and he can do really cool things, but if left unchecked it can go crazy and you’ve gotta watch out what it’ll do.
[00:32:49] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. And you don’t want it to, and I think that, actually you just kind of sparked a thought for me. So when it comes to just general marketing communications, [00:33:00] one of your foundational pieces is like knowing who your audience is, knowing their pain points and knowing what they need to hear, right?
Yeah. So message, you, you always want to have a clear message, and it sounds like what you’re saying, foundationally, if you’re going to have a CRM and you’re going to expect it to be able to take advantage of AI agents and AI features, you have to have a foundational item of clean, organized data. And if you’ve got that, then you can take advantage of all these things.
If you don’t have that, you have a drunk uncle apparently now. Yeah. That’s at best. That’s what I’m going to start saying. Yep. We, we don’t need any more of those.
[00:33:39] Libby Olson: We do not. The world does not need more drunk uncles.
[00:33:43] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. I mean, maybe after hours, but not, not,
[00:33:46] Libby Olson: not, not, not from eight to five.
[00:33:48] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. Um, so that’s a pretty cool way of explaining it.
And I, I think just another. Another, I guess vocabulary question is when you think of an [00:34:00] AI agent, would you say that, like a good way to explain that would be, it’s almost like imagining you have this unbelievable intern who just always knows what you need in order to be prepared for a meeting or prepared to mix the next phone call or prepared to, like kind of face your day as a salesperson.
[00:34:21] Libby Olson: Yeah. It’s like the best executive assistant that you could have. And I think intern’s a great way to say it too, because I think an executive assistant you might trust to call your customer, call whomever. An intern, you’re not. and I think that’s the way, at least where we are in the evolution right now, that’s how we have to think about AI.
It can’t go unchecked. It, everything has to be human led, human involved, human intervention, and needs to have that kind of ongoing checkpoint to make sure that it’s cleaning the data that we want. It’s, it’s evaluating things. It’s writing emails in our tone. It’s, you know, [00:35:00] whatever that agent is that you have kind of working on your behalf, you are checking its work just the same way that you would an intern.
[00:35:07] Terri Hoffman: Right. Yeah. But if you’ve, if you’ve trained the intern appropriately and they have a good work ethic, which we can assume a piece of software does, then your, review time or the lift it takes from you just kind of gets better and better and better the more training time that you’re able to put in.
[00:35:26] Libby Olson: Absolutely.
[00:35:26] Terri Hoffman: That’s definitely been our experience.
I want to talk a little bit more about, something that’s a little bit niche in the HubSpot or CRM space, but it’s a word that when you hear it and you really understand what it means, it’s like, that sounds very appealing to me, I want that.
Can you, and what I’m, what I’m going to ask you about is the concept of a playbook. Maybe you can explain what a playbook is and then like maybe a common way, something like a playbook could be used in HubSpot.
[00:35:53] Libby Olson: You know, if you think about how playbooks are used in sports, it’s used very much the same way in a [00:36:00] marketing or a sales conversation or workflow or campaign.
You know, playbooks for sports is you have a series of plays that you’re going to run based on the situation that’s at hand, and that’s very much the same, that we would build a marketing or a sales playbook. Where we know we want to go to market in a specific industry or a specific way, or with a specific product.
We build it once and then we can iterate it based on the most expected situations that we think we’re going to have. So yeah, as an example, we had, a client that was in the home exterior services space and they came to us. They had PE backed funding. They had already acquired, I think four companies and had big plans to ramp that up with high velocity.
[00:36:55] Terri Hoffman: Mm-hmm.
[00:36:57] Libby Olson: The challenge side [00:37:00] of acquiring a company is you acquire their customers, you acquire their systems, you acquire all of their problems and everything that comes with it. And so how do you integrate that well, because the other side, if you don’t, you have high churn of those customers.
[00:37:18] Terri Hoffman: Mm-hmm.
[00:37:18] Libby Olson: That you basically just bought.
That’s what you’re buying. You’re either buying, assets, or you’re buying customers, typically in an M&A type of conversation.And you don’t want to lose those customers that you just paid a good price for and so you want to keep as, you’ll lose some, but you want to keep as many as possible. And so making that conversion from old company to new company as seamless as possible, you want that thought out well ahead of time.
[00:37:47] Terri Hoffman: Yeah.
[00:37:47] Libby Olson: So thinking through that playbook of we’re going to acquire these types of companies. Here’s our playbook of how we’re going to integrate their system, how we’re going to integrate their people, how we’re going to bring customers over [00:38:00] and have that conversation with them to let them know, Hey, X, Y, Z company is now 1, 2, 3, company and don’t worry where you’re going to get these more services and you know, really have that best transition possible and have that well thought out ahead of time and create that repeatable playbook, whether that’s. Acquisition, whether that’s marketing campaigns or literally a sales conversation and having that, okay, if they say this, this is our objection.
Yep. This is our objection response.
[00:38:30] Terri Hoffman: Yep. Exactly. So I think, that’s just one example of a playbook. Like you said, there’s so many,
[00:38:36] Libby Olson: so many,
[00:38:37] Terri Hoffman: so many other types, and I think when you guys go through that discovery process, and talk to the different roles at the beginning of your engagements, you’re looking for a lot of information at that point, but one of the things that you’re looking for is, are there opportunities to create playbooks
[00:38:53] Libby Olson: mm-hmm.
[00:38:54] Terri Hoffman: That help this client scale in the way that they want to scale their business so that it’s [00:39:00] just more efficient use of their time. Again, not to replace somebody, but to make more of the time and talents of the people that they have currently. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that’s a huge thing.
Especially there’s a, there are a lot of industries right now that are heavy into the mergers and acquisitions. Mm-hmm. And having a systematic approach to not only the customer communications and the service, but also how you’re, you know, kind of scaling that with each new acquisitionis huge.
it’s happening a lot, especially in the home services industries, but other ones as well.
[00:39:36] Libby Olson: We’re getting a lot of conversations of M&A companies or just even the advisors coming and talking to us and wanting to have those conversations with their buyers or sellers.
[00:39:45] Terri Hoffman: Yeah. And that’s, I know, just from relationships I have in that same space, if, there is a PE firm or, an investor who’s interested in acquiring a business. They’re either looking for [00:40:00] a company that has this type of system in place, which then increases the value of the organization, or they’re looking at it and saying they don’t have that.
So I’m going to get, a better sale price because of that and then I have an immediate system that I can implement to really enhance the value of what I bought. Those are the things I’m hearing from the market.
[00:40:21] Libby Olson: Yeah, same thing. Absolutely.
[00:40:23] Terri Hoffman: It’s a huge opportunity to scale, if you’ve got that clean, organized, non drunk uncle data working for you, right?
[00:40:32] Libby Olson: Yes, exactly.
[00:40:34] Terri Hoffman: So let’s come back to a topic that I teased at the beginning of the episode, and we were talking about debunking the skeptics who are like, no, I don’t want to have anything to do with CRM. We touched on it a little bit about like, things that salespeople don’t typically like, but mm-hmm. You know, what are, what are some of the other,
skeptical views that you hear quite a bit or experience and, and like, how can you debunk them for us?
[00:40:58] Libby Olson: Yeah, [00:41:00] absolutely. Yes, we definitely take a therapist approach to that too. We’re like, tell me more. you know, because it’s, it’s understanding why they think it doesn’t work. And a lot of times it’s typically a poor implementation.
so if it’s not because the process is broken and the people aren’t using it, it’s typically because of a poor implementation and it’s not working the way that they want it to work. It’s not that the people aren’t using it, the system doesn’t function the way they want. and that does happen a lot.
They were, sold on the fact that it was really easy to do it yourself, and it really wasn’t, which is a lot of these tools, and I mean, even HubSpot. HubSpot, relatively straightforward, but to do the very basic things, you know, if you want to do anything of any level of complexity.
Bring somebody in to help you manage that and think through the processes of everything. I think the other reason too is, from a DIY approach is you’re too close to your own stuff and you really need that [00:42:00] outside perspective to ask those questions and go deep. I think that’s the other side of a poor implementation is a lot of, not a lot, but there are a number of implementation agencies that it’s just a technology implementation and they don’t ask enough of the right questions to truly understand the business process and understand what the business is trying to accomplish. So it gets implemented, it’s functioning, but not in the way that the business really can use it to grow as a growth engine for them, which is what A CRM should be. Yeah,
[00:42:39] Terri Hoffman: absolutely. I think. That poor implementation is like the heart and soul of it. And having somebody who has the expertise and has seen like, oh no, this could go wrong. don’t brush past this we need to talk about this more.
it can feel like any kind of strategic engagement. It can feel like it’s moving slow at the beginning, But the clarity that [00:43:00] you gain will add speed, later on and it’ll help to assure buy-in.
[00:43:06] Libby Olson: Yes.
[00:43:06] Terri Hoffman: And usage, which is key. Like don’t go pay for something that isn’t going to get used.
[00:43:13] Libby Olson: Yeah.
[00:43:14] Terri Hoffman: Follow a process that helps highly increase the chance or confirm that it is going to get used. So you can get the value out of it.
[00:43:22] Libby Olson: And I think what happens a lot too is they people get one system and then it’s not working the way they want. So they bolt on something else that does the thing that they aren’t, they’re missing, and then they bolt on something else and they both on something else, and it’s still not working the way that they want.
And so now they’ve got. Five systems that they’re paying for, they somewhat overlap and the expense has increased and they’re still not getting what they want. And I think that’s where you get to the point of, oh, CRMs don’t work. We’re not getting any value out of it. And it’s, again, it kind of goes to that implementation side.
[00:44:00] But that’s what happens a lot. And what we come in and do first is, as a part of our audit, is a marketing technology assessment. We’ve, and not just marketing, we want to know all of your business systems because there’s likely an opportunity to consolidate, streamline, better integrate, and saves people some money too.
Yeah. Not just make the processes better, but we can probably save you some money. Yeah. Depending on what systems you’re using. I mean, if you’re going from thing to Salesforce or HubSpot, we’re probably not saving you money, but if you’ve got 10 systems, there’s a good chance we can.
[00:44:36] Terri Hoffman: Right, exactly, and for sure save manual time just trying to reconcile those systems and get them to all agree so that you’re getting the right data.
Boy, the, just the time savings alone
[00:44:47] Libby Olson: Yes.
[00:44:48] Terri Hoffman: adds efficiency. I think too, that being guided, because a lot of, a lot of these software tools, like if you haven’t used them before and you’re not working with somebody with that expertise, you don’t even [00:45:00] understand the feature set that could match up. To the, so the solving of a, of a problem or pitfall that you’re running into, I think you’ve gotta work with someone and work with a team who knows these systems.
[00:45:14] Libby Olson: Yeah.
[00:45:14] Terri Hoffman: Really well there, you, you should feel as a client like, wow, I just got led to something that I didn’t even think was possible. Right?
[00:45:21] Libby Olson: Yeah. You want to get excited? We, and we want you to get excited about what you just learned, what we just showed you, what you’re, what you’re now going to be capable of doing.
As a business, who cares what the system can do? You as a business are now going to be able to do X, Y, Z, and that’s what we’re looking for. And that’s hard to do on your own because these systems are getting more and more complex. And as we add AI layers and AI tools and other functionality, they’re just getting even more complex.
And you know, you need somebody who is deep into those tools and that’s, [00:46:00] where they spend their time and research and resources making sure they understand everything that’s coming out and from that company and knows the ins and outs of everything.
[00:46:11] Terri Hoffman: I want to ask you a question that I think helps wrap up our interview,
I want to be really careful about how I ask it because our podcast is not a commercial for
[00:46:20] Libby Olson: Yeah
[00:46:20] Terri Hoffman: the guest, right? I hope is coming across to people like, Hey, if you’re going to move forward with something like this, these are things you should be keeping in mind and these are things you should expect.
I mean, of course, I hope that they want to talk to you about it, but, one of the things that you guys talk about a lot that I think is a good mindset to have about this kind of project is crawl, walk, run, right? So maybe that’s, that’s a good thing to leave the listener with, is like, explain what you, what you mean by that and explain how that approach really ensures value.
[00:46:52] Libby Olson: Crawl, walk, run, andit’s kind of what you were saying before. Sometimes we have to slow down to speed up and crawl, walk, run is really about, [00:47:00] let’s figure out, you know, crawling our, what are those low hanging fruit, small wins that we can get together that. It makes everybody feel good about this project.
You know, we’ve got buy-in. If we’ve got, adopters, if we’re struggling with adoption, we’re going to get that adoption more quickly with a few things that we’re putting onto their plate versus rolling out this huge, massive implementation all at once.
[00:47:26] Terri Hoffman: Mm-hmm.
[00:47:26] Libby Olson: Let’s figure out how do we get a few of these things going and get that flywheel just spinning moving slowly and then we can add some speed to it and continue to revolve and get faster and faster. But if we wait and do this eight month massive implementation. One, we’ve probably missed the mark because we haven’t talked to enough people and the world has changed in eight months and your business has changed in eight months.
Yeah. And so it’s not very agile in the way that the world works anymore, [00:48:00] but also we we’re going to miss out on that adoption. And so we just need, and that crawl, walk, run is really that agile approach. We put something out there, we get adoption, we start working with people, we learn how people are using it.
Where it struggles, we fix it. You know, we work with them, the business and understand it and optimize and continue to move forward the way that we kind of do in our own lives.
[00:48:25] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, I love it. I think that’s an awesome approach and it’s not as daunting. Right. that can be, when you think about like cleaning up all of our
customer data, that sounds really unfun. And so
[00:48:38] Libby Olson: even if you’re small, it doesn’t sound fun.
[00:48:41] Terri Hoffman: Yeah, exactly. It’s like just making your Christmas card list is hard enough and now you’re wanting me to clean up our whole entire customer database. So I think
[00:48:48] Libby Olson: exactly.
[00:48:49] Terri Hoffman: Crawling into it and really understanding what those outcomes are and what can create those quick wins is an awesome approach.
so I think, yeah, like I said, I think, I’m hoping that [00:49:00] leaves people with maybe some thinking about next steps and getting in touch with you. What is a, if somebody wanted to talk to you about like, Hey, I’m really frustrated with our implementation, or I have been contemplating this, this kind of implementation, how would you like them to engage with you, get in touch.
[00:49:16] Libby Olson: Yeah, absolutely. So, I did put together a little landing page for people and we put, we have an ebook on there, really, it’s called The State of MarTech for, for this year. And it talks about a lot of the things that we’ve been talking about and the challenges and struggles and kind of a plan of attack and kind of the why.
So it helps you also if you’re trying to sell this up, your team.
[00:49:37] Terri Hoffman: Mm-hmm.
[00:49:38] Libby Olson: It’ll give you a lot of that language if you’re trying to sell up why we need to do a project like this. And then on that same landing page, if you want to connect with us, you can schedule time with us and it’s, we, it’s just a simple conversation.
We start with, we talk about your goals, your challenges, and let’s just see if we’re a good fit. You know, girl’s, a specialized high touch team, we only take on a handful of clients at a time because we go deep.
[00:49:59] Terri Hoffman: Mm-hmm. [00:50:00]
[00:50:00] Libby Olson: And. We get in your business and like, we need to make sure that we both really like each other and want to spend time together.
So, it starts really with just the, let’s just have a friendly chat and see if this is a good fit for both of us, so if that feels good with people. But that is going to be at Growl agency.com/refresh.
[00:50:20] Terri Hoffman: And we’ll put that in the show notes. if you’re watching this on YouTube, it’ll be in the comment or the summary of the podcast interview.
if you’re not impressed that she’s walking the walk and talking the talk on having a landing page put together. Then, you need to have another cup of coffee. That’s pretty awesome. I love, I love that you did that. That’s like a free tool. I hope people take advantage of that and I really appreciate you doing that for our listeners.
[00:50:44] Libby Olson: Yeah, my pleasure. it’s a great asset and it will also lead you to that, marketing tech platform audit that we give out to. So that’s also a free resource that you can have though.
[00:50:54] Terri Hoffman: Okay, cool. Well, thanks again, Libby. I really appreciate your time and I think this has been [00:51:00] super interesting and also valuable information for our listeners.
[00:51:03] Libby Olson: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Terri. It’s been really fun. Enjoyed the conversation, appreciate you asking me to be a part of it.
[00:51:09] Terri Hoffman: Thank you for listening to B2B marketing methods. Please be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast channel and leave us a review. We’d love to hear from you and connect. You can find me on LinkedIn or visit our company website at marketingrefresh.com.