Dan Tyre, a 16-year veteran of HubSpot, head of the Lion community, facilitator of Academy’s bootcamp strategy (most notably the Pipeline Generation Bootcamp), and longtime advocate, resource, and friend to many in the solutions partner community joins the pod to talk about the two things he says are the most important aspects of scaling your business as a HubSpot partner: culture and growth.For culture, he shares actionable steps and the things you can do *right now* to improve your ability to recruit, hire, motivate and retain the right executives, employees and partners. And for growth, Dan Tyre shares his own experiences in sales, marketing, and as an owner of a managed services provider himself—and the concrete steps partners can take themselves to sell better, scale effectively ,and address stagnant growth.

Dani Buckley, Vice President and General Manager of LeadG2, joins the show and shares with us her team’s strategies for securing sustainable growth as a services provider. Our primary discussion is around sales enablement, and while they offer sales enablement services to their clients, Dani shares what sales enablement looks like for her team, including the methodologies, resources, playbooks, processes, and technologies that have been put into place.  And as a remote, distributed team, we discuss what sales enablement, team management, and sales performance management looks like for them, what works well, and what tips she has for others.

Tara Gearhart, owner of T Media Consulting, joins the show to discuss (1) established relationships with “sister agencies” and (2) the strategies that have allowed Tara, as a small business owner, to achieve sustainable growth and to carve out success as a Platinum tiered solutions partner. For partnerships, we talk about how & why she’s sought out relationships, how these help support her menu of services, protect her key areas of focus, and how these relationships appear on the client-facing side. We also talk logistics—including how these are originally scoped & made, how payments and invoicing work, and how optionality is presented to the customer. On the strategy side, we talk about building and positioning contracts for long-term engagements, the means for establishing trusted advisor relationships, and her talk track and value proposition for HubSpot in competitive sales situations with other CRMs,

Jeff Bell, President of Mindscape, joins the pod to talk about Service Hub—and how they built in a client portal through Knowledge Base and Help Desk where clients can access embedded reports unique to their business, viewing recordings of trainings and videos custom built for them, submitting tickets to their points of contact at Mindscape, and more. Jeff shares structurally how it was built, how his developers unified the UX and menu with the Mindscape website, how private content is hosted and made viewable, and how client access is provisioned through automation. After we discuss what it looks like, Jeff shares the value his team now sees by transforming the way clients engage with the team—including time savings and efficiency gains, streamlined communications with clients and between departments, and improved visibility of work in production. We wrap with how Mindscape rolled this out, how they onboarded both their teams to the new processes and how they incentivized adoption from their clients.

Christopher Barnett, Founder of WORQFLOW, joins the podcast to explore solutions-based selling as a catalyst for scaling small sales teams. He explains its intersection with RevOps and how it can give partners an edge in competitive scenarios with other CRMs. Christopher also delves into multi-Hub selling, shares how it enhances the value of HubSpot, spotlights his favorite Hub "pairings", and compares it with the common "land and expand" strategy. The episode rounds off with his approach to software demos, where they live in the selling process, how they're structured, and how he provisions hands-on access to prospects.

Bryan Byler, Director of Solutions Architecture at Mole Street, is here to talk about artificial intelligence—specifically, how partners can navigate the growing proliferation of AI-powered solutions and technologies. He outlines a number of use-cases that partners should consider incorporating into their work streams, tools that enable those use-cases, and how he keeps pace with the rapidly evolving AI landscape. We then move over to Mole Street’s performance within the HubSpot ecosystem, and after coming in 2nd for North American Partner of the Year, Bryan shares his insights on the team’s sales engine—including their digital transformation initiatives and emphasis on expanding existing client relationships. We wrap with his recommendations for how small teams can find success in HubSpot’s partner program—including the resources, approaches, and GTM strategies that can yield great results.

Rich Wood, CEO of Six and Flow, joins the podcast to share his team’s experimentation with generative AI. He discusses what drove the initial interest, the guardrails he’s set for his team, and how he’s begun integrating it into his workstreams, processes, and more. Rich also shares some thoughts on how to onboard a larger team to generative AI use and upskill a team’s “AI-savvy-ness”—including prompt creation, templatization, and the human “sense check” reviewal of outputs. We then discuss how generative AI has helped the team—including the efficiency gains uncovered and the pull-through impact onto the client experience.

Samuel Banks, Head of Implementation at Fuelius—a solutions partner who has been awarded three accreditations, joins the podcast to share how he identifies the work his team does as being well aligned with a specific accreditation, and how others can determine their readiness and eligibility. He shares the actual application preparation process, including who was involved across the team, the project management approach applied, the time and bandwidth required, and how to leverage the preparation resources made available. He also goes into application design, with his tips and strategies for building applications with a greater likelihood of success. And we wrap with a discussion on prerequisite certifications, and how Fuelius assigns, tracks, and manages that process.

We’re less than ONE WEEK away from World Certification Week 2023—so George B Thomas, owner of George B Thomas, LLC and longtime HubSpot Academy advocate, joins the show to walk us through the role HubSpot Academy has played throughout his career and life journey, and the impact he’s seen from achieving certifications by the dozens. We get into this year’s World Cert Week event, what his plan is, and his recommendations for others to approach it with intention. And knowing George has navigated nearly all of the HubSpot Academy catalog, he offers up his tips for operationalizing the pursuit of certifications—including how he keeps up with new additions and updates, how he determines what to take and in what order, how to keep recertifications manageable to maintain certification status, and how to improve exam pass rates overall.

The countdown to World Certification Week 2023 has begun! From May 15th through the 19th, HubSpot will donate five dollars for every certification awarded during that week to nonprofits dedicated to expanding access and opportunities for education around the world. So it makes sense that for this week’s episode, Penina Shtauber, a Director of Digital Marketing at ScaleOps, comes on the show to talk about her team leverages HubSpot Academy certifications to scale new hire onboarding efforts and reduce the ramp up time for the team. She shares the benefits behind certification assignments, both for the team and as a pull-through to their clients, how assignments are handled between company directives and self-selection, and how they continue to layer in for continued employee development.