Dan Tyre interview with Resa Gooding
Resa: Alright, Thank you thank you so much Dan for having me on today. Excited to have this chat with you.
Dan: Okay, I've been a shameless fan since I met you in December of 2019. Where did we meet Resa?
Resa: Tel Aviv!
Dan: Okay so this is a great story. Everyone should know first of all that Resa is an overachiever. She ran her own company for many, many years, she's been helping HubSpot users for a decade. She's just an unbelievable person who just goes out and helps people without asking for compensation. Just helping, helping, helping. And then when I first met her, we were working with Prateek.
Resa: Oh my Prateek the man himself.
Dan: He was amazing. He's like Tyre, I need you to meet some partners. I told Prateek it’s 8 o’clock at night. He was like that's okay we’re going to meet at a nightclub. And I'm like no way. I'm exhausted. Who comes in for my 9:30 meeting, but my friend Resa. And she has a big smile and I'm like this lady is so smart. And she's like no Dan, I’ve been teaching people all over the world for eight years on how to use HubSpot CRM. And I'm like, what, how did I not know that? And then we became instant friends and she continues to do great stuff. And then I cycled back a little bit earlier this year and now she's a HubSpot employee!
Resa: I know, the life long dream has come true Dan!
Dan: Awesome, and what I found is she took all that experience, all that knowledge, all of the work, to write a book.
Resa: yes!
Dan: Empowering, marketing, sales at HubSpot. Oh my goodness. And so we are going to take the next 18 minutes and we’re going to talk a little bit about Resa, because you should know a little bit about her. We’re going to talk a little bit about the book. Who should buy this book? Your top 3 takeaways. And we’ll post it on dantyre.com, we will use it as a piece of content, but my ask is that if you know anybody using HubSpot I want you to buy this book. This is an awesome book. I've been through the whole thing. If you can’t afford it, let me know, I will buy it for you. And I want to make sure that it gets the visibility that it deserves.
Resa: Thank you so much!
Dan: How is that for a build up? Yeah, baby! Everybody’s rolling their eyes, going okay Tyre enough about you, let's talk a little bit about Resa. So tell everybody who you are and a little bit about your background.
Resa: Yeah, sure. Thank you so much. So I am Resa. I've lived in Israel, Tel Aviv for the last 15 years. But I am originally from the Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago. Now when I came to Israel I was thinking where do I begin? How do I use all my skills? But Israel is a Hebrew speaking country so I was a bit perturbed where to begin with my career journey. And I came across HubSpot because I was working with a company one day and looking for ideas about how to help leverage their business and bring in more leads for them and came across HubSpot’s famous blog, you know everyone found HubSpot through that blog. And then I was hooked. And that was almost 15 years ago. And the goal is that since that moment I wanted to use more of the platform because I found that it was so easy to use and so easy to learn hacks and tricks of how to be better marketers. So eventually I began working with an agency again as you said earlier, loving to volunteer my time. So where I really began was volunteering my time to one of the first agencies in Israel, Penguin Strategies. And while I worked with them just to take an overload of work from them, eventually they hired me and I worked for them for 3 years. And then I was inspired to start my own agency. So I began working and starting my first agency with the goal of really just helping entrepreneurs realize their dreams and become successful using this platform. So like you said it was not always about money for me, which was not the best thing for my husband to hear, but it was more about making sure these entrepreneurs and businesses succeed.
Dan: And that's an amazing story. You have a big orange heart. That's what we call it, orange being the color of the HubSpot sprocket and logo, right? And even before you heard HubSpot, that's just the way you roll. You like helping people, you understand the foundation of the Inbound organization is to help first and then get compensation afterwards. You have done lots of good for the universe, now it's pay back time. You've written this book, now what we want to do is make sure we get the broad visibility of the people who are doing it. So who should buy the book? But first of all, what is the book called?
Resa: Well, it's called Empowering Marketing and sales with HubSpot. Right. So again I wrote the book mostly on HubSpot’s most famous hubs, marketing and sales Hub because I still think there's a lot of fear in the industry with customers touching this platform. Many customers know they want HubSpot but they don't often know where to begin and why they should use the platform. As an agency owner it's kind of like shooting myself in the foot because this book is like giving away my best secrets. Because again I wrote this book taking all of my experience in the last ten plus years, how I work with different customers, how I use HubSpot for their successes, and I showed real life examples of how the platform was used. So the book is a combination of HubSpot tutorials, like you know how to do certain things in HubSpot but it always encompasses the best practices of how other companies would have used HubSpot in different instances.
Dan: The thing I like about it is that it's tactical. Lots of people write books about the philosophy of Inbound, myself included, which is easy, right? The hard part is, okay, how do you actually do it and reset with ten years of experience? This is how you do it. This is exactly what you do. This is how it works. So I'm going to use it as a guide for some of the HubSpot Academy bootcamps. We’re going to distribute it to some of the partners at Inbound, and I'm super excited about getting this really valuable content to as many people as possible.
Resa: Thank you, and again, this was the goal, right, when you asked me who did I write it for? It was mostly for agencies and customers. So agency owners always suffer with having to train new employees, and they don't usually have the bandwidth or the time to spend showing their new employees exactly how to use HubSpot for their customers. So the book is like reading a manual where the employees can flip through to the areas they’re not so sure about and just skim through what they need to know and be able to execute it on the fly. Because believe it or not, this is what we’re good at as agency employees and owners, right? We have to be able to operate on the fly and give best practices and give best knowledge, because this is why the customers come to us. So it's really an easy ramp up for the employees.
Dan: All right, so if you're hiring new employees, any partners out there hiring new employees. Any HubSpot users hiring somebody as a system admin or a super admin for your HubSpot sales and marketing, anybody who is a student and wants to learn and leapfrog after you’ve taken HubSpot Academy classes, this is the book for you. It's $30. It will save you a lot of pain, and it's just chock full of knowledge. But I'll tell you what, Resa, give our audience three things that they will learn from reading this book.
Resa: I think the three main things they will really learn is, first of all, how to create quick wins for their customers. HubSpot customers buy HubSpot and they want to be able to have real value from the platform within the first 30 days. So we do have an onboarding period of 90 days. It generally takes us a year for us to see good results, but there are definitely certain things that you can do within the first 30 days of onboarding a customer to HubSpot. So this is one of the big takeaways that the book gives you early, it is the first chapter in the book really.
Dan: Before we go to the next, let me just interrupt because I hear that a lot. People are like I bought HubSpot, and I haven't gotten any new leads. I'm like, you've been using it for 12 days. And I'm like okay, it's 2022 and there are a lot of people who are using technology. The shift has changed in regard to this was a little but risky, now the risk is that you don't move ahead. That you like to bury your head in the sand. It takes a little bit longer. It takes building a foundation. And what I really like about the book is those quick wins. Like this is how you start. This is how you build the house. This is the foundation. Because there is a right and wrong way to do it. And the right way is to start with somebody who has 10 years experience, and done this for hundreds of companies. And step by step this is the way you start. So if you are a new HubSpot user. If you have HubSpot and no one knows how to use it. If you want to make sure you are going on the right path, all of those segments are really good options for reading this book. Alright what is number 2?
Resa: The second thing I think people will really get from this book is understanding what industries they can use HubSpot for. Because some people think that they can't use HubSpot because of the industry that they are in. Like if they are in manufacturing, or e-commerce, or even in the health industry, they think I can’t use HubSpot. But that's not quite true. There are many instances and I show examples in the book how HubSpot was used for those specific industries. It's not just for BTB tech, even though it is really great for those types of companies, but there are so many other industries that can really use HubSpot. So one of the things I wanted to highlight was how different industries use the product.
Dan: Yes. When we look at this, there are certain industries like technology, software, hardware that were early adopters. And it made perfect sense because they were tech savvy, they understood that people were starting to do a web search or like a search engine. They understood social media really early, and it was like, foundational for them. If they wanted to grow they needed the leads for their website. There are other industries where it was a little slower. Manufacturing is a good one. I remember, these are the nicest people in the world and they didn't start Inbound early because they didn't have to. The way they did it was through word of mouth and like, they would talk about, but the world has changed. And when you can't go buy coffee and donuts for the people that you're selling elevators to you have to find a different way to go hybrid. So when you're pointing out all of those different vertical markets, right, we struggle with this. Is there any vertical market that couldn't benefit by coordinating their sales and marketing, by having a professional customized outreach, or optimizing their website, or having a clear path in their sales process?
Resa: You know, really, not quite. I mean, even I worked with companies in the so called BTC industry as well, and you have companies even in the automotive industry, even selling a car that used to be so much walking in to sell your car today they are also relying on these types of systems to drive more leads and drive more business. So even the businesses that thought that they could not use it, can use it. Even your neighborhood florist, she can still use it to send highlights and stuff about Mother’s Day coming up, get these types of flowers, etc. So there are so many industries that can still benefit from it.
Dan: Right? If a car dealer can leverage HubSpot to sell more cars, to sell more service for better customer satisfaction, it is likely that your business can. And you brought up a very interesting growth vertical for HubSpot, and that is e-commerce. So tell me a little bit about your experience with e-commerce.
Resa: Yes, so the thing with e-commerce, as I work with those types of companies mostly, is that they also felt that their sales were very quick. So people come online like an Amazon situation and they just buy or they don’t buy. But what has happened and we saw and we know very much in e-commerce is abandoning the cart, how you follow up with those types of customers. So HubSpot systems are ideal for that. And with the many integration the system also offers, you can still, you know, connect HubSpot to things like Shopify or WooCommerce or whatever commerce platform you are using. But the background of HubSpot really supports those systems to help you leverage and get much more out of the platforms as well. So this is why I still think e-commerce is one of the growing industries for HubSpot.
Dan: I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve worked on a lot of e-commerce projects, right, and that shopping cart abandonment. I remember a friend of Mike Ewing saying no, if you install this, the uplift that you’ll get right, just from that one feature in shopping cart abandonment will pay for HubSpot forever, right? Because I don’t know if you know the exact statistics but many Gen z and millennial folks will go into the cart and then abandon it just so that they get the coupon to play the system. And if you’re playing that system, you got a shout out, that business. If you’re not, then it’s harder. And the key today is creating your tribe, building your flywheel, understanding how you get that word of mouth for visibility and awareness, to get people to want to spend time on your e-commerce site. So it makes perfect sense, and a huge fan. And of course you figured that out many years ago, and now the rest of the world is catching up. All right, what’s point number three?
Resa: I think the last point is really the purpose of the book tour is to give people the confidence to really use the tool. So many times I've dealt with customers who were calling me all hours of the night because they were afraid to send out this email because they think they will break the system in some way. I just want to help customers and employees even to understand there’s very rarely a chance you could break the system. Most things can be undone and what cannot be undone, you could be forgiven for. So don’t feel like you are running into such a problem where you cannot really use the system or you can’t turn things on to try things with the system. HubSpot is a very user-friendly platform. It feels like having an iPhone, really. It’s very intuitive. You don't really need to know what to do, how to do things. But once you try things and you learn from it, you’ll be able to move on and do much better. So I want to give people that confidence to really use the platform more.
Dan: Okay, that’s so important. And as a HubSpot employee for the last 15 years, I love to demonstrate that feature. I’m not the most technical person in the world. You’re way more technical than I am. I didn’t write a technical book, you did. And I went into these demos and somebody had asked me a question. I had no idea. I’m like, I got nothing. And I go, but let’s figure it out. And I learned very early that I would just type it into the help scenario that’s in the software. Right. One of the proudest things I have is exactly what you said. It’s not that hard to figure out. Like, I’m a little about average intelligence and so if I can’t figure it out because the software is developing and so I would say, all right, let’s see if we can figure this out together. I go into the HubSpot knowledge base, explain to our listeners what the HubSpot knowledge base is.
Resa: Yes, so the HubSpot knowledge base is really a vast resource of everything you want to know about HubSpot and also even about just marketing and sales. It gives you best practices for different things as well. But the knowledge base really allows you to understand the platform, right? I think one of the things to how this book complements the knowledge base is in two ways, because it gives you the practical examples of not just theory of how to do things, but exactly the practical examples as well as in the book, we kind of try to always highlight why you’re doing certain things. For example, people always get confused about why they have to connect their domain to HubSpot. And it’s not really connecting your domain. Right. You have to connect a subdomain because it’s a different platform, holding pieces of your content outside of your website. So you can’t connect your website if your website is connected to WordPress, that crushes your site. But they needed to understand why they needed to do it. So I tried my best to kind of give those explanations. So even sometimes when the IT people are asking, even the marketers that have to do this, they will understand the reasoning behind some of the actions.
Dan: Yeah, so for me, I used to cycle in and say, all right, let’s solve this together. And I’d be like, okay, create a chatbot. It says, go over here and actually do it on the screen. I’ve never met these people before. They’re coming to me for a HubSpot demo by underlying directive. As I’m trying to show you, I know squat. I don’t know anything, but we’re going to figure this out together. And I’m going to say at least 90% of the time, sometimes I get stuck. I’m like, okay, I'm a pooch. I don’t know what I can do. I’m going to have to talk to an SC. 90% of the time I say, did you see what just happened? And they’re like, yeah, you’re not that smart, Tyre. I’m like no, no. I didn’t really understand. Don’t you want a system that you could figure out yourself without having to go to a super expensive sales administrator or somebody who knows? And they’re like, that’s a good point. I’m like, that’s why I do it. Right? I was really kind of prepared for this. Right. But it serves the end user customer. And I love HubSpot UI. You’ve been around the HubSpot ecosystem enough to remember when it wasn’t the nicest looking UI. And now it’s beautiful. It’s like a video game. I had a lady say that the other day. I’m like, are you familiar with HubSpot? She goes, oh, I love the way it looks. It looks like a video game. All right. Very good. All right, so those are three good reasons why you should buy the book. Number one, specific examples. Number two, build a foundation. Number three, don’t be afraid to try things so that you can have the confidence to get the most from the HubSpot expert. All right, so do you expect to update the book as the technology continues to grow?
Resa: Yeah, for sure. As a HubSpot employee, I will not probably update it myself, but what I am doing now is opening it up to the other partners in the ecosystem to actually contribute to keeping the book updated. So as you know how HubSpots tool is growing fast and furious and every year and every month on with their new product features. We do want to make sure those product features are on time and always updated in the book. So I am leveraging my partner ecosystem to keep this book updated, for sure.
Dan: Awesome. And I’m going to do the same thing. I’m going to make sure that everybody in the Lion community, everybody that I connect with, our partners, and it’s a huge community. There’s 6000 there. Understand the power of this book. Understand your background and experience. Understand that you’re a perfect example. Darmesha, the co-founder of HubSpot, said, if you want to make a million dollars, help a million people and ask for a dollar, that comes at some personal sacrifice. But the reason I want to support you is because it’s payback time for all that hard work, right, of helping all those people without asking for conversation. Now, we want to sell this book, and we want to make sure it does well. If people want to contact you directly for either bulk purchases or they have questions, can they do that?
R: Yeah, for sure. You can reach me on LinkedIn. Just direct message me. That's the fastest, easiest place because I've always been on LinkedIn, so just message me on LinkedIn and for sure we can arrange that.
Dan: Awesome. So congratulations on the book. And it's only been out for a short period of time.
Resa: Yes, it came out in July. It took me two years to write it, but it came out in July this year.
Dan: And it follows so nicely, and it’s a good read and it's a valuable read. And once again, if you cannot afford it, you let me know, right? And I'll purchase a certain amount of copies and send it out to people. And I got to get you to sign it, how am I going to get you to sign your copy of your books? We will figure that out. Are you still in Tel Aviv?
Resa: No, they're mostly in Dublin because I'm living in Dublin now.
Dan: Okay, all right. Next time I'm in Dublin, I'll lug over ten books or some to sign it, right? Because that’s super exciting. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. Thanks so much for putting all of your effort in for the last ten years and writing this book and looking forward to helping more of the partners in our ecosystem grow better.
Resa: Thank you, sir. Very much. I appreciate you keep doing the amazing work that you do for us partners.
Dan: BOOM!
Purchase Resa's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Empowering-Marketing-Sales-HubSpot-correctly/dp/1838987142?ref=d6k_applink_bb_dls&dplnkId=bd56a636-a7f5-468d-bde5-390427fc1b99