HubSpot's INBOUND24 recap: Part 1

Brenda  
Welcome to another episode of Little Talks, your weekly dose of marketing news and insights from Littlefield Agency.

Sam  
Still buzzing from inbound. I am Sam Littlefield. Welcome back to another edition of Little Talks, the Littlefield Agency. And with me is Roop. Roop. And we are back in the studio. And we are literally the energy part of this is I did have a Celsius this morning. And the reason, by the way, I never drink Celsius.

Sam  
I never drink this stuff, ever. I see you drink it almost every week.

Roop  
To my cup right now.

Sam  
It's in. It is in your cup right now.

Roop  
I brand though the show so I have a little.

Sam  
Okay. Oh very nice, I brand Celsius. I love a love of sponsorship. Anyway, we have a Celsius here because Josh said we we'll get to this here in a little bit. It inbound last week had 3 to 3 Celsius before he went live. In his first session the guy was on fire.

Roop  
He probably missed three in the previous 15 minutes. But like he's he's high energy presenting.

Sam  
his his energy is in credit. It was it was contagious and we'll we'll get to that in a little bit. So we're we're back off the fresh off the plane from inbound.

Roop  
We got back late Friday night.

Sam  
You got back late Friday and I got back at a nice time on Friday early afternoon

Sam  
to decompress. We saw our families and now we're back at it feels good to be back in the office. Claudia and Brandon are very, I feel like just very strict and professional this morning.

Roop  
With this before they start.

Sam  
Yes. Oh my gosh, we can't have any fun conversation clouds. Just glaring. Good lord.

Roop  
Not appropriate. What?

Sam  
Never never never never never never. So

Roop  
depends.

Sam  
anyway, what we'd like to do this week

Sam  
is, we have no script because we've got an all hands on deck debrief meeting myself. Joy holder is going to join us next week.

Sam  
Yeah.

Sam  
And we're going to go into all the ins and outs, give you a couple of glimpses this week, but we want to recap our week with you because it was it was an amazing Tuesday through Friday.

Roop  
Having a high level meeting to talk about what has been announced for the services and what a platform, which is pretty big.

Roop  
Every year

Sam  
There's big breaking news. This is big news.

Roop  
then we'll go through some.

Roop  
of the sessions that we did attend the we'll go to depth on them and kind of like explore some of the better points. We've been able to decompress next week with joy.

Sam  
No that's perfect. Yeah. No I think that sounds good. So we're going to walk you. We, we landed on Tuesday, late afternoon. We went to the Bellingham Tavern. Fun fact it is the oldest pub in the United States located in the heart of Boston. I mean, there's really no surprise there. Boston is a pretty old city, but,

Sam  
there's a great lobster roll.

Sam  
We were with our clients. Adriana from Williams.

Sam  
Sean, from which, they'd actually talked on the phone before, but never met each other in person. It was a wonderful time. Just on that Tuesday evening. Really just kind of, you know, setting the stage, getting ready, talking about the sessions that we were going to go to, you know, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday.

Roop  
And, and.

Sam  
We did immediately. There's a lot of lobster in my, in my system this last, last few days. Anyway, it hit the sack early and then day one, Wednesday of inbound. The energy there was pretty awesome. I mean, you got a bunch of marketers that are just super savvy and very excited for the latest and greatest trends, technologies, etc.

Roop  
So.

Sam  
Here's the thing. I've been to tons of it's a great question. I've been to tons of trade shows. I've been to tons of conferences, all the above. First off, the Boston Convention Center is insane. It's huge. It's beautiful. Right in Seaport District. Very, very cool. You walk through security and you're on the main level, and then all of a sudden there's just massive glass and there's a couple of escalators going down.

Sam  
You have the whole horizon. And it was unbelievable. Just the setup. There's lounge chairs, sofas everywhere. So you can take meetings. There's vendors when you first go down the escalator. So you've got.

Roop  
Tellers.

Sam  
For fortune tellers, technology vendors. All of these people were HubSpot integrated, which I thought was very cool. And then among this massive floor, there's pop up stages everywhere. So you got to stage, got the hero stage over here, you got the creator stage over here. Then you go all the way to the back, which is the main stage.

Sam  
And then you also have various to, second and third levels that you can go off in to different conference rooms. One of the cooler, call it conference setups that I've ever seen in just because it was so chill, relaxed. Everyone's excited to be there, but everyone's also doing their own thing. They're there. Everyone's a marketer.

Sam  
There's a lot of people on client calls. There's a lot of people on calls in general. There's people that are, you know, ingesting this wonderful content. And you got people networking. So, I mean, it's a very cool experience from the get go going down this escalators to the main stage on day one.

Sam  
Which seats how many people probably 5000.

Roop  
Whatever. The final number was 12,000.

Sam  
That were that attended.

Roop  
Okay. So there were probably I would say I don't know how many you can fit in there, but at least half that. Okay.

Sam  
Yeah. 75. Yeah. 7006 thousand here.

Roop  
And so you get in there that, that first,

Roop  
the first day they're giving you a kick off like this.

Sam  
The, the CEO, the founders of HubSpot. Yeah.

Roop  
They come out and there kind of like hyping you up for.

Sam  
Like, think, think Bill gates back in the, what, 70s, 80s when it comes out and they're super pumped and or think about an Apple, you know, product demo. Yeah, yeah. There was no, summit dance last year, but there's no dancing this year.

Roop  
There's not that.

Sam  
And share,

Roop  
Very

Sam  
share the the biggest news that they shared with us in that opening session.

Roop  
Yeah. So, HubSpot every year tries to announce new products and services at this, in January. I don't know, like last year, I knew I was going to be a lot of it. And so they talked a lot about AI was a big part of last year, along with the marketing of this year. They made some improvements to the marketing.

Roop  
But the biggest thing they announced was the rebranded their I and really integrated it in a to say modern way feels weird to say modern. You know, it's only two years old.

Sam  
No, seriously.

Roop  
In a more.

Roop  
called breeze. Like as in, this is a breeze.

Sam  
This is a breeze to use. Whoever named it, kudos to them. Really. I mean, naming projects are not easy, that it's simple, it's intuitive, and it gets right to the point. It's in beta right now.

Roop  
Breezes it is. I've turned it on for, our clients and for us, so some quality I mentioned before, you start recording that, you start seeing some stuff pop up last week. From from the new breeze, tools. The rolling it out, I believe, in the next 3 to 4 months.

Sam  
So they it has to be by end of year. Here's, here's the thing. The way that they,

Sam  
they label the term agents, which is not a new term, but it's very, and they showed the matrix, right? You know, Morpheus. And then, they called it there's an agent for that. Right.

Sam  
So one of my favorite lines from the opening session was, AI creates and people curate.

Roop  
Yeah.

Sam  
And they want you to tap into these AI agents and think of them literally is like, it's like, hey, Tom, Tom, the agent right here, his expertise is in X, Y, and Z. Obviously, you have to pay for said agents. Really, really cool way to think about it. Instead of like a tool, it's like an actual person that happens to be a tool.

Sam  
The implications. Oh, not a bad tool. Like a technology tool. Oh,

Sam  
I see, I see. Oh, yeah, I walked right into that one.

Roop  
Long week.

Sam  
But really, really neat just conceptually and then execution wise, they showed a couple just quick use cases. Again, it's an hour and a half opening session. So they're just speeding through these pretty quickly.

Sam  
Pretty freaking impressive. Yeah really really neat.

Roop  
And speaking of agents and in AI. So you know agents are a I, tool that does one thing like it only does proofreading or only does research and only does I mean really

 like analysis or whatever. I was in a different session later on, I think Friday maybe about AI, and the guy talked about the same concept of agents and how they're important.

Roop  
All this kind of the future you have, you built a little agent.

Sam  
And which is really I mean it absolutely.

Roop  
As far as to say, to encourage people with the personas against these agents so that.

Roop  
they, they have a little bit more personality and they feel like they have a little bit more umph behind.

Sam  
Them.

Sam  
By the way, this guy who is the founder of HubSpot, one of the co-founders, Dharmesh, has been building this for a year.

Sam  
And, he's impressive. And he was so passionate about it, had some great dad jokes along the way. Keep the dad jokes good. Just a good dude. I really enjoyed his session.

Sam  
So we open that and then we we broke out for the rest of the day.

Sam  
Yeah. And we were. You were in sessions? I'm in sessions. We kind of meet up for a quick, you know, powwow and then we're just bopping around different sessions. We started this slack thread myself, Joy and Roop. But did you have any favorite day one sessions?

Roop  
Yeah, the ones I went to on day one, right after kick off, I attended a advanced LinkedIn ads for the B2B marketing Superhero, which sounds like the most boring session you'd ever come to, but I did learn a few things there about, some suggestions that I like that link inmates for how you run and set up your ads that you kind of don't want to follow like that, like some hacks around how to get better, reach better, results out of your listing that.

Roop  
So I'm anxious to talk to our media team about those. I went to one about,

Roop  
content's not kidding.

Sam  
Neil Patel. That was a great one. I was, I was at that one.

Roop  
Neil's kind of a mixed bag. Like, he's he's very self-promoting, like to the nth degree, but there's some nuggets.

Sam  
Claudia doesn't know what nuggets are. We just. We just enlightened her last week. We're like, hey, cloud, there's some great nuggets here. And she's like, excuse me?

Roop  
Yeah. Yeah, he had some interesting stuff in that session that we'll break down.

Sam  
Yeah, we'll we'll go into detail. There's actually some very, very, very good stuff.

Roop  
So each other over by Jay for his first session of the weekend.

Sam  
And that is. Yeah. He had three sessions. He had two on that first day.

Sam  
The first one will really get into detail next week because we took a ton of I mean, his I need to reach out for a slide deck. That's when Jay. So I again, I've never met Jay in person. Right. Just on zoom into LinkedIn.

Sam  
and he was on our podcast.

Sam  
And this guy is just he's got a Celsius in his hand. He's just the energy, the excitement. I, you know, that just gets me going. Right?

Sam  
Gave me the biggest hugs. Like, it's so good to see you I'm ready to do this goes out there. He just totally crushes it. So we took a selfie with him and Joy after the fact, which is great.

Sam  
We'll, we'll probably use that as our header for this week. Notes. Think. I think that'd be a good one.

Sam  
He killed it. He did. It was some really good. Just again, what I love about this conference, there's some great 30,000ft, you know, strategic initiatives. And just again like Brees then you've got the alternative which is very tactical.

Sam  
Takeaways. Your LinkedIn example a Jay's email marketing session. The one in the afternoon they call it an email teardown.

Sam  
it was Jay and this founder, who lives up in Canada I.

Sam  
I feel so. And I've got a story on this here in a second.

Sam  
They basically, for the last few months, have been scouring brands, emails, and the worst ones that they found and users could submit their, worst emails to imagine, like a little talk's email up on the big screen. There were probably 5000 at that session. Yeah. And they are just ripping these emails apart.

Roop  
You have to.

Roop  
things that could be better. The things that were not good.

Roop  
But they did.

Sam  
And they point out some good things there. That was the guy from Canada, a very, very nice guy. And the job that I do, this is trash. I mean, he just he was it was so, you know, just blatant and adamant. But it was things like that, right? It's really good color, really good information. I saw someone later post on Jay's.

Sam  
I was like, it broke my heart when I saw, you know, my email up there. But at the same time, I just so enjoyed your session. So people are in a good spirit there.

Roop  
We both sit next to each other. Please, please.

Sam  
Oh my God. Like actually actually. So great session that we had a big night on Wednesday night.

Sam  
So we wrapped the day.

Roop  
Today.

Sam  
Sean from ditch, which has a good friend Matt. Shout out to Matt Metz. Super cool guy.

Sam  
is actually born and raised in Boston so he knows knows the city really well. Well, Matt reached out a couple weeks ago, was like, hey, little singer called Post Malone's at Fenway Park for one night on Wednesday, September 18th. We should all get tickets.

Sam  
So we go beat up around Boston, have a fabulous dinner and kind of a Mexican fusion. Very, very good. Yeah, you remember it. I forget the name of the place, but goddess is incredible.

Sam  
And then we went and over to Fenway, which I've never been to Fenway before. Super, super cool experiences. Cloudy, chilly. God. Just felt like fall and good.

Sam  
With great sea of seats. Ended up being great. The fireworks are incredible, by the way, if you're not listening to Post Malone, I listen to Post Malone. But like not not religiously. And Claude knows my love for Posty. I like his classic bangers. He's he's gotten into this new country scene and I'm like, okay, you know, what's the split going to be?

Roop  
What I'm going to feel about it. Like I'm like 3 or 4.

Sam  
This dude I've got, I've got him on repeat. His ability first off, one of the best vocalists I've ever heard in my life. Life. He's incredible. Half the time he's on his knees near the floor. It's like, that's even hard to like, get those. Good, you know, ab muscles working for great, acoustics. No. He's incredible. And he would switch between country and pop and his twang and his ability to do so.

Sam  
God is amazing. He brought the energy.

Sam  
I love it. And they were they were there for it. And I mean, as an adult, Claude, one day you'll appreciate this. What time did Posty come on?

Roop  
He's prompt.

Sam  
815.

Roop  
No opener, no opener.

Sam  
815. We got into our seats at about 805. Lights go down, he goes on. Never took a break. Played from 815 to 1015 on the dot. Did one song. Encore. Sunflower. Super cool. Awesome way to end it. Fireworks everywhere. And then see you later.

Roop  
Was.

Sam  
Incredible.

Sam  
And then we went to the Boston bars. It was fantastic. Taco Bell had a chicken wing. Taco Bell, the roof had a chicken leg. That's a story for another time, but we had a great chicken wing.

Sam  
Anyway, bring us today to again. Good.

Sam  
I'd say overall really good content.

Roop  
We spent some time with, some folks talking about TikTok and how to find your next customer on TikTok.

Sam  
I will tell you.

Sam  
So there were two really good takeaways. One, if you're experimenting with content and you're trying out different things. Neil Patel actually said this said and then I'll, I'll segue to TikTok because like, hey, try some different content ideas on X, put 5 to 10 bucks behind him. He's like, you'd be surprised at some of the engagement that you get.

Sam  
See what's working well and then go and put it on. You know, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc.. And I was like, oh, that's actually great advice. This lady from TikTok.

Sam  
actually, excuse me, she is not from TikTok. She works for a financial solutions, company mortgage company. And she basically during the pandemic was like, hey, I'm gonna just start experimenting with things.

Sam  
I went back to her early post, you know, 600, 800, 1000 views. How many posted she had that were at a million and over?

Sam  
Quite a bit. Turning into Allegiant engine. She built a case for it in the C-suite. So it's kind of a good challenge. Whether B2B or B2C get in there, dive in. So just some good reminders there.

Roop  
To rent a video.

Roop  
was with us in that.

Roop  
circle

 thing later. Yeah, there's like a photo.

Sam  
Their name is Don dos. And Don. You were really cool. Yeah. She we we connected on LinkedIn, so, And I had to catch it. Go ahead.

Roop  
Well, there's one other thing I was going to say you talked about of these sessions being kind of technical in how they operate. And the name of this one completely misled me.

Roop  
It was called alignment in the Age of AI rethinking.

Roop  
You. When you say GTM, you're referring to.

Sam  
Google Tag Manager.

Roop  
Yeah, Google.

Roop  
tag manager with Chris talked about uses nonstop. So I'm like, I think I'm going to help Chris out. And I see about rethink the GTM structure.

Sam  
And if you're Sam Littlefield, how does.

Roop  
The right nothing to do it. It was it was for.

Sam  
Go to market.

Roop  
So that was something I said.

Sam  
Maybe you learn a few things.

Roop  
a little bit.

Sam  
Yeah.

Sam  
So there's there's some things like that.

Sam  
that you might.

Sam  
I'd say overall content was good. You got some attention to it. It may not be your cup of tea, but you still take something away, which I think is important.

Roop  
To Serena Williams.

Roop  
kind of talked a little bit about, being an entrepreneur, investing and I think more trusting instincts and stuff like that. David Spade a spade, was he that night? Yeah, he was.

Roop  
business meeting every year last year. John Mulaney, she was spade. He was funny. And the comedians always tailor the content to.

Roop  
Yeah.

Sam  
It's incredible. Yeah. And then, Friday, join a caddy to catch an early flight to get home. You did get to see the keynote speaker, Mr. Ryan Reynolds.

Roop  
Before that, I.

Roop  
Olson.

Sam  
And and which was cool. He looked, he looked pretty excited to be up there.

Roop  
He went through his whole routine, unfazed by not getting reaction. And at some point, he made some reference to, I think, his weight or something. In fact, for that, he.

Roop  
Yeah, I saw he killed it again.

Roop  
It was a brand. Yeah.

Sam  
It's incredible. It's big time.

Roop  
I went through, how to do content marketing in the post Google apocalypse. Like.

Roop  
content for I more?

Sam  
Yeah. And we're going to dive into that. And actually that's a big takeaway.

Roop  
I first marketing with open and it's just kind of cool to see OpenAI there. Speaking. And then the end of the day, right before I had the, the crazy journey home, Ryan Reynolds came out. He was the final speaker, the anchor speaker, and he talked a lot about owning an agency, trusting your instincts.

Roop  
Always budgets. And,

Roop  
how, you know,

Roop  
money kind of is actually constraint to creativity. Sometimes we have unlimited resources. So he kind of prefers to work with us.

Sam  
Ryan. Call us buddy.

Roop  
I think most of us can kind of relate to that.

Sam  
Now, for sure.

Roop  
Horses force great creativity and he was a good way to end it.

Sam  
He, is the as handsome as he, looks in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Clouds, clouds over there. Donner had.

Roop  
More.

Sam  
So that's the tree top highlight. Next week, we're going to have joy over on with us. She's a senior, client engagement manager here at the agency. She joined us, with her client, Williams. We're going to pick Joy's brain. We've got a full debrief schedule coming up. For the three of us to just put all of our heads together.

Sam  
We'll share this with the agency, but excited to share this with you. A lot of really cool things. We'll dive into deep,

Sam  
just deeper next week.

Roop  
You know what? I think we should watch that.

Sam  
What's that?

Roop  
Okay,

Roop  
I think we have a debrief, and each one of us picks our favorite session to talk to the audience.

Sam  
Without any prep.

Roop  
Well, maybe a little or.

Sam  
No, without, like, telling each other what our favorite is.

Roop  
The other topics will spread in the future. Podcast.

Sam  
Peppered serialized content. You genius I love it.

Sam  
Or if it's good to be back with you, it's good to be in Tulsa. It is 72 degrees today. It is nice to have fall here on our second official day of fall. It's good to be back in the studio. Brandon and Claude, please just bear with us as we continue this inbound excitement and energy.

Sam  
And to our listeners, thank you. As always. We missed you. It's good to be back. We'll see you soon.

Roop  
I guess.

Brenda  
And that's a wrap. We hope you've enjoyed our little chat and found ways to grow your own marketing strategies. Remember to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and follow us on social media at Littlefield Agency.