The Entrepreneurs Radio Show 089 Mike Volpe

THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW
Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business
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Episode #89: Mike Volpe
In this episode Travis interviews successful business owner and dynamic entrepreneur Mike Volpe.
Mike is the CMO of HubSpot, which is a company that provides CRM solutions to customers and
provides a lot of relevant materials that entrepreneurs can utilize in their business. Mike's determination
helped HubSpot grow from a business with only a handful of employees to a company that presently
has over 600 employees, and generating millions of dollars in revenue. And he shares his experience
and knowledge for the listeners of this episode.
Mike and Travis share their vast knowledge and experience to provide lots of valuable information on
marketing and how important it is to track your client's response to your product or business. Mike also
shares his ideas on what entrepreneurs should do to ramp their business up. Things like providing
informative materials like blogs, having an effective set of calls to action, which is a button that offers
customers something in exchange for information, as well as implementing a social strategy like asking
a question after every blog or article. These are just some of the things that entrepreneurs can learn
from this episode of the Entrepreneur's Radio Show.
Mike Volpe – Rapid Growth & Your Business
TRAVIS: Hey, this is Travis Lane Jenkins, welcome to episode 89 of the Entrepreneur's Radio Show, a
production of RockStarEntrepreneurNetwork.com. Today, I'm going to introduce you to rock star
entrepreneur, Mike Volpe. Now Mike is the Chief Marketing Officer of HubSpot. Now, to give you a little
background on Mike before I tell you what we're going to cover today because Mike's too humble to
mention these things, is this is pretty impressive. Mike has helped HubSpot grow in a very short period
of time, just think 4, 5 years, grow from 10 customers to 10,000. Also, he played a critical role in helping
them grow from 5 employees to 600, and also raised $100 million in venture capital. So, pretty
impressive stuff. I know things like that interest you because, of course, all of us want to grow our
business as quickly as possible.
Today, Mike's going to reveal to you what you need to do to ramp up your business. And usual fashion,
I ask him what the top 5 things are that you should focus on to ramp that business up. Now, HubSpot is
a tool that helps you with some of that stuff, although the advice is completely separate. So basically,
you don't need HubSpot to implement what he's talking about. Now, be sure and stay with us until the
very end if you can because I want to share some inspiration with you, plus I've got a contest that I

want to tell you about, where you'll have a chance to win $73,000 in cash and prizes plus a
Lamborghini. So be sure and hangout with me until the very end. Before we get started, I want to
remind you that there's two ways that you can take these interviews on the go, or two easy ways,
through iTunes or Stitcher. Now, Stitcher is good for the Android. If you listen to podcast audios through
an Android then your best option is going to be Stitcher. And then of course if you have an iPhone or
iPod then iTunes is the choice for you. Now, both of those services have terrible search functions,
which drive me nuts. It's very hard to find shows that I know when I'm looking for them. So if you go to
rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com, I've placed the links on the bar right there, and you can click on
them, and it will take you directly to our show, that way you can subscribe there. We're kind of new to
the Stitcher, so we're working on building that one up. So, now that we've got all of the intro stuff out of
the way, what do you say we get down to business? Without further ado, welcome to the show Mike.
MIKE: Thanks for having me; I'm excited to be here.
TRAVIS: Man, I'm super excited. You've got an interesting story that I want to get kind of the behind the
scenes on if you don't mind. So, do you mind sharing the back-story of what got you to where you're at
today in business?
MIKE: Sure. So, where do you begin, but I think-- I'm CMO at HubSpot and I think we do some pretty
interesting marketing. We espouse inbound marketing, we really focus on that. And I got into marketing
having been in investment banking for a couple of years, and I sort of feel like my investment banking
experience and that real sort of quantitative background led me, in my first couple of marketing jobs to
really focus on measurement. And one of the things that you can do and where all the different
techniques you can try that will get you measurably better results, and then that sort of led me down to
a job where we ended up focusing a lot on SEO, and blogging, and all these different sort of inbound
marketing techniques. And after doing that for a little while I connected with the founders of HubSpot
and said, "Oh, you guys are doing some interesting stuff, it'd be great if somebody had software to do
that." So, I feel like a lot of marketing career actually comes from having had a pretty quantitative start
after college.
TRAVIS: Yeah, I completely agree with you. I speak with a lot of entrepreneurs and I mentor a lot of
them. And the missing component is they don't track anything?
MIKE: Yeah.
TRAVIS: They don't track lead source, they don't track closing rate, they don't track any of this stuff. So
if you've got, maybe you have 8 sources, maybe you've got 4 sources that are bringing leads in. If you
don't know which ones are bringing you how many leads and which of those are closing, then you can't

increase more of one and decrease the other. And so, that's kind of at the core of what you're talking
about, right?
MIKE: That's exactly right. I think having-- what you're basically talking about is you need to have the
data available in order to do the analysis in order to make anything better. I agree with all of that.
There's a lot of people that are trying to get the car going down the road but they're driving with
blindfolds and they're not using any of the data that they should have to help make the marketing and
their customer acquisition better.
TRAVIS: Right. So, I have a little bit of a theory behind why that happens, is most entrepreneurs are
right brainers. And so they don't like how things are getting done at wherever they're at, or they don't
like being fenced in, so they go out on their own, right? And so, they're highly creative and they don't
like getting caught up with the drudgery of numbers. And a lot of times those numbers, that's what we're
talking about. Those numbers are those metrics there. And so, most right brainers don't have the
desire, or maybe they don't feel like they have the ability to track those little metrics, right? What's your
perspective on that? I have a suspicion that you're a little bit of both. And everybody is, but you've got
to find the balance of that. Where do you fall in that?
MIKE: Yeah. So me personally, I think I'm balanced like you said. One of the characters I look for in
really great marketers is they have a combination of that, I call it sort of that quantitative analytical skill,
but also a creative problem solving skill, which I think is a little bit of that sort of entrepreneurial sort of
gene that you are talking about. I think to be really good at marketing, we will look at the data, look at
these different lead sources you were talking about, see which ones are working, which ones aren't.
But then, come up with creative ways so like, "Oh, what could be a totally new lead source that no one
else is using?" If you're only doing exactly the same things that everyone else is doing, you're never
going to get the most amazing results. So there's definitely an innovation component there, and I think
the best marketers in the world have a balance between those two things, or figure out a way to build
that balance into their team. Maybe not always and every individual person but having people to have
both of those skill sets. I think that that's really important. And I think there's definitely something to your
theory about entrepreneurs sort of being those dreamers, and that's kind of a different skill than the
quantitative skill.
TRAVIS: And so you guys have some pretty impressive growth, and based on your background. So I
would assume that you were a left brainer that developed right brain skills, because you come from a
number-crunching industry. And that's where left brainers come from. Now, people are much more
complex than left-brain, right brain, and I know that, so I'm not trying to bowl anyone down into one
simple brushstroke. But I believe God starts you out with a dominant one or the other, then it's up to

you to strengthen or balance that. And so, is it fair to say that you come from a left-brain side first?
Highly analytical.
MIKE: Yeah, I guess if you want to say like under your model. My math scores are always better than
my English or Language scores. And I was always fascinated by things that had to do with numbers. I
like Math class, things like that.
TRAVIS: You naturally see patterns?
MIKE: Oh, I love to see patterns on things and I love to break things from my analytical perspective. I
did this in a meeting yesterday where someone on the marketing team asked a question, and I sort of
broke it down. I said, "Well, probably for this is right about 60% and then that. So that brings you down
to like probably about 400,000. And on the other side it's this percentage, that percentage, so that gives
you about 200,000, and that's why I think the first one's better." And this guy in my team just looked at,
he's like, "That completely explains to me how your brain works."
TRAVIS: Right.
MIKE: I was like, "Oh, interesting, right?" So yeah, I think there's definitely an element there--..of what
you're talking about.
TRAVIS: And blew his mind at the same time.
MIKE: Yeah, exactly. He's definitely more on the creative side.
TRAVIS: Alright. So let me read one of your own stats to you, okay? So, HubSpot, from 10 to 10,000
customers and from 5 employees to 600 employees. So, I think that, that exemplifies when you take
somebody, a right brainer dreamer that has come up with a concept that's got legs to it. And you pair it
with somebody that's got the left-brain skills. And put them together, that's when the potential really
come to life. Now, most people either need to develop those things themselves on both sides, which is
a very long, arduous road, or you just bite the bullet and hire somebody to do it. When this drastic
upward, if we were to put this on a chart, those stats that I just put there, you come on I think in 2007.
How rapid was this straight upward growth, and are you still on that type of trajectory?
MIKE: Yeah. We're still growing today, business looks great, and at the same time in the early days,
the growth trajectory for us started relatively quickly. Once we kind of honed in on exactly what we were
doing and the value that we were creating, we started to grow pretty fast. It's been kind of a wild and
crazy trip the entire time since then. So, I feel like for us, once those ideas start to get some traction in

the market, and then we're able to sort of, both myself and then Mark Roberge who run sales. We're
able to sort of build the sales and marketing machinery, sort of that, maybe the left-brain portion of the
company, what you're talking about. I think, once we're able to build that and put that together, and start
to scale it over time, yeah, it's been a pretty constant growth path since the beginning. All these bumps
along the road but it's been a pretty constant growth path for us.
TRAVIS: Yeah. So it's just kind of a rinse and repeat model, not to simplify what you're doing, but once
you find a formula that works, you just kind of rinse and repeat it on as you scale the thing up, right?
MIKE: Yeah, I think that's true. I think you always want to be experimenting because the 100th copy of
something never quite looks like exactly like the original. So you always sort of want to be innovating,
but I think what we try to do is create a structure where we have big portion of the company that's doing
a good job of executing, continue to scale what we have. And then at the same time having this like
experimental area where we do run a couple of experiments at the same time and try a couple of new
things because you do need to sort of stay fresh. If you sort of stay static, you're never going to
continue to grow.
TRAVIS: Right.
MIKE: So, it's kind of a combination but you're absolutely right. You don't want to innovate for the sake
of innovating; you want to find things that work and try to scale them as much as possible.
TRAVIS: Right. Now, something that a lot of people don't know and I know this, because I've been
through it personally, is building a business to a million is very different than building 1 to 5 million. And
then building it to 10 million is very different than what it took to build it to 5 million. It's completely
different; it would blow your mind. And most people don't realize how painful has that been for you and
what have you learned in the process.
MIKE: Oh boy, there's been so many sorts of break points in our growth where something we were
doing just didn't scale, and it's harder to break as we started becoming bigger. A couple of times culture
kind of broke, so there's a certain type of culture that you can have it 10 or 20 employees. And then as
you start to greet 5 employees can be different than 20, and 20 is different than 50, and 50 is different
than 100. And 100 is different than 300, and then 300 is very different than 600. There’s kind of this
break point along the way and one of the biggest things for us is sort of how do we continue to keep
most of the culture that we want, but change and adapt that over time to make it work for the size of the
company we are. In the early, early days we had very, very little management structure. We actually
have a fair amount, more management structure now. I don't think we're very hierarchical but it's very
clear to everyone who their manager is, we're trying to do a better job of management, things like that.

And I think, and a better job of communication. In the early days communication was one of those
things where you were in the office, you were all in one room, and everyone knew what everyone else
is doing, and it just kind of-- because you overheard a conversation.
TRAVIS: Right.
MIKE: Today, there's a lot of things that are happening that not everyone in the company knows about,
and they might need to know about. And we're trying to figure out ways to have more structure to the
communication. We have this very open company wiki, but we're trying to think about better ways to
really, clearly tell everyone what the company goals are, how that breaks down into different teams,
what they need to be doing, things like that. And that just didn't exist when we were a smaller company.
So for us, culture definitely had a few break points where we needed to reevaluate and change some
things, communications related to that. And that was something where, with the way that we think about
communicating has had to evolve and change over time as we've grown. There's lots of other things,
but those are probably two of the big areas.
TRAVIS: Yeah, lot's. It gets to where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand's doing. It's
ridiculous, it gets to a point where it's embarrassing, to be very honest with you. We had to make a
custom conference table that was 6-foot wide and I think 80-foot long so that we could sit down and
have a large group of people. And I really found that I wasn't happy in that environment. It's different
strokes for different folks. So let's take it back, because the majority of businesses aren't at the 10
million and beyond, right? They're much lower than that. Let's talk more about what you guys do and
let's dig in to some stuff that you feel like is valuable to the entrepreneur's that are between startup and
say, a million and beyond. Let's dig in what HubSpot specializes in, if you don't mind.
MIKE: Yeah, I'm happy to talk about HubSpot always, right? It's been my passion for the last 7 years.
So, I would say there's fundamentally, I think 2 things that we have that could help the folks in that
category that you're talking about. I think the first thing is we publish a lot, we share lots of-- and we
have lots of other informational resources, lots of interactive resources that help companies figure out
how to grow and do marketing better. So we have our blog, we have over 4,000 articles there; a lot of
them are really popular. We publish more than 50 eBooks a year. We have lots of webinars,
educational videos, all sorts of tools and things like that. And most of that folks can grab at
blog.hubspot.com in various links from that site. And that's a great place, all that stuff is 100% free and
I think it's very, very valuable and helps people thinks about growth. And that's a great place to go do
some research and start-- if you have a question or things like that, start to figure that out. The second
thing that we do, and this is how we make money, because at the end of the day it's what a business
needs to do is we sell software. And we sell marketing software and we have an all-in-one inbound
marketing software platform. And by that I mean, I think we're one of the few folks that really focuses on

helping companies do inbound marketing with a software platform. So, how do you spend less on
advertising in the more traditional forms of marketing, and make it more effective by leveraging
blogging, SEO, social media, those things, more. That's fundamentally what our platform does, and it's
all-in-one. So, the value of doing inbound marketing with HubSpot, rather than trying to cobble together
Google analytics, WordPress, MailChimp, HootSuite, is that we have everything in one place. And what
that means is, hopefully we believe, easier to use, but it's also more powerful. And you can do a lot of
really interesting things where there's no setting up of custom funnels. And all these custom tracking
stuff in Google to figure out what's going on with your site because HubSpot just does all that
automatically, because we know where your landing pages are and things like that. You get one unified
view with all of your customers and all of your prospects because we know what their social interactions
are with your company, we know what their interactions with you on email are, with your website, with
your sales team, things like that. And so, there's just one nice profile where you can say, "Oh, this
person tweeted to my company yesterday, and two days before that they were on my website. Here's
the pages they viewed. And four days before that she downloaded this thing. And 3 days before that
they clicked on an email I sent them. Having all that information in one place is super, super valuable.
And that's sort of the benefit of HubSpot, we believe is that we focus on inbound, which we think is
more effective, and we put all that stuff in one place which we think makes it both simpler and easier as
well as more powerful.
TRAVIS: So define for me inbound marketing.
MIKE: Yeah, so I think inbound marketing, I always talk about it in terms of; it is all the techniques that
help customers find you more effectively without you needing to interrupt them. So, I sort of break it
down that this is kind of probably about 4 fundamental areas. One is definitely content marketing and
how can you use content to help attract people to your business. One is free tools, and a good example
is we have a tool called Marketing Grader that's free and people can type in their URL and get a free
report about their marketing. And that's one where the free tool itself is something that people share
and that does marketing for us.
TRAVIS: What did you say that was, Marketing Better?
MIKE: Marketing Grader.
TRAVIS: Oh Marketing Grader.
MIKE: Like getting your grade in school, so marketing.grader.com.
TRAVIS: Oh, okay.

MIKE: So our folks can grab that. And then we also have, I would say kind of the third area of inbound
marketing would be Freemium models. And if you have some sort of free product that people can use,
that then leads them into becoming a paying customer of yours, that would be kind of a third bottle. And
then I think a fourth part and the final part of inbound marketing is context marketing. And what I mean
by that is using what you know about people to more personalize their experience with you. So it might
be customizing the content of the website to each individual person doing more targeted emails, having
custom content to each of the emails that you sent that is targeted to that individual person, things like
that.
TRAVIS: Let me interrupt you there, how is it personalized? I'm a pretty sharp marketer, or pretty
decent, so how's a personalizer uniquified for each person?
MIKE: Yes, so I would say that it if you want to get a better response rate for conversions on your
website or better response rate to your email, you want that experience that you're providing to your
prospects, to your customers would be more personalized. And that's why you need to use whatever
information you know about them. So at HubSpot, one of the things are customers do is use all the
information that they know about their people that are in their database. So, what parts of the website
they viewed, what questions they've answered about their company, things like that. And then use that
to personalize the content of the website. Same thing for email. So, things like first name, last name,
company name, things like that, yes. But also the content within the email. So, you can maybe send
one email out to your entire email list, or you can break it down by the size of the customer that you're
serving, or what geography they're in, or who they are, maybe what their title is things like that. And
those are all sort of ways to make that information and that marketing basically more personalized to
the person based on the contextual information you know about them. And in general, response rates
are much, much higher the more personalized you can get with that stuff.
TRAVIS: Well, I think that, that was even the initial-- I bought in to the concept of CRM early on, and I
guarantee you that I spent probably, close to a million dollars trying to bring Microsoft CRM into my
business because I wanted-- and this was, I want to say 2000, 2001.
MIKE: Wow.
TRAVIS: Somewhere around there. So it was really kind of ahead of the curve. And the whole concept
was-- I know for a fact that people feel special when they're treated as if you know them. And I don't
mean that in an inauthentic way, but I want my people to be able to greet people by the name, you
know? Hey Mike, how are you? And you're like, "Wow, how did they know that it's Mike?" And so, the
whole concept of that was everything through CRM, and that's really kind of what you're describing is
everything's uniquefied there.

MIKE: Yeah, I think I would think about it as kind of a modern take on CRM. So, what you were talking
about and what you're doing, going back as far as 2000 was how do you have better customer
information at the fingertips of your people, so that when they're talking to someone, they can have that
more personalized interaction.
TRAVIS: Right.
MIKE: I totally agree with that, I think that, that is the promise of CRM. I think the next generation is
how do you take that same type of information, that same type of information, that same type of very
contextual, personal interaction. And bring that to email, bring that to your website, because we all
know more and more people are using the internet to conduct more and more business, right? And
more and more people are using your website more than maybe calling someone, maybe more than
they used to, right? And so, wouldn't you want to try figure out ways to make that website be more
personalized, just like using CRM makes the phone conversation more personalized. So I 100% agree
with you, and I think that that's sort of the world that we're living in is the companies that can do that
stuff better have higher customer satisfaction, customer spend more with you, they go to competitors
less often, and more people are going to sign-up with you and be more interested in doing business
with you.
TRAVIS: So, I wanted to completely get my hands around HubSpot, and make sure I'm understanding
it. So does it have a CRM element, customer relationship management element to it?
MIKE: Yeah. So, what I would say, that's one of those things, it's like-- well, it depends what you mean
by CRM, right? How you define it. What I would say is we have a very, very rich customer contact
profile. So you go into HubSpot and you see this rich information about everything that that person has
done, all the interactions in your company, and then we do have ways for you to act on that information.
What we don't have is sort of the-- today, what we don't have is sort of the sales force automation or
the customer service like the customer support center sort of ways of interacting with that. So we don't
have any way for customer support to create a ticket. We don't have ways for sort of sales people to
kind of log deals and sort of create a forecast. But we absolutely have, you could track tons of custom
fields and lots and lots of information about individual people. And then the way you bring that
information to life and personalize it with HubSpot is you could look at the contact record, you can edit
it, things like that. And then you could also use that information to personalize their website interaction
and their email interaction. But if you need more than sort of that very, very rich contact management
for CRM, then today what people typically do with HubSpot is we have integrations with a variety of
CRM. And then they basically do that, if they need more of the sales force automation or the customer
support sort of stuff out of a CRM than what we offer today.

TRAVIS: Right. And so, for everybody listening, I'm not wanting to turn this into a commercial for
HubSpot as much as I believe that this is the future for even small businesses. We talked about
measuring the little metrics. A lot of sales, of closing rate, of all those other things, a lot of small
businesses believe that that's a big business strategy and they're wrong. Those are strategies that
make you a big business. You've got to do those little bitty things. And so what we're talking about here.
Now, I'm knowledgeable with the majority of everything that you're talking about here. And so, if it can
be collapsed, a lot of these elements can be collapsed into one system rather than having to get
through learning curves with all of these other tools that I believe you referred to as cobbling them
together. They don't talk sometimes. Right now we've got a plug-in throwing a fit, we can't figure out
which one it is and it's doing some crazy things to our website. So, that's a whole another problem
there. But how much of a genius do you need to be able to implement this? Can a small guy get in and
implement something like this?
MIKE: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of our customers are small businesses. A lot of our customers are big
businesses too; a lot of our customers are small business that becomes bigger businesses. But we
have a lot of small business customers and we absolutely-- our price points range from $200 per month
to-- there's customers who'll pay us 20,000 a month. So, it's a really, really broad range but we have
lots, we have thousands of small business customers. Even a small, it's just a couple of people. So we
absolutely have a whole system there and our heritage. In the early days, when we first got started we
were basically starting in the small business market. And it's been huge for us and we're big fans of it.
We love entrepreneurs, we're obviously entrepreneurs, we've gone with the business since we started
with just a few people. And we're big believers and all that stuff. And the reason we created HubSpot
was to bring the power of all the things that you're talking about, those analytics and how do you
generate more leads more effectively and bring it to everyone. We didn't feel like that was the kind of
thing that the Fortune 500 should only get to use. And we feel like to be honest it's actually more
powerful for a smaller business to do things like inbound marketing because it can make such a huge
difference. Increasing your lead flow by 50, or 100, or 1,000 leads a month makes it a gigantic
difference to a smaller business. So, we have tons of small business as customers for sure.
TRAVIS: But again, do you need to be a techie to get this?
MIKE: It's a good question, that's even more detailed. No, it's not at all actually. Again, it's all in one
system so the whole point about that is it makes it much easier. And we have a lot of different ways for
you to work with our team to make sure it's really, really easy to get started. The other thing I would say
is you were talking about having, it sounded like a WordPress plug-in that was throwing some sort of fit
on your website or whatever. The great thing about HubSpot is we've got an 800 number, if you have
any problem you call us and we fix it. And we help you fix it or we help you with whatever problem
you're having. And that means you have 1 number to call for your email system, for your analytics

system, for your website, for your landing pages, for your social media, there's literally one number to
call and there's no finger pointing between those things, right? Because I'm sure that the WordPress
guys say it's the plug-in, the plug-in people say it's something else. If any of them even have a phone
number you can actually call. So I think in a lot of ways, for someone who's not a techie, HubSpot is
probably one of the best things that they could do.
TRAVIS: Okay. So, this is based on my experience. I'm naturally inquisitive and I'm always asking
entrepreneurs, business owners what they are doing, what they're not doing. I'm very careful to ask it in
a way that I don't lead them, right? Because I don't want to lead people to answer things the way I want
them to answer it.
MIKE: Yeah.
TRAVIS: And so, from a boots on ground standpoint, a lot of people don't get autoresponders on a
deep level. I've got some autoresponders that-- I'm a right brainer, although I enjoy left-brain stuff, as
long as it's not my 9-5. And I like to flow chart out these autoresponders because I feel like visualization
really brings a whole new level of-- I can see where the weak points are and I can stew on it. I've got a
flowchart I've been editing for a year and a half. And when I pull out some of these flowcharts that
represent autoresponders, it blows people's minds; they're like "What? I didn't know." They have no
idea. And so, you've got to be a little geeky to do stuff like that, and most people don't have the time or
the desire to do that type of stuff. So you're saying they don't need to be like me to where I'm white
boarding stuff. I know it helps you but don't need to be like that in order for it to benefit in it and increase
their lead flow 20, 30, 40, 50, 100%.
M`KE: Yeah, so I think it's really interesting. You certainly can be someone like you, right? And
specifically talking about like arctic animation or sort of email drip campaigns, the autoresponders that
you're talking about. You would be the type of person that would setup up this very, very complex flow
with lots of detail there. What I would say is that for most of the businesses that you're talking about,
those ones that are short of trying to get to kind of a couple of million in sales. Adding just a couple of
autoresponders is going to be huge. Just starting to blog, so you're actually trying to get better content
that's going to help rank you higher in SEO, give you more to talk about in social media, it's going to be
huge. So I think that, for sure, you do not need to figure out much of-- no offense, but a marketing, or a
sales, or a business geek as what you're talking about to be successful with something like HubSpot.
Certainly, if you want to go to that extent, absolutely. Do that to your heart's content. But most
businesses, there are some fundamental things that they can do on their website in terms of SEO and
social that would just get them a lot more traffic and get them a lot more leads. And then just setting up
a simple 3, 4 kind of email auto responder campaign can also make a really, really big difference. And
then certainly, if they want to do more after that to kind of get into it more and do more of what you were

talking about, then yeah, absolutely, you can go there. But most businesses are doing so little of this
stuff today, especially the smaller ones, that there's a huge, huge opportunity there.
TRAVIS: I think 90% of the businesses are not doing it.
MIKE: Exactly. So, doing some of it is going to have a huge, huge benefit versus doing none of it. And
that's why I say HubSpot we try to make things very easy, we provide a lot of support, a lot of training,
some great on-boarding classes and things like that. And we try to make that stuff as easy as possible.
And the goal is really to get that 90% that are doing none of this stuff to be able to do some of it so they
can get a huge, huge benefit from it. And then also at the same time have some really, really cool, more
sophisticated stuff that folks like you would also really love to.
TRAVIS: Yeah. I first started to going to some fairly high level masterminds and I was talking to people
there. And so, I automatically assumed because a lot of the people in masterminds are expensive, are
definitely brilliant people. Or they wouldn't be there; they wouldn't be able to afford to be there. And to
my surprise, majority of them were not doing it.
MIKE: It's funny, specifically around kind of like the detail we're talking about here around
like marketing automation. Most of the studies say it's kind of 10% market penetration and that kind of
jives with the 90% who are not doing it figure that you were talking about. There's a huge, huge
opportunity there and that's why we started HubSpot to be honest. Big market opportunity and we feel
like it's one of those things where if we're successful, it means our customers are successful. And what
I love about our business is talking to our customers and having them tells me stories about how much
they were able to increase sales, or grow their business, or cut advertising cost but still increased sales,
things like that. There's just so many great stories there. And people will thank us sometimes for having
sold them our product, right? Which is great. and it warms your heart, and it means you're doing, in
addition to making money and building a business, you're doing something good in the world and
helping some other people. And that makes you feel great.
TRAVIS: Right. So, to make sure that we're not speaking in esoteric terms. A complicated auto
responder series could be something that, if they do this then give them that. If they do this then give
them that, and it's something totally different. If they do A, B, C, D, E, F, G then give them this, because
each step is inferring that they are more interested, or it just depends on what path you're taking them
down. But it is dialed in based on the behaviors that they are, or not doing. So, I just want to clarify that
so that nobody's getting confused here. So. let's step back for a minute. What do you feel like in this
play in to what we've talked about so far. What do you feel like are the top 5 things that people are
missing in growing their business. Well, let's start at the root which is more leads, right? So what are
the top 5 things that they're missing in growing their lead flow?

MIKE: Top 5, I would say the number 1 is probably an effective blog, and by that I mean a blog that
they publish you regularly, they update regularly, and the content is not purely about their product. The
content is driven by what people are searching for in Google. So that would probably be the first thing.
The second thing after that I would probably say is an effective set of calls to action, and a call to action
is a button that offers someone something in exchange for some information. I think that a lot of times
people try to go from, "Hi, we just met", to, "Hey, do you want to buy my product?" And for many sales
there's a couple of steps in the middle there. And so, what you want to think about doing is, "Okay, the
blog should pulls some people in from SEO, from people searching in Google and other places. What is
at the end of that blog article, what is the thing I'm going to offer them next, what is that next step in that
getting to know me kind of process? So having those effective calls to action and the offers to back
them up, that's probably the second thing. And then, I think if you're doing those 2 well it's probably
time to start doing, thinking about social media, and there's a lot of different components to social
media. But I'm starting to think about listening and seeing what's going on in your market. Starting to
think about maybe even doing dome outreach, trying to answer some questions, build up your expertise
in that market, as well as sharing your blog content. I think that's kind of broadly speaking, kind of like
another area. Those are probably the 3 kind of key ones at the top, and maybe chat about those, or if
you want to dive in, we can go all day and talk about this stuff. But to me, I think in terms of generating
more leads, those are probably like some of the real key ones.
TRAVIS: Okay, so I'm going to come at you from the blog, let's start at the top here. I have a multiple of
business. And so my first business is a home improvement company, and I spend very little time in that
business, and I've always purchased my customers. When it first started, it was a one-step buy my
stuff, hey we're great, trust me, give us a call, right? And that worked for several years until it got less
effective. And even still, we dominated on SEO and a lot of other things. And for the longest it was still,
for the most part, a very close version of a one-step marketing like what you're talking about. We never
really put time into the blog because it didn't seem like people would want to read about home
improvements. You're only interested in home improvements when you're doing a home improvement.
But beyond that, who else wants to talk about home improvements. So, elaborate on that.
MIKE: Well, I think there's two kind of purposes to a blog. And I think that your question right there
exactly gets there. There's one purpose which is content that lives on the internet that indexes well, and
ranks well in search engines. So when someone is going to do a home renovation or a home
improvement project, then they're going to Google and they're searching for things related to that. And
if you do an effective job with your blog, you'll rank well in those things. That's one purpose for the blog,
and for that you're really want kind of evergreen content that sort of doesn't really spoil, and it answers
questions that your buyers have. Then there's the kind of second purpose of the blog, it's having at be
more like a newspaper, which is kind of this something that people would want to subscribe to and read
on a pretty frequent basis over time. I could probably think of some ways that a home improvement

company could have that second type of blog. But at the big benefit I think is going to be having that
first type of blog. I'll tell you a story recently. So my wife and I moved in to a new house about 2 years
ago. And hot water up in New England, hot water heating system, hot water baseboards. And there
was kind of this sort of noise coming, and knowing a little something, I was like, "Ah, there's some air in
those lines, right?” So I go to Google, I search around, I find a video of a plumber, home improvement
guy in New Jersey who took a video camera and a big light down into his basement, and showed you
how to bleed the air out of your hot water baseboard heating system. And I can tell you that that video
had over a hundred thousand views and I watched that video 3 times, and then went down on my
basement. And I actually brought the video up on my iPhone in the basement and watched it like while I
did it myself. And I can tell you that, that saved me some money, but bigger than the money it saved
me a bunch of time and hassle to get somebody out to my house to do something that's really simple.
And I can tell you that if I was in New Jersey and I ever needed anything from a plumber that was more
that a step about that, something that where I wouldn't be able to do it myself, that would be the first
guy that I would call. And so, I guess what I'm saying is you're right. There may be some cases or some
businesses where you're not going to have a blog that's going to be something that somebody wants to
go back to and read the new article. Like what's the newest update in the home improvement industry?
TRAVIS: Yeah, what I use it to build decks, right.
MIKE: Yeah. But will it index well in Google and help you rank in Google. That is kind of 2 purposes to
the blog I would say. And I think that first one applies to every business, that second one, it's probably a
little bit more specialized. I think it's probably more broadly applicable than most people thing but I think
that first used case for a blog works really, really well.
TRAVIS: Well, and there was a time where we dominated SEO on so many words because we were so
early to SEO that we had so many leads we couldn't handle them.
MIKE: Yes.
TRAVIS: So, the construction industry is typically 3 to 4 years behind adopting technology and we got
on the SEO bandwagon when it first started. So, I was ranking nationally for a lot of keywords. And so,
that is one of the problems that can come with that is paid advertising is kind of like a light switch, you
can turn it on and off. Where SEO, you can't turn it off. But that's a good problem to have.
MIKE: Yeah, and I think we will start a focus group of people how to deal with too many leads, right?
TRAVIS: Right. A recovering group.

MIKE: Yeah.
TRAVIS: However, I think I can really see the value of taking, like this interview, taking the transcript,
posting it on the page and letting that get indexed. Because we're probably get to create 50 pages of
content in our conversation here, right?
MIKE: Absolutely.
TRAVIS: And so, that's what you're talking about.
MIKE: Yes, that type of thing, exactly. Yeah.
TRAVIS: Okay.
MIKE: Just having great content that is useful to your buyers and your customers. And if you do that,
Google is so smart, over time, they're going to figure out that you got great content that people love,
and they'll figure how to direct people to it.
TRAVIS: Right.
MIKE: Yeah.
TRAVIS: Yeah, due the amount of time that they're on your site. Okay. So number 2 plays into number
1 because you said effective set of call to action. And so, really what that is, is that's a way of entering a
form of conversation with a prospect and moving away from the one step-buy my stuff, click here and
buy my stuff, right?
MIKE: Yes.
TRAVIS: So, with the call to action, so download something that's valuable. I see a lot of people
producing what I would consider junk. And I think how you do anything is how you do everything. We
don't need to be perfect; I don't think we need to focus on being perfect. However, there needs to be a
level of quality with what you're producing. And so, if you're going to give something away, they need to
say, "Wow, this is some pretty good stuff here." And so it earns the respect. And the video that you
watched earned your respect, correct?
MIKE: Yes, absolutely.

TRAVIS: And so, the next time if he had a series that followed up behind that, that was not a hard sell
and just kind of dripped with you over time, you wouldn't view him as a pest would you?
MIKE: No, of course not. It comes down to customer value. I think a lot of times people ask me how
much is too much email? And that completely depends on how valuable it is. There are emails that I get
that they send me something every single day. And if they're valuable I say I sign up for them. There
are other emails that I get that they send me something once a month that I may unsubscribe because
it's not valuable. So, I think a lot of it depends on the expectation that you're setting and really comes
down to the value. That's I think what drives a lot of this.
TRAVIS: Right. I think if you were to even translate it into your personal life, if you speak with someone
every day and you know them to be an intelligent, good person that normally shares valuable stuff with
you. What are you looking forward to talking to them? "Hey, how are you doing?" Whereas, if someone
is always trying to sell you something, you'll try to duck them, right?
MIKE: Yeah. Even if you only see them once a month, right?
TRAVIS: Yeah, exactly. And so, that rule applies to online also. And I think a lot of people are
disconnected there. And so, for clarification, I believe that's exactly what you're talking about with the
effect of set of call to action and a strategy behind it, right?
MIKE: You got it.
TRAVIS: Excellent, okay. And then number 3, implement a social strategy. So, one thing that really hit
me here is answer questions. How would you engage in a series of questions, or invite people to start
asking you questions on your page on Facebook?
MIKE: Well, the best way to get people to ask you question, if you have some fans, is to ask them a
question. The best way to start a discussion is to really to ask them a question. The same thing goes
like the end of your blog post. If you want to get more comments in your blog and you have some
people reading it but they're not commenting. At the end of the blog post ask them a question and tell
them the answer in the comments. You get more activity when you just ask for it, so I think that's the
first thing. The second thing is I would say, there's places you can look that people are asking
questions but they're asking anyone, they're not just asking you. So, a Q&A on LinkedIn or questions
that people leave in LinkedIn discussion groups is probably the way that's sort of working now, as well
as people asking questions on Twitter. There's a site called Quora which is very popular with the hi-
tech community, Quora where people ask questions. And I would say searching around in those for

questions that are related to what your business is and what your expertise is. And if there's something
there and you're an expert in that industry, yeah, you should go for it.
TRAVIS: Okay. So, as an example I could go on to Facebook on my page, like we've got 2,000 fans, if
you will, on Facebook for my home improvement company. I would just go on and ask people what's
your biggest fear about home improvements as an example. And then maybe--
MIKE: What's been the biggest disaster home improvement project you have to deal with? What home
improvement project are you most proud of? What's one of the things that are in your dream kitchen,
right? And also finding examples of stuff around, and posting that, and then asking people their opinion
of it. Maybe you can find a picture of a dream bathroom, or something like that and say, "Wow, look at
this bathroom. The toilet is gold plated. What do you think about that, would you want this or not?"
Things like that will really get the discussion started, and then just make a lot more interactive. And
then, once you have that interactivity then you can start, maybe once a week you have a time when you
post, "Ask us your home improvement questions and we'll answer them." Things like that. It's that back
and forth that really is what makes social work.
TRAVIS: And then once you get that dialogue going back and forth, where do you go from there, or is it
just something that unfolds naturally?
MIKE: I think a certain degree could unfold naturally, but the way I would think about it is if there's a
way within the conversation to put in a little bit of a non-intrusive plug for your products and services, I
would say something like that can work very effectively. It's all in how you leave it in, right? And I think
that your example or illustration by thinking about how would that work in the real world. Well if you
were having a big conversation with someone about a home improvement project, blah, blah, blah. And
you offered a little bit of advice, you provided some value, and then you brought up, "I actually have a
company that helps with these kinds of things. Let me know if you'd want to talk more about it
sometime and I can send one of my guys by and we could take a look." It wouldn't be the first thing--
you wouldn't meet someone at a cocktail party and say, "Hey, how many home improvement projects
you're thinking about because we do them", right?
TRAVIS: Yeah, right.
MIKE: You would talk to them awhile and then they bring something up. You offer them some advise
first, and then after that you say, "Well, by the way, you know we sort of do this thing."
TRAVIS: Right.

MIKE: And by that point, hopefully, if your advice was good and it made sense to them, they're like,
"Wow, this person really knows what they're talking about. This is who I want to do business with."
That's just much better than sort of that spray and pray, clash of the world with your advertisement kind
of way.
TRAVIS: Which is what the majority of people are still doing to this day?
MIKE: People hate change because it's hard and it's unfamiliar. But, when you change you have an
opportunity to make things a lot more effective.
TRAVIS: Right. Okay. Well, listen, we're running a little long on time, so let's move towards the
lightning round. I've got 3 questions that I sent over to you, that I'm sure that you've probably been
toiling over and studying for the last week or so, right?
MIKE: Of course, yes. Every waking moment I have.
TRAVIS: Yeah. I figured I'd go ahead and get it out of the way so that you can get rid of those nerves.
What's one of your favorite tools, or pieces of technology that you've recently discovered if any, that
you'd recommend to other business owners and why?
MIKE: I'm going to be a little selfish here, it is a HubSpot tool, but it is a free tool. We just launched
thing called the Blog Topic Generator. So if you Google HubSpot Blog Topic Generator, all you do is
you type in 3 keywords for your business and we spit back out a bunch of potential blog articles that
you could write on those topics. So it's sort of getting to that kind of like a question you're asking, like
what do you ask people, how do you get discussions started, what do you write about? It helps with
that, so that's the HubSpot blog topic generator.
TRAVIS: Oh, that's genius. It doesn't write the article, it just gives you ideas, right?
MIKE: It writes the headline for you, so it's just the headlines. So you got a little bit of work to do, but it's
free and just something you were playing with and the feedback that we see on Twitter. So far today it's
been pretty good.
TRAVIS: Cool, okay. So, what famous quote would best summarize your belief or your attitude in
business?
MIKE: Yeah, I thought about this one a lot. I know a lot of trouble with it actually. As an entrepreneur, I
don't know--

TRAVIS: It doesn't have to be famous; it could be just something that really rings a bell with you.
MIKE: Yeah, to me I think there's a lot of quotes from various athletes and things like that, and I think it
was actually originally, maybe attributed to Michael Jordan but there's the quote about talented players
like, "Individuals win games but it's teams that win championships." And I'm just a huge believer in that.
Because as you think about growing your business and things like that, it really boils down to the team.
You talked about one of your businesses and how you don't spend that much time working in that
business anymore. And that's the level that you need to figure out, how do you have a great team. And
that's, I think, so critical to that kind of level of success and growth. So basically like that. It's sort of like
individuals win games but teams win championships.
TRAVIS: Yeah, I completely agree. What book or program made an impact on you that you'd
recommend?
MIKE: There's all sorts of them. I would say the selfish plug is, our co-founders wrote a book called
Inbound Marketing that I'm a huge, huge fan of. And related to that book is sort of another book called
The New Rules of Marketing and PR by a guy named David Meerman Scott. Both of those are
fantastic. If you want something a little bit more recent that I think makes you think about the world in a
new way. There's a really cool book called, maybe a couple of years old now called Predictably
Irrational by a guy named Dan Ariely. He was actually a professor first at MIT, then at Duke, and I
actually had an opportunity to spend a little time with him when he was in MIT when I was there. It
makes you rethink consumer psychology and a lot of things. So that's kind of a cool, interesting book.
So I know I gave you like three and that's probably against the rules of the Lightning Round, but--
TRAVIS: No, that's okay. Yeah, I've read the book, Predictable Irrational, great book. And I just finished
interviewing Meerman.
MIKE: Oh, David Meerman Scott, yeah, he's fantastic.
TRAVIS: Yeah, good guy. Excellent. One final question I'm going to throw at you that I did not send
you, that's going to be a little bit of a curve. Do you have any super powers that you can share with us?
MIKE: That I can share with you. Yeah, that's when I take off my shirt, my uniform appears. I would say
that the biggest one is I got 2 kids and neither of them sleeps very well or sort of at that stage. They're
two and a half, then 6 months. And so, doing things like being able to operate on very, very little sleep
as well as doing things like changing diapers in complete pitch black of the middle of the night, and
things like that. So I've got some interesting skills around there.

TRAVIS: Being able to function on two and a half hours of sleep?
MIKE: Yeah, functioning on very limited sleep is probably the biggest one that I've learned how to
develop for the past couple of years because I had to, I've been forced to. Yeah.
TRAVIS: Hey, so, how do people connect with you?
MIKE: Lots of different ways. You type Mike Volpe into Google and you'll find a bunch of ways there.
Twitter's probably the fastest and the easiest; we're posting or using that on @mvolpe on Twitter. Also
LinkedIn is great, I've got a blog and there's a contact me page there. And lots of different ways,
Facebook too. People want to do that as well.
TRAVIS: Excellent interview Mike. This has been like a firehouse of information for a lot of people. I
think they're going to have to listen to the interview a couple of times. I appreciate all the brilliant
wisdom that you've shared with us. It's really going to be helpful.
MIKE: My pleasure.
End of Interview
TRAVIS: Excellent, thank you for that. Before I close the show today, at the risk of being redundant, I
want to remind you that building a profitable business is a series of formulas. And as you apply those
formulas to your business, your profits become very predictable, and start building long-term wealth.
This is what moves you into a position to help others, which I believe is part of the responsibility as
entrepreneurs. Now, when you have complete financial freedom, you're in a position to be the person
that you always felt like you were meant to be. Meaning that you're not on that exhausting treadmill, just
trying to keep up. The reason why I say that is I once had a friend tell me, "Travis, I want to make
enough to where I just feel like I can be the person that I want to be." And a lot of times when you're
struggling, or you're in constant state of struggle, you really can't reach that place. And so, I guess what
I want to point out to you is when you do reach that level of financial freedom, that's when the magical
things really start to happen for you and the people around you. Now, it's not all about the money. Once
you get there, you'll find that it's about giving back in ways that's meaningful for you in your life. Now, if
you haven't reached that level of consistency yet with your business and you'd like to learn how it's
done, we've put together a free program called the Business Breakthrough Sweepstakes, where we
focus on teaching the formulas in a simple, step-by-step format so that you can customize it into your
own business. This is what I've used to build several, tiny, little local companies to multimillion dollar

businesses. Also, to add a little fun and excitement to the program, if you join the sweepstakes and stay
engaged, you'll have a chance to win $73,000 in cash and prizes, where I will personally mentor you
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more information just go to rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com and click on the sweepstakes promotion.
One other thing, I jumped the gun a little bit. Of course, for show notes and the links to the books and
recommendations, you'll find those at rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com as well. Now, my quote for
today comes from Joshua J. Marine. And the quote reads, "Challenges are what make life interesting,
overcoming them is what makes like meaningful." This is Travis Lane Jenkins signing off for now, to
your incredible success, take care my friend.

How We Can Help You
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Travis Lane Jenkins
Business Mentor-Turn Around Specialist
Radio Host of The Entrepreneurs Radio Show
“Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs That Grow Your Business"

The Entrepreneurs Radio Show 089 Mike Volpe

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