HubSpot Inbound Certification
I set out to understand what the fundamentals of Inbound are. The Hubspot Inbound Certification is a short certification thatcovers indroductory topics like developing Buyer Personas, determining your Company Purpose, understanding your Persona’s Buyers Journey, and using the OKR framework to set and accomplish goals.
Here is a full list of the questions covered in the certification process:
Inbound Certification Study Guide
What is inbound?
Inbound is a philosophy of marketing that emphasizes human interaction and empathy. It is about knowledge sharing and providing help to ensure the customer has a relationship with your company. Inbound is about drawing people in.
What are the stages of the inbound methodology?
Attract, Engage, and Delight. Attract by being helpful and relevant, engage by starting a relationship with the customer and building trust. Provide solutions. Delight by great customer service and by creating future promoters of your business.
What are the fundamentals of an inbound business?
The fundamentals are the Inbound Principles, Company Purpose, Business Goals, Buyer Personas, and the Buyer Journey.
What are the inbound principles?
The Inbound Principles are 1) Standardize for consistency, 2) Personalize for Impact, 3) Optimize for Clarity- best channel, 4) Empathize for perspective- speak to a customer’s emotional state.
Why is developing your company purpose important?
Having a clearly defined purpose keeps your company connected to the problem’s “jobs” of the customer
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer’s persona is a fictional representation of a real-world customer that helps a business market effectively by understanding behavior and demographics. It is derived from data and customer interviews.
What are the buyer’s journey stages?
The research processes a customer goes through in order to make a purchasing decision. The three stages are Awareness, Consideration, and Decision.
What is a flywheel?
The flywheel is a way to look at the marketing funnel by customers that come from the bottom will feed back to the top of the funnel. The attitude of the customers will speed up the flywheel. Positive interactions will speed up and continue growth.
Why is the inbound methodology a flywheel?
Because by attracting, engaging, and delighting a customer will add positive energy to the flywheel fueling growth.
How do you combine a funnel approach with a flywheel approach?
A company can place each part of a funnel into the flywheel to see how each step can be optimized.
Why is a company purpose important?
Companies should clearly understand their purpose so that they can create buy-in from their employees and stay aligned with the mission of the company. With a clearly stated purpose, a company can ensure that all of it’s departments are aimed towards a common goal.
What is The Golden Circle?
The Golden Circle is a way of determining what the purpose of your company is, popularized by Simon Synak. It is composed of what, how, and why of a business. The what is the product or service, the how is the business model and processes, and the why is the purpose you are in business. It is the mission and vision of your company
How is company culture part of your company purpose?
A company culture is the mission, values, and decisions employees make when no one is looking. It is the employee experience and attitude towards one’s customers.
What is the Jobs Theory?
The Jobs Theory is the idea that customer’s problems create “jobs” and they hire a company’s products or services to do that job for them. One can determine your customer’s jobs by asking questions.
What components make up a job story?
A job story begins: As a ___, When I am__, I want to __, so that I can__.
What are the different job dimensions?
Functional Dimensions- minimal functionality required to get a job done
Financial Dimension- Monetary guardrails I need to stay in
Personal Identity- Does it affirm a customer’s identity?
Social Appearance- How will others view me while I use this product or service?
--Align your entire organization around helping a particular kind of person overcome a particular challenge
What is the OKR framework?
OKR’s are Objectives and Key Results. It is a goal setting system that helps ensure company focuses effort on same important issues.
How are objectives defined?
Objectives are statements that describes a qualitative outcome (For example “Improve Customer service.”) They must be significant, Concrete, and guard against fuzzy thinking.
How are key results defined?
Key Results are quantitative goals that use metrics to benchmark performance. KR’s must be specific, time-bound, measurable, and aggressive—yet realistic
How can key results be graded?
KR’s can be graded on a scale of 0 to 1.0. For example if 70 out of 100 new customers, then 70% toward your goal. Binary results are either 1 or 0, there is no in-between. For example, “Open a new office by 2020.”
What is the three-horizon framework? What is each horizon?
Horizon #1- Goals and strategies to maintain your current business. 70% of your time.
Horizon #2- Bridging the gap between Horizon 1 and 3. Lean into the future, this is the effort needed to progress. 20% of your time.
Horizon #3- Time to be spent researching new business models and innovating in your industry. 10% of your time.
What does MSPOT stand for?
MSPOT is HubSpot’s method of tracking OKR’s. Mission, Serving (Internally and Externally), Plays (Top 5 Objectives), Omissions, and Targets.
Who should create your persona?
You should create your buyer persona as a single customer in mind. They are a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer. The Marketing Department will most likely do this, but there must be collaboration between all departments
How do you create a persona?
1. Define information to be included. What is your company purpose, who has this problem? Common traits, who will and will not have their problems resolved. Make sure there is a market of those people. “Marketing Mary” Ask customer facing teams to gather info on the customer’s that they encounter.
2. Marketing Team should identify: How do they phrase their problem on Google? Where does each person go to solve their problem? What channels do they prefer to be communicated with? What are their demographics?
3. Identifying Information to answer questions- historical data, patterns in data, and loyal purchasers.
What ways can personas be used?
Marketing can use personas for positioning and content type.
What are the different sources that can help you create your persona?
Data, interviews, customer facing teams in your company
When are personas considered complete?
Never.
What is the buyer’s journey?
The Buyer’s Journey is the information gathering process every customer undergoes before a purchase.
What are the different stages of the buyer’s journey?
Awareness Stage, Consideration Stage, and the Decision Stage
How is the awareness stage defined?
The Awareness Stage is when your prospect is experiencing & expressing symptoms of a problem or opportunity. They may not yet know of your company or even the problem they have.
How is the consideration stage defined?
The consideration stage is when a prospect has clearly defined their problem and now needs to find a solution.
How is the decision stage defined?
The Decision Stage is when the prospect has decided on their solution strategy and is narrowing down their options to make a purchase.
What terms are used in the awareness stage? Consideration stage? Decision stage?
Educate, Engage, Confirmation
What are typical content topics for the awareness stage? Consideration stage? Decision stage?
During the Awareness stage, it is useful to create content on the problems that a persona may be experiencing. It is your job to educate them on their problem. This can be done with blog posts and pillar pages. One should show knowledge and understanding of problem.
Consideration Stage- content about the solutions to a problem
Decision Stage- content that answers questions about product or service.
