Maia Morgan Wells:
Welcome back to the Marketing Hero Podcast. I'm your co-host, Maia Morgan Wells.
Chris Strom:
And I'm your co-host, Chris Strom.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Today, we welcome Nick Jensen, marketing operations manager for Tony Robbins. Yes, that Tony Robbins. Nick looks over the marketing technology stack, including lead flow, email deliverability, and customer data for Robbins Research International. He has a wealth of experience in digital marketing and operations over the last 15 years and is here to share it with us. Let's get into it.
Chris Strom:
Nick Jensen, welcome to the show.
Nick Jensen:
Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Maia Morgan Wells:
So Nick, we're really glad to have you and I want to start off with a question that we ask all of our guests. What is your favorite part of your job?
Nick Jensen:
I think for me, my favorite part of the job has always been the people we help. We're fortunate enough to help literally millions of people every year and come into their homes and help them find the better in themselves, and I think be able to help orchestrate that and help facilitate that and help Tony reach those people has been something really great.
Chris Strom:
Well, cool. Well, we'll get into some of the details of what you're doing with Tony Robbins and the rest of the organization and the people you're working with in this show here. So we'll start off with walking through, first off, who do you sell to and what do you sell?
Nick Jensen:
Who do we sell? We sell to everyone. Interestingly enough, though, we do have have both B2C and B2B operations. We have a lot of entry points for just consumers looking for some help in life improvement, self-improvement, self-help, that type of scenario. And then we also have a business to business side of things where we have business coaching and events that help business owners and entrepreneurs take their business to the next level. Most of this is done through events. We host 20 plus events a year of various sizes. Everything from Unleash the Power Within, to Business Mastery, and then a signature event, Date with Destiny, that you can see on the Netflix documentary I Am Not Your Guru. On top of that, we also have a few community-based programs that we offer and we just bring everyone into this system.
Chris Strom:
So on the B2B side, you're doing corporate events of different types where you go work with one company directly for a three-day session or something like that, or a one-day session?
Nick Jensen:
We have virtual corporate program offerings that typically the business will buy and will offer the training itself to their employees. So that's one program that we offer. We also have business training specifically for entrepreneurs and higher-level executives to also learn and grow.
Chris Strom:
Okay. And then for the B2C side, you talked about selling to various products and services to people looking to improve their lives, I think, right? Can you tell us a little bit about some of those?
Nick Jensen:
Yeah. The core offering and entry point that we typically sell is Unleash the Power Within, which is four-day event that happens twice a year in the United States. One's virtual, one's in person and then also offered virtually. And that's typically where we'll make a connection with people and they spend their four days at 13 to 16 hours a day at these events and then go through the process that Tony has developed over the years. We have a free event that happens every January as well that we host. This year, it was a summit that brought in over 1 million people registering for the event. We had about 50,000 join us in our VIP Zoom rooms while the rest watched over YouTube and Facebook.
And so in that, we engaged for three days on a smaller level, and it was free. If you wanted to join us in VIP, it was just a small little one-time fee for that. And then we have other events that are more intense. One of the things that Tony is really about is immersion. So when you attend these events, you're in it and you're there and really experiencing it. There's all sorts of lights, sounds. It's a really immersive experience when you attend these events. We also offer online programs for the consumer side, which are in the form of an app with self-guided training programs that can last anywhere from a few days to a whole month.
Chris Strom:
Okay, cool. So you have two pretty different lines of businesses, both in terms of the scale of the services as well as the pipeline as well, I'm sure. So can you tell us a little bit about the whole customer lifecycle, starting from first marketing touch to additional marketing touches to sales process to then post-sales? Can we talk through the B2C side of lifecycle first and then talk through the B2B lifecycle?
Nick Jensen:
Yeah, sure. I think we are one of those few businesses that is unique in which Tony is just such a well-known figure, and we are positioned where we bring a lot of organic traffic in and we have this weird capability to be able to buy cold traffic and actually convert it pretty well compared to what I've seen throughout the industry. Our life cycles are typically that found where they're finding us through either that free summit, which happens in January, or a free download to help them better understand their relationship with our relationship guides or where they want to go in their life through our wheel of life assessments, which we bring people in, and then we move them over to nurture sequences that will lead them into our sales funnel cycle.
We have sales teams that manage and sell our different prospects, the products and offerings we've got, and then we will actually re-target and drive cold traffic to our sales opt-in forms for our coaching programs or for our signature events, Unleash the Power Within or Date with Destiny. From there, we either sell online depending on the product price or we go direct to a sales rep. That's typically based on the product pricing and how that's offered. But we have a sales rep you can pretty much talk to for any product we offer. And so post-sale, we...
Chris Strom:
Oh, really? Even like the B2C products?
Nick Jensen:
Yes, yes.
Chris Strom:
They can still talk directly to a rep?
Nick Jensen:
Yeah. We have multiple sales departments based on the product offerings for that.
Chris Strom:
Can you tell us a little bit about how you divide up the sales departments based on the product offerings?
Nick Jensen:
Yeah. So we have about three different sales departments. One focused on the business side for business events, one focused on coaching, and then another that we call personal results specialists that help find the program fit for someone. So if you're not really sure what it is that you're looking for, they'll be able to guide you and help you find the right program and path for you as you journey through the ecosystem.
Chris Strom:
That's really interesting. I wasn't expecting to hear that there was such a big sales involvement even on the B2C side. I was assuming the B2B side would have sales involvement, but that's cool that you're able to maintain a sales team that's able to support anyone who's interested in talking with the organization.
Nick Jensen:
Well, it's interesting when you think about, like this organization, Tony's been doing this for 40 plus years, and it wasn't until COVID happened that they moved events to virtual and online experiences. He started in the, what is that called? The infomercials. He started in the infomercials and he was selling cassette programs back in the day, and it's transformed over the years, but at the end, he's still helping people, it's just in a new format. And I think having that personal touch is something that's always been important to this organization, and so we work to maintain that.
Chris Strom:
So in the whole customer journey that people go through, some companies like to define different points or different lifecycle stages in that process, different opportunity stages in the sales pipeline or different marketing stages, like marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead and things like that. Do you all at the organization define stages in the journey like that yourselves?
Nick Jensen:
We have some very base stages that we work through, which would be the subscriber to a marketing qualified lead, sale qualified, and then a customer. We don't really get too granular into that. We have a large database and a regular sending that keeps our contacts engaged, keeps our clients engaged, and just naturally moves people through without too much real effort or orchestration.
Chris Strom:
So you keep it pretty straightforward. Subscriber, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, and customer?
Nick Jensen:
Yep.
Chris Strom:
So a customer lifecycle stage is pretty cut and dry once they make the purchase, of course, and subscriber is when they first sign up for any of the communications. But then how do you define when someone becomes a marketing qualified lead and how do you define when someone becomes a sales qualified lead?
Nick Jensen:
Yeah. So when we're looking at marketing qualified and sales qualified, we have sales opt-in forms to speak with people. We use Calendly to engage with people. So when you're doing activities like that, that's when we associate you as a sales qualified lead. For a marketing qualified lead, we also have a lot of interactive downloads, and if they're engaging with nurture sequences after the quizzes or if they're spending time on a quiz just in general or an assessment. We've got multiple online assessments that we let people work through and trying to better understand themselves. And so those fold into our more engaged bucket as well. And then we also look over email engagement and automate some of that through dynamic lists based on the activity in their emails. So if they're opening, if they're clicking, if they're doing a lot of stuff, that's going to move them higher, of course, to the list of who we want to talk to and who we want to move forward with sales.
Chris Strom:
So it sounds like you've set up a lead scoring system for looking at various factors, like how many emails are they opening, how many forms and quizzes or other activities are they doing? And then once they hit a certain threshold in the score, you mark them as a marketing qualified lead?
Nick Jensen:
You say scoring, but I feel like we don't really do scoring. But when you put it like that, we do have criteria that needs to be met, and we are going to typically when they meet that criteria, we will start sending a more targeted messaging based on whatever our promotion or how our engagement calendar is going for the year based on the next upcoming event as well.
Chris Strom:
Okay. So that's the marketing qualified leads. And then for a sales qualified lead, it's basically once they book a meeting, they're marked as a sales qualified lead?
Nick Jensen:
Yeah. Once they book a meeting or once they request to schedule a meeting, that's when we will typically mark them as sales qualified leads. At that point, the sales team will work them through their engagement and then either move them into an account status or move them into an unqualified status in which they get tossed back over to the marketing side of things, and we continue to do that magic where we send them those emails and try to engage with them.
Chris Strom:
All right, so that's the process, subscriber MQL, SQL, the customer that people go through. And then can you tell us a little bit about the CRM and marketing system setup that you're running to manage and run that whole process?
Nick Jensen:
Yeah. So on the front end, we're using HubSpot Marketing Hub with operations. The sales side and our source of truth ends up in Salesforce.com, and those things work together as best as they can. What's interesting is, though, with us working a lot more B2C and Salesforce being initially designed for a B2B structure where you're working with companies with multiple employees, we happen to use Salesforce with person accounts, which then adds a new layer of complexity to things like native integration with a HubSpot, where HubSpot also understands and works with companies and contacts. And so orchestrating that data together adds a new level of complexity that is not native to your standard integration. So it makes for some fun challenges if you like to look at sync errors and like to think about things a little bit more outside the box where even though you're dealing with a contact on the marketing side, you're also dealing with a company with the same name as the contact, and it's an additional layer that you need to think about when you're thinking about the data structure that's in there.
Chris Strom:
And that's for the person objects in Salesforce where the HubSpot contact is syncing to a Salesforce contact and Salesforce account with the same name?
Nick Jensen:
Yeah. So the Salesforce account houses all the data, and that data is related in HubSpot as a company, but of course you can't email it to a company, you have to email it to a contact, so it creates a lot of extra associations that are just not really native. So when you've got a closed opportunity in Salesforce, you've got a closed deal synced over to HubSpot. Now that contact, if you want to email that contact based on, say their closed deal and the product that's on the closed deal, you have to have matching filter criteria of this contact is associated with a company that's associated with a deal that's associated with that product. So it adds a new layer of complexity to it, but once you really spend time understanding the schema and the architecture, it becomes like a second language.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. So it's doable, but it takes some practice.
Nick Jensen:
Yeah, exactly. Definitely doable. Definitely takes a bit of a learning curve. When we bring some new people in, we work to get them up to speed quickly, but that person account tends to throw people in a bit of a loop for a bit.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, that's understandable that that would cause when you're running both types of contact accounts, contact slash accounts, plus person accounts within the Salesforce org.
Nick Jensen:
Yeah. Well, and so in Salesforce, we're leads and we're running accounts, so we will convert the leads to accounts and then yeah, it adds a little weirdness.
Chris Strom:
Oh, yeah. I was going to ask if you also use the leads object as well, and it sounds like you do?
Nick Jensen:
Leads in Salesforce if they haven't purchased anything from us yet, yes. And so those leads are sent over to the sales teams to work through their cadences, but if you have an account, we're not going to create a new lead object for it, we just associate the account with the cadence.
Chris Strom:
Are you using the HubSpot inclusion list to limit the amount of HubSpot contacts that sync to Salesforce, or are you syncing all the HubSpot contacts over?
Nick Jensen:
Yeah, no, we use the inclusion list for sure. It ensures that we're not sending over a bunch of useless data and filling up that database where you're charged, like Salesforce charges per volume, right? I think that was one of the things we learned early on in our HubSpot integration is how much data HubSpot can actually create if you just let it do it. We had the data turned on to allow for when you set up the Salesforce, you can have it turn on the data and add tasks for everything. Well, if you start sending millions of emails out and you're getting tasks created in Salesforce for every email send, every email open, and every email click, that'll create gigabytes of data within a matter of weeks.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Is that something that actually happened when you implemented HubSpot?
Nick Jensen:
It did. Yeah. My IT director yelled at me and said, hey, Nick, what are you doing? I said, well. I think we created, we turned it on just to test it. And we're like, okay, cool. And we sent out a few million emails here and there. I mean daily. And we created I think 30 gigabytes of data within a month in Salesforce because of task records. We went back and deleted it and retroactively changed that. But lesson learned. Don't turn on the tasks for emails.
Chris Strom:
Wow. I can't even imagine how many task records it would take to fill 30 gigabytes. Do you remember how many tasks that was?
Nick Jensen:
I couldn't tell you, but it was creating a task for every email send on the contacts, and we were sending a few million per send. Our actively engaged is 1.2 million. Our full database is three and a half million. So just one of those sends, if you've got a 25, 30% open rate, that's a task, too. You've got that send, plus the task, plus the clicks, and now you do that three or four times a week, you've really started to add a lot of data to Salesforce.
Maia Morgan Wells:
That's wild. For people who are normally used to sending thousands of emails, not millions, just hearing that scale is pretty interesting.
Nick Jensen:
Well, yeah. It's really interesting to work with that data sends on that scale. You break stuff a lot, too, right? If you look at our January send, we sent 42 million emails to contacts. Our average isn't that high.
Chris Strom:
Holy cow.
Nick Jensen:
Yeah, 42 million.
Maia Morgan Wells:
What are the most important KPIs you track to make sure all of this activity is successful?
Nick Jensen:
Obviously, we're tracking deliverability. Opens, click-through rate are very key when you're managing a database of this size. And when you're supporting sales teams like we do, we want to make sure that that data is actually making it over to the sales teams and getting routed correctly. We actually have a custom object that we use to manage that routing, and so there's a daily monitoring of that to ensure that our lead number is coming in through our forms, like our HubSpot forms, and are creating the same amount of custom action. So that's one of the dashboards that we have set up in HubSpot to monitor is the custom actions, because those sales teams really need to make sure that they're getting the data that we're sending them, that we're working so hard through, whether it's through paid traffic or through email sends. So we're tracking that.
And then on the backend, we're also monitoring the velocity. What is it taking to make it to a closed state? And so where is our top source and how are they getting there? So we're able to report on that, too, for my ads manager, who is driving our ads or our email team, who's leading the campaigns for the emails. And then I like to track how many sync errors we have. We have a lot with Salesforce and HubSpot. That's a daily thing to monitor. But yeah, that's another important metric that we track because getting that data over to teams is so crucial.
Chris Strom:
One sidebar question is, can you tell us a little bit about the custom object you mentioned for tracking some of this stuff?
Nick Jensen:
Yeah. So we have a custom object that we use. It's just a web action to track activity and it's associated back to the lead or account that allows us to say, this person took this action and which we have identified as something that we need to store. We use it for lead routing. So there's some naming conventions we use in the object name that will route it to the correct sales department. We also use it in our affiliate tracking as well. So we can track, all right, so this person took this action, they were sent there by an affiliate, and so that way we can later reference the purchase on the opportunity with it, too. And so yeah, it's just a simple little object that sits there and is created often when people take those types of actions. And it sits there in Salesforce for us. And so we can also build reporting on it in both places.
Chris Strom:
So it's a web actions object associated with a contact object?
Nick Jensen:
The lead or the account, yes. And so when you convert a lead into an account, it associates with the lead or the account, yeah.
Chris Strom:
Okay. And every web action is logged as a record on the web event object?
Nick Jensen:
No. Every action that is like a sales related action would be. So when they request to speak to a sales rep and that event happens, that's logged on there. If they make an engagement from a lead form from an affiliate, that's logged as well. So it's flexible. I think that's one of the great things about custom objects is it's flexible and it can be used in various ways. And so definitely one of the reasons that I love custom objects. But yeah.
Chris Strom:
So that's in Salesforce. Do you sync the custom object back to HubSpot at all, or do you just keep that object in Salesforce?
Nick Jensen:
Yeah, that one's synced back to HubSpot, and we actually build lists around that, too. We weren't always on HubSpot. We were previously on Marketo for years. And so that was one of the ways, when we migrated, we were able to get the historical data of these people were interested in this type of information and their activities around that.
Chris Strom:
Were you involved in the implementation of that?
Nick Jensen:
Goodness, no. That's been around for many years before me, but we've definitely worked to make some improvements to how it was done. When I got here, these objects were being created from a field update in Marketo that was then synced over to Salesforce that then created the object, which when I really started to dig into it, I noticed we were losing probably like 20% of our leads a week, not making it over to sales teams because there would be issues with that field data not syncing from Marketo to Salesforce, which created a whole other issue. So I did lead the charge on creating an API endpoint for us to be able to just send a web hook that created the web action object itself from an immediate event versus waiting for field updates.
Chris Strom:
And that seemed to solve the problem of actions not syncing over all the time?
Nick Jensen:
It did, yeah. When you get into these systems that have been around forever, you have a lot of skeletons in your closet, you have a lot of dirty data, and that's always going to cause a sync error between anything. And so it often would, and then further investigation led us to seeing that this was the root cause of it, but being able to create on demand those custom objects and then associate them with the proper object really has streamlined the process and it even allowed us to move into and leverage that with affiliate partner tracking and the other use cases that we've had for it.
Maia Morgan Wells:
We've been talking with Nick Jensen from Robbins Research International. Nick, thank you for coming on the Marketing Hero Podcast. Thanks everybody, and we'll see you in the next episode.
