Unite Sales + Marketing for Growth

Speaker 1: hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the she builted experience with Melanie you're here because you want to experience the life and business that you crave join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from

Speaker 1: when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in Lauren kenned is the founder of coastal Consulting a people first marketing automation agency focused on HubSpot and Salesforce hi Lauren so thrilled you are with us today please tell us more about who you are and I have to say I was so incredibly inspired reading the story of your grandfather and I love your mission to continue his legacy thanks Melanie great being here and I appreciate that it's become a huge part of my life and it's interesting because when I started my business I didn't realize that was my story was something that was kind of below the conscience and through this and doing interviews learning more about myself I realized that really is my story and my why I'm a 27y old founder of a marketing automation agency specializing in HubSpot and Salesforce I focus a lot on people first leadership based off of the story of my grandfather and the Legacy that he left and I have really enjoyed growing my business over the last year it's constantly shock talking to me that it's only been 11 months I feel at the same time that it's month one and year two all at once it's been a fun journey and I'm excited to talk to you about it today yeah you've had incredible growth can you share with us your grandfather's story yeah so my grandfather was an executive at the World Bank he grew up in a small town called Larks Scotland and he traveled around the world lived in all different countries so that's kind of what I knew about him growing up like that's was my awareness he took me out to eat twice a week and if you're familiar with Lisa Frank journals really popular when I was younger and so I got one of those every week and that was what I knew of my grandfather and then he passed away when I was 13 that was very challenging for me because he was very much a father figure in my life and we flew to lar Scotland for his funeral because he wanted to be buried in this beautiful place where he grew up and whenever we arrived at the funeral we hadn't told anybody about it it hadn't been put in a paper we didn't send out invitations it was just family but hundreds of people showed up in this very small town in Scotland to pay their respects and while he was in a large position a high power position that wasn't the reason they came they all had stories to tell about how he had had a like in large impact on their life throughout his journey by helping them with a promotion or helping them out with something that was going on in their personal life and there were all of these small things that he had done throughout his life to make a strong impact to the point where people traveled from across the world to be there for his funeral that's was my first big example of what a leader looks like and the type of Legacy that you want to build your company Coastal Consulting is focused on HubSpot and Salesforce integration share with us how you work with clients and how that integration can be beneficial for their business we're all EX marketers we've all been on the in-house side of agencies what we look to do is partner as part of your team from a teacher or coach perspective so coming in and seeing what's wrong with your systems why they're not sinking and how your organizational alignment looks around your data around Salesforce around hpot so we work on aligning sales marketing and customer service around the customer Journey which if you work in any of those departments you know that there's a lot of disjointedness between those three departments so we come in and we don't just look at the actual issue that's happening and solve it from there which is where a lot of firms start we start with talking to your people figuring out where their pain points are where the communication gaps are and building that alignment and then fixing your systems to match that and not just fix the bugs that you've identified but re architect the systems to make sure that they're working for your team rather than against them so that's what our normal partnership looks like and we have found that it's such a great thing for internal teams to have a people first approach to marketing automation because you're actually build systems that actually work for you and automation is everything while growing a team and growing a business it can be really frustrating when things feel disjointed yes automation is very important especially when you're on a small team I have a team of five and the problem with automation on a larger scale is if you don't have Team alignment your team's not on board there isn't a process automation is just a disaster because no one knows what's being automated or why or what triggers it it's really important at all sizes to have great communication before you automate can you share with us a little bit about hubs if you're someone that's not familiar with HubSpot because they do so much can you share with us a little bit about HubSpot and how your company works with clients to make them successful HubSpot is a CRM for scaling organizations and what makes HubSpot different from the other crms and email marketing tools in the platform is that HubSpot grows with you and also has a suite of products that are all accessible in the same portal so if you think you can do your email marketing automation you can do your sales enabl by looking at the CRM sending sales emails having different sales documentation and quotes as well as your website your customer service portal where people will submit tickets for support from account management or from your product Team all of that lives in One login so as marketers we often have 40 tabs open at any given time and on average HubSpot cuts that in half being able to consolidate your social media schedule your email marketing Your Design platform all of that in one my team helps Hub with HubSpot from the system architecture usability Revenue operations perspective of how HubSpot connects into your organization overall whereas a lot of firms will focus on helping you with content designing your website all those are very valid and their own respect our Focus really is just making your system work well because while hubspot's very user friendly there's so much in there that you need to distill what do I actually need to be using what are we not using enough and what do I not know about that I could be using so true there is so much and I know they just launched a podcast option too within their platform MH they just launched a podcast platform they also just launched payments so you can now use HubSpot as stripe um it is built on the stripe platform but you can access it and manage it through HubSpot and have payment links they've really developed their CMS recently and they're working more and more on the CRM so there's so many exciting things coming out and they're one of the only companies that I've worked with that has new releases new features new fix every month and that's really great as both a customer and a partner you mentioned people first leadership share with us your approach with working with your teams so whenever I started this business I didn't plan to be starting a business I planned to be a freelancer that worked on their own and had their independent thing but I quickly outgrew my own bandwidth and so I started hiring and whenever I made the decision to hire my first employee I looked at okay what does the benefits package look like like what is what is hiring look like all of the decisions I had to make about Healthcare 401K match all of that and made it through the lens of what's the environment that I wish I had worked in before why did that environment not work for me through that I made the decision from day one of hiring to offer a 4% 401K match unlimited PTO fully employer paid Health Care medical dental vision and flexible work schedule of being able to say you can work whatever hours like as long as you're hitting your targets for the week from the start I've had a very people for culture in that all of the decisions we make they're considered before profit I've had just a really great response from the market our last job that we like posted and hired for had over 300 applications wow in under a week of being posted which is a really powerful metric I am really proud of the fact that my team often says that so many companies are saying that they're people first right now but we actually mean it there's a little bit of skepticism when you join our team of well are they actually saying that or is this just a platform and it's incredibly ingrained in our culture and everything we do and that's always priority one for me is that our culture internally is people first and that we're delivering people first Solutions and solution design and I've really enjoyed building that Tech is wonderful and amazing we couldn't live without it but we are still people and I love how you've looked and said what would I have wanted it worked well what do you like the most about what you do so I thought that I would like getting to work in HubSpot Salesforce as much as I do the most that was always my expectation because I've always been a solution or and an an Executor but I love managing people now that I have the opportunity to have a team and help nurture grow develop promote members of my team there's like nothing that I look forward to more than team meetings or one-on-one sessions or coaching or development opportunities or seeing someone achieve something that a few months ago they thought was impossible and I really enjoy seeing them all grow as people as part of the team because them growing to be a better person while they work here is just as important to me as the tangible results that they're delivering from like a build perspective or marketing performance or whatever and so seeing how working here and the things that I choose to discuss with them like open their minds more like we watched Berne Brown as a team two weeks ago one of her TED talks and reflected on that and so to me it's really just seeing people grow and change and feel better about who they are and what they do by working here I love the foundation and that you bring in those different elements because you're right not every company does we have a weekly meeting every Friday where we have some sort of topic like at the end of it we go over what tasks are up for next week but we start off with some sort of conversation so one week we talked about productivity and how the concept of productivity has become kind of toxic so what does that look like to us how do we struggle with feeling productive what do we do next um we talked about vulnerability when we watch ber Brown we've talked about the concept of unlimited PTO and how that's perceived negatively at some organizations where it's bad if you take your PTO and how our perceptions are changing and how we still struggle with taking PTO because of preconceived notions and having those conversations is so important and feeling worthy and like you can trust the people around you and bonding in a remote culture yeah how can we really do our jobs well if we don't take care of ourselves first exactly is there a client story that you can share with us and how you were able to help them so I would say that our most complex story from last year that was our most fun was our most challenging was a company that came to us to implement HubSpot because they were using maretto but a subsidiary of their company was already using HubSpot and they needed both accounts both companies to sync to the same Salesforce account so a lot of tech wordss there but essentially they needed to manage contacts like they were for two separate companies in one system and so we built a lot of custom development custom code to help this system delineate between who's what and like what do we touch what do we not and we were able to implement HubSpot move over like 300 assets from maretto to HubSpot which includes forms landing pages emails in under 60 days so to be able to build all of that development Implement a new system and migrate all the Assets in under two months was a huge feat for my team and it's been super fun to help get that team up and running and I'm still working with them to help them learn more about hub spot and we're tackling reporting now and then we're signing off with them in two months because they are now so self-sufficient in HubSpot they don't need an agency which is always my goal right and that shows the knowledge of your team also to be able to pull all of that together so quickly magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy what is one tip you can leave with us today about how you find and live your joy I found my Joy by starting this company and I live my Joy by allowing myself to continue to grow I have found that I have really improved my vulnerability and my ability to put myself out there and be honest and transparent through this journey and so continuing to show up for myself and my team every day and being the one that admits their mistakes first is how I continue to make myself really proud of me i' love it well you have built an incredible business please share with our listeners how and where they can find you do you can find me on Twitter at cmn Coastal or you can find us online at Coastal in.co if you are new to Sheil it we'd love for you to join us we offer Community memberships masterminds Innovative virtual events and meaningful connections to entrepreneurs and corporate leaders please also check out our sheb built it shop curated products from women-owned businesses who put their heart and soul into their beautiful and Innovative products we offer she built it business Consulting and the shilp blog thank you to everyone around the world who joined today thank you to my editor Rich stalino please download And subscribe wherever you get your podcast and until next time together let's let nothing stop us from experiencing the life that We crave