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How to respond when someone waves at you that you don’t know

Was walking down the street the other day, and a car passed by. A woman in the back seat was looking at me, and started waving. I didn’t recognise her but she obviously thought she recognised me. In that moment I was a little paralysed – Are they actually looking at me?  Do I wave back? What’s if I’m mistaken and they aren’t looking at me – will I look like a goose if I wave back...

Being disliked

I read a quote on social somewhere (possibly Instagram) recently but can’t find the source (possibly it’s a version of the Andre Gide quote).

The quote stayed with me though:

“Better to be disliked for who you are, than liked for who you aren’t.”

Impressively Useless

Let’s chat about those impressively useless people you’ve probably come across over the course of your career. In corporates mainly, and mostly guys by the way. They’re well meaning, nice people, so they’re not not terrible people by any any stretch. But they don’t get much done. They’re really good at presentations, lots of meetings, lots of catch-ups, lots of...

Craving Connection

Connection. Relationships. What does this even mean these days? Perhaps it’s my years of marketing that have jaded me, but I’m starting to lose my soul seeing all the new automated tools that CRM platforms and AI companies are pumping out. A few years ago HubSpot was speaking about connection with customers – but what does connection really mean? Is it about personal relationships –...

HubSpot Hub Tiers and Feature Allocation

I’ve been thinking through the reasons to recommend upgrading from HubSpot Pro to Enterprise (when chatting with clients) and the broader implications of HubSpot’s pricing strategy. It’s such a complex area – I’d love to be a fly on the wall when the HubSpot product teams decide which features belong in Pro versus Enterprise and how they adjust these over time...

Panadol versus Vitamins

You’ve probably heard the panadol versus vitamins cliché a million times – and been ‘encouraged’ to decide on which one you’re going to offer. But it’s not about choosing one of the other, it’s actually about timeframe. What does your ideal client need now (versus later)? Most new clients need a key short term problem solved before they can think more...

Slack Notifications in HubSpot

A reminder about getting Slack reminders in HubSpot.I quite like how granular you can make the out-of-the-box ‘Other App’ notifications (eg Slack) in HubSpot.eg to get Task Reminders:

And then you’ll get notifications in you HubSpot channel in Slack:

You can also get further control by using Workflows. Lots of flexibility here (simple example via a Company workflow):

The boring but impactful things our clients are doing

Data 3.0 I’m in my mid 50s now, which means I’m in that stage of life where I’m highly focussed on health. I want to live not only a long life, but also a healthy life. One of the books I’ve been re-reading is the excellent Outlive by Peter Attia. If you’ve read it you’ll recall he discusses the topic of Medicine 3.0. As a quick oversimplification:  Medicine 1.0 was the initial medical...

Canva and HotJar price update

There was a bit of angst on social when Canva announced some price increases last week (up by 300% in some cases). Not to be outdone, I received the following ‘hold my beer’ notification from HotJar a few days later: Admittedly this is less about a price increase right now, and more a removal of a legacy discount against price increases a while back – but to the end user (ie me)...

Personalisation versus Personalisation Tokens

In marketing we often talk about personalising our marketing activities – which is a good thing. We all want to be like Amazon – those emails all seem like they have been personally curated for my interests and tastes. That’s a good thing. But often the extent of personalisation in corporate email stops at: inserting the person’s first name in the email subject line Which as you may...

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