Elevate Your Team's Skills with SmartBug's On-Site Business Training Workshops

In today’s ultra-competitive, fast-paced business environments, it’s essential to stay up to date with relevant technology and streamline business processes if you want your marketing, sales, and customer success teams to keep up.

Investing in on-site business training workshops is a cost-effective, high-impact way to ensure your employees have the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to excel in their roles and contribute to the overall growth, efficiency, and success of the business.

SmartBug helps businesses meet these goals with HubSpot training and workshops designed to give teams the skills and expertise needed to drive their business forward and stay ahead in the market.

What Types of On-Site Business Training Workshops Does SmartBug Offer?

SmartBug offers two types of expert-led, on-site training opportunities: HubSpot software suite training and process-focused, skill-building workshops. 

HubSpot Software Training

Our HubSpot software training courses are designed to help onboard new HubSpot business users or expand your organization’s working knowledge of the different tools in the HubSpot ecosystem, including HubSpot Marketing Hub, HubSpot Sales Hub, HubSpot Service Hub, and HubSpot CMS Hub.

Depending on your organization’s specific needs, SmartBug’s HubSpot training specialists will work side by side with your sales and marketing teams to help them quickly get up to speed in SalesHub; seamlessly switch to CMS Hub from Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, or another CMS platform; or leverage Marketing Hub to take control of your inbound marketing efforts.

SmartBug also offers more business process-focused workshops designed to help marketing, sales, and customer success teams build specific skill sets and implement effective strategies.

Targeted Workshops

Each of our on-site workshops targets a specific marketing approach and its associated business processes, providing in-depth, actionable knowledge and skills that can be used to improve business outcomes. 

Currently, SmartBug offers training workshops in the following areas:

Inbound Marketing

This workshop is ideal for sales and marketing professionals who are new to the inbound approach and want to learn the basics. 

SmartBug trainers work with participants to build foundational knowledge, including essential inbound marketing processes such as:

• Developing buyer personas and the buyer’s journey
• Creating an inbound content strategy
• Understanding the importance of database segmentation
• Getting the most out of lead nurturing and automation
• Defining demand generation and conversions

During this workshop, participants will take part in collaborative exercises such as using a whiteboard to map out content and identify gaps in the buyer’s journey or participating in a facilitated card-sorting exercise to brainstorm content ideas.

This hands-on approach to learning makes our in-person training sessions even more effective because these face-to-face exercises help draw people who otherwise might not speak up into the conversation.

Sales and Marketing

Even senior-level sales and marketing professionals benefit from continuous learning. This course takes a deep dive into the latest digital marketing implementation and strategy best practices to give your organization a competitive edge.

Key topics covered in this session include:

• Setting goals and funnel benchmarks
• Implementing service level agreements (SLAs)
• Identifying ideal buyer personas
• Mapping the customer journey
• Generating quality leads

In our experience, training sessions that include sales and marketing teams often produce the bonus benefit of bringing these two frequently siloed departments into better alignment. 

For example, during one on-site training session, sales complained that marketing wasn’t providing enough leads. Marketing in turn complained that sales wasn’t following up in a timely manner with leads being provided, so sales wasn’t closing them. Talking through this disconnect in an in-person workshop, moderated by an unbiased third party, helped bring both teams out of their silos and realize that they were, in fact, working toward common goals. Together, they drafted an internal SLA that defined how many leads marketing would bring in and how long sales had to follow up with them.

This level of collaboration would have been difficult—if not impossible—to achieve over a Zoom call, and it was made even easier by using an outside facilitator to keep communication focused and productive.

Customer Marketing Success

In today’s competitive marketplace, delivering an exceptional customer experience is non-negotiable. In this course, SmartBug’s experts will help you stay relevant to your customers by providing the right support at the right time, identifying the most impactful touchpoint opportunities, and consolidating your tech stacks to eliminate duplicated effort.

The skills developed during this workshop are applicable to anyone who is involved in customer onboarding or delight, including your marketing, customer success, and even your sales teams. Topics include:

• Buy-in for customer marketing
• Marketing strategy for customer success
• Buyer personas
• Key customer touchpoint mapping
• Content strategy
• Key technologies
• Customer marketing performance

During the workshop, the SmartBug training team helps participants understand how these skills can be applied to create and maintain great relationships with their customers while also streamlining internal workflows.

One exercise we work through is how to avoid inconsistencies and duplicated effort by identifying which touchpoints it makes sense for the marketing team to own versus the customer service team. For example, which team should acknowledge a customer anniversary? Who should send holiday greetings? Who’s in charge of follow-up after a new purchase is made? 

Having the marketing and customer service teams collaborate and work together in person to develop these processes, talk about what is or isn’t working, and identify gaps and overlaps will accelerate process improvement and speed up time to value. 

Note: When these conversations also include the sales team, we often uncover duplicate tech stacks that can be consolidated, saving the company even more money.

Inbound for ABM

Account-based marketing (ABM) is all about having a list of targeted accounts or prospects that you want to go after. This course will help marketing leaders develop targeted B2B marketing strategies using ABM best practices, including:

• ABM metrics tracking
• Targeted accounts
• Inbound-centric account strategy
• Content mapping to your account strategy
• Account data mining and engagement

This session also includes a demonstration showing how HubSpot’s targeted account technology streamlines ABM processes and generates reporting that can be used to retain and grow accounts.

Although ABM is an effective approach for any business, this training course is especially popular with organizations that serve a niche industry or market to a narrow set of customers.

This workshop brings together company leaders to identify target companies, designate who will reach out to them, and determine a content strategy. Participants benefit from the in-person learning environment because it makes it easier to collaborate, debate, and use visuals such as whiteboards and card sorting to brainstorm how to get the right content to the right account.

5 Reasons You Get More ROI from On-Site Training than Virtual Training

There’s a lot to be said about the convenience of virtual training, but in our experience, businesses see a lot more return on their training dollars when we deliver SmartBug workshops on-site.

Here are just a few of the benefits of face-to-face learning:

1. Immediate Feedback

When workshop participants are all in the same room, it’s easier to ask and answer questions in real time, which helps ensure everyone fully understands the material.

2. Hands-On Experience

Learning in a real-world setting often deepens comprehension and increases skill mastery, which speeds up time to ROI.  

3. Team Building

Learning together helps strengthen relationships between team members and builds better communication and collaboration.

4. Increased Focus

In-person training reduces external distractions, allowing participants to concentrate and retain the material more easily.

5. Alignment with Company Culture

On-site trainers can more easily customize the material and delivery to match your company’s objectives, challenges, and learning style. Working face to face also allows the trainer to pivot as needed to ensure participants walk away with valuable and applicable skills.

What to Expect from a SmartBug On-Site Training Workshop

Although SmartBug’s on-site training workshops are customized to meet your organization’s unique needs and requirements, every workshop we deliver follows a similar roadmap:

• Discovery: This is when we get to know your business and your team, along with your process gaps, discrepancies, and friction points.
• Preparation: Using the info from discovery, we put together your training agenda, surveys, and presentation slide decks.

• On-site workshop:

• Day 1: Attend an expert-led training session and learn how to implement the target business process or HubSpot solution to improve your business outcomes.
• Day 2: Test your newfound knowledge and refine your skills through breakout sessions and one-on-one support from your SmartBug training team.

• Post-training support and follow-up: Typical training workshops last 1-2 days, but our work together continues after the live event. During the weeks after your workshop, we will meet for one-on-one training sessions, and your training team will be available virtually to help you implement your new skills.

SmartBug Training Workshops Aren’t Like Other Training Workshops

Many companies offer on-site training, but SmartBug does things differently. Here are a few of the things that separate us from other HubSpot training providers.

Expertise

One of the biggest differentiators between SmartBug training workshops and other providers’ offerings is our expertise. 

A lot of training providers may understand the software, or they may understand the process—but the SmartBug training team has deep-rooted expertise in both the HubSpot software and the business processes we’re teaching. 

Relationships

At SmartBug, we want to grow partnerships, not just client lists. We work as an extension of your in-house team with shared goals and shared objectives. Our strategists work closely with our customers to establish strong relationships that last far beyond the initial training engagement.

Alignment

Many sales and marketing teams work in silos, but the SmartBug training team excels at bringing disjointed teams into alignment. Working in person with a knowledgeable third party that can facilitate conversations and moderate disagreements between teams can open lines of communication, identify process gaps and inefficiencies, and empower sales and marketing to work as one functioning unit, rather than disconnected departments.

Return on Investment

What we can accomplish in two days of on-site training could take months to do in a virtual setting. Working face to face, we can facilitate deeper conversations, troubleshoot and clarify information in real time, and stay laser-focused on the topic at hand. These efficiencies help teams start using new HubSpot software or applying business processes sooner, so you see ROI faster.

Putting everyone in the same room also makes it easier to identify where tech stacks or marketing efforts are being duplicated across departments and find ways to consolidate and streamline resources, saving the business time and money.

Learn More about SmartBug’s On-Site Business Training Workshops

Yes, on-site training is an investment. But it’s an investment you can’t afford not to make. Find out how SmartBug’s on-site training workshops can help your marketing, sales, and customer success teams gain a competitive advantage—and drive ROI—with a clear inbound marketing strategy, aligned sales and marketing goals, exceptional customer experience, and targeted account-based marketing tools.