After just a few years of being a Hubspot Partner, GetCre8ive reaches a feat of claiming the Hubspot Diamond Partner title in Asia. As the news is still fresh in the Hubspot community, we did a deep dive interview with Chief Advocate, Sarah Medilo, and Head of Innovations, Ley Castillo, on the journey towards the diamond status during GetCre8ive’s 12th year.
How does it feel to be a diamond partner now on Hubspot?
SARAH: A lot of the people in GetCre8ive get on Hubspot’s inbound methodology, which has been focused on trying to help companies adapt to this “new normal”.
We started our HubSpot partner journey in May of 2020. This was during the time that the country went on lockdown and a lot of the businesses were affected. Considering that most of the on-site businesses had to move into a digital space, they had to move their operations from in-office to work-from-home or limited in-office work. So a lot of the businesses that we engage in GetCre8ive for the Adobe side, for our Lead coaching offerings, experienced challenges on adapting to this new form of doing work. We felt that HubSpot was a great way for them to be able to manage and grow their business on a platform that allows them to see their business end-to-end.
We were just focused on helping, and the partner status wasn't something that was top of mind for us.
LEY: Well, I can say it happened so fast. And we're just doing the legwork. We're trying to listen to the customers, trying to resolve their issues. It's a bit overwhelming at the start but it feels great, and I think great is an understatement right now because, Hello! It's “diamond”, right?
What did it take to get from Gold to Diamond?
SARAH: We can go into the entire journey of GetCre8ive. We were using Salesforce prior to 2015 for managing our sales engagements and we tried HubSpot primarily for the fact that HubSpot, we felt, was an end-to-end system.
As an entrepreneur, it’s really helped me to be able to see revenue attribution for our efforts from marketing and seeing that come through into our sales pipelines. Being a champion of the product (because we use it ourselves in our business), we really see how it has helped us grow as a company, grow as a business.
Because of using the inbound methodology, we've been able to grow a 2800 USD business to 2.8 million USD revenue in less than three years. That's our testament to HubSpot, to using the platform correctly and being able to maximize our investment on it.
The diamond partner is really a testament of the amount of support that we see Filipino companies need for HubSpot onboarding and HubSpot implementation.
When you're proposing a new system to any company, a very big challenge or a blocker that can come in would be the fact that people do not adopt the new system. That is one big thing that me, Ley, and his innovations team really put some work in, some thought in, primarily because we wanted to make sure that client’s adopt well moving into a new process.
HubSpot has this tagline, “Solve not for your systems, but to find solutions to problems.” and that's what they do and we also do.
We are also very excited to have Sam as our HUG leader for this year. So HUG, or HubSpot User Groups Manila was a community that GetCre8ive and our sister company, StraightArrow, founded back in 2014 and since then, we've been hosting quarterly HubSpot user group meetups.
I’m very excited about the HUGs because the HUGs have become a support system for a lot of our customers and even a place where people who are considering HubSpot for their business get a taste of what HubSpot can really do and how fun HubSpot really is.
LEY: It takes a lot of listening to our customers. Sitting with them in meetings, extracting the pain points, asking a lot of questions to know where they are coming from and what they want to do and how Hubspot and GetCre8ive can fill that gap, right? So, yeah. That's really the path that we took for us to be able to go to diamond from gold–listening, resolving the customer issues, and helping them implement it in their systems.
What kinds of customers do you have at Hubspot and how do you help solve their problems?
SARAH: You know, we love our clients at GetCre8ive. We kind of tend to get a little bit more involved primarily because when you use HubSpot, you really have to understand number one, what the business of the client really is. When we engage clients, we have a process wherein first we do a discovery call with them. We try to understand what their business is, what their pains are or what their challenges are.
So, two types: the newbies and the ones who have been using Hubspot for a while. We are able to service them and able to help them really build a great inbound engine to help their business grow.
LEY: But still, GetCre8ive is there because the end of the retainer is just the start of our partnership with them–a long term partnership.
What’s in store for GetCre8ive this year?
SARAH: You know, this year, we've really been focused on “All Systems Go for Growth” primarily because this year is very special for the GetCre8ive team. In May, we will be celebrating our 12 years in the industry. [I’m] very excited to be sharing so much inspired innovation for the last dozen years and for that, we're actually preparing a few things. We have a few surprises coming up. One thing that we're making investments on is our website, developing it on the Hubspot CMS platform. We're very excited about that and really being able to use all the HubSpot hubs to be able to manage our business from marketing, sales, our website, even our support. We want to make sure that we embody the ideal HubSpot customer, so that we can share our learning, share our secrets, to customers and clients that we service. We're very excited about making sure we complete that Hubspot journey also as a company and using those systems to help us grow as well. [We’re] so very excited for 2022. We know that our 12 years will mark another milestone for us and we hope to have you all be part of our journey.
LEY: The road to being an elite partner starts. A lot of pressure, a lot of work to be done, but exciting times ahead.
