BrightBull B2B Marketing & Design

30/09/2025

What is the real ROI of AI ? Some leaders ask
Not sure if time saving on silly tasks is not an actual REAL ROI.

In conversations and posts people say...
Apart from:
> Meeting Notes
> Auto follow ups + summaries
> Reports
> Data analysis
> Deep research on topics

Where else are companies deriving ROI??
As if the time your team spends doing all the things above does not waste time our counts. Granted there is no general benchmark report etc.

Through our own personal experience we've found that we are saving ~ 12-15 hrs a week:

> 2 hrs/day - On meeting notes, summaries emails etc
> 1hr/day - Auto follow ups reminders
> 50% Less - Reports certainly whenever we need to data crunch
> 50% Less on Deep research - scoping etc

As a service business this is TIME=MONEY saved working on projects.

This alone allowed us to add more value and agility through the services we provide.

When my friend AI validated this hypothesis through various studies the conclusion was that:

Total realistic weekly saving: ~7–11 hrs/week per knowledge worker once tools are embedded.

That’s ~1 to 1.5 workdays reclaimed each week. - This is A LOT in my opinion

So, for a £30k/year employee, AI tools could unlock the equivalent of £430–£650 worth of time per month in productivity savings.

So to any business leader out there asking for for the real ROI.... if this aint real. I don't know what is.

01/10/2024

Inbound this year, provided a lot of food for thought and paved an exciting road ahead for those using it.

These are my 7 Key takeaways from Inbound.

1️⃣ Onboarding and implementing HubSpot is not enough > as companies requirements become more complex 74% of clients need customisation of their CRM. But also 80% of organisations are not getting the "value" of their CRM. Adoption is and will continue to be KEY.

2️⃣ HubSpot and agency ecosystem is going upmarket > But at BrightBull we are not wanting to abandon those in the small and medium size organisations. We love you and have amazing tools and functionality that can turbo charge your growth plans

3️⃣ Data Enrichment / Data management > It is a big area for most organisations that many have not solved or have anyone internally to deal with this. Beyond enrichment, this is breaking silos, cleaning, enhancing, tagging, segmenting. We are heading there!!

4️⃣ AI Agents > Companies know about existing AI tools and are not using them to its full potential. The launch of Autopilot and Breeze in HubSpot is HOT. But the real potential here is AI agents.

5️⃣ Content Hub > Massive opportunity to enhance your marketing stack with the content hub from HubSpot, especially the content remix, podcast tools and all. Honestly it is super hot for

6️⃣ Pimping your HubSpot portal > There is an abundance of new tools to enhance your portals and your day to day operations and the tools you currently use outside Hubspot can connect with it.

7️⃣ Shortcuts > Everyone is super busy these days. Everyone wants to learn how to... do stuff in HubSpot, but if there is a shortcut, they will take it. As we specialise in the events and publishing industry, we have plenty of these. Soon you will be able to purchase these to be installed in your portal at a touch of a button. ;-)

Any of these resonate?

Use HubSpot? I am building a small cohort of HubSpot users in the events and publishing space, to run and stress test a few ideas around AI agents and maximising this for you.

Exciting times ahead.

07/07/2024

A very useful productivity toolkit to manage one's time.

When we operate in small organisations and startups, one wears multiple hats, we have to if we want to grow. This has become a compulsory watch for everyone in our business and we are currently using this method.

As the leader of my business, personal productivity is of utmost importance and recently found this video from Alex Hormozi that I found super interesting and game changing for me, worth your time if this is hot for you.

These are my key takeaways from it, if you don't have the time to read it.

➡️ In organisations you have two types of contributors > Makers / Managers

➡️ Managers role is to oversee/help/support/coach/decide so their output depends on meetings >
A Manager can have between 7-20 slots in the day to do their job properly

➡️ Makers role is to create/do/innovate/fix etc this is highly dependent on DEEP WORK, generally you have comfortably 1 - 2 slots in your day allocate (AM / PM)

➡️ Are you a Manager/Maker? generally we all have both. You need to determine from your weekly flow where you stand.
In my case I am Manager (70%) / Maker (30%)

➡️ How much Maker time do I need? There are three versions/approaches that might be helpful
V1 > Make "Maker time" > In my case weekends, evenings
V2 > Split 50/50 any given day
V3 > Have Maker Days (no interruption / no meetings) - Manager Days (available for meetings)

➡️ In our Manager days, try to allocate meetings where possible from the back end of your day towards earlier slots (This I have found extremely useful)

➡️ Constantly ask yourself > Do it need to do this again? / Do I need to attend this meeting again? / Is there somebody else or a system we can put in place to eliminate it all together?

The full video is well worth the watch if you have time > https://hubs.li/Q02Fn7jZ0

11/06/2024

Do you a lot of DB list research and DB build? How to track if your event registrations came from it?

In there are various ways to track this. This is how I suggest you do this.

☝️Tagging > Name the import file appropriately
Eg. Event-X-Data-Build.xls / Association-A-Members.xls

When you import this file there will be a record kept of the name of the import, but more importantly the properties ORIGINAL and LATEST SOURCE.

The original source tells you if your contacts were NEW. This will remains constant.

The latest source tells you if your contact was updated or upgraded from your DB Build process.

✌️Search-ability > Always create a list after the import so it is kept in the system and easily.
I would also keep this in a folder called "DB Build"

🤟Create a custom property "DB Build source" or equivalent

Should be a multiple option dropdown so you can "tag" and determine if a contact or company has been appearing in other sources.

It is possible that you undertake one or more DB build activities and the original source and last source only gives you one dimension of the data. With a custom property you can easily track and log the DB Build source

📊 How to report on it?

Now more than ever you will be realising that event marketing and the source of registrations is not always linear.

Was it the DB build or the email you sent last week or the AD placement you provided. So the story is never straight forward, because it is always a multichannel approach (or it should be at least)

1️⃣ The list performance will give you a good idea (See video below)

From here you can always add it to a report in an event dashboard.

2️⃣Create a custom report using the original, latest source > It will give you a very good indication of how well your DB research is performing.

3️⃣If you record all attendees as a DEAL, you will have a more robust way of logging performance and revenue etc.

🔮 You could even get a workflow to LOG the latest source at that point in time which will allow you to determine what were the activities that essentially got that person to register.

How do you track your DB list research performance in HubSpot? How do you track source of registrations in Hubspot?

17/04/2024

Every time you say YES to something you are saying NO to something else.

As a "yes-we-can-do-this" type of individual, I have found this to be a very useful tool or layer to add to our decision making situations at a business level and certainly very relevant and true on a personal level too.

Saying YES to lot of things brings you unexpected rewards along the way in whatever business journey you are in.
- We said YES more than 10 years ago to becoming a HubSpot Partner
- We said YES to being a remote first business
- I said YES to take a sabbatical, reduce our client base

Saying YES also brought us burdens that we couldn't carry and let to wasted resources, time, effort and money.
- We said YES to other software tools that we firmly believed in...but had no time to properly implement it
- We said YES to hiring a senior and experienced employee at a time when we were not ready for that person

So we have been trying a very contrarian approach: That is to say NO as a default answer when presented with an "interesting" and "suggestive" situation, simply because if it is not about time commitment, it certainly will be about resources.

So this forces us to really think about the situation clearly and properly.

One of the many validations and pearls of wisdom from an interview that shah gave to the Lenny's podcast on

37 seconds · Clipped by Ricardo Molina · Original video "Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO)" by Lenny's P...

10/01/2024

Join us at a 6 week community building bootcamp with HubSpot Academy
The next cohort starts on Thursday, February 01, 2024

Our director Ricardo Molina I will be leading this workshop with Nurit and Nico and if you are a HubSpot customer you shouldn't miss it.

Everyone is talking about building communities, but… what does it actually mean?
Building a thriving community is a challenging task that demands time, resources, and collective effort across the organization. It relies on executive sponsorship and empowerment to achieve scalability.

Effective community management entails a blend of soft and hard skills while adopting a data-driven mindset from the outset, which paves the way for sustained expansion. Ultimately, it is the invaluable community members who make the journey worthwhile.

This bootcamp presents a systematic approach, guiding you through big-picture strategies and concrete tactical measures. You will learn how to strike the right balance in coordinating, interacting, connecting, and organizing events within your community, ensuring its success and growth.

Apply to HubSpot Academy’s Building Community for Marketing, Sales & Service Bootcamp → https://hubs.li/Q02f-KXt0

27/10/2023

Our best advice on email marketing for

After more than 25 years in the events industry and evaluating literally hundreds of emails most event organisers fail at both, the only two companies that our Director has seen excelling at this are Influence group and Agency Hackers and that is because Michael P. Owens and Ian Harris have paid special attention to it.

We run specialised workshops and where we share among other things our 10 key areas for event marketing success.

If you want to find out more let us know.🙌🏼💡

07/10/2023

The customer journey is changing + AI is here to stay and it is enabled across the HubSpot Platform.💡

These are the key mega trends from HubSpot's CEO Yamini Rangan at the Inbound Conference last month. Also we added our personal thoughts and key take aways.

18/12/2022

Communities and Pubs

When it comes to differentiating between communities and networks, many organisations do not know how to run communities.

Penny Power gave me a really interesting analogy:

You could have lots of pubs across the country but, you can walk into some pubs and absolutely love the atmosphere, and the landlord greets you with a smile and the next time he remembers your name and he then starts to remember what drink you like.

Or you can walk into a Pub, and no matter how many times you walk into it, nobody recognises you.

Full interview https://hubs.li/Q01qqkxv0

08/12/2022

Do you need a technology 💻 tool to start your community?

The answer is NO.

While it is useful and it serves the community owner to be in one single place it might not be the best place to start.

If you are serving your client, you meet them where they want to be met. Otherwise you are not serving your clients in the way they want to be served.

While your community might be able to gravitate towards certain types of technology/tools, not all will be willing to adjust their behaviour to engage with the community.

So, at least at the very beginning of your community journey, do not start thinking Community = Community tool.

In this conversation with Penny Power and Thomas Power they explain this concept and in the end, you have to be present in many places.

Full interview on the comments

06/12/2022

On setting up your B2B community member prices during the pandemic

James Mayes and the team at Mind the Product decided to pivot their business and one of their plans was to have a membership model. But where do you start, how much to charge for? Especially at a time when companies were laying off people etc?

James says:
"At least at the very basic level. James Mayes and the team at Mind the product, approached their MVP membership pricing in a way that it wouldn't need to create the the need for the individual user to go to their company and ask for permission to expense it.
We know there were a lot of product folks that were operating as freelancers so it would come out of their own budget, we knew that it was a hard time for companies as people were being laid off.
If we can get it to a point where it's a comparable price to a couple of coffees a week, that feel like the right sort of level to get the proposition outthere and get started".

Full interview and summary link on the comments

https://hubs.li/Q01qqQl30

On setting up your B2B community member prices during the pandemicJames Mayes and the team at Mind the Product decided to pivot their business and one of the...

04/12/2022

Hot tips on B2B community building: Find out who are the conduits of a successful ecosystem

Porter CEO of InspiredMinds! shares how she started building connections and helping members of their community achieve their goals.

"It is about learning as much as possible about what they are trying to achieve, what value they would bring to the ecosystem and what would make it valuable for them."

"When you understand at a granular level the members of your community, and the very reasons of what they are doing what they are doing, why that is important to them and the impact. Then you can start work on helping them to do that. All of that achieves is a collaborative effort... we are all pointing in the same direction"

https://hubs.li/Q01qqCQ30

Inspired minds is now a community of 200k+ members and if you really have some time in your hands spend a few minutes reading the summary:

https://hubs.li/Q01qqCCR0

Full video in the comments

Sarah Porter shares with us really good tips on growing your community and how to add value to them which in turn evolves into a collaborative approach.Liste...