Verity Dearsley is the Managing Director at The B2B Marketing Lab. In this interview, Verity explains how and why B2B Marketing Lab, originally a public relations company, changed its focus from content to inbound marketing and grew to become the first Hubspot Diamond partner in the UK and Singapore, a Hubspot trainer, and the largest Hubspot partner in London.

Public relations is marketing targeted to enhance the image of the client . . . and that personae is the "product that is being sold." But, when your "product" is your client's public image, how do you measure sales?

When B2B Marketing Lab had difficulty tracking client ROI impact metrics, Verity "crawled through Google metrics and numbers," then latched onto 5-year-old Hubspot, and launched customers on its marketing automation platform as well. Using Hubspot helped Verity realize that, when clients paid for an agency to create great content, it didn't make sense to present the material on a website in the form of a static online brochure.

Instead, content could be the beginning of an outreach to customers. Blogging valuable information targeted to interested potential clients helped build relationships. Strategic content "gating" – holding back some critical pieces of information – could provide fuel for future lead generation. Verity also learned that, beyond marketing, it is important to create effective sales, customer engagement, software implementation, and client management processes – to build a robust backside infrastructure to support client growth amd healthy marketing company scaling.

Hubspot Partnership enabled B2B Marketing Lab to "grow another business" – and with great success.

Verity's presentation at Hubspot's Inbound 2018, "To get to Platinum, you just have to sell, but to get to Diamond, you have to scale up your business," covered the strategies B2B Marketing Lab uses to support the high level of sales, managed services, and ongoing retainers required for Diamond ranking. She discusses working past the fear of bringing on non-client-facing staff, the challenges of finding and retaining great talent, the necessity of firing certain clients, and the pain of corporate introspection. She says, "Holes in anything will only get bigger if they're left unattended,"

Verity also talks about the differences between her company's work in EMEA and in Singapore and explains the importance of knowing how Google processes multiple language websites. She warns that improper website setup can result in cross-country customer cannibalization and lauds Hubspot for deploying the Hreflang tag on individual language pages.

Verity can be reached on her company website at www.b2bml.com, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and on Instagram

Kyle Seidel (5 of Diamonds, Connecticut)