3 Lessons Learned from Inbound 2022

Although it was a busy three days, we had a great time at HubSpot's Inbound last week. From walking the floor in person to Obama's keynote session,  we loved every moment! We met so many of you and learned a ton while attending.  Now that we are settling back into our day-to-day, there are three main takeaways that we got from Inbound 2022.

Key takeaway #1 Slow deals sink ships

Let's say that again. Slow deals sink ships.

Whether it's sales not having visibility into the status of their deals or slow contract creation and negotiation cycles, these are all factors that cause friction for sales, legal, and other teams in an organization. As it turns out, deals and contracts don't have to be difficult with the help of Malbek's frictionless HubSpot integration to contracts. 

Every minute sales spends struggling with a contract is one taken away from selling. With our HubSpot integration, all of the important info (and even the little things you didn't think of) will be sent into a contract draft right from your HubSpot dashboard. The experience of reviewing, negotiating, and executing a deal is so streamlined that your sales team will only wonder why you didn’t do this sooner. So, slow deals don't have to sink ships once Malbek is involved 😎

Key takeaway #2 Creativity is much appreciated.

Creative minds think alike, right? Well our marketing team for sure hit the head on the nail with this one. Someone came by our booth and said “You guys have by far the most creative and fun booth here”.

No lie, and it was all thanks to our creative graphics, big wheel of prizes, expansive swag collection (if I may say), and our amazing team. With our target audience in mind, we developed our strategy for this event, and swam hard with the tagline "slow deals sink ships". *Cue every beach song you know* We brought out the lifeguard hats, whistles, our favorite freebies for the beach like drink koozies and reusable straws, lifesaver candies, and even our favorite Malbek mascot, Bek, was decked out in in her lifeguard gear.  

I realized how much fun, themes can be for a conference, but also how important and sometimes necessary they are to stand out. It's how you get your business purpose across to your audience. Our theme was impactful since one of the major pain points facing sales teams is trying to move forward with deals but not being able to due to slow contract cycles.

Will we reuse this theme again? Only until we help all the salespeople of the world with their contracts. 

Key takeaway #3 Build a community for success

Something I was very excited to experience and witness at Inbound was the emphasis on community. There were a handful of sessions focused on building internal organizational communities and external customer communities, but my favorite by far was the specific community "meetups" at Inbound. These meetups expanded from ethnicity to personal and career interests. 

One of the meetups I attended was Black at Inbound partnered with Chase Ink. At first, the thought did pop into my head, what does Chase Ink have to do with the black community? Why is this the only meetup that Chase Ink is collaborating on? All of my answers were put to rest once I was there, among the other black professionals. Chase Ink wanted to show support and emphasize their assistance and guidance program for minority entrepreneurs. They did have some good swag and reps available for us to talk with! 

Overall, the Black at Inbound meetup was a great opportunity to connect with other black professionals, and just to be surrounded by other people who in fact normally don't feel too accepted or represented at conferences. The meetup included a scavenger hunt to win prizes (like a free sweatshirt, which is a top-tier free prize IMO), picture ops featuring our "crown", and networking of course. To say the least it was very comforting to be among other black professionals at Inbound. And to the future conferences out there, take note, it's important to acknowledge the lack of representation and to improve on it.  

Inbound was certainly one for the books for the Malbek team. If we didn't get a chance to meet you, we hope to meet you next time, and you can always get in touch via social or by scheduling a demo 😉