Starting at the persona level, HubSpot needs to realize that Owner Ollie and Marketer Marys are just one of several people involved in the buying process of their services. HubSpot needs to understand who the other people are in the buying process in each of these segment, including the influencers of Owner Ollie and Marketer Mary, and how their influence impacts how each of these personas achieve their marketing and sales objectives or not. The persona research also needs to include pricing elasticity by service and the overall pricing elasticity for marketing services in general. HubSpot today has not gone to this level of analysis with any customer base yet. Given their strong analytics background and core base of engineering talent from MIT, this will be achievable. Knowing each member of the buying process for Owner Ollie and Marketer Mary will also allow HubSpot to understand the demand curve for each service and their total solution across these segments. Persona and pricing research need to be included in conjunction with one another as the behavior of entire customer segments will change based on pricing analysis and overall perceptions of value. These are advanced aspects of pricing and positioning, yet HubSpot has the staff that can take action on these recommendations and achieve them. From a paradoxical standpoint, HubSpot needs to use its own tools on its very own selling and marketing strategies to be more effective. That is the ironic aspect of this case study, as HubSpot suffers from the same problems its customers do. By using advanced analytics and a solid platform for unifying them, HubSpot can bring together persona research, pricing analysis and more effective analysis of buying cycles of their products. Lastly, the highly effective use of their Grader freeware tools connotes a high value...

But what price and valuation do prospects attribute to them based on these tools? They don't know the answer to that question yet it is critical to their long-term value-based pricing strategy. Twitter Grader, Facebook Grader and Website Grader all deliver significant value and set expectations of performance and are invaluable for generating leads. HubSpot has no idea what the value of these services are worth however.
HubSpot needs to modify its existing pricing strategy and make it more value-based, with the number of quality of leads delivered being the primary metric. HubSpot has the ability to create an index to quantify the relative level of quality of leads and needs to press for a minimum 12-month contract for high quality lead generation and coordinated marketing management. This needs to be the high-end offering, followed by a low-end service package that requires a minimum of six months and value-based pricing tiers within it as well. The low-end six-month package would be just for generating traffic and SEO optimization. The mid-tier would be for lead generation and SEO optimization and the high-end package would be for all components of a marketing strategy. Value-based pricing is the way to go for HubSpot, not pay by-the-drink type of approaches they had previously. Their inbound marketing needs to be more topical, faster to produce quality content, concentrating on guides for Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms showing how these applications can be used for generating high-quality leads. Their inbound marketing needs to be accelerated to match what they claim their services can do, and if they can make that leap in performance they will be able to attract an entirely new and larger customer base.