Over the past several years, I have blogged about my experiences at the HubSpot Inbound Marketing conference. So, it is time to do so again.

Setting the stage

But wait a minute. Let me set the stage before I talk about Inbound 2016. Simon Associates Management Consultants (SAMC) has built a business around helping organizations change. As corporate anthropologists, a big part of our work is teaching business leaders how to use their own eyes to see, feel and think in different ways about their companies.

Intentionally, our business is eclectic. We have clients in healthcare, higher education and those that are tough to put into a box, such as cement companies, professional organizations and non-profits. Why do all these different companies hire us? Because of our process. As Blue Ocean Strategists®, we help clients forget about the competition and instead, focus on how they can meet their customers’ unfulfilled needs, thus creating new markets.

With that as a backdrop, I’ll now talk a little about the conference, Inbound 2016, within the context of what we do at Simon Associates. It was a well-attended conference (18,000 people) and offered many subject areas across multiple content sessions. But what I would like to focus on here is the keynote speech given by Brian Halligan, HubSpot Co-founder and CEO.