Dubai to Boston - Inbound 15 Was it worth it?

So after a week of being wide awake at 4am and me waking up my child and not the other way round for a change, now jetlag free, it maybe a perfect time to reflect if my 27+ hour journey to Boston and back for Inbound 15 was worth it.

Short answer? Yes, absolutely.

This was one of the most productive marketing events I have been to in the last few years and pleased that from the first day we arrived back we have been able to positively add and adjust our inbound marketing services for our clients in Dubai as well as the region.

With HubSpot running the event I had a feeling that it would be a good one but didn’t think I’d be leaving an event where I wished there was more hours in a day. There was so many interesting sessions on, run by many of the most knowledgeable marketers around.

The biggest challenge was hoping you picked the ‘right’ one and also beating the 14,000 strong turnout to a seat. Happily I’d managed to do both in most cases.

The keynote sessions were all great, but I especially enjoyed Brene Brown’s take on vulnerability as well as Aziz Ansari talking about his new book - Modern Romance. However the star of the keynotes for me was very much HubSpot’s Co-Founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah.  For those that may be reading this that as of yet not come across HubSpot, I would definitely recommend reading more about them, their platform is truly phenomenal and hearing Dharmesh talk about some of the future add’s on was really exiting, especially when considering how our clients can benefit from some of these new features.

Keynotes were great but the real value I found during the event was in the break out sessions. Attending these and hearing tips and tricks from the people that live and breath inbound marketing was extremely useful.  Like in any marketing show you have good and bad sessions but if I had a top 3 it would be:

1.   Mike Lieberman – How To Grow The Hell Out Of Your Agency.
Here Mike talked about how he grew his agency from 12 – 62 and how they become HubSpot’s first Diamond partner.

2.   Marcus Sheridan – How To Get Inbound Marketing Buy-in and Participation from Your Entire Organisation.
The extremely energetic and inspiring Marcus talked gave us tips on some of the ways we approach Inbound that will help us get buy in from our team but also from our clients.

3.   Cameron Herold – Creating a World Class Company Culture.
Company culture has become a big topic for us at Nexa and we had recently been working on our core values as well as our vision & mission statements with our entire team, so this was a perfect   session for me to attend and confirm from Cameron that the way we are approaching this is correct.

That’s it from me now, looking forward to Inbound 16, which I believe will be during November 8-11, 2016 in Boston.