The HY5 Story

Holly Yalove, HY5 CEO & Founder

Professional Background

With over 20 years of management experience and a B.A. in psychology, I love cultivating relationships, exceeding expectations, and driving growth through technology and talent optimization. I spent my early career in the corporate world serving in leadership roles with Fortune 100 and 500 companies, including Ameritech (now AT&T), First Union (now Wells Fargo), Rubbermaid, and SunTrust (now Truist).

Agency Life

In 2009, I moved from Atlanta, Georgia to Knoxville, Tennessee, and joined VIEO Design, an award-winning web design and digital marketing agency founded in 2008. Within the first year at VIEO, I achieved a 300% increase in sales and started growing our three-person agency into a team of 16. In 2011, I accepted the offer to become an owner of the agency, and in 2013, I launched our HubSpot partnership and expanded our services to include HubSpot setup, onboarding, training, and support.

As VIEO’s chief strategist, I served as the head digital marketing and inbound services strategist for our clients (B2B and B2C) and delivered HubSpot training workshops. I also directed our agency's marketing, sales, client delight, and key partnership strategies. I established and nurtured our company culture and conducted all recruiting, hiring, and new employee onboarding to optimize talent. Employee happiness and continuing education were a big focus in our dynamic and changing digital world.

Digital & Inbound Marketing Specialties

I’m versed in a wide range of digital marketing tactics, strategies, and best practices. As our agency’s chief strategist, I conducted monthly training with my team related to the services we offered. Our specialties included web design (WordPress and HubSpot CMS), SEO, inbound and content marketing, email marketing, marketing automation, conversion optimization, sales enablement, digital advertising, eCommerce tactics, and HubSpot utilization.

In leading my agency’s marketing and sales, I directed our marketing strategy and worked alongside my team to execute campaigns that heavily leveraged HubSpot’s Marketing, Sales, and CMS Hubs. I wrote blog posts, created landing pages with forms, set up automated workflows (internal and lead nurturing), segmented contact lists, crafted email marketing messages, established lead scoring, and monitored our database health. I conducted content and SEO audits, updated our website pages, created CTAs, set up live chat and chatbots, created HubSpot campaigns, planned social media strategies, A/B tested, and optimized conversion pathways.

Data Analysis & Reporting

My instinctive desire to understand and analyze behavior initially led me to obtain a degree in psychology and continue to be a passion. Marketing is indeed both an art and a science, but data-driven decisions are essential. Whether I’m digging into the data in Google Analytics, creating and analyzing reports in HubSpot, or using SEO tools to monitor trends, I love inspecting what I expected and using data to optimize results.

Public Speaking & Training

As a HubSpot Certified Trainer, Knoxville's HubSpot User Group (HUG) Leader, and President-Elect for Knoxville's American Marketing Association, I craft training presentations and regularly speak at events to educate and inspire marketing, sales, and service professionals. To see some examples of presentations delivered to the Knoxville HUG, check out our decks posted on SlideShare.