INBOUND 2021: HubSpot Spotlight

my name's mike hart i'm the global cio of avis and young one of the challenges we were faced with our previous crm was the fact that they didn't speak to one another but a larger challenge was just the industry perception within commercial real estate of all of our competitors being on either microsoft dynamics or salesforce and avis and young is very much thought of as that challenge or brand within the industry that we do things differently we think about data we think about technology we think about how we go to market with our various products in a different fashion hi i'm dave matson ceo of sandler we consider ourselves a scaling company which in my mind means that we're never satisfied with what we did last year we're always competing against the you know the large mega organization so we've got to make sure that we're always looking for the smartest way to do things we're always looking for where the puck is going to go to in our industry which is constantly changing but that's why we went with hubspot because they allowed us that flexibility as the industry changes we didn't have to change platforms so if i look back four months before we rolled out the hubspot instance we had about 600 users in north america of which we only had 23 adoption and that was of the existing salesforce platform when you have only 23 of your revenue producers using a crm it's it's ultimately a loss it's it's ultimately something that is not adding value to the overall organization in the last four months we've actually already gotten it up to a 90 adoption rate amongst those 1600 brokers nobody wakes up as a leader saying today's the day that i've got to change a platform but you know we're at a point where as you start to look at all of our offices throughout the world you needed a single view and we had huge data gaps actually and we needed to expand that crm should be your best friend it should be a silent sales manager it should be a silent sales person that's helping you a coach on your shoulders giving you the information that you need to run a business and that's really what hubspot allowed us to do by giving us the data so we could make those decisions and we felt very confident and you know we had that conviction that we were heading in the right direction so that's really what it did for us greetings and welcome to inbound 2021 thanks for joining and a special thanks to hubspot customers and partners all over the world now i had hoped we could be together in person this time which is ironic because i'm not really an in-person kind of guy i follow the pajama principle if an activity requires me to change out of my pajamas i avoid it on principle but even for an introvert like me the pandemic has been challenging we've spent a large amount of time with a small number of people relationships have been tested behaviors have been shaped and in my case a copious amount of pizza was consumed this led to what i'll call some personal growth about 11 pounds worth to offset this i bought a standing desk well in theory it's a standing desk in practice i've never actually stood at it i prefer sitting but as it turns out in order to get the benefits of a standing desk one has to actually stand who knew only sickness tracking were a thing on the other hand there's my son sohan this is a photo of him when he's two years old beta testing the latest ios sohan is geeky and indoorsy just like me but sohan's 10 years old now and he's been cooped up for months because the pandemic and so his indoorsiness was overcome by his desperation to get some time away from the parental units so son decided to try boating camp this is where he learned kayaking and sailing with a bunch of other equally desperate kids someone enjoyed boating him much more than my wife and i thought he was going to or that he thought he was going to but then one day someone got back from camp and said the words that i found super scary we need to talk daddy some of the older kids at camp have been using asian appropriate words and yes someone uses phrases like age inappropriate so i sat him down i said sohan you're going to hear these words your entire life everyone makes their own choices just because they're using these words doesn't mean that you have to use those words so we had a good chat pretty good parenting now the scariest form of we need to talk is when it's followed by about our relationship we need to talk about our relationship have you ever gotten those words in a text or an email or even worse in person usually when someone says that to you in person they want to talk like right now in real life talking about relationships can be uncomfortable but as my hero ted lasso would say it's like riding a horse if you're comfortable while doing it you're probably doing it wrong and speaking of doing things wrong we have some work to do on our customer relationships and it's holding back our growth in a recent study it was found that 27 of people had in a customer experience that was so frustrating that it ruined their day and one out of 10 had such a bad time that it made them cry or nearly cry we're talking tears here last time i cried is when someone put black olives on my pizza who would do that but there's good news this is something we can work on and we can improve but we all have to get on board and we have to start with a conversation so i'm going to say on behalf of all customers everywhere the four dreaded words we need to talk we need to talk about how this relationship is so one-sided the only time you reach out to me is when you want something it's always about you and never about me now it's understandable that customers feel this way the crm is usually just something the sales people use and making customers happy is a customer support team's problem in many companies customers sit at the periphery of the organization instead they should be the center of focus for every team across the entire company now one of the things that gets in the way of customer centricity is something i call funnel vision it's like tunnel vision but it cleverly uses the word funnel and it's even less fun with funnel vision customers become so myopically focused on converting prospects into leads and leads into customers and then they stop there there's a better model is called the flywheel with the flywheel instead of just doing a prospect to lead and lead to customer it continues in a virtuous loop and you convert customers into delighted advocates people that are so happy with their experience that they will tell their friends and colleagues this leads to well more leads now some of you are probably thinking wait a second didn't brian introduce the idea of the flywheel at inbound 2018 yes he did so why am i bringing it up now the reason is at hubspot we have embraced the flywheel in a big way the largest team at hubspot is the flywheel team it consists of marketing sales and customer service and we hired our first chief customer officer to lead that team and this has worked wonders for us in terms of aligning everyone around solving for the customer so if you want productive customer relationships stop forcing your customers into a funnel and think flywheel and to get that flywheel really spinning well you have to delight customers and it turns out a generic impersonal experience just doesn't delight so here's what non-delighted customers have to say we need to talk we need to talk about how you don't even know me i know you have other customers but i want to feel special i want to feel understood i want to feel connected so why do customers feel disconnected from us the culprit is this insidious sinister thing i call the underpants gnomes effect now i can't take credit for this harvard-worthy brilliant business concept it's adapted from a south park episode a source of so much business wisdom the underpants gnomes are these little gnomes that go to great lengths to steal people's underpants not just new underpants all underpants like no underpants left behind here's their grand master plan phase one collect underpants phase two question mark phase three profit so they accumulate this giant pile of underpants and they have no idea what to do with them companies have a similar problem but instead of collecting underpants they collect customer data and of course the goal shouldn't be to just collect customer data the goal should be to use that data to deliver a more customized more connected customer experience so why do companies fall prey to the underpants gnomes effect to understand this phenomena better we take a look at the evolution of crm way back in 1993 a software company called siebel launched the first legit crm or customer relationship management system they took every customer and made it a record in the database so now the entire company had this shared system of record super useful the problem was that you had to buy your own hardware and then install the siebel software on it like a caveman seven years later salesforce came along and they had a brilliant insight there was this thing called the internet and all the computers were connected to it and you could use the internet to deliver software better hence came the first cloud crm subsequently all crms or most crms are on the cloud now seven years after that hubspot came along and we had a novel insight ourselves there's this thing called the internet and not only are computers connected to it but people are connected to it too including customers and we could use the internet not just to deliver software better but to deliver a more connected customer experience now what do i mean by a more connected customer experience well number one the crm should connect teams within your company marketing sales and service should all be on one unified system two it's not enough just to connect teams within your company you should connect your company to its customers customers want to have a window into their relationship with you they want to be able to log in and view their data and interact with it they want to be able to self-service when appropriate customers don't want to just have an emotional connection with you they want to actually have a real digital connection and third it's not enough just to connect teams within your company and your company to its customers you also need to connect customers to each other this builds trust because customers gain confidence when they can talk to other customers but more importantly by connecting customers to each other they can get the most out of your product or service because they can learn from other customers hubspot's investing in this in a big way with something we call the hubspot network the hubspot network connects the millions of people in the hubspot ecosystem so they can discover each other learn together and help each other grow better so some of you are thinking okay that all sounds awesome but we just are not able to do this at my company now the issue may be the systems we need to talk we need to talk about the fn systems and no i'm not using a word from sohan's expanded voting camp vocabulary i'm talking about the franken system the franken system is a crm monstrosity cobbled together with software parts applications built by different people in different companies with different design goals it's the result of decades of mergers and acquisitions and frankly it's a disjointed bolted together mess too many databases and too many core applications that all do things their own way there's no consistency there's no cohesion and ultimately there's no control no control now it's fine companies tell themselves late at night and it is fine if you're a fortune 1000 company with tens of thousands of employees and you have an army of crm consultants with pitchforks and process diagrams it's fine but for the rest of us it's not fine because a franken system causes us to spend all of our time trying to tame the monster instead of taking care of our customers now if you have a franken system let me say it's not your fault i'm giving you a virtual hug right now it's not your fault nobody intentionally unleashes a franken system in their company it just sort of sneaks in and it grows and then it makes it much harder for your company to grow and the result of a franken system is a frustrating disjointed experience and very very annoyed customers customers like me so recently i leased a volvo sight unseen over the web now you know i'm a parent not because i got a volvo but because i was excited to get a volvo and honestly the purchasing experience was awesome i didn't have to talk to a single carbon-based life-form and then it came time to make my first monthly payment instinctually i pulled up the volvo app no dice the app can beam signals into space and unlock my car from three continents away but it won't let me send volvo money so i go back to the website where i leased the volvo strike out there too evidently it's a marketing and sales website not a send volvo money website pro tip commerce and payments are a big part of the connected customer experience and commerce is all about convenience so i google it up evidently there's another website for payments called volvo financialservices.com yep that's the actual super catchy website name so i try to register it asks me for an account number i have no idea what that is or where to find it and volvo's online knowledge base was not helpful primarily because of its complete absence so out of desperation i contact volvo to their credit they respond promptly the account number is in the letter that we mailed you the letter that you mailed me i responded i have no such letter is there another way what i should have said was the 1900s called on their rotary phone and they want their fountain pen and parchment paper back volvo responded no problem you can call our customer service department with your vehicle identification number they can use the vin to then look up your account number and you can use your account number to then register for the website and then you can use the website to then submit a payment now i'm going to spare you the details of what happened after that because it might make me cry or nearly cry this is a ridiculous but true example of what happens when you have a franken system in place your teams are disconnected and your customers are disconnected from the company the dream is to have a single unified cohesive uncomplicated crm a crm that was built for creating a customer-centric connected and customized experience a crm that was built by people that care with consistent design goals one of the primary goals being easy to use by actual humans that's the dream and speaking of dreams we need to talk we need to talk about the future it's fun to dream and to imagine where the world could go so let's geek out a bit on the evolution of the web and how we got here way back in the 1990s when volvo first started mailing letters with account numbers we got the first generation of the web and the potential was mind-blowing it made me giddy with excitement and gave me goosebumps that early web was read only in order to put content on the web you had to know html and ftp and other acronyms or you had to have a distant cousin that worked at best buy in new dreamweaver but with this early web businesses could take their marketing brochures and turn them into websites and sure some of these early websites had ugly colors and blinking text but they were an important first step towards creating a connection with the customer in a way that brochures never could fast forward 15 years it's 2005. brian i are classmates in graduate school this was the time that web 2.0 came on the scene web 2 was the new new thing it was read write you didn't have to be a technical wizard in order to get content on the web even mere muggles could do it this made me giddy with excitement goosebumps again and brian was excited too and that's what led us to start hubspot now some have speculated that we started hubspot just so we'd have a place to play ping pong it wasn't that well it wasn't just that with web 2 came this massive shift in buyer behavior and change equals opportunity and what we saw was that businesses could now create a blog they could engage in social media and they could otherwise add value to customers before they tried to extract it we called this process inbound marketing and it was a game changer so over the past 15 years i haven't really felt that same level of giddy excitement no goosebumps like i had with web 1 and web 2. until now now i'm feeling this massive shift that feels even bigger than a shift from web 1 to web 2. but before we jump in a quick cautionary note this segment is rated fp future predicting i'm going to give you a peek into what i think the future might look like it's not a peek into the hubspot product roadmap you'll see some of the amazing progress the hubspot product team has made on our crm platform in just a few minutes okay so what has me giddy with excitement what's giving me goosebumps now 15 years later it's what some are calling wait for it web 3. shocking i know we techies are super awesome at creatively naming things here's what has me excited about web3 web one was about information web 2 was about interaction web 3 is about decentralization it's about putting power back in the hands of the people it's the way the web was always meant to be now some of you probably have a few questions one what the heck is he talking about two why should i care and three what should i do great questions in the current web 2 model your data is split up and fragmented and owned and controlled by a handful of massive tech companies running massive networks in a decentralized web 3 world you own and control your data data like your purchase history your preferences your connections your credentials you own and control all this data so you get to decide which companies that data gets shared with and if anyone's getting paid for access to that data it's you now some of you are wondering okay that sounds fine why should i care how does this matter to my business the reason we should all care is because this new web3 model will provide us a new direct way to forge connections with our customers and our prospective customers instead of advertising to the masses that we know little about over these big networks we can forge direct connections with prospective customers and we can give them a customized experience based on data they willingly share with us it's a much more efficient and much more trustworthy model now this feature is still years away but the pieces are already starting to fall into place we have cryptocurrencies like bitcoin decentralized application platforms like ethereum and decentralized social networks like bitcloud these all give us a glimpse into the future that's coming so what should you be doing don't worry i'm not going to suggest that you start moving all your data to blockchain or that you start buying bitcoin what i am going to suggest is you embrace the idea that we're in the age of the customer embrace the idea that over time customers are going to have more and more power and they're going to be equal partners in their relationship with us that's what the future looks like now the future is awesome but it's still the future and chances are you're kind of thinking about how to grow today so let's come back from the future get out of our time traveling deloreans and let's recap what we talked about in terms of customer relationships here are things no customer has ever said you know i'd love to introduce myself to you for the 43rd time i've been meaning to get to know as many people in your company as possible transfer me to whoever you want you know what this relationship needs is more management customers don't want more management they want more magic they want to experience a moment that makes them smile they want to tweet about a company not at a company they want to feel connected and our businesses want that too the growth over the long term is a function of how much customers love the experience you give them so give them an experience that makes them stand up from their sitting desks brush aside their pizza and to gush with friends over coffee about how awesome the experience was it's time to abandon funnel vision put to rest the franken systems and put aside the frustrating underpants gnomes effect your crm platform should help you deliver a better connected more customized experience that's focused on the customer the crm should put the customer first in the design not just in the acronym because better customer relationships lead to delighted customers and that's what fuels all of our flywheels that's how we grow better and with that i'd like to introduce members of the hubspot product leadership team they'll be talking about the hubspot crm platform and the development that's happened this year i could not be more thrilled with the progress they've made in helping you deliver on the dream of customer relationship magic thank you wasn't it great to hear from darmesh about the history of crm to me it is just fascinating the ups and downs and twists and turns this market has taken i am so excited to be here with all of you in person in the office to talk about how hubspot is going to move crm forward into sort of the new era yeah one of the things i loved about that was thinking about how we want hubspot to evolve and you know we want to be the number one crm for scaling companies and for us that means a couple things it means it's got to be customizable it's got to be well connected and it's got to be customer centric and we want to focus on end users to do that we want to build for the people who are using hubspot every single day total yeah even more than that i think it's so cool how we keep a focus also on like how do people want to shop and buy and how can we build a product that's going to help our customers get there that's right how many customers have we all talked to that just feel totally trapped by whatever they've done with crm in the past it's either they were too scared to get started they're too scared to move off of it they've created a monster in some ways and i don't know it's pretty scary out there sometimes yeah totally you get into a world where you know the crm has been customized to the point where it's like a rube goldberg machine and no one even understands how it works anymore no everyone's afraid to make changes to it and so you absolutely need customization in the way that you set up your crm and your customer database you need it to reflect your business your customer you need to make it work for your company you know you need to be thoughtful about the way that you bring that customization into the system there's a big difference with a crafted platform that's built to work together it really makes a big difference in how you're able to use it how your teams are able to interact really smoothly and have an efficient process when we think about customizing the crm we don't just want to make it easy to customize the database part of the crm we also want to make it easy to customize the crm for the users that are using the crm you know we think about the end user who's using the crm like a sales person or a support person or a marketer who's in there every single day we also think about the admin who's setting it up we not only want to make it easy for the end user we also want to make it easy for the admin and then we want to make it easy for the admin to make it easy for the end user you know in the way that we're they're setting up the system i think an example of that is the way that we've created permission templates so it becomes easier for an admin to add users into the system because they can use these templates and then once they add the users the users get set up faster and the experience is natural for them in the product because they're able to see the things that they're supposed to see and they're not distracted by the things that they're not supposed to see most customers i've talked to have gone about this in two ways right one they've sort of cobbled this together on their own with whatever is out there or two they've gone with some platform that has cobbled a bunch of stuff together and i like to call it the cobbling tax where like no matter what you do there's a tax to pay and i think that's where we're really coming in with this crafted approach and has a big impact on customers and developers and their customers there's a lot of sort of runway there that's really important because you know we know for a fact that the more people at your company who are using hubspot beyond your sales team the more likely companies are to grow have better higher customer retention better customer satisfaction scores and that's why this crafted approach is so critical that data was fascinating if sales marketing and service all use a crm you will grow faster and your customers will be happier i just i thought it was incredible and really validating of doing crm right absolutely going forward this customization is going to be key so each of our customers is going to need to differentiate themselves in the marketplace so both an amazing experience and a unique experience that can really help people remember them and help them stand out and we keep saying crafted not cobbled and i always want to call out that that doesn't mean that hubspot builds everything for everyone so our ecosystem is a huge part of this if you need to use other solutions alongside hubspot we want that to feel seamless too so we're really focused on the developer experience and on having the integrations in our marketplace and the apps that will help users bring the tech stack together bring those things inside of hubspot so that the user's workflow and the user's day-to-day feels very connected and very seamless we want to let people build experiences that don't look like they're systems right the experience that your customers have shouldn't look like the way you have your software stack set up it should look like a really compelling end-to-end experience with a full view of the customer exactly typically when you hear about customization it's about the developer and making anything possible and that's sort of what people thought about and i think if you have the customer in mind and their customer in mind that's when you really bring out the magic you make the end user experience more consumer grade you make the developer experience a thing that can be transferred through to those folks and so i feel like it's a very unique thing that's happening and it's we call it the greatest magic trick in software history that's one of my favorite things to say so uh to me it's really exciting it is it's breaking the tyranny of ore like we can do both of those things and when we think about customization without complexity for the admin for the ops person for the developer part of that is enabling them to test these customizations before they go live so we're offering a sandbox that's a very production-like environment that's going to enable those folks to do a little test drive and to make sure that it's going to work the way they thought it would before they go ahead and push it live i am so excited that hubspot is introducing sandboxes for our most advanced customers as companies scale their business gets more complex so their crm is going to get more complex they'll have more properties they'll have more workflows they'll have more happening inside of hubspot therefore the impact of a change may not be obvious so having a sandbox environment allows them to see things that might have been unexpected before data gets wiped out or someone's workflow is all messed up in production in a lot of ways the things that you're automating with hubspot workflows are things that would have been manual processes before the things that you're building on top of hubspot are things that are reducing work for the people who are working out of hubspot and that goes back to trying to make hubspot easier trying to make hubspot consumer grade when it comes to delivering a more connected experience for our customers we've made a ton of improvements to our crm platform you know last year at inbound i remember brian darmash talked about this rev-ups persona this operations you know person who was doing a lot of work in hubspot and was in a lot of pain couldn't really connect their systems and their process very well and this year we've really invested in in solving for them and that's why we launched operations hub yeah we realized like this there was this whole other group of people working in the company who either had the title or maybe don't have the title yet but are growing into the title of operations and they spend a lot of their time actually being the people who are connecting data being the people who are building the business process and being the people who are doing reporting off of all the data inside of inside of hubspot and so this year with operations hub one of the big things we want to focus on was making it easier to connect to a bunch of different systems because once you can get your data just because you you have the structure to get your data in hubspot doesn't mean that your data is going to be in hubspot are going to be in your crm and so we wanted to make it really easy with our sync framework which is a part of operation sub to to allow people to connect systems into hubspot in a better way than they were doing it before ops people are the glue of the crm in a lot of ways right and so i think that this crafted approach that we have actually empowers ops people probably better than any other platform right you go in you can code a workflow action and it can impact something from marketing to sales to service pretty instantaneously without having to sort of hack something together across multiple systems and so i feel like we're doing a great job empowering these ops people to maybe come out of some of the shadows that they've been in sort of lurking in the in the code base somewhere and and being able to do it in a really really easy way and that's really the point of trying to solve for front office teams and the end user we just want to make their lives easier we want to make them better at their jobs and make them more efficient earlier this year when we launched operations hub we were thinking about empowering operations teams to build the platform and the process that their companies need on top of hubspot so that meant connecting systems bringing data in from different systems and building a business process on top of that data on november 1st when we launched operation sub enterprise we want to take that to the next level and we want to give operations teams the tools they need to both manage their data and do reporting on their data inside of hubspot what oftentimes starts with a reporting problem that a company has actually turns into a data problem right like either the data is not there the data is not good enough quality for them to build a report on top of and so what you realize is a lot of these companies and especially the operations people in these companies need better tools with which they can manage the data right and so with operation sub enterprise we're launching a new system inside of hubspot called data sets where operations teams can manage their data they can do calculations on top of their data and then they can save these data sets that can be reused by everybody downstream which is really powerful for operations teams it's powerful for operations teams but it's also powerful for folks like marketers sales reps support reps they have access to the data without having to manipulate it themselves super super powerful and again that's what our goal is in terms of making hubspot really easy to use for those folks with all of these improvements like the launch of operations hub custom behavioral events the data sync framework the new connectors built on the data sync framework the report builder the custom data set builder we've created a crm that lets you connect all of your data channels and teams in the same system to create a better experience for your customers some of the magic of crafted not cobbled is not just the fact that yes it's all working off the same database and we built marketing tools sales tools service tools ops tools all those things but it's these glue features that really tie it all together and allow people to self-serve and the more power we can give to folks the better they can be at their jobs i don't think it's lip service either we have a bunch of data that shows that when people think of the crm as like the heart of their business they're also more successful that's pretty compelling as well right if you end up having a bunch of systems of record you end up getting in trouble but if you really orient around the crm i think it breaks down the silos of the different parts of the org it lets people connect everything together it can be pretty powerful yeah as much as the crm is that customer database and you have your sales team your marketing team your services team working out of that the thing that we've seen is that companies continue to have tools outside of the crm and that's that trend is only going to increase over time companies are going to have more and more of those tools and it's so important to have those systems connected into your central customer database and that's what makes hubspot so easy to use and i think now we have like over 800 apps in the app marketplace with the launch of operations hub we now have like 50 plus of those apps are powered by our data sync framework and with workflow extensions we've got you know 60 uh apps that are integrated into workflows so now you can actually power those external systems like with hubspot um based off of your customer data yeah now it's really getting to be an incredible experience both for the developers they have to build those things and then for the users within the company that get to take advantage of that connectedness yeah to be able to sync in a way that's consistent that's configurable that really gets the data in in the way that you need it has been revolutionary one thing i want to make sure we talk about is just sort of the customer part of crm i feel like a lot of crms in the past have left the sea out of crm all of us are consumers in our own right we have totally shifted the way that we buy a lot of things our expectations are through the roof and i think crms need to represent that right many crms don't have as many self-service options as you might like for the end customer they don't have commerce as part of the crm and those are things that i'm excited about launching this time around i think we need to put the c back in crm and think about not just the people inside your company that are using it but the people who are actually interacting with what you're trying to sell and interacting with those people that's right the way that people are buying and shopping is different now and we want to really meet that need and so what you're talking about is not just us building a really easy to use crm but the fact that that can be extended to the customer's customer to give them an incredible experience a lot of people have traditionally thought of like cms as being something different than crm right but when you think about customer relationship management you know now a lot of that customer relationship is happening through the web right it's happening through those through those experiences that you're creating for customers you want things to be more self-service i want things to be self-service the average person you know wants wants to be able to do things themselves and that's exactly what you can do with hubspot cms working with hubspot crm talk about the self-service portal because i mean building that on the cms connected to the crm i think is a really great example of this coming together our service hub is probably the biggest ingredient to creating a great customer experience think about when somebody buys from you what happens after that service hub is there to make that process easy and seamless and we've launched a couple things that are really going to help there first one is our customer portal the customer portal is basically a mini website that your customers can log into to see the status of their tickets and the reason it's so easy and powerful is because it's built on our cms and that means you can log in and there's templates already set up for you to be able to create a portal whatever design you want to use or you can use one of our designs it doesn't require any developers it doesn't require any custom code it's something that you can set up very very quickly and provide value to your customers right away it makes intuitive sense too that like as when we think about our own experiences with customers we expect to have when we have any interaction with the company whether it's visiting a website or talking to a sales person we expect that full view of all the interactions we've had with a company to be there so they can give us contextual information that's so true customer expectations have risen so high like regardless of what company they're dealing with they expect a seamless clean useful experience you could be a small company you could be a giant company they have that same expectation regardless of your resources and so if you when you were talking about building these really seamless digital experiences that are now an expectation having that data all in one place is a game changer customer expectations around digital experiences have just increased so much a lot of what drives those cobbled experiences is because businesses have let their systems define what's possible rather than thinking about what's the what's the great experience they want to build and then being able to build that there's a lot of things you can do across the the journey and i think we'll continue to innovate there i'm excited about service hub this year's launches are going to be great and there'll be a lot more to come there all right let's talk about payments for a second because there's a lot of pain around this whole buyer experience and buying in general i typically see two things when we talk to customers first they are not offering to sell things online when they probably could and should i think most businesses could sell something everybody could totally absolutely and when they are selling things through sales reps that experience is pretty painful there's hoops to jump through whether it's excel or an accounting system or an erp system or something like that and so hubspot payments is gonna simplify that the b2b buying process has been broken for quite a while i typically see two things that customers are doing first they're actually not selling anything online even though their customers probably want them to the second thing is with their rep assisted selling process there's a lot of hoops to jump through both for the sales rep and the end user and we really want to go at the heart of those two problems with this really simple payments and commerce offering hubspot payments is a capability that allows our customers to do just what it sounds like collect payments as part of the hubspot offering and so what we've done here is we've taken this critical capability that's often sitting across a bunch of disparate systems and embedded it natively into hubspot you can pull right from your product library turn a product into a payment link and put it wherever you want you stay in hubspot you turn it on and you can start collecting payments today i think there's a lot of companies that don't think about selling online because they think it's not for them they think like oh i'm not like a traditional e-commerce company so i shouldn't be thinking about this a lot of them think that way because even though there might be a touchless side of the experience there's also you know a side where you are interacting with a person in order to buy something and it's hard to think for them to think about bridging that gap and that's exactly what payments does inside the pub spot these are critical parts of the customer experience that have just been sort of off to the side for so long uh and that's what makes it so great that we're bringing it all together and consumer grade you have so many tools at your disposal to make it compelling to make it meet these very high expectations that customers today have my challenge to most of our customers is pick something that you can sell online and start it you could start it today and it's going to make a huge difference for your buyer experience what i love about that feature is that it really meets the challenge of how businesses need to adapt today and we're filling that need i think brian said it last year how you sell is why you win and we're really bringing that to life here i think this is going to be really really important and a thing that's been missing from crm for a long time commerce has to be part of crm or else it's not a sierra yeah we are trying to rethink and reformulate what a crm should be right there was a baseline of things that everybody thought was in crm and then as the market evolved people started adding more and more capabilities and point solutions and we think like there's just a new baseline a modern crm needs to have certain things and then there's still lots of room for partners and extensibility and customization and all that so i think we are sort of leading the way on the new sort of wave here you shouldn't have to work for your crm your crm should just work for you yeah totally that's our vision for the future wow hearing all those amazing product announcements gets me so fired up hey everyone i'm andrew lindsay i lead business and corporate development at hubspot and i'm really pleased to be here with the omni and brian to chat with you all today good to see you both great great to see you good to be here great and i wish we could be in person with all of you but live from boston it's inbound 2021 [Laughter] no brian yes let's get right into it i got a question it's actually for you first brian and it's something that has been top of mind for me and i know i'm not the only one wondering about this okay many people are wondering about this you had a snowmobile accident 13 broken bones yes many surgeries yes long recovery time what did you binge watch during all that time ah you started off with a hard ball there was one show that i get into during during my healing period it wasn't a super popular show and it was a little heady you probably didn't see it andrew try me ted lasso [Laughter] but you know who really loves ted lasso darmesh loves to at last geeky minds think alike [Laughter] well now that we've given people and myself what i really wanted to know yeah uh i'd love to hear about some of the changes and the transitions all right and yamane i'd love to hear about what that was like when you first got the call and learned you're going to be the ceo of hubspot well first off brian so glad that you're back and you are stronger than ever and you're back in full force so that's great and by the way i love ted lasso i haven't watched the season finale of the last season so no spoilers this week from anybody i just want to keep it clean and i think it's a it's a requirement uh to be a ted lasso fan to be on like hubspot's leadership team uh but andrew the call that brian and i had it was surreal uh brian calls me up one evening and we start chit-chatting we're going back and forth and then he says we need to talk about our relationship the dreaded words you know i was like oh no where is this going and you know what he does he actually like whips out a presentation and starts walking me through his decision-making process and this is the first time that my boss has ever actually presented to me so um you know i was very emotional i have to say i think first of all there is the enormity of stepping into a role right after brian as the ceo uh brian's a legend and i have tremendous amount of respect for what brian and dharmesh have built here at hubspot and then second uh i got really emotional thinking about my journey to this point you know i grew up in a super small town in rural south india did not have a high school but don't worry i did complete my high school we moved towns from there to being an engineer to a salesperson to a customer-focused executive my life has been through a lot of twists and turns and so it was um especially emotional and very thrilling at the same time and i can tell you i'm like so excited to be here at hubspot leading the next chapter of growth and um i'm very committed i'm very committed to being the kind of leader that hubspot's customers partners employees and all of you deserve i gotta get a little dusty on my side of the zoom too i can imagine that was an emotional thought that was that was nice that was really nice moment yeah that's that's quite a transition and you transitioned as well brian yes to hear about some of the thinking that went into that yeah so i started it sort of crossed my mind literally back when i was in the hospital seven months ago and the thing that was in my mind was i'm i'm a starter you know i started hubspot 15 years ago with hubspot and i've been ceo it's going great but it's a different animal i mean we have thousands of employees hundreds of thousands of customers billions in revenue like this is a much larger scale company and i've never seen that movie before so that was sort of one side of my head and then i was thinking a little bit about yemeni sort of on the other side of my head and i was like well one of the reasons i hired her she worked in companies at much bigger scale than hubspot so she had seen that movie and then i watched over the next seven months while i was on leave and she was running company running the company for me and not only didn't she miss a beat i think she picked up a couple beats while i was out she just did a fantastic job she's super focused on the customer super focused on scale she's not a she's not just a culture fit she's a culture ad so at some point just became a no-brainer like this is going to be great for our customers great for our partners great for our employees great for the community yamaha is going to be ceo i'm going to be able to work on the stuff i'm passionate about we work great together and so i'm super excited and super confident in yomi in the next phase and up spot thank you so much brian it means a lot yeah and i know i speak for the whole company y'all many might say we're really excited to have you as our ceo thank you really excited thank you and your experience scaling companies combined with brian's experience and darmest experience founding the business growing the business to the stages today it's just an incredible win for the entire hubspot community i think so it's really awesome uh one thing i want to switch gears for a moment uh we as a company spend a lot of time thinking about customer expectations right uh how it's changing how it's evolving and brian i'd love to hear from you to start uh what you see changing with customer expectations yeah i think you know this about me but i have a very odd hobby i consider myself like an amateur [Music] anthropologist like an orange anthropologist now most armchair anthropologists andrew they study like the migratory patterns of birds i'm a little different i like to study the migratory patterns of buyers and i i really obsess about this and from my new job as chairman i have a whole new purse to study this kind of thing going forward i'm really excited and we're you know we're the we're raped at the beginning of a major migratory change for buyers and i think what's like the way i kind of think about it in my head is b to b buyers business buyers are starting to look a lot more like b2c buyers and i think about b2c buyers and 25 years ago it was a big deal if you went and spent 25 bucks on a book online and now people are spending 25 grand on cars online like this like darmesh bought his volvo online the whole thing uh and business business buyers are turning more into business consumer buyers they expect a delightful and gorgeous delicious experience buying that product from their vendors and so that's a huge huge change that that's underfoot right now and you know the funny thing about darmesh's presentation that that i love and you know i know him very well is he's not a big fan of carbon-based life forms actually like carbon based life thanks but i think if i had advice for our customers and partners is how do we get a little bit of that carbon based life form out of that buying process how do we lower the friction in the buying process how do we use technology to accelerate it and how do we enable them to create those delicious buying experiences for their customers and i think everyone's got to move from this old school way of thinking that it's a very linear funnel based go to market model to a very circular flywheel based um not go to market model but you know customer experience model so i think we're at the beginning of that shift and companies are for looking that can take advantage of that i think will thrive in the next five ten years got it very interesting and i gotta tell you i love carbon-based life forms and the fact that we can be sitting here together as covered based on platforms it's really awesome you know darmesh isn't here i know i'm surprised for a reason and now yummy i want to ask you because i know uh you talk about customer expectations and you're customer obsessed right i've seen this and we've talked about it could you share a little about uh what you see changing with uh customer expectations as well what you've observed over the last year as part of your uh you're looking at customer experiences absolutely i mean look i'm a lifelong learner and i think i learn as much from great experiences as i learn from not so good experiences and in fact in many ways i think not so good experiences teach you they teach you what not to do so i have an example a less than stellar example for you andrew a dream turned nightmare situation it started with a dream and the dream was to convert our home into solar and i was very excited about this we started working with this company whose name i shall not name okay they have a fantastic product we were excited we were happy to be going on the sustainable journey with them it's turned into a nightmare now 12 months after we started this project we still don't have solar going back into the grid and here i was trying really hard to give them my business and they're trying really hard to give me the experience of talking to every single person within this company you know what i call it i call it the deluxe transfer package you know it right i have now been transferred and connected to more people within this company than the number of people i had in my small town back in india and it's quite painful and what is ironic about this is that i'm trying to lean into the future with solar yet i'm dealing with a customer experience that's stuck in the past and what i have observed and learned from this is that companies that grow very rapidly they end up in silos they end up in very disconnected places where they therefore expect me the customer to become the bridge across their systems the departments and the people and that lends to a really poor customer experience and so for all of you customers out there as you're thinking about this uh the one thing i would share is that always look at it from the customer perspective not from a function or department perspective and that's certainly something that we think about deeply here at hubspot yeah that sounds like a real abuse abusive power yummy okay that's funny uh brian uh if i may yeah you you mentioned being a anthropologist yeah could you amateur nonetheless if you could put that hat back on for just a moment and discuss about some of those patterns that you mentioned and how many kind of mentioned and extrapolate from that into the future of of hubspot and future of hubspot crm yeah you know i think of hubspot andrew and there's really two chapters in hubspot chapter one the aha dimension i had was that humans were sick and tired of being marketed to and really good at blocking it out yep and we created a new methodology for them inbound and then we created a marketing app to help them match the way they market to the way people buy a couple years ago we had us really our second aha and it's it's just like domini's story people are sick and tired of of cringe-worthy customer experiences it's not just limited marketing it's the entire end-to-end experience and so we created a new flywheel methodology and we move from a marketing app to a crm platform and that's ongoing it's going extremely well but that's what hubspot's up to we are building a very modern customer in legit crm platform for scaling companies and uh we're just getting started it's gonna be really good got it and clearly crm is the space in which we play and we think a lot about yeah can you share a little bit you know about the uh about hubspot's approach to crm and how that might be evolving look i i think brian put this very eloquently there is a whole massive shift that's happening towards the buyer yeah buyers want low friction they want consumer-like experiences that are end-to-end and therefore the way we are approaching crm is changing it's much more about buyer empowerment not about seller enablement um i started in crm a couple decades ago and at that time if i needed to call a customer i actually pulled out a contact card that's what it was called back then and i would dial and that was it was back then and so that is what customer relationship management meant and it was for me the seller way back then i think crm has changed so dramatically right now you don't have a customer that is calling you they visit your website and that could be the front door into your company or they could without even talking to any human within the company they could download a free trial of your product and they can actually experience your company and your product through that or pretty late in the in their buyers journey they may do the more traditional thing and call a rep it is about making that journey great so crm is now all about providing something that is connected that can delight the customer in the journey that they take with you and as brian mentioned that's been our chapter two that's what we've been focused on uh really laser focused on that buyer empowerment not seller enablement and we're really focused on having that magic creating that magic companies can provide for their customers i love that the magic that's what we're focused on i like our meshes customer relationship magic system i i might stick i might stick yes i like that i like that and and speaking about some of the magic we heard a series of really exciting new product announcements yes right i'd love to hear about your thoughts on those and what particularly excites you about hubspot's product feature well andrew as a parent yeah i always get asked you know who's my favorite son and i never fall into the trap so i am not going to fall into that trap and i think we have had some amazing product announcements and launches today uh they're all very exciting but i will highlight three which i think are going to have the most impact for our customers the first one is hubspot payments this is big b2b buyers have a long way to actually catch up to providing a very customer-centric buying experience think about your latest amazon purchase or my chewy purchase your warby parker purchase uh so our vision is to help b2b companies sell touchlessly to their customers and we want to be able to do that and we also want to make that rep assisted selling motion the last leg the last mile of that sales process just smoother and so hubspot payments that we launched today and some open beta that's going to be the first step in helping our customers sell to their customers online and so that's pretty exciting i think the second i have to talk about is op sub enterprise that's another huge one now this ops persona we call it the revenue ops persona they are really critical in go to market organizations and they are like the unsung heroes with capes because they're asked to do so much their job is to provide great insights to the vp of marketing to the vp of sales to the vp of customer success and we want to empower them with the right tools and the right insights and earlier this year we launched operations hub starter and pro and that allowed these operations professionals to get all of the data from their entire tech stack right into hubspot and also automate the workflow so in november when we launch operation sub enterprise it's going to be all about reporting what do you do when you have the data and when you have the workflows you start driving insights out of it and so we're squarely focused on reporting and squarely focused on data and i'll tell you as a former operations professional i'm just like giddy with excitement it is going to be so powerful for these folks the last quick one i'll make it really quick is service hub customer portal this is going to streamline the communication between companies and their customers customers are now going to be able to look at all of the interactions that they're having with the company simple powerful streamline so i'm very excited about all of these announcements that we made today and it really takes a massive leap forward in terms of offering a connected customizable customer-centric crm that's going to help scaling companies uh a lot i love it i agree with all that hubspot's product organization is on fire these days and it's we're just getting started it's much more coming it's really impressive what they're doing yeah clear path to customer magic right yes excited yeah you're talking about the the product organization being on fire and this is just getting started yep you share a little bit more as you think about what the future of hubspot crm uh it may look like yeah you know i've been i've been watching the crm industry literally since 1990 i remember my first sales job out of school installing with floppy disk a contact management system to track contacts so that was my first use of it but i purchased crm many times i've implemented crm i've used them all and you know there's a tried and true playbook for how you build a crm company and um it basically goes like this andrew like you start with sfa you get a little bit of traction and then you start acquiring and cobbling and cramming and gluing and taping together tens of acquisitions and that's how you build out your crm suite and that's how the industry is gone that's how a lot of people think uh we should go and i get a lot of advice like why aren't you just buying your way to a crm suite in the whole industry zigging we're zagging we're not going to follow what this big crm vendors are going to do we're going to follow a little there's a little company in california i'm not sure if you've heard of them uh they're called apple yeah and we're gonna follow apple what i love about apple it's certainly scales internet scale but it's just such a gorgeous customer experience and such a gorgeous user interface you unpack it and then you just feel something different you connect it to the other devices feels different you use it it feels different and so we are crafters you know apple is crafts those products with love that's what we're doing we're crafting a crm product in-house with love from the ground up and i think our customers are gonna love it our partners are gonna love it i think it matches the time and if you're a normal company i think you should buy it now i will say this i'll caveat it if you're a walmart or you're like delta airlines maybe you should buy one of those franken systems you know if you have like 100 developers sitting around with nothing else to do and you have millions of dollars a pile of money with nothing left to do it feel free go and use one of those but if you're a growth company and you want to get after it and build a modern customer experience i feel like we're building exactly what those companies need i'm really excited about yeah and we're building it by being ziggy craftspeople [Laughter] now before we come to a close i just want to acknowledge the difficult time that it's been for a lot of people right it's been a difficult year a difficult couple of years i know each of you has had your own challenges i've had my challenges and with those come lessons and life lessons and i want to ask is there any life lessons that you'd want to share with the folks listening start with you brian sure uh mine's very personal uh back in february as you mentioned i had this terrible snowmobile crash and i was lying in the snow not confident that i was going to live and i in running through my head was a dalai lama quote and i'll probably get the quote wrong but it goes something like live a good and honorable life so you can enjoy it when you're an old person and as i was running the tape of my life sort of through my head or the movie you know hotspot's a relatively large part of my movie and i feel like we've built a good and honorable company i'm proud of it so i look back favorably on it i think that dalai lama would have liked what i saw but now that there's seven months apart from that or eight i guess it's eight months and um i'm healthy now i just look at it as like there's so much more work to do to achieve our mission our mission is we want to enable millions of companies to grow better our mission isn't to enable thousands of companies to grow it's millions to grow better in a modern awesome way so lots more work left to do the second thing i would say and a lot of people at hubspot know this about me but i have my own personal mission and you two are sick of me talking about this but my own personal mission is i hope to build a company that my eventual grandkids decades from now will be so proud about that they're bragging about it to all their friends and that underlies a lot of my decisions it underlies a lot of the long-term perspective we take on things and underlines the zagging instead of zigging uh it's an important part of sort of my dna when i think about the company and so i hope when i'm an old cranky you know anthropologist in my rocking chair that my grandkids are growing about upspot and i'm looking back at my life and feeling like i had an honorable and good life and that hubspot's a big part of it and i hope that for all of you out there watching i hope that you can look back at your life and your career and feel like you had an honorable and good career that you're proud of and your grandkids are proud of and my hope is that hubspot can maybe play a little or even a big role in helping you do that to your career so thank you to all of you who are hubspot customers and users thank you for sharing that brian really appreciate that and yummy i'll ask the same question to you lessons learned personal too uh i've had kind of a roller coaster ride you know from the time i started in my dream job at hubspot january 2020 i think uh we hit the pandemic crisis mode literally two months in yeah two months into my new job and that was a pivot that we had to make and then this spring brian obviously called me to take care of hubspot so that he can recover from a life-altering accident and then six months later he came back in and asked me to be ceo and um two weeks after that i suffered a personal loss my my dad passed away and it was exceptionally emotional and he's been a huge supporter and life has been full of ups and downs well the only way i get through tough times and there will always be tough times mixed with great times is to care deeply and persevere relentlessly that's been my life lesson now as soon as we got into the pandemic there was a ocean of uncertainty people worried about jobs their health lives livelihood so my job at that time was to remain calm and provide clarity to hubspot's customers partners employees and do it quickly decisively but more importantly do it from a place of deep empathy and care and that's what i did and when brian you called uh it was super emotional and my first thought was my god you know i hope you're okay i hope we give you all of the space for you to recover and you've built this wonderful organization we'll take care of hubspot for you and that's exactly what we did we focused and i have been relentless in terms of execution and driving hubspot forward from there and that's been my life lesson and i will also say that's my commitment that i will relentlessly pursue the vision that brian and dharmesh have for hubspot relentlessly focus on delighting our customers and building an organization that people are just excited and proud to work and get their best work done thank you i really appreciate it that's good good clothes i just want to say thank you both right thank you for spending time with us really appreciate the honesty the candor and hearing about both personal learnings and also uh thinking about the business as well and all of our customers and the entire hubspot community and for all of you out there thank you for spending time with us really excited about inbound 2021 and hope to see you in person soon thank you and enjoy the next couple days thanks everybody thank you everybody you

Channel: HubSpot Marketing

Views: 3,473

Rating: 4.8620691 out of 5

Keywords: inbound 2021, Inbound marketing 2021, inbound marketting 2021, hubspot academy, hubspot, inbound marketing, dharmesh shah hubspot, marketing, dharmesh shah, seo, digital marketing, blogging, inbound 2021 speakers, inbound 2021 oprah, dharmesh, dharmesh shah hustle, my first million dharmesh, My first million podcast

Id: yfB5K2ovP8c

Length: 70min 50sec (4250 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 15 2021