INBOUND 2021 - Live with Yamini Rangan & Brian Halligan

wow hearing all those amazing product announcements gets me so fired up hey everyone i'm andrew lindsey 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 hmm try me ted lasso [Laughter] i i know ted last night i never said last night but you know who really loves ted lasso darmesh loves to add lasso geeky minds think alike [Laughter] well now that we've given people and myself what i really wanted to know yeah uh would 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 uh 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's 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 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 call 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 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 uh 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 yamanei 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 it just became a no-brainer like this is going to be great for our customers great for our partners great for employees great for the community yeah 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 how many might say we're really excited to have you as our ceo thank you i'm 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 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 uh customer expectations yeah i think you know this about me but i have a very odd hobby i consider myself like an amateur [Music] anthropologists 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 right 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 darmeshbot is volvo online the whole thing uh and business to 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 i 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 models so i think we're at the beginning of that shift and companies that 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 got to tell you i love carbon-based life forms and the fact that we can be sitting here together as carbon based platforms it's really awesome you know dark mesh isn't here i know i'm surprised for a reason and now yummy i want to ask you because i know uh we talked 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 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 this 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 uh it's quite painful and what is ironic about this is that i am trying to lean into the future with solar yet i'm dealing with a customer experience that 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 a department perspective and that's certainly something that we think about deeply here at hubspot yeah that sounds like a real abuse of power uh brian uh if i may yeah you you mentioned being a anthropologist yes right yeah could you amateur by the way but an anthropologist nonetheless if you can 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 moved 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 omni 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 we're 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 teacher 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've had some amazing product announcements and launches today they're all very exciting but i will highlight three which i think are going to have the most impact for our customers uh 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 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 i'm excited yeah you're talking about the the product organization being on fire and this is just getting started yep can 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 gonna follow what this big crm vendors are gonna do we're gonna 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 is 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 going to 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 i like that [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 and 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 it 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 yeah really appreciate that and yeah 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 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 uh my my dad passed away and it was exceptionally emotional and uh 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 hub spot 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 was good good clothes i just want to say thank you both right thank you for 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: 890

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: hubspot, hubspot academy, digital marketing, marketing, seo, blogging, Live with Yamini Rangan & Brian Halligan, Yamini Rangan, Brian Halligan, brian halligan, dharmesh shah, yamini rangan, dharmesh shah hubspot

Id: ShX6UKAGTcs

Length: 26min 53sec (1613 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 20 2021