HubSpot Spotlight: GROW Edition

Hi, everyone, and welcome to grow Europe 2024. We're super excited to have all of you joining us for an exciting day of learning together. Thank you so much for joining us. I am Susiranquista Amadi and I'm the vice president of HubSpot's international marketing team. And along with Julia, I will be serving as your host for today.

Hi, everyone. It is so nice to be here. My name is Julia Pilkis and I'm the senior director of EMEA marketing at HubSpot.

Grow Europe is all about connections and learnings to be inspired and to elevate. Maybe you have something to add to that as well.

Well, perhaps only the fact that this is the biggest event that we have organized in Europe with HubSpot year to date, and. And that is a great and exciting thing for all of us, and we are very happy to be here with all of you. My personal goal, Suzy, for today is to get to know at least 50 new people. So I look forward to meeting you to learn about your challenges, your opportunities, because ultimately, that is what Grow really is about. This morning you will hear from HubSpot VP and GM of EMEA, Mark Berry on where we grow from here. He will be joined by Shay Redmond from the HubSpot product team, who will announce our latest product innovations with you all. So please join me in welcoming Mark Berry to the stage.

Thank you, Susie and Julia. Hello, everyone. I'm Mark. I work at HubSpot, and I am absolutely thrilled to welcome you all here today to grow. I love this. I love the opportunity to connect with people, the high fives, the chats, the selfies. But what I'm most hoping for today is that you leave here inspired. And we need that inspiration, right? Especially as technology is changing everything around us. I don't think you could have looked at any news in the last year without being hit with some AI hot take. Look at these headlines from 2023. Handelsblatt told us that AI will revolutionize our world. And Le Figaro said that AI is the dawn of a new world. Meanwhile, the BBC. Meanwhile, the BBC went on by saying that experts warn that AI could lead to extinction. Dramatic stuff, right? A year on, look at where we are now. Lamond says we've moved from AI euphoria and onto fear. Der Spiegel asks if AI is a bubble or not. And from the inquisitive to the sensational, the Guardian warns of the pitfalls of AI worship. It's quite a shift in just a year. So what is the truth, Is AI just hype or is it a true revolution and are we at the peak or are we at the trough? And you know, in reality, these are not the questions you need to ask or answer because these are not the headlines that are keeping you awake at night. You don't get up in the morning thinking of some sweeping reflection of the state of AI. You're thinking about your job, you're thinking about your team, you're thinking about some friction in how you get stuff done or something that's hurting your customers. Or perhaps, you know, you're thinking about how you get your kids out the door and off to school so you can get your day started. Maybe, you know, that's just me at the heart of it. What you really want to know is how do I drive growth? Because we've probably all felt it, right? It's been harder to grow. And what we should be asking ourselves is why has it been so tough and what's changed in our customers journey? And most importantly, where do we grow from here? And to answer that, we really need to be able to understand what's changed so that we can fix it. Because as we see it, the growth formula is broken. It's harder to attract customers to your website, it's harder to convert them once they've engaged, and it's harder still to retain them even after you've won them. And this is not just how we see it. The data shows us that traffic is down. The number one challenge for marketers is generating traffic and qualified leads. Conversion is down. 42% of businesses report a decrease in win rates and retention is down, which means growth is down. Only 47% of reps are hitting quota. The only thing that's going up is our stress level. So what's changed? Three big things. Search, social and all of your customer channels. Let's dig into that. Search has fundamentally changed. It used to be that when a customer searched for something, a search engine would serve up blue links and the customer click through to your website. But now with AI overviews and search GPT customers are getting more comprehensive, more useful and more insightful responses without ever leaving search. And the same thing is happening on social media. Social platforms are holding onto your customers for longer. Here's how they want to create a sticky user experience. So when you put a link in your post, an external link, it gets way less reach. It used to be that you would use social to distribute your content. Now social platforms, our customer destinations, just look at your own screen time or if you're feeling brave? Look at your kids screen time. This is what it looks like when my kids are playing FIFA on the Xbox while streaming the office, while checking in on Mudang updates. I wrote this three weeks ago. I don't know if moodang is still a thing that people are searching for, but this is what it looks like. What does it actually mean for you? What it really means is fewer visitors to your website. It used to be that search and social were open, feeding you visitors. They're now closed, keeping your visitors. It's a massive shift and it's only going to continue. Search volume is predicted to decrease by 25% in the next two years. That's not all. People want to talk to people, not brands. In fact, 7 in 10 B2B buyers use social media to make buying decisions. They trust relatable people, aspirational people, funny people. They just don't trust you. They go to LinkedIn and Redis and G2. They look at YouTube videos and they talk to peers. And by the time they do get to your website, your customers know more about you than you know about them. So what does that mean? So now, by the time your sales rep actually connects with your customer, the bar is just incredibly high. The conversation has to be engaging, it has to be insightful, and it has to be precisely tailored to their situation. And the same is happening in service. The easy questions are answered by chatbots or by search results. So by the time the service rep connects with your customer, that bar is incredibly high. And if they don't reach it, that leads to lower NPS and lower retention. The old growth formula, it doesn't stand a chance. So what now? Well, time after time, technology has shown us that it can be profound when it solves old problems in new ways. We need new ways to access insights to solve the age old problem of growth. And AI has the potential to do just that. And we know this because we went straight to the source. We surveyed hundreds of our customers who've already embraced AI in some way, shape or form. We talked to them about the problems they're trying to solve, their mindsets, their use cases, their fears, their hopes. And here's what we learned. Today. Our customers are using AI for acceleration, and soon they'll be using it for transformation. So what's the difference? Acceleration is taking something that's feasible and making it fast. It means you automate specific tasks like summarizing a call or drafting an email. AI is working with you to drive growth. And it's happening right now. When we talk to customers. We saw example after example of leading growth professionals who are already using AI to help them drive growth. Transformation is taking what's impossible and making it possible. It means you can reimagine goals and string tasks together. AI is working for you to drive growth. And if acceleration is happening now, transformation will happen next. So how does this apply to marketing, sales and service? Let's start with marketing. Fundamentally, marketing is about attracting customers. And we do this by providing a compelling reason for them to engage through content. Here are three top ways our customers are already accelerating content marketing with AI. They're creating content, they're personalizing content, and they're distributing content. 65% of customers using HubSpot's AI are using it to create content. And those who are doing it well do so by understanding what AI is good at researching topics, delivering decent first drafts and iterating for different audiences.

And.

Humans are great at taking a good draft, a draft from good to great by infusing originality, creativity and insight. AI is also great at personalizing content. This year our marketing team at HubSpot got great at sending personal messages with AI and the conversion increased by 82%. Yes, thank you. When a prospect filled out a form on our website, we didn't just send back a generic email. Instead we used AI to research the prospects about their company and their role. And we mapped the right academy content tailored to their situation. And then we sent back a personal email and that's the result. We delivered 82% increase in conversion. And it's not surprising, right? Because everyone who who got that email felt like it was written just for them. And it was. Once you've created and personalized your content, you have to distribute it. And here's how AI can help. A few months ago, when we launched Content Hub, one AI feature saw fast adoption. Content Remix. It allows you to take a single piece of content and turn it into a blog post, a video email. It allows you to distribute that piece of content where your customers are. So what does it look like in practice? Let's hear from one of our remarkable customers, Pierrick From AZICAP with HubSpot marketing.

AI tools with using the EA assistant in order to streamline writing process and generating a content suggestion for blog, for email and for social media. So key metrics for iicap, it's email automation. I reduced the manual outreach support by 40% and that's allowing the team to be focused more on the strategy and the personalization. For CEO and CFOs, the lean nurturing workflow have increased also commission rate by 15% due to the more timely and brilliant follow up. And the last one is the campaign setup time has decreased by 20% 10 thanks to the AI generated workflow and template. So that help us to be faster during the launch phase of our campaigns. First improvement have resulted in faster execution, better collaboration and more impactful campaign for the team.

That's acceleration. So what's the transformation that's coming next? That's terrible. It's all about agents, AI agents, software and AI and software that uses AI and tools to accomplish goals with multiple tasks. And these agents work for you in the world of marketing. A content agent will work for you to prioritize, personalize and distribute your content. A social agent will work with you on your social content to tell you when, where and how to share it. And a campaign agent will work with you to analyze what works and what to amplify. And what have we learned from all of these AI use cases? Couple of big shifts. AI AI creates and people curate and AI can help you create better content, not just more content. So if AI can have this kind of impact on marketing, what about sales? I've worn a lot of hats in my time in tech over the last 25 years or so, but selling is by far my passion. I don't know why I did that. We didn't rehearse that. It's not how I think about sales. I genuinely love sales because sales is the art of engaging with customers. But you know, one metric that we haven't been able to shift as an industry is, is time in front of customers. It's our most precious commodity and I'm absolutely obsessed with it. A 5% productivity increase could be the difference between a good year and a great year. Could be the difference between underperformance and making the number. And yet we have never been able to shift it. It feels tough. Especially now. The average salesperson spends only two hours a day selling two. What are they doing the rest of the time? Now, if you park the cliches of playing golf or hitting the gym or the bar, they're buried in prep work for their next call or they're drowning in follow ups. And nobody has been able to figure out how to how to shrink the time spent on busy work. Until now. AI is helping shrink the time in discovery and follow up. Here's what our customers are doing. They're using AI to research prospects. Then they're scoring prospects with high intent and using AI generated personal messages to connect their reps with them. Across our customers and HubSpot, we found using AI can shrink discovery by by 30%. That's huge. Next they're streamlining follow ups. They use AI to summarize conversations, identify objections and generate insightful emails. And that results in a 20% reduction in time spent on follow up. Here's Pyrik again on how AI is helping Agicap's sales team.

HubSpot Sales AI tool has significantly improved our sales efficiency by surfacing key insight quickly scanning through email, meetings, notes and CRM data to highlight relevant lead detail and provide them to the sales team. The lead response time has decreased by 25%. The sales cycle lengths are shortened by 20% and 30% increase in the meeting group due to automated outreach and follow up reminder. The customer feature has been a game changer really for personalizing customer interaction. It's automatically generated key takeaways for the sales team and action point for the call. Or a 150 sales rep can save one hour per day. So at the end of the week we saved 750 hours for Agicap. Sales rep can be focused on what they love to do and demonstrate what is the value to the customers.

That's now. So what's next? A prospecting agent. Imagine coming into work on Monday and your prospecting agent has already found leads for you to go after. Your agent asks do you want me to add these leads? Do you want me to create a personal message? Do you want me to set up a call or a meeting with this prospect? You say yes of course to all of those things. Do it now. And you use your time for the best part, which is high value connection with customers. So what have we learned in sales? AI offers context. People offer connection. AI does the busy work so sellers can focus on the best work. And all of this means that your conversion rates and your attainment go up. Where do I sign? Right. Finally, there's customer service. This is the art of delighting customers. And the North Star here has always been the same. We want to be strategic partners to our customers but we're stuck with being kind of human band aids, solving problems reactively. Too little too late. And we've all been at the end of that call, right? For me it was recently I made a next day purchase for a pair of running shoes. The shoes didn't arrive and so instead I got in touch with the brand by WhatsApp. I was delighted. This is great WhatsApp. It's super easy. And I got connected with Kelly and Kelly was wonderful. She was really quick to respond, very polite and extremely apologetic. But Kelly had no idea where my running shoes were. And after about 45 minutes of back and forth, Kelly finally found out that my shoes had been delivered to the wrong address. As a CRM professional, I felt sorry for Kelly. Right? I was wondering why does she not just have access to my basic information to be able to help me? Secretly thinking to myself as well, what CRM are they using? Always be closing on these conversations because what we want as customers is get my context and fix my problem fast. And despite being a loyal customer of this brand for many years, that interaction really turned me off. And just like that, the conversation can make or break you. So how can AI help? Well, it can answer customer questions and and help fix problems fast. One of our global customers, Kaplan, has been exploring AI this year. First they're using AI to manage tickets, generate email responses and share information with customers faster. They've reduced the average time to respond by more than 30% and today 30% of chats are resolved by AI. And when a human touch is needed, that follow up continues to make sure that they deliver an exceptional customer experience. All of that in just one year. So how do we transform service with AI? You guessed it, Support agents. Imagine each customer getting their own agent available to be contacted, knowing their context. 24 7. What about knowledge base agents? Soon AI will be able to recommend and update Knowledge Base articles so your team can focus on delivering that amazing customer experience and the lessons in customer service. AI handles simplicity, people handle subtlety. AI handles the typical questions so that we can tackle the tricky ones with nuance. And all of this leads to increased MPS and increased retention. So let's take a step back and put it all together. The way to grow is not to underplay AI or overhype AI. It's to understand and co create with AI. Co creation is what catalyzes growth across go to market functions. AI creates and people curate. AI offers context and people offer connection. AI handles simplicity and people handle subtlety. So the real way to think about AI is how it powers people to help us scale. That's the real unlock. So if we reimagine the growth formula and we raise it to the power of AI, can you imagine the kind of growth we could achieve? AI can help us create the right content to drive traffic, the right insights to drive conversion and retention. And if we just remain laser focused on that, maybe, maybe we can fix the growth formula. This brings us to our mission at HubSpot. We exist to help millions of organizations Grow better. We're doubling down on our mission to reimagine the customer platform to help you drive growth. To co create with AI, you'll need support for not just structured data, but also streaming and unstructured data. The customer platform exists to bring together data about your customer. Which webpage did they visit? What did they buy? Where did they need help? What blog did they read? But now, to fully leverage AI, you need your customer data and contextual data all together. Things like company filings or announcements, transcripts, conversation logs, all of us. And you'll not only need support to gather those insights, but you'll need multimodal support for text, for audio, for video. You won't only want your apps to work well together, but you'll want your apps and agents to work with the same context. And you'll want to be in control to decide the data that you share or don't share. This is exactly what we are reimagining at HubSpot. We don't just wonder what's going to happen in the next two or five or ten years. We also ask ourselves what's not going to change? Customers will always want things to be easy. Two years from now, nobody is going to be wishing things were harder. So we are laser focused on making things easy and efficient and intuitive for you to use. You'll always want fast time to value. Five years from now, nobody's going to wish it took longer to realize value. So we're focused on immediate impact with every single use case. You'll always want unified customer and context data. Ten years from now, nobody is going to wish that their data was all in silos, because we all know how painful that is. So instead we are working on bringing all of that data together. All of the data you will need to drive insights now and in the future. Our mission is to help you grow. Our passion is to make it easier.