INBOUND 2021 - HubSpot Product Spotlight

Wasn't it great to hear from Dharmesh 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.

Totally. 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 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. 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 it to make it work for your company. 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 salesperson 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 in the way that 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 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 thought that 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 their 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 we call it the greatest magic trick in software history. It's one of my favorite things to say. So to me it's really exciting.

It is. It's breaking the tyranny of or 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 and Dharmesh talked about this rebops Persona, this operations 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.

And this year we've really invested in solving for them, and that's why we launched Operations Hub.

Yeah, we realized 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 HubSpot. And so this year with Operations Hub, we. One of the big things we wanted 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 have the structure to get your data in HubSpot doesn't mean that your data is going to be in HubSpot or going to be in your CRM. And so we wanted to make it really easy with our SYNC framework, which is a part of Operations Hub, to allow people to connect systems into HubSpot in a better way than they were doing it before.

Opspeople 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 code base somewhere and being able to do it in a really, really easy way.

And that's really the point, 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. And on November 1st, when we launch Operations Hub 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, and need better tools with which they can manage the data, right? And so with Operations Hub Enterprise, we're launching a new system inside of HubSpot called datasets, 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 datasync framework, the report builder, the custom dataset 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 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 DataSync framework. And with workflow extensions we've got 60 apps that are integrated into workflows. So now you can actually power those external Systems like with HubSpot based off of your customer data.

Yeah, no, it's really getting to be an incredible experience both for the developers that 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 C out of CR. 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 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 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, 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 as customers, we expect to have when we have any interaction with the company, whether it's visiting a website or talking to a sale, 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 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 a great experience they want to build and then being able to build that.

There's a lot of things you can do across 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 online.

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 ERP system or something like that. And so HubSpot Payments is going to 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 of HubSpot.

These are critical parts of the customer experience that have just been sort of off to the side for so long. 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 to. 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 CRM.

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.