Time Kills Deals. AI CPQ Is Here. | INBOUND 2025

My name is Sarika Darg. I am the GM of Commerce Hub. I actually joined HubSpot in November 2024 through the acquisition of my company Cashflow cash flow reimagined CPQs. So does everybody know what CPQ is? It's in figure, price and quotes. Traditional CPQs were built for manufacturing companies. They were small, complex, expensive and frankly they just sucked. So we reimagined CPQs to be very user first for the salesperson to be able to close the deal faster. And we built them for all companies, not just manufacturing companies. Nine months ago when we joined HubSpot.

We brought all these learnings into HubSpot.

We started working with thousands of customers like you to once more reimagine ctq putting AI at the center of it. This morning you heard Karen talk about AI powered cpq. I heard there were lots of platts. She told you about it. I'm going to spend the next 25 minutes talking about why it matters. We're going to have sessions throughout Anne Bound talking about what it is, the details, how you extend it and how you make it work for your company. Let's start with a show of hands. Who sends PDF quotes out there to their customers still. Okay, I see hands.

And.

Who has a vpq? A lighter fee. Fpq. Let me ask one question. How many of your sales reps love this experience?

Boo. It sucks.

My personal story around CPQ started a few years back when I bought a Tefla in five minutes on a mobile phone. I was able to configure, buy, pay and even upgrade a Tesla. It was a mind blowing experience. So the question works. You can buy a 60k car in 5 minutes.

Why can you not buy any service.

Any software, any equipment out there? Why does it take us days and.

Weeks and months and back and forth to buy software?

There has to be a better way.

Really matters because that first experience that your buyer has with this buying experience is the first, it's the first impression they have. And first impressions are lasting impressions. So this is why it matters. And we really live in this paradox where some of our experiences in our everyday lives, in our everyday consumer lives are changing and becoming so instant and better. And yet when we look at our business lives, we're still stuck in the past. So before we go any further, I want to say CPQs matter for every single person in the go to market team. Let's actually start with the hardest. Any marketers in the house? Yes, one or two here. Well, CPQs matter for marketers. And here's why. That proposal that your seller sends to your buyer is basically a mini brochure. It's a mini website that talks about the value of your company, the products, the positioning of how you talk about them. As a marketer, you want that to be perfect. If you're in operations. Anybody in operations? Yes. I see one hand up there at the back. Well, you as an ops person, rev ops or an admin, don't want to be spending your time approving every single quote. You want the system to do that for you to put the guardrails. If you're a seller, you don't only want to send a coat. You actually want to track who is looking at the coat. How many times are they looking at it. And there's a fun fact. We did a study on this and we found out that when a buyer looked at a quote eight times, it actually took the win rate to. It increased the win rate by 65%. So there's real value in this. And lastly, if you're a sales leader or a CEO, I see a CEO sitting right in the front over here, then predictability and forecasting matters to you a lot. And that quarter end is always stuck on the last mile of the deal because you don't know if you can trust the seller who's telling you, no, no, I'm going to close the deal. Because you don't know. You don't have signals that are coming from the, from your solution. This is why CPQ matters for everybody. And here's the hard truth. The hard truth is time kills deals. So once your buyer says yes, every single minute counts and time becomes an enemy. And this is really a difficult thing to come to. Right, because you get stuck on that. And the data shows that we talked to hundreds and hundreds of companies and we found one simple pattern that each of these, you know, once a buyer said things would get stuck on the manual processes that were happening. And B2B buyers are actually saying this. Getting stuck on the last mile is increasing even more as more and more buyer stakeholders are getting added to the buying process. In fact, 86% of these deals are stalling at the Dasco. So all stats show you that this last mile is becoming harder and harder for your seller. So as we look at 2025 and 2026, all the 13,000 companies that are here in Moscone center at Inbound are asking themselves one question. How can I take AI to make my go to market processes better? And this one area, this deal closing process is so, so ripe for innovation and to thinking about it differently because it's still stuck in the past. So there is your opportunity to do much more. So I want you guys to think about this deeply, right? So if you are sending Your quotes through PDFs, if you are approving every single quote, one quote at a time, or if you are actually going back and forth and doing negotiations on email, you are not only helping, not only like slowing down your sellers, you're actually frustrating your buyers. And that matters because your buyers are experiencing something different from your competitors and from your peers. They're actually experiencing an experience where the coat is sent to them immediately. They actually have a seller who helps them close the deal or understand a solution for them actually. And you actually have a very transparent experience that you can really even enjoy. So with AI, this opportunity becomes even further and more interesting. So with AI, you can ask the question, how can I actually take the same number of reps and have them close twice as many deals? And what do I have to do to do that? And this gap widens between legacy CPQs and AI CPQs when you ask yourself that question. So if you have ever seen a legacy cpq, it actually steals time from deals. And it's all about controlling reps. And you hear that all the time. They'll say things like, oh, our reps are not very trained. We have to give them guardrails, we have to stop them, we have to give them a very concrete process to follow. And these CPQs are disjointed, they're disconnected, which means that you don't get any insights. It does not help you to accelerate your revenue in any meaningful way. AI CPQs are very, very different from that perspective. They actually enable your closing. Not only do they enable your closing, they accelerate your closing. And they actually use hybrid teams, teams of your humans, which is your sellers, your ops people, your CS people, and AI members on your teams. They actually help your reps to do their best work ever because they can focus on the customer. And they give your buyers an amazing experience by creating like a revenue engine. And that's always on, that's helping you to close the deal. So let's actually talk about what is this AI cpq, right? There are three pillars for an AI cpq. The first one is code creation. So code AI can actually help you to take all your call recordings, notes, emails, all your CRM data and help create beautiful codes which are compliant as well. Next step is negotiation. This back and forth that happens, you can actually create collaboration and visibility. You can surface risks and actually move the deal forward much faster. And the third pillar of the, of the CPQ AI CPQ is the closing. And closing is all about taking processes around, signing, paying, renewing, and connecting them in one flow. So let's go back, let's go into like the demo part and let me actually show you. So let's set the stage. Okay, so there's Sally the seller. Sally the seller has been working with a buyer for the last six weeks. They've been going back and forth talking about the buyer's problem solutioning. And she just got off the call with the buyer and the buyer said, hey, send me a coat. I like your solution. And this is a point at which in the old way, Sally would panic. She would be, shit, I need to go look at all my call notes to see what did I talk about, what were the pain points, what products did they want to buy, what were the terms that I talked about? And she will be looking at a blank sheet to figure out how to build that code. That's how quotes get delayed in the new way. This is what happens. Sally goes to a deal object and all she does is says, create coat. And it magically takes all the CRM data, all the call recordings, and generates a code for her. She can then further customize it with a cover letter which lists all the pain points. And look, there's a beautiful video telling the customer about their product. And she can then do mass actions like add 20% discount because that's what the customer had. And these breeze assistant on the side helps her to tailor the coat to the customer's needs. She can also do things like add a payment method and say, hey, customer, pay me my credit card so that I can actually get the payment part included into the deal closing as well. And just like that, she has actually created an amazing quote. So in that process, not only does Sally create a compliant a beautiful coat, she actually created a compliant quote as well. The next step is negotiation. So Sally has shared this coat with a customer, with a buyer, and the buyer is now ready to negotiate. And this is a point at which in the old way, what would really lead is all this sort of like scheduling nightmare where Sally would say, hey, do you want to talk on this date? The buyer would say, hey, I have some more questions. I talked to my cfo, he has some more questions. My security guy has got some other things that they want. And this leads into weeks and weeks of going back and forth. That's the Old way. The new way is here's the proposal that the buyer sees. And it's a beautiful proposal that's transparent and you can see what's happening. And there is a closing agent. And the closing agent can answer questions like, hey, what was the ROI that we discussed during this conversation? What needs to happen? The buyer can also say, hey, give me a 40% discount. Let me actually just ask the agent to do that. And this is where the agent is super smart. The agent says, no, I cannot do that. But let me get you James, your rep who can actually help follow on this conversation. And James just comes into that same conversation and says, I can't give you a 40% discount, but what about a one year maintenance fee? This guys is how deals close. This is how negotiation happens. I've done this a million times. And what you can see is you've taken something that takes weeks and shortened it into a very short time. Now we're into the last step of closing. So in the old way of closing, what would happen is the seller would have to go to DocuSign, create a DocuSign signature, share it. Maybe if a change happened that DocuSign would go out of sync. So they would have to figure out what to do if the customer, when the customer signed, somebody would have to chase the customer to say, hey, who is your billing contact? What's your billing, what's your payment credit card? Can you share that with me? That's the old way. The new way is that same proposal we were looking at or the same code we were looking at. There is an E signature built in and the buyer can simply go in and sign the document into a contract right there and then. And not only that, because it's top of mind for them, they can go ahead and enter their payment information, their billing information right here. And just like that, they have now closed the deal. So was that great or what? Yes. This is what a modern day CPQ and closing system looks like, guys. And we are not building this alone. Right from the start we've been working with partners because we understand the ecosystem is really, really important. In fact, some of these partners are in the room right now. Right? So codapath. Guys, stand up. Yeah. Come on AJ. So imagine having the coat show commissions for the buyer right there and there embedded in that breeze assistant that you had. So now the seller can actually figure out what to, you know, how they're going to get commission than this. This is incredibly valuable. And sellers oftentimes have cheat sheets. They have little cheat sheets that tell them how they're going to get commission. So this is built into the solution. We have Stripe. I don't know if there's anybody from Stripe here. Yes, there's our wonderful Stripe team. Stripe is our wonderful partner. We've been working with them for years and it helps us to build in automated payments and financing soon right into the product. And then one of our newest partners, Monk George, right there. Stand up. Right. So George and his team are building something quite incredible where they're actually building an agent. It's a Dunning agent that actually works for you in the background and sends reminder emails to your customers so you don't have to. And these are smart emails and so they work for you. Their closing rate is 35% better than any human being can do. And that's the power of the ecosystem where we bring everything all on HubSpot. And that is what we are trying to build for you. So there's one more thing, and that one more thing is it's not only about closing, it's not about your reps, it's actually about your revenue data. And when you close a deal on your CRM system, what you do is you get all kinds of insights on what did you close, what products do you sell, how much discounting happened. And that data can then create powerful feedback loops for your entire go to market team. Let me give you an example. So if you're a marketer and you're running a campaign, you actually do want to know what that campaign results in, how much upsell actually happens. You can now do that because you have the data right here in HubSpot. If you're actually a CS person, customer success and you are dealing with renewals with your customer now right here you can see which customer closed, how much, what usage did they get, how much have they paid on time? And that's incredibly valuable for you as a CS person. If you were closing your deal on HubSpot, you can then automate all your billing and payments, all on HubSpot as well. And this missing piece, this middle piece of closing or the CPQ was a missing piece in HubSpot which we are bringing to you. And that connects all the processes and makes your go to market teams much, much smarter than they've ever been before. So CPQ went into public beta this morning, right? Yes. But here's the thing. We have had hundreds of customers and hundreds of partners using this for months. And they're seeing the value of this. And here, you know, don't hear it. From me, hear it from them directly. So here's a video of some of our CPQ billing and payments customers talking about HubSpot and talking about CPQ and billing.

Commerce Hub, like all the other hubs at HubSpot, really have been really easy to use.

I know that I can put things on autopilot. I can set it and forget it. The things that drew us towards Commerce Hub was the fact that it was all in platform. With the Commerce Quotes, sales rep can build quotes quickly and efficiently. They can adjust them on the fly if they need, and then the customer gets this professional, clean quote in their hands immediately. It's easy to use. It's all in platform. I can accept a quote, review your list of quotes. I can select the template that I need and quickly create quotes from our deal board or our sales workspace. We love seeing the quote summaries. To be able to visualize all of our send quotes on a timeline. Quotes in Commerce Hub allows our reps to close our deals quicker.

Prior to being able to take ACH payments through Commerce Hub, we would have to set up split payment plans, which, you know, it's really just not something we want to be spending our time doing. With Commerce Hub, it really makes the process completely automated. Once it's all been set up, I really even haven't even thought about it in months.

We love being able to customize our process. I can connect QuickBooks and I can use this as a command center to kind of play into my processes. And that has also been really easy to where integrations are seamless and quick and efficient.

The overview section is definitely a reliable tool for us because we can see if something has been initiated, what's coming through, what's going to be hitting our bank account. It makes it really simple for us to see it in just like a.

Snapshot and have the visibility to see it all in one place. That's essential to us having a healthy business. The closing agent has been great. When our customers receive an online version of the quote, they're able to ask questions like, hey, what is your renewal policy? Shortening our deal cycle using Commerce Hub.

Has really helped not only us as an organization to simplify things, but it's also given our clients another option without stressing our administrative team.

Commerce Hub keeps reps all in one platform without having to flip through multiple windows. Multiple technologies allow sales reps to focus on closing deals. The most important thing for me is to have a system that I trust so that doesn't slow us down with AI and everything that's coming out. We have to move quickly. HubSpot and Commerce Hub allows us to do that.

Awesome. Amazing. So Donalyn, I see you right there. So let me talk to you about Working Work. Leap is a 400 employee, 400 ish employee company and they build AI powered talent management software for companies. And Donovan has been working very closely with us and what he really, really cares about is having his sellers not have to go somewhere else to do their coding, to do it all in one system. And he talks about in the video is how he really values having the closing agent answering questions which the reps would have had to do before. So that's pretty cool. And thank you Donovan for coming over here. The second customer that we saw was Jess Regan and Jess is a co founder and CRO of Pave Pave very differently is actually a 27 employee company. And what Jess talks about is he doesn't have time. So he wants to set everything up, have a system that he can trust and so that his reps work for themselves. And what he really, really loves is that professional quote experience which the customer gets. And as a 27 employee company, trust me, I know because I was there, that really matters. You want to actually appear as big as possible. And so as I promised, there's six minutes left. So one more minute and then I'll let you go. So if there's one thing that I would love to ask you to do is to remember one, one, one thing. And that's time kills deals. So I'm going to repeat it. Time kills deals. Okay, can we get everybody to repeat it? Time kills deals. Right? And that is a real seriousness message. And here's the good news. We actually have a way to shorten this time with our AI cpq. And why that matters is because of the unified revenue data that you get that makes all of your go to market better. So this was all about why it matters. But we actually have 20 product team, product people from our team. Actually Cash HubSpot people, please stand up. Right, Commerce Hub. That's right. There you go. There we go. Guys, please go find them and ask them questions, Ask them hard questions about how this can work for you. And take a picture of this because this is where you can go see more demos, more presentations on what we are going to be doing. So with that, I want to thank you for your time and thank you for having me.