Dharmesh Shah shares three practices HubSpot uses to stay close to customers as the company scales. Start every all-hands with a live customer interview. Stream real-time NPS responses to Slack so employees read actual customer words. Have leaders and staff spend at least an hour weekly on support desk, forums, or social media to hear directly from customers.
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So here's a question I've gotten recently is, how do you stay close to the customer as the company grows and scales and you're no longer working directly in the kind of frontline operations? And I love this question. I love all questions about staying close to the customer. Now, before we dig into the answer to this, I think there are actually 2 parts to understand about what contributes to this kind of growing distance between founders and the early employees. And the customer, one, was embedded in the question, which is, hey, in the early days when it was just the founding team, everybody's talking to customers every day. We're right there on the front lines. And as you kind of grow, you add kind of layers between yourself and the customers, and so there's that kind of growing distance. And that's sort of what the question was implying. But there's another thing that also contributes to the distance that's a little bit more subtle but equally important. Which is in the early days, what you have are customer stories and anecdotes, right? The things that you hear as a result of talking to customers. As you scale, you start to replace more and more of those stories and anecdotes with actual data, right? But now you have like trend lines and charts and graphs and the average sentiment and all sorts of things. So as the company gets bigger, as you have more and more customers, you sort of replace stories and anecdotes with data, which in many ways is a good thing. I love data more than most people, but you do lose some of the emotion and the nuance that you had when you were hearing directly from customers and you hear stories and anecdotes. So those are the 2 things to be mindful of. So in terms of how you kind of maintain that distance, I mean, keep that close distance to the customer as you scale, here are 3 things that we do at HubSpot, and I think you should Steal all 3 of these things, by the way. So number one is that for every all-hands meeting that we have, we begin that all-hands meeting with a customer interview. So someone on the HubSpot team will interview an actual HubSpot customer, and the beauty of this is that we get back the kind of stories and anecdotes, right? It's just one customer, fine, but also everybody— The company, we have 6,000+ people now, has an opportunity to hear an actual live customer that has hopes and dreams and fears kind of talk about the HubSpot product and their use of it, their ideas, how it could be better, and that's a fantastic way to start all-hands meetings, so you should totally do that. The second thing that we do that you should also steal is that we take the kind of customer survey data, and you should be doing customer surveys, whether it's Net Promoter Score or whatever, questions you wanna ask. If you're not doing customer surveys, that's like the number one thing, like go do that first. But one thing we do above and beyond that, so we do, you know, regular surveys of all of our customers. We take the feedback that comes in from those Net Promoter Score surveys and we pipe them directly into a Slack channel in real time. And so that Slack channel with our kind of customer feedback has 1,500 people in it from HubSpot. out of the 6,000+ people, so a decent percentage of the company is subscribed to that particular channel. And what's particularly telling is that one of the other most popular channels at HubSpot, which is the #dadjokes channel, has about 1,000 people, so we have like 50% more people subscribed to customer feedback than even to dad jokes, or Ted Lasso for that matter, we have a channel for that too. And so that's kind of tactical tip number 2, is try to get as close to the feedback as possible, and give people an opportunity to kind of actually read words that customers have said and like put words into sentences. You kind of hear from carbon-based life forms versus the aggregate in this kind of abstract sense of, oh, we did a survey and we had 400 respondents and here's the average. Useful, don't get me wrong, but there's no replacement for actually being able to hear what customers are actually saying. Third thing you can do to stay close to customers is to actually stay close to customers, right, and we do a variety of these things at HubSpot. For instance, we will rotate folks through, you can sit on customer support for a day and you can shadow one of our awesome customer support folks and kind of learn more about what customers are saying and what issues they're having, which I highly recommend, you should do that, but I think it's less important in terms of what channel you use, what's more important that you actually do it with some degree of regularity. I'll tell you what I do myself personally, is that I will kind of lurk and respond in the customer support forums at HubSpot. I will track social media mentions, so if someone has a question about HubSpot or has something to say positive or negative, whatever it happens to be on Twitter or LinkedIn or things like that, I'm all over that. So not a week goes by where I won't have, you know, 5 or 10 actual interactions with actual customers or prospective customers online. That happens to be my kind of medium of choice. I'm on social media all the time, so anyway, so 3 things. Number 1, start company meetings with a customer interview, the all-hands meeting. Number 2, try to channel the real-time customer feedback into an easily consumable channel. Slack works well, that's what we use. And number 3, actually, like, you don't have to spend 40, 50 hours a week doing it, but spend an hour a week engaging customers in whatever channel is most comfortable for you, whether it could be customer support, sitting on the phone line for an hour, it could be responding to emails or customer support forums or doing what I do, which is engaging on social media, but actually interact with customers, like not a faceless, nameless abstraction, but actual people that are customers. So those are my tips.
