5 Tips For Growing Better: Dharmesh Shah keynote at INBOUND18

Please welcome HubSpot founder and CTO, Dharmesh Shah. Thank you. Greetings, everyone. Greetings. We all want to grow better. The question is, how do you grow better? This is the question I've been obsessed with. Now, we've already looked at the physics of growing better. We've looked at flywheels and force and friction. And I think it's also useful to look at the philosophy of growing better. Now, I've had 2 major milestones in my life that have kind of helped me explore this idea of growing better. This is my son, Sohan. I introduced him to y'all. I've lived in the South for 10 years, I'm allowed to say y'all. I introduced him to y'all 7 years ago from the Inbound stage, and so yes, this is a photo of him projected on the inbound screen. So next year, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have a photo of me with the photo in the back screen. It'll be like an Inception thing, or Modern Family opening credits, based on your preference. So when Sohan was born, I was overwhelmed with emotion. All the emotions. Fear, anxiety, Excitement and joy. Uncomfortable joy. Uncomfortable because imposter syndrome. I wasn't sure I was ready, wasn't sure if I was deserving of that kind of joy. Many parents in the room, I think, have experienced this. Now, when a child is born, you're never really sure what they're going to be like. Sohan got lucky. He's more like his mom. But he and I do have some similarities. We have some traits in common. He too is more indoorsy than outdoorsy. He too is musically inclined, which in our family means he too knows how to create a Spotify playlist. And he too is a technology geek. This is a photo of Sohan when he's 2. He's making some money on the side as a freelance mobile app tester. Now, I know some of the parents are thinking, is that really age-appropriate, Dharmesh? Don't worry, it's okay. He only accepted payment in Bitcoin. It's all right. Sohan's long cryptocurrency, for those keeping score. By the way, if you have young children in the family and they're not making money on the side, you're missing on a big opportunity. It's the gig economy. I'm telling you. You heard it here. So Sohan is 7 now. So he just graduated first grade. And this summer, he went to coding camp. As one does. Now, he's written more code this summer than I have. It's not a competition. I mumble to myself, it's not a competition. But if it had been a competition, I could have imposed his screen time limits and I could have won. I'm just saying. Could have won. So, Sohan's my younger one. My older one also had a milestone this summer. My older one turned 12, and by my older one, I mean HubSpot, or as my wife likes to say, your actual firstborn. Now, this is a photo of an early HubSpot birthday party. I'm gonna make note of a couple of things. Number one, I'm wearing a HubSpot t-shirt. Shocking, I know, shocking. Like, the odds were 100%, that was my entire wardrobe back then. But what's noteworthy is I'm wearing a large HubSpot t-shirt. It was too big, I didn't need a large HubSpot t-shirt. Every t-shirt I bought was a large HubSpot t-shirt. Why? Because it's better. Because I had vision. I had foresight. And as we heard from Beth Comstock, vision doesn't matter unless you act on it. You have to execute. So I will make note in this photo, I am holding a slice of pizza. No one else in the photo is holding a slice of pizza, and while holding the slice of pizza, I am simultaneously eyeing the cake with serious intent. I didn't just have vision, I executed on the vision. I executed a lot. By the way, with all due respect to skinny jeans, I am very comfortable in my dad jeans. Just so everyone knows, also wearing dad jeans in the photo, years before I was a dad. Vision, people, vision. Okay, so I got to thinking, okay, I've helped out growing a tiny human, I've helped grow a company, are there similarities? Are there lessons to be learned from the two? So I got together with my wife, and the answer is yes, there are similarities, and so we made a list. What do— what does growing a human and growing a company have in common? Both involve a moment of passion followed by years of hard work. Neither one will make money for the first couple of years. People will find you insufferable because it's all you can talk about at parties. That's true. It's not as easy as your friends make it look on Instagram. It's not that easy. Around year 2, you decide to never ever do this ever again. All the wrong people are eager to give you advice. And finally, there will be days You want to sell them. But you shouldn't. You shouldn't. The overall lesson here is that you start out being completely clueless. Startup, kid, same thing. And as time goes, you become slightly less clueless over time. So let's dig into the growing a company part. We'll save the deep conversations on kids for when there are grown-up beverages available, which is the appropriate thing to do. So, this is a photo of HubSpot in the early years. It's the 3 of us, and by 3 of us, it's Brian, myself, and an office plant that my wife gave us as a present. The plant is named Duo because it's the second one. Uno, the first one, well, we don't talk about Uno. It's not important. So in the photo, we're shown in ascending order of socialness, from less social to somewhat more social. This might explain why Duo the office plant got invited to more after-work parties than I did. I probably wouldn't have gone, but it's nice to be invited sometimes. Okay, so in these early years, Brian joined a CEO group. So he would get together with several other CEOs of high-tech companies in the Boston area. They would meet quarterly to talk about their companies, talk about growth, and I'm not really sure where they had their meetings, but I always pictured it like this. Now, Brian has repeatedly assured me that they did not meet out in the wheat fields. But to this day, Brian has never provided photographic evidence to the contrary, so my theory still holds. And as far as I know, they met like this. So they would sit in a corner and they would talk about their CEO dreams. They would confess their CEO problems. They would sing CEO songs. And at one of these meetings, a very pivotal meeting, the key topic was culture. Culture. And now, we were in the early stages of HubSpot. We hadn't talked about culture a whole lot. As far as I knew, culture was that stuff you put in yogurt or make yogurt with, or is that gluten? I don't know. Anyway. And so, as this conversation is progressing with his CEO buddies, Brian's like, Oh yeah, you folks are further along, like we have product to build, we have content to write, we have growth to generate, like we'll deal with culture later. But his CEO buddies were insistent, they're like, Brian, no, you don't understand, culture is critical, it defines the destiny of a company. Brian's like, okay. So the next day, Brian stops me like, Dharmesh, Dharmesh, I learned something super important at my CEO group meeting. Okay, Brian, lay it on me. Culture is critical. It defines the destiny of a company. Okay, Brian. So I waited for him to finish his dramatic pause. That's the role of a co-founder. He would do the same for me. And he went on to say, You know what would be great is if we could dig into this culture stuff. Now, when he said we, he did not mean the royal we. He meant the very unroyal me. What he meant was, Dharmesh, it would be great if you could dig into this culture stuff. And my reaction was this. And I remember thinking, dude, like, we went to grad school. We've been co-founders for years. I've spent more time with you in those years than I have my wife, who I love. Do you not know me at all? You see, I'm not a people person. And from what I know of culture, what little I know, there are people involved. I'm— I'm an introvert, right? I'm not a cultural anthropologist. I'm an introverted technologist, otherwise known as a technologist. And so after a few weeks of anxiety, I finally sent Brian this email 9 years ago this week, exactly this week 9 years ago. And I apologize for a couple of the typos. This was a late-night email. Brian, not sure how I wound up being the guy to lead the discussion on culture. It's freaking hard. Eventually, we need to give this to someone that actually likes humans. Now, this is a bit of a misrepresentation, because it's not that I don't like humans. I just don't like being around them a whole lot. Especially in large groups, which I define as being like 3 or more, including me. But I did some deep breathing. I did an unguided meditation, best I had at the time. And then I had— I scheduled a one-on-one with Duo, the office plant. Which I know it sounds— it's not weird. Duo was head of HR at the time. It's all we could afford. But then I'm like, okay, this is a— so I did what engineers do. I got distracted on Reddit for a few hours, but then right after that, I started collecting some data. For weeks and months. connected some dots, found some patterns, made some observations, and I took all the lessons learned and put it in an internal document called the Culture Code. Now, I know the Culture Code sounds like a Dan Brown novel. I know. But it's a slide deck. It's a slide deck that explores the relationship between people and the companies they work for in the modern world. What do people want from the companies they work for? Because this was the idea, we wanted to create a modern company at HubSpot. And so we later published this deck, shared it with the world, all 128 slides, got some traction, well received. And now a few of you are wondering, Dharmesh, like, why are you telling us this? Is it just to vent? Is it just to do a not-so-humble brag that you got 4 million views on a slide deck? And my response is, well, no, it's not just that. I mean, it's that. It's not just that. The reason is the biggest lesson I've learned in my career about growing better came from an idea in the Culture Code deck, and it's this slide: solve for the customer, solve for their success, put the customer first. If I had to get rid of all the other slides and keep only one of the 128 slides in the Culture Code deck, this is the one I would keep. And the lesson here is that to grow better, you need a culture that puts the customer first. If you do not have a customer-focused culture, it's not like friction in your flywheel, it's like a full metric ton weight sitting on top of the flywheel. You need to start with a culture where people care about the customer. Makes everything else easier. Now there's a problem. It's the trendy versus truthy problem. It's trendy to say we're customer obsessed, customer obsessed. Truth is, companies are often self-obsessed. It's trendy to say we're customer-centric. Truth is, companies are often customer circumfric. Circumfric is a word that I made up 3 weeks ago. I don't expect it to get added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary anytime soon, but you know a word that did get added this year? This year, Chiweenie. 2018, the word Chiweenie was officially added to the dictionary. A Chiweenie is a breed of dog that That's the intersection of a Chihuahua and a wiener dog, also known as a dachshund. Chiweenie. Chiweenie. Sir Cumfrick. Never know. It's trendy to say we're a customer-first company. Truth is, many companies are customer eventually. We'll get around to some of our customer stuff. Now, when I say companies have this problem, I'm not talking about all those other companies. HubSpot isn't without fault. Wea culpa too. Over our 12 years, we've made decisions that weren't always customer first, despite our best intentions. And over those 12 years, we've accrued some bad habits. And so for the last several years, Brian and I have been working on. A new season of Breaking Bad Habits. I know this is a dated reference, but I just binge-watched all 5 seasons of Breaking Bad, and I worked on this slide too long not to sneak it in somewhere. So Brian once said— well, actually, he just said some minutes ago— you don't need to make your product 10 times better. you need to make your experience 10 times lighter. I would add improving— I am going to add, like right now. Improving your experience 10x is much easier than improving your product 10x, which is good news because as we know, how you sell is as important as what you sell. Now, speaking of what you sell, what does Starbucks sell? We're going to do a quick economics review. If you were selling coffee beans, you would have little price differentiation, and as a result, relatively little price leverage. It's a commodity, literally a commodity. I'm using the word literally like literally. Literally. a commodity. If you took those coffee beans and you put them in a bag, now you have a product, not a commodity. More differentiation, more price leverage. If you brew the coffee and served it in a cup at a McDonald's or a Waffle House, now you have a service. Yet more differentiation, yet more price leverage. If you kept going and you opened a coffee shop, and you put in comfy lounge seating, and you created a Spotify playlist every week of mediocre lounge music, which Starbucks does, by the way, every week, you can look it up. They create a new Spotify playlist, it's not random. Then you have an experience. So the question really isn't what does Starbucks sell, because for some it's like, okay, well, they sell a cup of coffee, and a place to charge my phone. For some, it's a cup of coffee and beginner Italian lessons. For me, Starbucks is a global network of restrooms where the price of admission is the price of a muffin, $2.95, and also you get a muffin. Awesome. So, The question isn't what does Starbucks sell, the question is what does Starbucks offer? And what Starbucks offers is the experience of relaxing and recharging. The coffee is somewhat incidental. What does Amazon sell? 20 years ago, easy answer, sells books. Amazon sells books. 20 years later, today, you could say— Books. You could say that Amazon sells whatever Jeff Bezos wants because nobody puts Bezos in the corner. Especially now that we know he's been Vin Diesel this whole time. This whole time. So the question isn't what does Amazon sell, what does Amazon offer? What Amazon offers is the ability to look up product ratings and reviews, put your order in, maniacally track the package all the way through as it goes through smackin'— smack over Arkansas, which is the place, and like winds up at your doorstep. It doesn't matter what Amazon sells, what they offer is the experience of buying things. That's what Amazon offers. What does HubSpot sell? Easy answer, we sell software, or more specifically, software as a service. But what HubSpot offers is success as a service. Yes, we invest tens of millions of dollars in R&D. I could not be more proud of the product team at HubSpot, but we also spend millions of dollars on training and education and community and hosting events like Inbound. So, what HubSpot offers is the experience of growing better. That's our mission. The lesson here is to grow better, you need to offer a delightful differentiated experience that customers love. That's the key. So let's look at that phrase customer experience. The natural way to think about the customer experience is okay, well it starts when somebody buys and then stops when they stop buying or they cancel. That's the customer experience, that's the way I thought about it for a long time. I think there's a crack in that thinking, there's a crack in that model. I think the right way to think about it is it starts the very first moment someone encounters your company or your brand and ends never. That entire time is the customer experience, and that's what we should be thinking about and optimizing. So the question is, okay, what do customers want from their experience? What do they want? This is a lot like the question The Culture Code tried to answer, only this time it's the relationship between people and the companies they buy from. What do people in the modern world look for? What do they want from that relationship, and what do they not want from that relationship? So I did what engineers do. I watched episodes 4, 5, and 6 of Star Wars to get Jar Jar out of my mind. Personal problem, it's not an issue. But right after that, I started collecting data. I started with a focused longitudinal study on the customer experience. And by focused, I mean n equals 1. And by n equals 1, I mean n equals me. Now, before these statisticians— before the statistics people get all judgy. I'm a customer. I buy things. It's not just pizza and large t-shirts and exercise equipment that folds conveniently and goes under your bed, never to be seen ever again. I buy lots of things, and all modesty aside, I thought I provided myself brilliantly insightful feedback. But I acknowledge I acknowledge my critics that say, well, that might have been too limited a sample to be useful. It may not represent the larger population. Okay, I'll concede that, maybe. So I doubled the survey and surveyed my wife. Now, this just didn't improve the sample size. Now it's much more reflective of the overall population because unlike me, my wife Kirsten is normal. Expanded the audience again. Went to social media, which is awesome for antisocial people like me. Went to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Stories and anecdotes and experiences started flowing in with #customerfirst and #customerfriction. I didn't use Instagram for the study, and the reason is it's It's really hard to get unfiltered feedback on Instagram. I know, sorry, sorry. I know that was cheesy, but for like the 3 of you that found that clever and witty, we just became BFFs, just so you know. So stories and anecdotes are great, but the plural of anecdote is not data. It's also not anecdie. What I needed was some quantitative information, something I could analyze. So, I had the HubSpot research team go out and survey thousands of actual people in a statistically valid survey and came back with a bunch of data. So, I'm excited to share with you the patterns that we discovered from all those stories, all those anecdotes, and all that data. It's the first time I'm sharing it, and I'm super excited. I am this excited. I'm excited. Excited about what I'm about to share. I'm as excited as a Labradoodle on a lawn. Now, I know some of you, the more astute amongst you, are like, well, that looks an awful lot like Brian's dog Romeo. Well, Romeo's a minor celebrity now. That's his stunt double. Romeo's back in the Airstream relaxing and curled up in a Patagonia fleece. By the way, Labradoodle, officially in the dictionary. It's a real word. Circumfric. Okay. There were a bunch of insights and observations that came back from this study and from this research. I'm going to share the top 5 with you, the things that I think would be most impactful for you to take back to your business and grow better. Number 1, Earn my attention, don't steal it. Give me something I value before you take something I value, like my time. Now, people have pushed back on this use of the word stealing because it's a little harsh, but it's like, okay, well, what word would you use when someone takes something that you value from you without your permission and doesn't give you anything in return? And you have to admit, some of these kind of permission-free outreaches can be somewhat inconvenient. It's like, then when would be a good time to tell you about our special offer? The data backs this up. When we surveyed people, 85% said they think less of a company that reaches out to them without getting permission. 11% said unchanged, and 4% said their opinion went up. I don't know, maybe they were just happy to get some attention, I don't know. But the point here is the worst-case scenario is not, oh well, we did that and it didn't work and we got zero return. That's not the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is you damage your brand, you dig yourself into a hole, and companies that may have bought from you in the future are now less likely to do so. So when you do this permission-free outreach, it's like applying force to the flywheel, but in the wrong direction. Number 2, solve for my success, not your systems. Don't make your process my problem. Now, we've all tried to buy some things, And experienced this. Thank you for your interest. Let me take you through our sales process. Now I understand some of you have beautiful, handcrafted, artisanal processes made with only the freshest organic steps. I get it. But if a customer wants to skip some of those steps, let them. If a customer wants to skip all the steps and just give you money, let them. Do not impose your process on your customers, it adds friction. And just like you shouldn't impose your process, you also shouldn't expose your org structure to your customers. It's embarrassing and it's unseemly. They don't care that you have a customer success team and an account management team and a customer support team and they all report to different people who may or may not like each other. Customers don't care. They want their question answered and they want their problems solved. Making customers deal with, like, your departments and their dysfunctions is friction in the flywheel. Number 3, own your screw-ups. We all make mistakes. Just say sorry, be sorry, and make it better. So I'm going to share with you an email from a fictional company that had a fictional outage, but the email itself is very, very real. Now, I've changed the name of the company— To protect the innocent, and by the innocent, I mean me. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to read through parts of this email, and I'm going to put my brain on speakerphone, so you can kind of hear what I was thinking as a customer of this company. Here's what I was thinking. So we're aware that you may have lost connection to your internet. May have lost connection? I've been a customer for 14 years. You know I live on the internet. You have the data. Like, the internet goes down, all we have is each other. Like, people. The horror. They go on to say, there were major cuts to the fiber provided by third-party partners, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't care about your third-party partnerships. For all I know, fiber is the thing that my doctor keeps telling me I need more of in my diet. But here's the most egregious problem with this message. Nowhere in the entire message— it goes on for 2 more paragraphs, I'll spare you— nowhere in the entire message does the word sorry, apologize, or any of its synonyms appear. Nowhere in the message. That is not how you own your screw-ups. Now let me tell you about another company that screwed up. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Kentucky Fried Chicken earlier this year had an issue. They ran out of what many would consider a critical component of their offering. They ran out of chicken. And as it turns out, KFC alone just doesn't cut it. Like, the C is important. And so what did they do? They didn't say, oh, well, this will— we'll get over it. It'll be fine. We'll brush it aside. They took a full-page ad out. Let me repeat this. They paid for a full-page ad to broadcast their screw-up. Here's the ad. Now, there are several things that are noteworthy in this ad. The first is just like the playfulness. They didn't take themselves too seriously. The second is the headline of the ad are the 2 words, we're sorry. Those are the perfect words to use. Not, if we happen to have interrupted your culinary behavior and habits, for that we sincerely apologize. No, we're sorry. And I love the first line: A chicken restaurant without any chicken. It's not ideal. I love KFC for this, right? And this is from a lifelong vegetarian. I've never been to a KFC and I love this, love this. The data substantiates this. 96% of the people, if you Acknowledge a mistake and fix it, 96% of the customers will not leave you. Just own your screw-up. So when you own your screw-up, you save yourself from a possible slowdown in your flywheel. Number 4, I don't mind paying, but I do mind being played. Make your pricing open, make it clear, and make it fair. kept coming back from customers, kept coming back in the data. So let's start with being open. If I visit your company's website looking for pricing information, it's like, hello, I'm not seeking the Holy Grail, just some pricing information. And the response is, go away, you son of a silly person, or I shall taunt you a second time. That's not a good experience. That was just me doing an audience survey of how many people watch Monty Python. That's not important. Don't guard your pricing information like it's a treasure. Now, I know some of you are thinking, well, Dharmesh, we're B2B, we're in a very niche industry, every one of our prospective customers is a special little snowflake, and we create special little price quotes for each individual one. I get it, not every industry is the same, but that doesn't mean you can't provide some guidance around your pricing. We charge by the hour, we charge by the project, and it starts from $25,000 and goes up to $75,000. Give them some idea, and the reality is it's out there anyway. People can find this stuff. There's this thing called the internet. The data substantiates this again. We asked people if a company doesn't have pricing information, What do you do? 75% of the people said they would look for an alternative. So unless you're working at a monopoly where there are no alternatives, the absence of pricing information is friction in your flywheel. We've talked about open pricing. Let's talk about clear pricing. Customers should not need a math degree to understand what they're going to pay for the product or service. Mere mortals should be able to understand it. Now, I showed this cartoon to Brad Coffey, who's the head of strategy at HubSpot, also one of the smartest people I know. And as expected, he was confused. And he's like, Dharmesh, so what part of sigma over the first derivative did people not understand? Like, what was confusing here? Data once again says if you have confusing pricing, People don't buy as often. 69% said, yes, I would leave as a result of confusing pricing. So we've talked about open pricing, we've talked about clear pricing, let's talk about fair pricing, which brings me to Blockbuster. So Blockbuster, for those of you that are under 30, is like Netflix in a little plastic box, except you have to get out of your pajamas, you totally can't chill, and then like an idiot, you go to the store and like browse shelves for a movie. And there's negative selection bias because the only movies there are the ones nobody wanted to rent, including Chad who works there, right? So you go home with your movie and you put it in this device that's like the size of 20 iPads. And you watch it, and then like a caveman, you rewind the thing, and then you have to repeat the process to return the movie when you're done. So in 2004, there were 4,500 of these non-pajama-friendly locations that Blockbuster had. Today, they are down to exactly one. This one. Bend, Oregon. Now, when the analysts and the media dug into the reasons behind the fall of Blockbuster, the most commonly cited customer complaint was what Blockbuster called the extended viewing fee, otherwise known as a late fee. Extended viewing fee, that's like, oh well, I know you had Elf for 43 days, I hope you really enjoyed it, here's a $200 tab, right? It's like, No. Because even though they called it the extended viewing fee, customers perceived it as a you're lazy and we're greedy and we're going to charge you fee. One of the critical pieces of the Blockbuster downfall. So here's an actionable takeaway for you. When you get back to the office, pick 10 random receipts or invoices that you have sent to customers recently and read it as if you were the customer. Does every item on that invoice, does it sound reasonable? Does it sound fair? How would you react if you got that invoice? Now there are 2 parts to being fair. There's the charge that's proportional to the value received, but there's also the charge me the same price that you charge other customers that are like me. Pricing should be programmatic. Don't make customers negotiate. They will reluctantly if they have to, but you should not make them. Now some of you are thinking, well, he's not suggesting we like do away with discounts. No, you can have discounts, they just need to be programmatic. So you can say we're running a promotion for the holiday, or it's a full moon, or this is a repeat customer, or this customer bought multiple products, All those are great reasons to offer a discount, just don't offer different discounts to different people at the same point in time if they have a similar profile. In the future, that's a recipe in my mind for discrimination. There's going to be a time where people pay a higher price simply because of where they're from or what they look like. That's just bad, it's just bad business. So, Charge them fairly. Last one, number 5, don't block the exit. You made it so easy to buy, don't make it so hard to cancel. It's like customers buy with the best intent. We wanted it to work out. Sometimes things don't work out, relationships just don't work. We don't always know why. It doesn't have to be awkward. I didn't leave clothes at your headquarters. We can still remain friends. We might get back together someday, right? Don't block the exit. Don't, don't be that person. Because we've all had this. Okay, well, to cancel service, you'll need a letter from your doctor, notarized by the Dalai Lama, and filed at the end of that rainbow. We've had variations of this experience kept coming back in the surveys and the anecdotes. Once again, The data says if you make it easier to break up with you, more people buy. This is not counterintuitive. If you make cancellations easy, it adds fluidity to your flywheel. Which brings me to an idea. We've all seen this button. It's the buy now with one click. Brilliant. We've all seen it, we've all used it. So what if you could make it even easier? Here's the idea. What if we started putting up a cancel now with one-click button? Do we think that if our companies built a reputation for being easy to break up with, easy to cancel, that more people would buy from us? I think so. There's precedent in the retail sector. Zappos, Nordstrom, lots of— it's like if you make it easy for people to refund or cancel, you get more sales. I think that works. So those are the 5 biggest insights and lessons drawn from the research and drawn from the data. There are more. You do not need to speed read all of these. We have kindly and conveniently put all of them into a new slide deck that we creatively named the Customer Code. By the way, I sneakily took that slide off just so you would— no, I'm kidding. I'm not that diabolical. Well, I am, but that's not why I did it. It's called The Customer Code. It's at customercode.com. Launches today. It has all the tenets, the lessons we've learned, more data, more fun cartoons, and at the end of the deck is an email that comes straight to me, an email address, but more importantly, there's this report card. So you can do a self-assessment of yourself. It's always of yourself, a self-assessment. And give yourself a score from 0 to 10 against all the things that your customers, my customers, people want from the relationship with you. Give yourself a score from 0 to 10 just to see. Now, some people are cringing and squirming a little bit. It's like, I'm not sure how my company would do on these things. It sounds like it could be painful and possibly embarrassing. And you're right, it is painful, it is embarrassing. I know this because HubSpot went through the exercise. I went through the exercise. The one thing more painful and embarrassing than going through the exercise is taking the results and putting them on a 50-foot screen and sharing it with the internet. This is HubSpot's 2018 report card, as honest as I could be. Not great. We have work to do. So we are, as we speak, working on getting this score to like an 8 or an 8.5 over the next year. I encourage you, go through the exercise, it will be revealing for you, it'll be useful. This is Domino's. They sell pizza, which I love, perhaps a little bit too much. I've probably had 1,000 Domino's pizzas in my life. I've almost never been to a Domino's store because Domino's doesn't just sell pizza, they offer a pizza-buying experience. Domino's has the pizza builder on their website. So instead of talking to someone and trying to explain the exact configuration of the pizza you want, you build it online. Okay, it's like I want a large pizza, hand-tossed crust, On the whole thing, I want green peppers. And on half, I want black olives because I married an alien. Like, who puts black olives on a pizza? There's very few ways to mess up a pizza. Black olives is one of those ways. Okay, so I'm no culinary expert. I do know black olives, but I'm no culinary expert. Here's what pizza is. You start with a bunch of bread, and then you use tomato sauce and cheese to cleverly disguise the bread so people feel less guilty. I'm not an expert, but I think that's basically what pizza is. And so when I go to check out and I see this page on the Domino's website, it bothers me a little bit. It's like, okay, well, we know you just ordered a bunch of bread cleverly disguised. Would you like some more bread? Have you considered some more bread? Perhaps you should think about some more bread. Now, I'm okay with this, I'm okay with it, it's like, but at least make it a fair fight. You're trying to upsell me so that you have these big green buttons and the thing I have to click on, find and click on, is this like, no, go to checkout, tiny little link, not even a button, not even a button. That's what I have to do to get my pizza. And so the thing that goes in my head is like, I'm weak. I'm very weak. I give up. Now, some of you are thinking, Dharmesh, have you considered that they're running an A/B test? I know how the internet works. I don't have an AOL.com email address. Give me some respect. Yes, I considered that it might be an A/B test, so I tested it with multiple browsers. Multiple devices logged in from different countries. This is not an A/B test. They are showing this friggin' to everybody, not just the weak of will like me. Now Domino's is well within their rights to do this. They have the right to do this, but just because they have the right to do it doesn't make it right. Which brings me back to To the question we started with. How do you grow better? The answer is simple. Not easy, but simple. Do the right thing. Treat people with respect. Treat them like you'd want them to be treated. Recognize people's differences. Some of us spend $120 on a Patagonia fleece. Some of us spend $120 on pizza and extra bread. We need to recognize and honor people's differences. Do the right thing even when it's hard. I know it's hard to own your screw-ups. I know it's hard to not get taken in by the temptation of short-term results. I know it's hard to let a customer go and not hug them too tightly. All these things are hard, but do the right thing especially when it's hard. Because when you do the hard things, by definition, you are differentiating yourself because the hard choices are the choices few others will make. So we've all had these moments faced with a tough choice and we make the right choice. We do the right thing for the customer. It feels good. It doesn't just feel good, it doesn't just feel better, you actually do better. We need more of those moments because if you put all those moments together where you do the right thing for the customer, all those moments together is what creates delighted customers. And customer love is the most powerful force You can apply to your FIWO. That's how you grow better. Thank you.