Dharmesh Shah shares three practices HubSpot uses to stay customer-focused as it scales: start all-hands meetings with live customer interviews, stream survey results to Slack in real time, and give every team member an hour weekly to talk directly with customers through support or social media.
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How do you stay close to the customer as the company grows and scales? In the early days, everybody's talking to customers every day. As you scale, you add kind of layers between yourself and the customers. Here are 3 things that we do at HubSpot, and I think you should steal all 3 of these things. Number one, 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 we get back to the kind of stories and anecdotes, right? The second thing that we do, we take the kind of customer survey data and we pipe them directly into a Slack channel in real time. Third thing you can do is to actually stay close to customers, right? 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. Customer support, sitting on the phone line for an hour, responding to emails or customer support forums or engaging on social media.
