Collette King Inbound Talks: Innovative Marketing Strategies with HubSpot

Welcome back to another episode of Sidekick Strategies, Expert interviews. And of course, this is Inbound talks edition. I'm your boy, George B. Thomas. And today we have Colette King, product lead for HubSpot Service Hub, joining us today. Colette leads the team responsible for building proactive post sale processes. Man, that just sounds good to say it. Working on some of the most innovative customer success tools in the market today in in her inbound session, Improve Retention in the new era of Customer success, she shared invaluable insights into how businesses can boost customer retention and Drive expansion using HubSpot's latest tools. Colette, welcome to the show. Awesome.

Thanks for having me.

You bet. My first question I'd love to ask everybody is how the heck are you doing post inbound?

Well, we're a couple weeks out now, so I have finally recovered. Although I was back in Boston for a product summit only two weeks after, after Inbound. So I've gotten a lot of good Boston time in this fall.

There you go. Some good food, some good people. And yeah, it's funny, everybody we ask that question, they're like, yes, I've had recovery time. So with that said, let's go ahead and get into the good stuff. Colette, your session focused on the new.

Customers through all of HubSpot's tools. You would sell to your customers through all of HubSpot's tools. And then once you close the deal, there was a lot of people running CS off of HubSpot, but we weren't giving you any dedicated tools to engage with your customer until they had a problem, like until they were trying to file a support ticket with you. And then we had some dedicated tools back for that at HubSpot. And we know that if we had that broken flywheel in our products, that our customers were also probably having a very similar problem within their own systems. We have a lot of people running customer success outside of HubSpot on some CSPs, which are wonderful products. You also have people who I've talked to are running customer success off of an Excel spreadsheet at a couple Google Docs. And that lack of integrating the data makes it really, really hard for your sales and marketing team to again see the customer success team as a true partner and a true revenue driver that they are. So by putting all of your data in HubSpot and keeping everything in the same space, it is really easy to create a workflow that flags for the sales team. Hey, this customer is doing really well. They're about six months out from their renewal let's start talking to them about an upgrade so that we're ready for that conversation rather than scrambling at the last minute when a customer says, hey, we're ready to renew our contract and it's maybe two weeks before. And they say also, by the way, like, do you guys have any other plans? Like, we love your company so much. Like that is something that the sales rep could have been working towards and building a relationship with them over the six months, planning in partnership with the csm. And it's the same on the marketing side. I think for marketers, there's two big benefits of sharing that data with customer success teams is one is not marketing to your least happy customers. I think that your marketing message really needs to change based off of when you're talking to people who love your product and when people who are maybe not so happy that they've been locked into this contract, you want to send really targeted messaging to those customers, potentially some form of re engagement campaign, but at a bare minimum, you just want to acknowledge where they are and make sure that you're not sending them this overly excited promotional, however long. Whereas with a prospect, you know that if you drop the ball with them on one meeting, they could be gone to a competitor tomorrow, they are probably already in conversation with someone else. So there is real urgency on the prospect side. But I'd argue that there's just as much urgency on the customer retention side of the house, even if it doesn't seem as obvious.

Some good stuff to think about on that answer for sure. Maybe a rewind point for some folks, to be honest with you. So I want you to kind of go future thinking for a second because I want to think about some key focus areas that customer experience or leaders should be thinking about when improving retention in 2025 and beyond.

Yeah, I think, I think some of the biggest areas that we're seeing are, well, first of all, making sure that the data across your teams is connected, that your teams are talking to each other, that you're all working off of the same source of truth for your customers. Because like I said earlier, customers really do not like having to repeat themselves and it makes it feel like you're not listening to them as a business. If two of your different sales teams, let's say, are reaching out to them about an upgrade point, or maybe that customer isn't actually ready for an upgrade point based off of their conversations with their CS team, but there's some other indicators in their usage that might say that they're a good fit like you need to let that CSM own that account, be that buffer for the rest of the org and make sure that they're. It's really easy for them to share information. So teams being on the same page and sharing information is one, I think a second one. And we're seeing this a lot with obviously SaaS companies is usage data figuring out what usage trends are leading indicators rather than lagging indicators of success at your business. And I'd actually venture to say that even if it's not formal usage data, if you're a non SaaS company, you have some pattern or indication of customer engagement that is a leading indicator of how happy they are. You know what a happy customer looks and feels like. Your best CSMs know what a happy customer looks and feels like. And finding some way to codify that and then measure that and track it and say these customers are hitting the marks, these customers are not hitting the marks is another really critical piece. I think we know that a lot of teams are really focused on scaling right now and being able to, to monitor for those engagement signs, positive or negative, across your entire customer base is a great way to scale your CSM's time. So those would probably be my two make sure your teams are talking to each other and make sure you have those leading indicators of success, not lagging indicators. That's also another way as a CS leader to really make sure that you're positioning your team as a retention, as a source of revenue, as a true revenue driving team, is make sure that you're being proactive, not just responding to the things that your customers are coming to you with and saying like, hey, we've chosen returned and then sending in your best team to kind of like try to save the account. You should be doing that ahead of time, but you can't do it if you don't know who to talk to.

I love this idea of proactive versus retroactive. I also love this idea of actual teams talking together and having conversations like humans should do. It's so, so many good points in there. It's funny, in your inbound talk you also talked about this kind of concept of a broken funnel flywheel and this kind of post sales data with marketing and sales. So can you kind of explain how businesses can fix this flywheel that we're all trying to get them to lean into by integrating post sales data with the marketing and sales teams a little bit more on that conversation piece?

Yeah, for sure. So this is something that I like to say, like HubSpot had a Broken flywheel until earlier this year when we started focusing more on customer success. We were saying you can run your entire business off of HubSpot, but we had this weird gap of you would market to your customers through all of HubSpot's tools, you would sell to your customers through all of HubSpot's tools. And then once you close the deal, there was a lot of people running CS off of HubSpot, but we weren't giving you any dedicated tools to engage with your customer until they had a problem, like until they were trying to file a support ticket with you. And then we had some dedicated tools back for that at HubSpot. And we know that if we had that broken flywheel in our products, that our customers were also probably having a very similar problem within their own systems. We have a lot of people running customer success outside of HubSpot on some CSPs, which are wonderful products. You also have people who I've talked to who are running customer success off of an Excel spreadsheet at a couple Google Docs. And that lack of integrating the data makes it really, really hard for your sales and marketing team to again see the customer success team as a true partner and a true revenue driver that they are. So by putting all of your data in HubSpot and keeping everything in the same space, it is really easy to create a workflow that flags for the sales team. Hey, this customer is doing really well. They're about six months out from their renewal. Let's start talking to them about an upgrade so that we're ready for that conversation rather than scrambling at the last minute when a customer says, hey, we're ready to renew our contract and it's maybe two weeks before. And they say also, by the way, like, do you guys have any other plans? Like, we love your company so much. Like that is something that the sales rep could have been working towards and building a relationship with them over the six months planning in partnership with the csm. And it's the same on the marketing side. I think for marketers, there's two big benefits of, of sharing that data with customer success teams is one is not marketing to your least happy customers. I think that your marketing message really needs to change based off of when you're talking to people who love your product and when people who are maybe not so happy that they've been locked into this contract, you want to send really targeted messaging to those customers, potentially some form of re engagement campaign, but at a bare minimum, you just want to acknowledge where they are and make sure that you're not sending them this overly excited promotional content because again, as a customer, that just makes them feel like you're not listening to them. And if you're not listening to them, how can you provide them a positive customer experience? Why should they continue to trust you with their business? On the flip side, marketers care very, very deeply about generating social proof. Excellent case studies. And we all know how hard that is to find a customer who's a good fit for the kinds of businesses that you want to market to or focus on who loves your products and customer success. They know who those customers are. And so by again, putting all of this information on HubSpot, you can make it really easy for the marketing team to just know whenever they need a case study. All right, here's a list of customers who meet this criteria. Because the CS team is logging that in HubSpot, they're tracking house scores. You can see people who have been really happy for a very long time who are right within your demographic. So that's the benefit for the marketing and sales side of the house and for customer success leaders. The reason that it benefits them is it's a better customer experience. When your entire team has the same data, they're not stepping on your toes by accident and sending a really happy message to an unhappy customer. It makes your job easier, it makes the customer feel heard. It makes the customer feel more attached to your company and that they're getting a much better customer experience without your team having to really change anything.

Yeah, I love this idea of that. It's all about the experience and what people are feeling and going through and paying attention to that. And so many good pieces there. It's interesting you kind of bumped into workflows like you could create this workflow. I do want to talk about the two big A's in the room right now, automation and AI. And so Colette, what roles do you feel automation and AI play in scaling customer success? And how can businesses leverage these tools to improve their post sale processes?

So I'll start with automation and then we can jump into everyone's favorite AI. So I think automation, particularly in the context of HubSpot, is great for, like I was talking about earlier, sharing information across teams, making sure that information from one siloed team gets to another team. And you kind of don't have those silos anymore because you have these automatic forms of collaboration again without your team having to change anything or make any differences in their workflow. The other piece of automation is the ability to scale processes and have them running in the background and monitoring your business. So like I was talking about earlier at HubSpot, we are hopefully this will be your sneak peek. We're going to have some workflow templates that will make this easier for everyone to just build out of the box before the end of the year. Using automation to, like I said, create those lists of your really unhappy customers so that again, marketing doesn't have to double check with sales or customer success every single time they want to send out a marketing email, they just know who it is. And you can use a workflow to look for customers who have a health score below a certain number or whose NPS sentiment is low or even where the CSM sentiment is low, because that's something that you can track in HubSpot as well, is the CSM is saying, listen, this customer is not that happy with us and you can have a workflow automatically add that customer to the list. Same with the use case. You can have someone where all of those things are really positive automatically get added to that list. Those lists can then send notifications to teams inside of HubSpot. They can send them an email, they can send them in Slack. And again, all of this is just working in the background. I think using automation as a way to scale your team and monitor things in the Background are the two key places for it, especially helping navigate HubSpot and move things from the customer success workspace to the sales workspace, automatically creating leads, all of that fun stuff. In terms of AI, I think one of the big things that we found when we were first talking to customers and doing our very initial customer discovery for going into the customer success space was that customer success teams in particular really want to make sure that they're owning that relationship with that customer. So they are, I'm not going to say skeptical of AI, but they're very mindful about how they want it to be used. So one of the big pieces of feedback that we got when we were thinking about building out the health score product that we have now, our customers were very clear with us. They did not want an AI generated health score right now. They're not opposed to it in the future, and they're not opposed to having two scores, a HubSpot AI score and then one that they've manually created. But they did not want to start with AI because they want to understand what the score is. They want to be able to customize it to their business. And it's the same thing for the customer experience. So a lot of our customers don't want AI to let's say automatically reach out to customers or automatically send them a message, but they're okay with having AI make recommendations. So some places that we would love to be able to use AI in the future, and I'm not making any promises, but these are all things that we're thinking about is using AI to make to give you feedback on your health score and say, okay, you've created this health score for yourself. And then we'll use our system to kind of see how good is your health score. How many of your customers, unhappy customers are actually unhappy in churn, how many of your happy customers actually stay and then giving you feedback on changes that you can make to waiting to different inputs. Same thing with making recommendations about who you might want to reach out to or the kinds of message that messages that you might want to send to them. I think we're really focused on using AI to make it really easy, but still leaving customer success managers as that, that last checkpoint before actually interacting with the customer. The other thing that we're seeing is AI is great at summarization and people are very happy that with some AI summarization tools. So we're looking at how to do a lot of that, making it really easy for a CSM who's maybe transferring over and taking an account for the first time to get a sense of who is this account, what is their business with HubSpot, how often have they engaged with us, what do they like to engage? These are all things that we want to be able to give to our customers. Identifying key contacts, people you talk to most frequently. Those are some other really great use cases for AI.

Yeah, I can't wait for some of those possible future things to become the present. But we'll see how that all works out. And it's fun because automation and AI, you can do a lot. But I love that there's this. Well, we're not sure we want this much yet, so that's, that's beautiful. One of the things that I love too about your inbound talk is you threw out some stats. One of them was about 35%. You highlighted that 35% of CX leaders have fully integrated data with the tools they use. And so the question that comes to my mind is how can companies close this gap and unlock the potential of unified data for better customer experiences? Because it does come down to you've got the data which leads the insights and you can take action. So how do we close the gap on having unified data. For the folks watching this, the easiest.

Answer is to move everybody onto HubSpot, put everything in one place. You're not worrying about reconciling different IDs from different data sources and figuring out like is this measuring the same thing from the same time? So that's my short answer is move everything onto HubSpot. HubSpot is actually the only system that's offering both success, customer success and customer support with their CRM today natively. So we're really excited about that. The other thing is having a really strong operations team. And I think even if you did put everybody on a HubSpot, if you have a big organization and you're expecting your CSMs to manage a larger book of business, let's say somewhere north of 75 accounts per CSM, you want to have a really strong operations team. It doesn't need to be a large team, but you need one or two people at least who are thinking really thoughtfully about what's the data model of how I want to set up HubSpot, how I want to represent my business in HubSpot, what information do I want? My system is paying attention, attention to someone checking in and making sure every quarter, every couple of months that like all of these metrics still make sense, that our data that we're getting still makes sense. Because at the end of the day you're still, even if you move all of your front facing teams on HubSpot, you're still going to have some level of integration with whether that's to a back office team or an ERP or something like that. So you need someone thinking about these things and HubSpot itself has grown and we're pretty complex now. So you want a really thoughtful full rev ops or HubSpot admin. And if you don't have everybody on HubSpot then that revenue operations team and that HubSpot admin becomes even more important to kind of manage those integrations and make sure that that data flow is coming in and going out of HubSpot really thoughtfully and carefully.

Yeah, I love this idea of HubSpot's growing up and it's become complex. Not complex in like a difficult way, but complex and the things that you can achieve with it. If you're watching this and it's been a while since you've used HubSpot or the service hub, I would suggest that you check it out again because the HubSpot that once was is not the HubSpot of today. And Colette, you are. You also Brought this other stat that I wanted to dig into and it almost leans into giving you the ability to talk again about like everybody being on the same platform. Because the stat was around how HubSpot customers with service hub integrated with marketing and sales hubs see a 67% increase in deals closed. My question to you is what do you think is driving this synergy to see an uptick in deals closed when they're all combined together?

I think it's really what I was talking about earlier. Having all of your go to market teams, all of your customer facing teams working off of that same same source of truth for the customer means that people aren't stepping on each other's toes. It's much easier to collaborate and flag either a positive or a risk for another customer facing team so that they can take action really, really quickly. Those are the two big things, is people aren't going to be stepping on each other's toes. It's really easy to share information inside of HubSpot and I think that sharing information inside of HubSpot also makes it easier to collaborate outside of HubSpot because you're building that relationship up. You can see how that person is interacting with the customer that you kind of care about and it's building that rapport. Even just by working off of the same system and the same data. There's just going to be less tension when you're not so not so sure. Hey, did that sales rep ever reach out to the customer like I asked them to or the sales rep asking the same thing for the csm? Now they don't have to have those questions and follow ups becomes a little bit less micromanaging and just a lot easier. The team doesn't have to think about it. They don't have to think about that collaboration element which is a huge mental drain when you have to constantly remember to follow up with someone to make sure they did the thing they said they were going to do. And people don't enjoy being followed up on that way. It's not that fun.

Yeah, that's not fun at all. You know what is fun though? Being able to dip back into the conversation of HubSpot that once was isn't the HubSpot of today. I want to talk about the customer success workspace and can you maybe walk us through how the customer Success workspace in HubSpot will help CS teams manage accounts, track metrics and ultimately improve retention just by having this dedicated space?

Yeah. So what we did with the initial round of the customer success workspace is tried to bring in all of the other places that we were seeing CSMs go and have to bounce around HubSpot. They were going to the CRM, they were going into reports and dashboards, people were going into pipelines. And it wasn't just one object pipeline. They were going into deal pipelines and ticket pipelines and custom object pipelines. People were bouncing all over the place and it was really hard to have just one place to get an overview of where their book of business is at. And that's what the Customer success Workspace aims to provide. It brings together all the tools in HubSpot that you're already using. It makes them easier to see and it pre filters everything down to just your book of business so you get a really good sense of where every customer is at, how many customers are in the different stages of the pipeline. You can also see things like upcoming tasks, your calendar, you can see your reports. So the workspace is about helping CSMs decide, like, who needs my attention today, who needs my attention this week? What parts of my book of business do I need to focus on? We have a lot of really exciting Updates coming in 2025 that will help make the workspace even more actionable than it is today.

I'll see that little tease right there. Just keeping people wondering what's happening next. Let's talk about what hopefully is happening now. I want to dip into the world of best practices. Yeah. And so what best practices would you recommend for running a customer success program within HubSpot to make sure teams are always working towards that retention and growth conversation we're having today?

I think the big one is aligning on the data model and then sticking with it. So deciding what objects you want to use to represent what inside of HubSpot. HubSpot recently released something really exciting in beta right now called the Object Library is available to all users. And this is a suite of new objects that are a little bit more customized than maybe the standard contact, company, deal and ticket. We've got objects that represent service delivery, appointments, courses, all kinds of different things. And we're going to be adding a bunch more objects over the course of 2025. And this is giving customers a lot more flexibility inside of HubSpot. So in terms of best practices, I would say choose the object that you want to represent your customer. Most people will be ending up with a contact or a company, depending on whether they're B2B or B2C. And then getting really clear over which teams own which objects or, or maybe the kind of the leader on that object. So maybe the sales team gets to dictate the structure of deals, but the CS team is the one that gets to dictate the structure and the custom properties that go on to the actual company object. And I think setting those boundaries and making it clear about who gets to have the final say when it comes to setting up your data model in different parts of HubSpot is really important because that way it means that teams know where to go, they know what they should be looking at. It makes your reports a lot cleaner trying to keep one object to represent one specific thing. So that's my first thing is getting really clear on your data model inside of HubSpot. The second one is don't be scared of custom properties. I see a lot of people trying to fit things into HubSpot's default properties, particularly with the tickets object and using objects and properties that like don't necessarily make sense for their business. So you build out the custom properties that work for you and make sense for you and represent your business. Because if your business is not inside of HubSpot in the language that your employees are familiar with, you're going to have a really, really hard time. Then after that I would go into workflows and figure out how you want information to flow back and forth between particularly your sales and your customer success team. That's the most important one. And then finally within the customer success space, get your health scores set up. If you are going to be running customer success in HubSpot, you have to be working off of health scores. This is a table stakes feature that all customer success platforms and solutions providers offer. And HubSpot has a really, really awesome new customer health score builder. So I implore everyone to take a look at that and use that to kind of help your CSMS prioritize. Book of business.

Yeah, I say yes to all of those things. I'll double click into the custom properties. The the magic secret sauce of wrapping HubSpot around your business, instead of feeling like you're cramming it into a SAS software, is customizing those properties to your needs. I want to kind of circle back around something that you kind of teased out earlier in this interview. You were talking about success teams being even revenue generating teams. And I for a long time said I wished marketers would learn how to sell and that sales folks would learn how to market. But I want to even go in this direction with you because I'd like to know what advice you would give to CX leaders who are being asked to take on this more kind of sales like responsibilities or sales like approach that we see happening in many businesses today. Like what advice would you give them on that?

Yeah, I think it's really tricky. I think for some customer success teams, they've always operated in that mindset of we're, we're also a sales team. And I think for other customer success teams, it actually feels really foreign to them. And they have always been in the position of I'm not selling you. That is part of my value is that I do not try to sell you anything new. And I would, I would make the argument that it's not so different. Um, because once the customer is in your account, the, the number one goal is to keep them as a customer and to keep them happy. That's, that's hands down the primary goal. That's the focus. Um, so you have to do that first. Once you're doing that well, and all customer success teams probably know how to do that pretty well at this point, then and only then does it become a conversation of like, how else could this customer grow? What are the areas that they continue to need help with that our company has other solutions. So in my mind it is really about matching up your company's offerings to your existing customers needs. And I think that if you're really struggling to do that and if your CS team is having a really hard time introducing other offerings to your customers, there's a couple of different reasons as to why that might be. One is your team just might not be comfortable asking those questions and you can work with them on that. But I think the other one is just maybe taking a look at the kinds of customers that you guys are bringing in and that your sales team is initially selling for the very first time. Are they actually a good fit for your business? Are they bringing customers who can actually grow? Or is the company kind of having people attached to really kind of niche value offerings or side benefits of your product? And they're not bringing people who are really going to focus on the core offering of the company in a way that they can grow with you over the course of their business growth as well as well. So I think that's the other thing is sometimes when CS teams have a really hard time shifting into a little bit of that sales mindset, it's because there's a mismatch between who you're selling to and who your customer base is and who maybe your customer base should be.

Oh yeah, there's a lot to think about right There. All right, I got two more questions for you as we land this plane. So one, we can't really have any conversation without talking about measuring or measurement or the metrics. And so in your experience, what metrics should customer success teams be tracking to ensure that they're driving both retention and expansion in their organizations?

Yeah, I think revenue retention is number one. That is what I hear from every single CS team across the business. Is revenue retention. The way that you want to do that might break down. You might want to look at net revenue retention or gross revenue retention slightly differently. Some people are, I don't really care. I just want to make sure that I'm retaining the same number of dollars and other companies are really focused on making sure that we're retaining the specific dollars that initially came in and then growing on top of that. But you guys know your business is best and can decide there. But revenue retention is absolutely number one. I think the next thing is probably some form of logo retention, if that is something that's important to your business. We see that pretty frequently as a focus on local retention and then also some kind of CSAT or nps. You want to see that NPS continuing to grow over time, continuing to expand into different parts of the business. Another one that has come up, actually it started to come up a lot more frequently is this idea of multi threadedness. So making sure that your CSMs and anybody who's customer facing at your account, that your customer facing team has multiple contacts and multiple strong contacts at an account. So that, let's say if George goes ahead and gets a new job, that you haven't lost that at account and it doesn't just all of a sudden drop into a huge risk point. So making sure that you have multiple champions. And like I said, the term a lot of people are using is multi threadedness. Multiple champions across multiple departments, even if that's just the finance or procurement department and then whoever, whichever team you're directly serving, you want to make sure that you have allies across the business and that those relationships are not just surface level.

It's so interesting. I actually heard exactly what you're talking about in a meeting I had last week where this was like an important piece for people to have dual connections, basically because of the exact example that you shared. All right, last question. I've been using HubSpot for 12 years, since 2012, but I always like to reflect on what if it was my first day. And so the last question I'll ask you is if a company is new to using customer success tools within HubSpot, where should they start to get the most immediate impact on retention?

Health scores, yeah, it's got to be health scores. That's going to be your best bet. Health scores also gives you a good sense of what's inside of HubSpot. That's one of the things that I love about it is basically any Data inside of HubSpot can be included in a health score. So as you go ahead and look through all of your options of things to potentially include in a health score, you'll get a really good sense of oh, I can track this with HubSpot. Oh, I didn't know I could track this with HubSpot. And then you can go ahead and make sure that that's all set up properly and your team is using the different tools the way that they that you want them to.

Very cool. Colette. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. It's clear that the landscape of customer success is evolving and HubSpot's tools are the forefront of helping businesses retain and grow their customer base. If people want to reach out with your connect, have questions, where do you want to send them?

Please connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm going to be posting a ton about all the new customer success updates that we've got and I will regularly reach out to people over dm. So if you want to talk more specifically or even potentially meet with me, we can chat there too.

Love that so much and love that HubSpot is so focused on listening to the customers and what they want. Hey, by the way, for our listeners and viewers, if you're looking to boost your retention and improve your post sales processes, which you probably should be focused on, now is the perfect time to explore the new features in HubSpot Service Hub. As always, you can connect with Colette and the HubSpot team to learn more about these powerful tools. If you're looking to boost your retention and improve your post sales processes which you pose and of course as you journey back to your regularly scheduled day, don't forget to be a happy probably should be focused on now is the perfect time to explore the new features in HubSpot Service Hub. As always, you can connect with Colette and the HubSpot team to learn more about these powerful tools. Helpful, humble, human and do some happy hubspotting along the way.