Listening Session with Jon Dick

Hey everybody. So good to see where everybody is from around the world. What a great community. Hey Kyle, do you remember back like 4 years ago when we were debating whether we should even like have admins for HubSpot?

I do remember that.

Kyle was like, we definitely need admin programming. The admins are the key. And I was like, admins? I don't know. That feels really salesforce. Well, fast forward a couple of years. Kyle was right. Which is not surprising because Kyle is mostly right. And I will note that because it is performance review season here at HubSpot. Kyle, John, I appreciate that but yeah, it's amazing to see the size of this community. I, of course, well, let me just tell you all a little bit about myself and then, and the next comment I was going to make will make more sense. But I am a long time, kind of a lifelong marketer, longtime HubSpotter and a more recent customer success leader. So I joined the HubSpot customer success team one year ago after eight years running a whole bunch of the marketing at HubSpot, all of our digital marketing and demand gen. So I like to think on a lot of dimensions when I talk to our customers. I've been in their shoes. Obviously the HubSpot marketing team scales entirely on HubSpot's marketing hub. So, you know, we are power users too. But you know, as a marketer who looked at, you know, things through kind of like a product marketing lens, the value of the admin wasn't as clear to me now that I am working with customers on a daily basis. Thank you all. Thank you all for all you do. I'm so glad that this community exists and that so many of you have committed to wanting to make HubSpot great for your organizations. It is so freaking important. So I just thought we'd just start out there with a little mea culpa. I was wrong about that. Kyle, you were on it. Thanks for pushing through anyway.

That's funny. I, I, I started posting just little tips and tricks on LinkedIn like I do. I started connecting with all these people who are like, yeah, I'm an admin. Like, yeah, but what's, what's your job like? No, I, my job is I'm an admin. I was like, did I would ask people at HubSpot did you know there are people whose full time job it is to be a HubSpot admin? And people at HubSpot would be like, no, there's no way that's true. Like, no, I think there's kind of A lot of them, yeah.

It's the orange bubble effect. Sometimes you're just in the orange bubble and you gotta talk to more, more customers. So. Awesome. Listen, I have a whole lot of topics. Kyle was basically like, these people know HubSpot deeply, care about HubSpot deeply. It's a great community to just get feedback from, talk, you know, talk to, ask questions to. So, as Kyle saw, I made a quite a lengthy prep doc of things that were on my mind, and I think we can kind of see how the conversation goes. I also would welcome, you know, 15 minutes or so at the end for Q and A. I would imagine this community might have questions for me or want to plant seeds with me, and I would welcome the opportunity to hear from you all directly. So, you know, thanks for. For inviting me and letting me learn today. I would say over the past year, as I've gotten to know more customers and of. Of been, you know, even more involved in the HubSpot strategy, and I've looked at the way the world is changing, there's kind of three big things that have come to mind to me that kind of, I think, will shape the future of customer experience. And the things that are driving these changes to customer experience in the future of customer experience are, of course, increased capabilities from AI and all the things that I think everybody would know. But my sense is there's kind of three big changes, and I want to start with those and get some feedback on them, reactions to them, help me shape them, help me be sure that I'm representing them right. The first is that I think in customer success and customer experience more broadly across the world, I think over the last few years, a lot of companies kind of made a mistake and had their customer success team focus mostly on being, for lack of better words, a worse sales team. The main thing that they wanted their customer success team to do was sell more software. And I get it. You know, it was tough times for a few years. It's still tough times for lots of businesses. But I think that was a mistake. And I think, like, one of the things that I really feel deeply is that the best way to drive future revenue from a customer is by helping them use the software and get value from the software. And it's caused me to just think a lot about, like, what is the role of customer success or customer experience team? And, you know, when we launched the flywheel back in 2018, the flywheel was attract, engage, and delight. And I think that I think delight's the wrong term. I think it's really about deliver. I think a better D word is probably delivering and deliver value rather than delight. Or maybe another way to say it is. I think the best way to delight customers is to deliver value. You could take either side of the coin. I'm not sure I'm going to convince Brian to change the flywheel graphic, but I've started my lobbying campaign now. And so I think that's kind of the first thing is just this real commitment to delivering value as kind of a cornerstone of what a great customer experience looks like. And I think a few years ago we might have thought that you could like delight your way out of it, right? And if you just like made the contract sticky enough and the platform like really hard to adopt, you know, and you threw some events, then people would just stick with you forever. And I think that's out the window now. And so I think that's kind of the first thing that I think is is changing in customer experience. So I think this kind of like delivers the new delight. I think the second thing that AI is really going to do is I think it is going to make speed a tremendous differentiator. If you think about probably the AI use case that most companies have had success with that I've seen anyway is support, customer support. I think the reasons for that by the way are there tends to be knowledge bases and AI can train on knowledge bases, etc. And it's a cost center in most organizations so people want to automate it. So there's kind of like a nice convergence there. But what's the real benefit to customers of using a support agent or a customer agent instead of talking to a human? I think it's actually about speed. I think it's about speed of resolution and I think that AI is going to really fundamentally change everything about what is considered fast. So I think that's the second big change and the third big change. And then we'll stop and we'll discuss and debate these Kyle, because I see the comments coming in is I think that the model of how to adopt software is maybe a little outdated. I think companies used to really obsess about one time adoption and setup. And I think that what we're learning from our customers is that they want ongoing help with adoption. It's not just a one off thing because if you look at HubSpot and how fast we're shipping product and even like when I look at your schedule of what you've got coming up here, so much of it is about like helping this community understand and be ready to adopt new parts of the software. And so I think there's kind of like the notion of onboarding, while still important, is really, I think increasingly going to be much more about what we might call like everboarding and having a continuous commitment to help customers continue to adopt. So those are kind of three big, like strategic shifts I see happening delivers the new delight. You know, time to value is everything and ever boarding over onboarding. So let me pause there. Kyle, thoughts? Reactions?

Yeah, I love that. I actually really, I've, I've heard as an insider the deliver versus delight thing and I've been, I've been pondering on that a lot. I would love for people to, to, to chime in on the chat for HubSpot specifically. Do you feel like we're delivering what we promised you? Do, do, do you get that? Do we delight you? I hope these sessions delight you. Right. I feel like I live in a land of delight. I just want to make you all happy and just be so excited that you get to be a part of HubSpot's community. Right. That's. I live in Delightland, but I really think if you're working with a csm, you want them delivering things to you. And I think, John, you made a really good call out. I've seen people on LinkedIn not necessarily talking about HubSpot, but just in general. Like when my CSM of whatever company reaches out to me to schedule a call, I just ignore that email because I know they're just trying to sell me something that's terrible. Right. That's really bad. So I, I see the chat scrolling, but I haven't been reading it. Are we. Looks like.

Well, it seems like some people are very delighted by you, Kyle. Good, good work on that.

Thanks. Everyone.

Seems like, seems like number one. Yeah. Michelle Roberts here. You kind of said it. Delight sounds too much like it's in the feelings, you know, whereas deliver is like, is a tangible thing. One of the questions I kind of had for this community is you really are like kind of the, the beachhead for your organizations, you know, into HubSpot adoption. How do you want to be able to communicate value? Like, what is missing from your ability to communicate value? And you know, there's some different dimensions of that. Like there's, you know, the ability to audit and understand how successfully you're using HubSpot. There's the ability to get more clear, like ROI. Like, in your opinion, what would help you better understand if you're getting the value from HubSpot that you would hope to get and importantly be able to communicate that to your organization.

Yeah, I love that question. I know a lot of these people are feel like solo HubSpot advocates. Right. They're the one person at their company who's like, no, we really need HubSpot, we need more of it. And please don't take my HubSpot away from me. It'd be interesting to know how we can enable you all to better have those conversations. I like what Kari said. I think we would be great if.

There was 60, 90 and 120 day.

Follow up after the six week onboarding.

Yep. So let's jump to the onboarding because it feels like there's a lot of comments in here around that. Yeah, I think one of the comments was, well, is like ongoing adoption just a path to more expansion? You know, I'll tell you what we see from our data on usage, which is that, you know, a lot of our customers are not even using what they currently own. They start out with kind of a very specific set of things they want to accomplish. And as you all know, HubSpot's way more robust than that. And so I would say like when we think about everboarding and getting really passionate about adoption, you know, beyond the initial purchase phase or the initial deployment phase, there's a couple drivers for it. One is the idea that we just want people to get the value out of what they're currently paying for. And we just feel like that's really fundamental. Especially as AI continues to disrupt software. We think value is a real differentiator. I think the other is just the rate at which we ship product. We get so much feedback that we ship at a really too rapid of a pace. And we have a really interesting debate at the exec team about that. Right. Because I'm like Andy and Andy runs our product org. I'm like, Andy, I'm like, you're shipping too much product. He's like, I'm sorry, what? Like, what do you mean? Of course like, you know. And I think we all agree, like we would rather HubSpot be shipping more product, but we know it's hard to keep up with and we know that we need to build more muscles to help customers adopt. I'm just going through the chat here. Yep. Yeah. So I think some of what you're all suggesting here is definitely what we are trying to experiment with this year. So one of the things we're trying to experiment is so you have an initial onboarding period, but like what's the follow up after that when are the right check in points. We also were experimenting with some different lengths of onboarding and saying, well like you know, maybe say you, you purchased 20 or 30 hours of onboarding support in your package. You know, maybe you don't get all of that in the first couple weeks. Like maybe you actually want to spread it out more and maybe you want to get more help at day 60 or 120 or 180 or whatever. So I think that's validating to see some of those, those points of feedback in here. Sam here says my CSM is a good escalation channel for product support. I'd love more high level monitoring for issues or contract changes that might affect us. And Sarah says I wish my CSM had been more like a partner as a mid sized business. Just kept trying to get me to adopt new features with no help on how very helpful and useful feedback there. One of the things that I did want to talk about a little bit is like of the human help that we have available. What are some of the different ways that you would hope to see us help you? And I can, I can share, you know, to Sam's point here, Sam, one of the things we're going to pilot this year and it's really, it's a pilot, we're going to test it and we are really envisioning it really for more complex customers. So I don't know quite where you fit in terms of your, your needs, but is is essentially a premium support option. I think we're going to try and do about 75 customers this year who would have access to a couple things that you don't get through normal support channels. So first of all we want our support to continue to be. I hope you all like our support team. I like our support team. I think they're, they're really great. I join a lot of calls and I, I watch them really work hard for customers. But I think that there's a couple things that are potentially missing to Sam's point. One is the idea that, you know, I could use more engagement on high level issues. And I think that, you know, in this premium support tier, the original design of it is essentially three things. The ability to have a name technical account manager so someone more technical who sticks with you and your account knows it better. A second piece of it is really elevated SLAs or faster SLAs for response time. A third piece of it is essentially elevated omnichannel support when you do have an issue. Who works on that and how quickly they work on it. I think that's one thing. Maybe Sam. You know, I don't know if that delivers on what you would have in mind, but I think it's something we definitely are trying to pilot.

One comment that stood out to me, Jessica says, I really wish we had an escalated support team. I have really hard, complicated questions sometimes and the support person can't help. This is in this community of HubSpot admins. I hear this a lot, like, hey, I called into support and I totally stumped them. Can you help me with this? And like, I am not nearly as smart at HubSpot as the average support rep. So the answer is always no, I can never help you with these really complicated questions. Yeah, but I think health SWAT is so robust and large now. There are people in this community who are doing incredibly advanced things and when they look around for someone who can help double check whether they've done it correctly or think through downstream implications, it's. It's very hard for them to find someone who is at their level.

Yeah, I, I hope that if we get. I hope that if we can get this premium support motion working for customers who have really complex issues, they would have more immediate access to somebody who could be a thought partner for them in solving it. But I do think you're right, Kyle. I do think like there are limits to the capacity of a single human brain and sometimes relying on the community can be more powerful in many cases. The support team obviously knows things and helps a lot of customers, but doesn't have the practical knowledge of saying, I've implemented this, I've tried this, here's all that. And so I do think Community Plus HubSpotters is a powerful combo.

Yeah. Yeah. And you all, I want to reemphasize that you 197 admins in the room here, you are each other's best support for a lot of these more advanced things. Because I tell people all the time I live in a world of HubSpot theory. I know where the buttons are, I can tell you how to click them and what is supposed to happen. But I've never carried real business stakes as I build a workflow that's a different thing to think through.

Yeah. Now the comment on premium support and partners in here. Yes, I think we are definitely envisioning that A lot of customers who work with partners, the reason we get excited about an offering like a premium support offering versus launching new HubSpot services is that I think new HubSpot services are more likely to be competitive with partners. And premium support is something that could be complementary to partners. Partners are probably going to want it. They are probably going to want it for their customers. They might even want it for their, for, for, you know, their business themselves. The initial pilot is going to be really just focused on customers. And so, you know, partners who are working with customers will have access to it. But I do think that comment is something that we're, we're definitely thinking. Thinking about. Okay.

I don't know if this is the same Sam who you were talking to before, but Sam Winsky says I will take any certification required to get escalated support access. I think that's a really interesting idea to marry HubSpot Academy credentials with. You now have access to the, this, the, the more advanced support team because we know you have done the, the legwork to have whatever basic. Not basic, but like foundational benchmark. I think that's, that's fascinating. You've turned it off and turned it back on again.

There it is. Yeah. I mean, Rick, your comment on shouldn't HubSpot be our support rather than suggesting other customers are our best support. I mean, I hope you understood the nuance of what I was trying to say there. I'm not sure you understood it the way I was trying to communicate it, which is that we're trying to build even more specialized support, more upmarket support, more complex support. But I think there are going to be situations where if you want practical advice on how to do something very specific from people who've done it and succeeded at it and have stretched the capabilities of the platform, community plays a great role in that. There's questions on premium support pricing in here. I mean, I'm not going to get into the whole go to market because it's totally pilot, but, yeah, I mean, it's something that customers will have to pay for. But we're piloting the different ways that that would exist. You know, if you're going to have a additional technical account manager fully assigned to your account and an elevated service, you know, there's, there's definitely a cost associated, but we are definitely innovating on that. What else in here? Let me see.

I see. Trixie says my company is nonprofit, so funding additional costs for support is not feasible. But I'm always willing to do more training. This is more for my benefit than John's. But if any of you have requests, gaps you perceive in HubSpot Academy's catalog, drop those in the chat or send them to me directly, I sit on HubSpot Academy. I'd be happy to send those to the appropriate people as requests from some of our best users.

Yep. All right. A lot of questions about the role of the CSM in here. It'd be interesting to talk to everybody about what role they would like to see a CSM play. I'll tell you how we are trying to shape it. We, as I said, I think historically in the world and at HubSpot, the role of the CSM has been quite blurred. It's unclear really what the role is. Should it focus more on helping customers with usage? Should it focus more on being part of the sales process? Should it just be a coordinator across a bunch of different resources? One of the things that we've done over the last year is try and rebuild that CSM role to really be focused on really usage and business value. You know, I think when some people hear business value they think like, oh, like McKinsey consultant, that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about understanding the business value somebody's getting from HubSpot. And of course to do that it's a bit of a hard, it's a bit of a hard transition to go through because we have to give reps all the tools that they need to be able to even understand how a customer is using the product and understand the value that they're getting out of it. I'd say we're probably 50 or 60% through the data and tooling journey to be able to get CSMs everything that they would need to be able to have the conversations that we envision here with our customers. We're continuing down that, that, that data path here. But yeah, I think that, you know, there are going to be a lot of cases I think where CSM can't answer the question for you and does end up bringing in somebody else, be IT support or a contract manager or somebody. But I think we really want our CSMs to be a strategic partner to our customers, to be able to say here's the biggest opportunities that we see, here's the value that I see you getting, etc. So interested in thoughts on that? All right. Boris says here I didn't really understand the role of CSM for questions, checking other best practices. For me, powerless influence, while their attitude is really great, their added value is questionable. Interesting. Boris would love a follow up there on what you would want to see for additional value. Or do you just feel like you're self serve enough that you don't, you don't really need that. I want to come back to a question from Chell here in a moment around support, but let's pause on that until we get through the CSM conversation a little bit more. Richard here says CSM should be strategic, focused on helping partners and their clients. Suggestions should be made. Yep. To learn. Yep. Yep. More adoption and use of HubSpot use. More stickiness. Yep. All right. Lucy's got a comment here. A lot of times the CSM goes behind the back of a partner. That's an interesting one to kind of break down here, I don't think. I think that implies to me, Lucy, that you believe there's some sort of malicious intent. Maybe a little bit. I don't know. I work with these CSMs most days. I'm not sure that is the intent there. I think what you might highlight, though, is that when a customer works with a partner, there's a bit of a tension between HubSpot identifying what we think a customer would need to use to retain better, which at this point we've got pretty robust data on, and what the partner is recommending.

Uh. Oh.

You know, one of the big things that we are going to be rolling out this year is we're going to take the same tooling that we've given CSMs to help them understand usage and usage opportunities and roll that out to partners so that we at least have the same data to talk about. The other thing we're doing with partners, which I think is really good, is we went through a process with our sales Org at HubSpot. I guess it was most of 2024. I guess it started in 2023. We called it Project Unity. And the idea was to really, you know, get really aligned around how we wanted partners to be involved in the sales process and what that engagement model looked like. We're doing the same thing now on the customer success side. It's called Project Harmony, and the idea is to get partners and CS get the engagement model right. You know, I think that quite often it's pretty unclear to our CSMs actually how they should be engaging with the partner who should be taking the lead. And I feel like the more we can give clarity to everybody on that, the better it would be.

Just hopping in here real quick. Liz asked, are we addressing the topics in the Q and A and yes, we will. We will come back around to those. Don't worry.

Okay, so Jeremy's never heard from a csm. I'll look into that. Jeremy, I got you. Let me screenshot that. That's interesting. I mean, our CSM model does, you know, I think you probably all know it does scale based upon, you know, the software adopted. And so, you know, a lot of our customers that are using HubSpot for more simple use cases don't. Don't have a name. CSA name, csm.

Yeah. Cheryl asks, how do we get a CSM question mark, question mark, question mark.

Well, I mean, everybody has access to customer success resources, and it just depends essentially whether you have a named CSM or not. And that does tend to scale with complexity of use cases adopted, which we think correlates well with how much help a customer needs in order to retain. So, you know, I think if you don't have a named CSM on your account, it is likely that you have a, you know, more simple use case potentially that you're using right now for HubSpot, which means you have kind of more on demand CSM help as opposed to named CSM help. So that's great. All right. Corey likes her csm. I like it. Someone who has a meeting scheduled. My CSM today. I agree with Boris. I'm ticking the box. But adding products after talk to sales. Understand? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So I think all of this leads me to believe that we should really continue to lean into training our CSMs with product expertise. I think is what I'm hearing here. And be sure that the partner engagement model is really good. And Jeanette. Yeah. That data is, is, is being rolled out to the partner community right now, which I think is always really great. Lucy. Yeah, I think, I think what we're going to do with Project Harmony should resolve that issue around CSMs talking to customers without partners if the partner is actively managing. I don't think we want that to happen. Yeah, Yep. Richard wants more. Richard wants more help from the csm, not just pointing them to resources. I think that is fair. Currently, our CSM is more research, finding information. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. So that's, that's definitely a theme that's coming up here. CSMs are really great at like pointing me to resources, not helping me really contextualize it and learn it. Okay, very helpful. That's kind of interesting. Cassandra. That's definitely not the intent of the csm. So the time. Yeah, I mean, I think, Chris, the nature of strategic conversations, I think it just varies a little bit. It's like, you know, the truth is, I don't think anybody can know your business better than you. And, you know, I don't think our intent would be that the CSM can know your business better than you or is, you know, amazing business strategy or business consultant. I think the thing we want our CSMs to be great at and there's a spectrum here depending on customer need, is basically to be really great at understanding how to use HubSpot to get value and then being really great at communicating that value to our customers and helping them contextualize that value. And, and I think, and I think that that is really the focus here. I think, you know, direct the focus seems to be CSMs focused on upsells. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. You know, one of the big changes we made to our CSM compensation in 24 is we removed any incentives for, for upsells. We focused them on, on usage and retention, which was, which is a little different. So we I think definitely hope that we continue to see that shift away from like I'm going to hop on this call as a CSM really just to upsell you and focus more on, on how to use the product better. Definitely what we're, what we're, what we're focused on building. Okay. I'd like to ask some questions about speed. What do you, I'd be interested in this community's opinion of what you think a fast implementation is in the year 2025. What do you think is, is fast? How would you answer that question? Two weeks. I like it. Jeremy. Three months, under a month. Yeah. I mean, Chad. Yeah, you're definitely right. Totally depends on size. Under a month. Depends. I think I, I was most interested on the, on the implementation side there. Depends on size. Two to four weeks. Two weeks under 20 miles, under 70. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's very interesting. I think it's just interesting to get this community's perspective on. Yeah. Where expectations are going in terms of speed and what people think. Yeah. What, what, what they would expect to see as, as fast. Yeah. Now listen, I think adoption is definitely something that can take longer. Getting people to actually adopt and use the software takes longer than, than potentially getting it set up in some cases. Change management. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Do you all think that, do you kind of agree that expectations on, on time to value, that on the speed to achieve time to value are going to come down? Is that something that, that you all think is going to change with AI or do you think that that kind of the expectations will stay the same there? Yeah, Darren thinks they'll come down. I think they'll come down. I'm pretty interested to see, you know, the big question. I think With a lot of AI is, I mean obviously like we're looking at like a future state world, right? And a lot of it hasn't materialized yet, but a lot of us, myself included, believe in it and there's just a question of, you know, how fast it will materialize and how much impact it will have. But my sense is that if you look across everything in the adoption journey for software, I think AI has the potential to shortcut lots of it. And you know, I think at HubSpot we're definitely thinking about that. I know we're encouraging our partners to think about it, but it feels like AI is going to be much better at managing unstructured data and being able to do things with unstructured data, which obviously helps with data migration. Going to help with user training. I think there's a lot of interesting stats about people who are using Gen AI to help personalize learning experiences, etc. So it'll be really interesting. I think it's one of the things I'm paying the most attention to is how that all of that will change and adapt over time.

It has scrolled away and I lost it. But one thing Chad said. Oh, there it is. I think setting the expectation properly is more important than anything. So we just, I, I think that's a really insightful thing to say that like I think with AI the possibility of going faster is certainly ever present. But I think when someone says yes sign on the line, sign me up for HubSpot. How long is this going to take? Giving them a reasonable expectation and then if we come in under that right better to under promise and over deliver whatever that saying is.

Yep, yep, very helpful. Flipping through the chat here out of curiosity, what is the, what is the top use case that you've seen your orgs or your clients adopt when it comes to AI description generation? Answering sport tickets Translations yeah translations is a cool one. Translations is really cool. Jenny I for writing customer mails assistance summarize the timeline. Ah Lisa, we gotta, we gotta solve that problem. Yep we gotta solve that problem. We don't we none of your data will will get put into any of the models so hopefully they, they change their mind on that meeting summaries yeah writing documentation is kind of interesting. It's pretty wide range actually it's not a concentrated set of responses. I definitely obviously like support is one again where I think there's very high product market fit right now you see it. I think our customer agent which is moving to GA pretty soon is getting better but you know I think that what I'm seeing particularly around like, meeting summaries, I've heard meeting summaries be brought up a lot. Meeting prep and meeting summaries as like kind of like a shoehorn, you know, use case for AI adoption with sales and success teams. So I think. Yeah, GA means. Sorry, GA means general availability. That the new version of the customer agent. I could be wrong about this, but I think the new agent of the customer. The new version of the customer agent, which is our support bot today, is in beta. I think. I think it's. I think it's an open beta, but I should. I should confirm that. I don't know if you know, Kyle.

Yeah, I don't know either.

Yeah, but, but I mean by ga, I think it's. It's going to move into GA pretty soon. The results have been pretty amazing. But yeah, I was just kind of interested. Awesome. To see how many people are using it for like in using Copilot in particular, I assume for like descriptions of lists and workflows, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that's really cool. Yeah, the translations is an interesting one. We're obviously looking at that as well. I see. Yep. You put that in here. And there is some nervousness about that because you kind of do need to be sure that nothing goes wrong there. It's good to have a human in the loop on that sort of stuff for sure. So good comments here. Very helpful one.

Just one note for you, John. I forget who it was. One of my friends here very wisely pointed out to me once that since AI can generate descriptions for workflows, if you find yourself in a portal with a whole bunch of workflows that you're trying to audit, you can just go have the AI generate descriptions and then you can read through. And instead of having to stare at all these workflows someone else built and trying to figure out what they do, you have this really great starting point for portal cleanup. And I think that sort of like we designed this to do one thing, but that actually opens up these other possibilities. There's a lot of. A lot of those. I don't know what you call them, network effects or something that AI is going to have.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I do think. I think AI is going to change a lot about how we interact with software. I think that's for sure. So it's pretty exciting. Okay. What we have probably 15 minutes. Do you want to go to Q a? I said 15 minutes for Q A. I've gotten A lot out of this. Thank you all.

Yeah, yeah. So if everyone wants to jump over to the Q and A panel, look through the questions real quick. There's about 18 or 20 in here. Upvote your favorites. I'll give you. I was gonna say two minutes. That's such a wild exaggeration. I will give you like 15 seconds and then we will sort them and. And get through as many as we can in the time we have left.

All right, let me tackle this one right off. Caitlin's question about how HubSpot CSMs are using HubSpot. So things you know are or you may not know, but Most of the HubSpot go to market runs on HubSpot. We use HubSpot as our CRM. Our marketing team has always used Marketing Hub. Our sales team used to be on Salesforce and in 2019 moved to HubSpot and our support team moved to help desk this year in 24, it's not 24 anymore. And so that was a huge milestone. And the last piece of the go to market that isn't in HubSpot is our customer Success Manager team. They have access to HubSpot. They see and use the contact record, the company record, a whole bunch of things like that. But they have basically like, we've built our own version of the customer success workspace on top of HubSpot's APIs, but that's changing this year. We're moving the full team in there. So hopefully that answers your question. I think Service Hub today, I think it has pretty good. It has some good health scoring in it, Caitlin, But I think if you're trying to do something really sophisticated, you know, I think what the team is trying to build out right now with HubSpot customer success will help more. There also will just probably be places where you will need to say, you know, this is something that's mission critical to us enough that we want to, you know, build our own version and pipe it in. So there's a question here about changing your csm. If you're having a bad experience with your csm, you can always send me a note and I will work to get you a different CSM and understand it and get feedback to them. What else has been upvoted here?

So I just sorted it the top one with 15 upvotes. I really wish we had the ability to put reports into folders. We have 500 plus reports in our portal and keeping them organized is impossible. Folders exist already for workflows and lists. So not sure why reports doesn't have them. Do you know if this feature is on the roadmap at all? I'll just put a quick disclaimer here that John is not representing the product team, but John, any thoughts on folders for reports?

I have. I have. That sounds like something we really should do. I'll say that I've been on the side here taking little. Little screenshots. So now I'll send that over to the product team for sure. Yeah, that feels like good clean living.

Katarina also has a feature request sequences. Features Ideas detect out of office pause sequences until the person's back. Semantic variation makes system randomly rotate a word within a template. I think you'll see this a bit with the prospecting agent.

I do too.

As that comes to light.

Yep.

Chris says to make sales hub stickier for sales reps. This is what I hear from my team. They want to be able to run their email completely out of HubSpot, I. E. A personal inbox. When they have to go out of HubSpot to use Outlook, we lose them even when they have their inbox connected, slash web app, etc. Curious. Do you know the flow our own sales team uses, John? Are they just inside HubSpot all day long? Are they hopping between Gmail? I don't know.

I mean, so I think that. I don't know. It's a good question. I don't know. This is really interesting though. I will tell you, Chris, this is great feedback in terms of. I'll send this over to Michael Walton, who is our sales Hub gm, because I do think they're working a lot right now on how to think about the email workflow and especially the role of AI in it. So I think that's super valid. And I've got your name linked here. So if Michael wants to talk to you, I'll be sure that he. He reaches out there.

Everybody is definitely got a product bent here. Campaigns. If there are 100 marketing emails in a campaign, why can't we create a list of people who have clicked links in a specific number of those emails? We. I. Maybe I need to have a session like this with Andy or somebody.

I think you should. I mean, I think, you know, I've worked with Andy now for a really long time. He's our head of product.

He.

What's really so powerful about Andy is he isn't just a product leader. He started as. I think he started as an onboarding specialist at HubSpot and then he became a product marketer and then he joined our product team and he's really been instrumental in building a lot of it. You should have Andy in one of these. And you know Andy right now, he does lots of sessions internally. He calls them watch Andy use the product. And he invites the product team to watch him like use the product. And he gives real time feedback on it. I think like, honestly, he will have answers to all of these questions in a way that I certainly am not as capable of.

Yeah. And Andy's been at Hubs a lot longer than I have and I'm going to hit 10 years this year. He's. He's watched the product grow up, he's helped it grow up. So that's really good. Okay. Finally, not a product question Caitlin asks. Really curious to learn more about how HubSpot CSMs use help swap to support customers. We struggle to use Service Hub effectively to strategically assess customer engagement and health as well as plan for account success. So I don't know if that's the question you were responding to earlier.

I think I responded to that. Yep. Yep.

Okay. Maddie wants advanced conditional logic for properties. Katerina, talk about workflow enrollments. Liz, why aren't we connecting sequences to campaigns?

I don't know.

You could do that now. That's a new feature of the product. Go do it. Connect your sequences to campaigns. PTO for users who own records. Oh, so again, managing a sales or success team. I think that's also a feature request. How do we submit feature ideas to influence roadmap? Go to ideas.HubSpot.com Carrie, that. That is not just a dismissive product forum. The product teams are in there daily. And so many of the features you see coming out every day started as suggestions on our ideas forum. So ideas.HubSpot.com multiple customer agents organize campaigns within campaigns. Active list of HubSpot users.

You gotta get Andy in here.

Huh?

You just gotta get Andy in here.

All these, I think this, this thought about I would like to create an active list of HubSpot users is really interesting. It makes me think that some of these admins would actually like access to some of the tools their CSMs have to understand the health of their own portal and account and understand where they as admins need to follow up with folks.

Yeah, it actually was a question I had on my prep doc here that we didn't get to is. It's kind of like. It's a subset of like, how do you want to understand the value you're getting from HubSpot? And I did have a question just around like, how much do you want to be able to understand how your users are using HubSpot? Basically how your employees and teammates are using HubSpot. So that's validating.

There's just a lot of feature requests in here. I'm not going to keep peppering them with you because I recognize you have no power over the product itself. But admins, here we go.

Frank's got a question on the CSM evolution. How do I see the CSM role changing this year? Have you considered segmentation by specialty rather than just value to HubSpot? Yes and yes. I think, you know, we are Frank, In a, the second year of probably like two to three year swing around getting our CSMs the training tools and engagement models they need to be able to help our customers who are struggling to use the product use it better and to communicate the value of that a customer is getting out of HubSpot to that customer so that they can make better decisions about HubSpot. You know, in doing that it has caused us to think about all sorts of different segmentation models that we might move to today. Segmentation mostly happens on the amount that somebody spends with HubSpot, which I hope is not a surprise to anybody. But it's kind of the way that, you know, I think the market for a long time has looked at these challenges, but we've started to get much more sophisticated about understanding the type of help that customers need. Are they a customer that's really struggling still to adopt? They probably need to work with a CSM that has a different skill set than a customer who's really adopted the software and is seeing really good results out of it. In which case you probably need a CSM who's better at value. And of course then there's industry, which we think continues to be something that customers would get a lot of value out of. I'm actually kind of hopeful that AI is helpful with industry specialization and can kind of shortcut some of that over time. You know, it's hard for a company like HubSpot where our industry mix is so wide. You know, as a horizontal platform. You know, if you look at our industry concentration it's like there's a lot of industries and so it's hard to, you know, go all in on, on segmenting a rep team by industry. But you know, I think we're hopeful that that AI can help with that.

Just to validate that one request we get a lot here at the admin hug is can you help me connect with other HubSpot admins in my same industry and that is a thing Deanna and I are working hard to try to try to facilitate. Yeah, well, we are coming up on time here. John, you've mentioned a couple times people are welcome to reach out to you. What is your preferred method for them to do that?

You can always, you can always email me, john j o n HubSpot.com Whoa.

How about that first name?

Boom.

Fancy.

Yep, yep. Easy to remember though. Seriously, I love hearing from people. Send me your feedback, send me your thoughts. Except product requests.

Maybe not those.

No, I mean, I mean, listen, I will tell you this. You know, in my time in CS I've spent a lot more time partnering with our product org than I have partnering with our sales org. And again, actually I think great CS and sales alignment is like really critical to any business. But I think that for CS to really succeed, we need to really be able to represent what customers need in the product. And so I do a lot of partnership with Andy and we're really, really tight, so.

Well, John, thank you so much for coming over. Time in your schedule, hanging out with a couple hundred admins here. I will export out this chat and the Q and A.

Perfect.

Send those to you if you want to dig through them and share them with anyone internally. But I'm going to go ahead and call it here. Thanks so much again. Thank you all for joining. Have a great Tuesday.