Massive HubSpot Payments Overview Interview with Jack Coopersmith & Michael Vittum

All right, ladies and gentlemen, Hub Ed Helper community, it's your boy, George B. Thomas. And we're back with another interview, and this one is a double dose of awesome because we're not only talking to one guest, we're talking to two. Let's go ahead and get into the good stuff. Jack, just to get us going, why don't you explain to the hubbed helper listeners who you are, what you do and where you do it.

Hey, everybody. George, thank you for having me here today. So my name is Jack Cooper Smith. I am based in Boston, Massachusetts. Usually it's beautiful this time of year here, but it is quite hot this summer. It's been a pretty hot run. I'm on the go to market side of HubSpot payments. So I do sit in the product organization. And essentially I'm the layer between the rest of the product organization and all of HubSpot and the market and all of our partners and other folks like George as well. So I have a pretty interesting role where I work with product, but I'm also very much chatting with customers and in the trenches working with folks on HubSpot payments.

It's hot in Boston. It's about to get hot up in here too. As we talk about HubSpot payments, Mike, why don't you explain to the viewers, the listeners, who you are, what you do, and of course, they probably will figure out where you do it.

Yeah, totally. Mike Fittum. I'm in Boston as well. Steamy Boston. We only get this four times, you know, four months out of the year, though. So we'll, we'll take it on the same team as Jack doing the go to market for HubSpot payments. And, you know, Jack sort of summarized it for us, but I think, you know, we're the voice of the customer and we make sure that that's relayed back to product and it's reflected in our roadmap and what we do.

There we go. And now you understand why I said we're gonna have a double dose of awesome because we're just gonna get all the information that you need to know as a HubSpot user around HubSpot payments. So, Mike and Jack, if you had 10 to 15 floors, and let's say this is somewhat of a modern elevator, so it's not like one of those where you're like pulling the rope and you got all day to talk to somebody, how would you explain what in the world is HubSpot payments?

For me, it's a quick and easy way to Collect payments integrated into the HubSpot system, you get all the power of hu behind your revenue collection. So we're simplifying commerce, we're bringing it all into one system and we're making it easy to collect money and get paid fast.

I'd add the payments can be scary, but this is ultimately just the movement of money between a buyer and a merchant. And we're doing it the HubSpot way. We're crafting this, not cobbling it. And our whole vision is bringing commerce and CRM together. We're simply building objects with the rest of the power of the HubSpot framework.

You heard it ladies and gentlemen, crafted, not cobbled. And if it's HubSpot, you know it is in the human way. So if I'm a business own, I'm sitting here, I'm learning about HubSpot payments and we'll get into all the crazy cool ways that we might be able to use that inside of our ecosystem. But I like to address the problems in the room. So what problem or problems does HubSpot payments solve for the end user?

Right now commerce and CRM are completely separate efforts. So on the commerce side you have your accounting team and they're kind of siloed in the corner and then you have the rest of your go to market teams. And because of that, that leads to inefficiencies, that leads to larger tech stacks than they to be. And so our entire vision is bringing those together to both whittle down tech stacks and break down the wall between the front office and the back office. Earlier on, about a couple years ago, when we launched our CRM and our sales tools and our service tools, we broke down the silos between those front office teams. Now we're going after that front office and back office silo.

Yeah, I mean simplifying the, you know, the amount of tools that you have to use. I mean I want to say we've done some research and you know, the average number of tools that is used in the commerce process is like five or six. So we want to reduce that to one and have that all through HubSpot, maybe two, maybe have your accounting system as well be in the back office as well. So simplifying number of tools and making that process more streamlined.

So one of the things that we like to do on these interviews is figure out who the heck is a right fit because there's a lot of, you know, E Comm solutions, stripe square, all of that. So when you think about who's a good fit and potentially maybe who isn't a good fit for HubSpot payments. What type of conversation do you want to unpack, though, there?

I'd say that when it comes to who's the best fit for us, ultimately a lot of the best fit for HubSpot in general are great fits for HubSpot payments. So Pro services companies, generally companies with fewer than 50 employees, more or less, and folks who are also interested in selling online and taking their products or services to market in a different way. So while yes, we do have a lot of, like, pro services companies as an example, using HubSpot payments, we also have people selling things like sewing machines for quilts using HubSpot payments as well. So anyone who is thinking about selling their products or services online in a new, more lightweight, more modern way, it's a great fit for HubSpot payments.

And I'll just add in there too, anybody who has, you know, a quote to cash process that has multiple tools that has, you know, a lot of things that they need to check off and do HubSpot payments is easy. It simplifies it. You know, you can spin up a quote, you can customize quotes now in HubSpot, which is a great addition. We're pretty excited about add HubSpot payments, send it out and get paid. Selling online and quotes of cash, two great, great ways to use HubSpot payments.

And I love jack that you mentioned, if you're thinking about selling online, I'm just going to add a caveat. If you're sitting there and you're not thinking about selling online, you might want to check yourself because, listen, it's not going backwards, it's going forwards. And consumers just want an easy way to get the button to get your product as long as it solves the problem that they're having. All right, moving on. If we can kind of think about when you get started with payments, there's this whole kind of Stripe HubSpot payment process that you have to go to. So can we unpack a little bit just for those people who might be Getting started? The HubSpot Payments and Stripe relationship.

So HubSpot Payments utilizes Stripe to process transactions. And the nice part about this is that you live inside the HubSpot ecosystem for everything you do in your commerce process. You build payment links, you build quotes, you track transactions. That's all done inside a HubSpot. And when the buyer hits checkout or they, when they hit purchase stripe, process the transaction, and that's it. The other thing that's nice too is that we have the power of Stripe security, right? So Stripe is PCI compliant, so all your transactions are secure and we don't have to worry about that. So you live your life inside a HubSpot. Stripe will process the transaction and we make it super simple.

I'd say this gives you the beauty and centricity and power of HubSpot along with the security and reliability of Stripe, which is really the top of the payments industry.

That was well said, my man. Well said. That might be a tweetable moment, listeners and viewers. We'll have to see if I can make a graphic and get that out or use it for some type of promotion for sure. Now here. Honestly, I'm a little bit selfish on some of these questions. This next question is one that I've been super excited to ask you gentlemen because over the last couple weeks I've seen this kind of like, bloop, oh, it's there.

Bloop.

Oh, it's there.

Bleep.

Oh, it's there. Oh my gosh. What is happening in HubSpot with HubSpot payments? So if we can just take some time to wax poetic on where are all the cool places that you can use HubSpot payments in your HubSpot Marketing Sales Service Operations, CMS. Like all the hubs, where's all the payments and all the hubs, like wax poetic on that for a bit.

George, I'll actually kind of give you a roundabout answer and tie back to a comment that you made a couple of minutes ago around selling online. We're definitely not going backwards. I think the pandemic obviously changed everything on that. We're not going to pre pandemic digital age and everyone has very, very high expectations in their own personal life as a consumer as to buy buying behavior online. I just purchased a new condo. I have so many boxes. They came early and they were really, really easy to purchase. Those expectations are generally thrown out the window though when you're buying on behalf of a business, that should not be the case. You are still a consumer even if you're buying on behalf of a business, not for yourself. And so our hope is that we can make these B2B online transactions as easy as the consumerization that we've seen during the pandemic. And that's only been accelerated. We don't think we're going back. So to that end, where do find HubSpot payments within HubSpot? Well, we want to meet people where they're already interacting and we want to, you know, help merchants meet their Buyers where they're already interacting them. So we're embedding payments throughout the entire HubSpot platform. You can see this in meetings. So go ahead and get paid before you even have that meeting thrown on your calendar. We see a lot of folks opening up completely new revenue streams with that functionality. Payments and forms allows for you to collect a lot of information and get paid from right there. You'll see payments in our CMS right now. You'll see payments in our marketing email tool as so payments is going to be proliferating throughout the platform. Ultimately, payment links are also just hyperlinks like any other. So if you want to put them into a chatbot, if you want to put them into an automation flow, you can absolutely do that. We give you that flexibility to meet your buyers where you're already interacting with them and ideally remove as much friction around the buying process as possible.

And I would just add too, there's other tools that utilize payments in the sense, right? So you think about workflows, you think about reporting. So you know, inside of a workflow now I can process automation off of a transaction, off of a subscription. I can build reports to see, hey, what's our future revenue book? Like how many, you know, what payment links are bringing in the most revenue. So payments is throughout the HubSpot platform, whether there's a module to add a payment link or to utilize the payments data.

Yeah, so one of the things here in a second, by the way, gentlemen, I do want to go off the beaten path because I started to think somebody actually might be researching HubSpot. They might not have HubSpot, but they're watching this interview because they want to know about payments. But one of the things that was mind blowing to me and I immediately was like, where's the knowledge article? Where's the video? Oh my God, I need to know how to do this. And that is HubSpot payments and the QuickBooks integration and how that's actually mapping together now.

Yep.

You can Google search that after you watch this interview and you can figure out how that will impact your business as well. Now the kind of going sideways question that I have is what level of HubSpot do I have to purchase? Is it in free? Like if I I'm sitting here, right? You like, hey, oh my gosh, I could get HubSpot do consulting for this thing I love on like baseball cards or like Marvel movies and people could pay me in a meetings link. But what, how much is that going to cost me? So talk us through like where does it show up? When can you get access to payments?

Yeah, HubSpot payments is available in any starter plus hub. So you could spin up Sales Starter today and be able to add a payment link right away to, to your meeting. So yeah, it's, it's throughout the platform. So if you have Sales Starter but you had marketing free, you can still use HubSpot payments. Super simple. So, you know, we, we were trying to target, you know, each of the levels there. You know, Starter seems to use, you know, the tool a little bit more like a Rolodex, a little bit more of like here's a collection of my contacts and companies. Hey, spin up a payment link, send it out to them real quick pro, maybe get into more of the quotes of cash process. Same with Enterprise. So yeah, as long as you're a starter plus you can use HubSpot payments.

We've tried to put as few barriers around adoption as possible and make it the pricing as simple as possible as well. So if you have a paid HubSpot subscription, you can use HubSpot payments and it doesn't cost you anything. Extra fees only apply when a buyer actually clicks on that pay button.

We're making it easier to find too. We're trying to add more discovery points in there. So as you're, if you're a free customer and you're going through HubSpot, you're going to see more areas to go and apply and check out payments.

What an amazing world we live in where you can buy a starter package of HubSpot, start generating revenue for your dream business that you're moving into. It really is enabling people to be who they want to be in the future. God, I love HubSpot. Okay, with all of those great places that we can find HubSpot payments and I know fully understand asking this question each of you and if we line seven other people up might answer this question differently. But with all those cool ways to use HubSpot payments, have you seen a best place air quotes to get started with HubSpot payments?

I'd say payment links are the best place to get started with HubSpot payments. That is really the Swiss army knife of HubSpot payments. It takes about 90 seconds to spin up, maybe two minutes. If you're really taking your time, you can distribute them absolutely anywhere that you can put a hyperlink. It is lightweight, it is super easy, it offers a great buyer experience and it makes the merchant's life nice and easy as well. So I'd say that is the best Front door. Now of course, if you're already running a typical quote to cash process process, the connection between payments and quotes could not be easier simply as that checkout button that you click, you pay and that's that you don't have to wait for USPS to deliver that paper check anymore. So payment links is going to be that front door. It is extremely easy to spin up and you can get paid very quickly.

I'd agree. Payment links are the way to go. I mean it's always exciting for me when I talk to customers that like payment links are like a light bulb moment. You know, you show them and they're like, wait a second, this is super quick and super fast. So yeah, I'd agree. Payment links is the, is the way to start with HubSpot payments. Get your transaction data in HubSpot and then start to see what the power of HubSpot can do with all that data.

One of the things I like to do on these interviews is almost paint the journey to the mountaintop. What is the mountaintop? What does success look like? So you know, think case study almost. In this case, if we were talking marketing terms or business terms. So what does success look like once you've injected the HubSpot payment system into your company?

Growing revenue. I mean we've seen it. It's interesting. We had a case study. We just lost it's International Car Wash associ. Check it out, it's on our website. We just went live with it this week. And by implementing HubSpot payments they've grown their revenue 4x which is amazing. So, and that's just. No, not, that's not just one isolated story. We have other customers as well. We talk about payments who have seen how much time they've saved and how much more money they've made just by launching new revenue streams do through payment links and then also streamlining their quote to cash process. So to me it's, it's how much time you can save and how quickly you can make money using HubSpot payments.

I'll tie that back to the flywheel in a lot of ways because if we kind of anchor that back, what makes flywheel spin faster? Well, you either add force or you remove friction. And the way that we're building these tools here is we are focusing on that like online selling route. And so payment links, B2B E commerce, that is very much heading force to your flywheel because you can open up completely new revenue streams that you're currently not thinking about or not tapping and Then on the removing friction side of things, if you go from using five tools to close a deal to one or two, if you can break down those data silos, if you can actually use automation and reporting to drive your business forward and inform decisions after that, then that opens up a lot of potential too. So we're looking to still remove friction and add force as much as possible.

I love that so much. Being able to simplify the complex and measure the success metrics with ease. Come on, let's go. All right, so final. Well, not final question, because in a minute I'm going to give you like if you want to send people somewhere and if they want to connect with you, if they want to buy you a steak dinner at inbound. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know.

Maybe they should be doing that, right?

Yeah, we should do that. We should do that. Here's the thing, after that, this question here, I'll ask that one. But what are some words of wisdom that you would like to leave the audience as they kind of move forward in their day? They're thinking about, you know, using HubSpot. HubSpot swap payments. Hey, you should definitely think about this.

Yeah. So I'd encourage folks to think about how they take their products and services to market in this new decade, in this new century. In a lot of ways, finance and like payments, accounting, change is kind of scary on that front. It's money. I'm the first one to admit it. But it also does not have to be that hard. You can build it the HubSpot way and have it be nice and easy and easy to adopt and ultimately make people's lives easier is what we're looking for. So consider change. Be open to change. Embrace new. Go to markets for your model and grow and embrace the technological change that we find ourselves living through.

This is why Jack and I are on the same team thinking the same way. And what I'll add on to that is prioritize it. I think there are times where businesses look at their commerce process and they say, hey, it's work. We're getting paid. You know, we're not going to put time and money into this. There's an easier way to do things. There's a better way to do things. Take the time. Work with your accounting back office folks. Find out what their day to day looks like and how you can make their life easier. Talk to your Flywheel team, see how you can make their day in life easier and take the time to prioritize it.

Love it. So Good. Mike, if people want to reach out, if they have questions, connect on social, learn more about payments, where you want to send them.

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, so please connect with me there and I encourage everybody you go, go to the HubSpot website, check out the payments fe page. George, I don't know if we can pass that along to you. If that's a link, that's something you can share with everybody. And then if you're in your HubSpot portal, go to sales and payments that will take you to the zero state page, you can enroll. And if you already are enrolled in HubSpot Payments, start spending a payment link and get started.

Jack, if people have questions, want to connect with you, what do you want to send them?

Absolutely love to connect with anyone and everyone on LinkedIn, so please send me that invite. I'd love to chat. You'll also see me on the HubSpot community. I'd love to see you folks on the HubSpot community throwing out new ideas for us, asking us questions. So I'd love to take the conversation there as well. So look for me on the HubSpot community, feel free to tag me in absolutely whenever as well.

And hub helpers, you know, any links that Micah Jack sent to me are going to be in the description below. So yes, we're going to make it easy peasy for you to use HubSpot payments. Now, what should you do next? Well, you should get the team together, you should have a conversation, maybe play this video if you've been watching it alone, and make a decision how to streamline your process, reimagine the way that you're going to generate revenue, and of course, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And we'll see you in the next interview.