Peter Sterkenburg INBOUND Talks: Leveraging HubSpot for Business Growth

Welcome back to another episode of Sidekick Strategies Expert interviews. That's right, the Inbound talks edition. I'm your boy, George B. Thomas from Sidekick Strategy. And today we're thrilled to be joined by none other than Peter Streckenberg, a revenue operations manager at Playo. Now, with over 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS, particularly in post sales roles, Peter has a wealth of knowledge about building efficient customer success teams and and overseeing commercial tech stacks. Currently, he's helping Danish fintech unicorn Playo streamline its marketing, sales, customer success and partnership operations. Now today we're going to go ahead and dive into the insights from his inbound talk, Seamless Success, How HubSpot evolved the post sales process where he shared tactical strategies on how businesses can unlock HubSpot's full potential beyond sales and and marketing. Peter, welcome to the show.

Thank you for that intro.

Absolutely, my pleasure. Without being able to intro you, it wouldn't be much of a show. But I do have a question for you right off the bat, not a hard one. How the heck are you doing post inbound?

I'm exhausted still. It was a 24 hour trip back home, so that was one. That's one thing. Skipped the night and all that. But I think I saw a great LinkedIn post about the post inbound hangover. It's like, how are we going to implement all of this? I think that's going to be the biggest one. I mean, I see three, six, nine months of work ahead of me easily just by looking at the few things I saw.

Yeah, inbound hangovers are a real thing and that's why we like to bring these interviews to folks because it can be a resurgent of something that they heard and they need help tactically getting it done. So we'll go ahead and get in to the good stuff. So you have a long background in customer success and operations. So how has the post sale process evolved in B2B SaaS during kind of your career? Talk us about like what it used to be, what was cool and like what we should be thinking about or doing now.

All right. I think, oh, there's lots of things to change. I think it was purely very reactive in the early days. It really was the support part of it, which is still a huge part of, let's say, the post sales process. But it's not only that anymore. And over time this thing called customer success evolved, which I think has its challenges, but I think it's a really great way of applying more business acumen to really help your Customers get further in what they're trying to achieve in their outcomes. I think it's a unique position to have one leg in both being the internal advocate like getting all your product features that actually support that customer and on the other side actually be that. I'm not sure I'm a huge fan of the word, but trusted advisor of your customers, as in you know how the tool works. You have a lot of other customers who are trying to achieve XYZ. Why not? Honestly, after 20 plus years in SaaS, everybody has the same problems, put different words on it, but in the end a lot of it is the same. So why not actually transfer that knowledge to others and help others be successful? Because in the end you have this one person across from you who is trying to do his or her job better and you're the person to help them do that. So that's what I love about that process, that it has evolved to really be that rather than fix the issue right in front of you.

Yeah, I love the golden nugget in there. The why wouldn't you transfer knowledge and help others around you be successful? That's probably like something you could implement in your organization right now. Now, Peter talked about an inbound this kind of concept of how HubSpot evolved the post sale process. And I'd love for you to take a few minutes and give us an overview of the key changes that you've seen at HubSpot that helped transform customer success operations into where it actually is today.

Lots of things actually, and I don't think it's necessarily just one one thing. So HubSpot always has had the flywheel where I think the last element there like the growth part has been lacking a little bit and I think there's been a lot of releases that have helped improve that part for me. Okay, first off, revenue growth is a team sport. That's it for me. That's it. That's why for me you need to be together working off the same environment, same database as in same database making sure that you actually know work off the same KPIs. KPIs. We can dig into specifics on that later. But for me things like these associated properties in CRM cards is a small thing, but it means that you can suddenly bring data to different places that you couldn't necessarily easily do before. Of course the customer success workspace love already what there is and I think especially when you're, if you're a high volume, let's say a lot of smaller customers, I think it's a perfect environment for that already to kind of work through that. And just in general, the whole CRM extensions, the UI customization that you can do, we've built a lot of really cool things already. Fortunately, I have some great colleagues who are really good at that stuff. I can't code to save my life, but I got some great guys in my team and we built some great things. Which means suddenly the customer success managers can very easily provide the right information for an AE to work on growth motions, to work on renewals, to work on all those kind of things, and to really show that the customer success team, who doesn't necessarily have a number depending on the company, but doesn't necessarily always have a number attached to their role, they can suddenly have a real impact on revenue and you can actually suddenly measure that much better. And I think there are a lot of these smaller and bigger releases that HubSpot has come with that have been really instrumental in creating that shared environment.

Yeah, I love that you mentioned shared environment. I want to double click too when you said transfer of knowledge and I probably want to triple click if that's even a thing into this, like being able to work together conversation. What are some of the biggest challenges you think companies face when trying to unify a post sales process with marketing and sales teams? Like if we can talk about the challenges and maybe how they could overcome those, where does your brain go?

I think the biggest challenge is who do you focus on? I mean, what kind of things do you measure on to help looking at that focus? So I think one of the biggest challenges any company has is that we're all very inward looking. As in we look at these like product KPIs, we look at how many tickets do they have, or even stuff like nps, which research has shown has zero impact on revenue. We're very much inward looking. Right. So we don't necessarily do a good job yet I think as a customer success field in translating that, what the customer wants into. How have we influenced the revenue growth by helping them achieve these outcomes? It's not an easy one. I don't claim I can solve it, but I think we need to look much more into what is it that they actually want and translate that to, for example, product KPIs. Just looking at product KPIs because you think they are important, because you think they're important doesn't make sense, right? So I remember in a previous role where a product analyst, data analyst, came to me and was like, hey, we can see that if Our customers, regardless of how much money they pay us, 5,000amonth or 50amonth, if they install the integration to a CRM, the probability of churn goes down with huge numbers. Okay, guys, any csm, any support person, whatever you want when you talk to customer and make sure that they do that because that helps that we need to know. Sure. What translates to success. We can of course, also the other way around say, okay, hey guys, if you install that integration, you can make sure that you have that data available in your CRM, which means you can do your job. X, Y, Z. So it's all about the translation to what makes a customer successful.

Yeah, I love that focusing on the human side of making customers successful. Another thing that was interesting and I like is you emphasized the importance of starting with onboarding in your inbound 2024 presentation. Peter, what makes onboarding such a critical point for customer retention?

It's the bridge. It's the bridge between the sales process and the retention. Because if you don't nail that, people will fall flat on the ground. Another one is the same data analyst. He also showed me and I'll never forget it. And I see it coming back again and again and again. Churn happens in your first three months, which means that if you don't nail your onboarding, make sure that they have step one to 10 in place, whether it's on a technical side, on a process side, sort of on a, on a general enablement side, they will you lose them. And it can be a simple tool, but it can be a complex tool. But you need to make sure that sort of the ground has been laid properly. And the only way to do it is to nail your onboarding process because that supports everything else that you do later. So if you're a small company, you're just starting off trying to get your customers to be successful. Start with your onboarding. The rest will follow, retention will follow. You'll work it out. But start with your onboarding.

Yeah, I love that you mentioned retention, especially around onboarding, but retention was a thing that you kind of talked about in your presentation as well, that you actually shared numbers around retention and personalized experiences. And so how does HubSpot CRM help service teams create a more personalized customer experience along that post process?

I think for me, a lot of it is also visualizing a lot of the data that you have in different ways. So just again, this is internally looking, but it helps you bring those things up to the surface, especially with all these different updates that have been happening lately. Translating that to how you help your customers is also making sure that you respond to them with the right context. So recently they came out with this update where you can load, let's say, your whole knowledge base as a learning for your agent, for your chatbot, for whatever it is, and you can actually now use that input as a background to responding to a help desk ticket. I mean, it's a small thing, but it's a huge difference. So I don't, as a rep, I don't have to go and look up in the knowledge base and look at, and copy paste it? No, I can actually get something right in front of me while I'm working. I don't need to. Cognitive overload is a big thing for any person. I also sit here with a big screen with a lot of tabs, but I'm used to it. But I can also understand that you don't want to get flustered, you don't want, you want to keep your focus. So anything we can do to help our reps, whatever that role is, to stick into one environment to get all the knowledge that they need to support that customer, that you win. It's that simple.

Yeah, I love winning. And I'm sure the people watching or listening to this love winning as well. It's, it's interesting because you kind of mentioned AI in that last answer. Just kind of dipped into it real quick. Let's just say there was a few AI talks at Inbound. But I'm curious with the topic that we're talking about today. Like AI is changing many aspects of customer service. How do you, Peter, see AI influencing the post sales process in kind of the next few years? Like, what is, what does your crystal ball have for us?

For me, I see the implementation of what last year's Inbound was talking about. Smart CRM. I see it happening step by step. So what do I mean with that? So I see all these different AI elements being released inside, inside HubSpot. Where I would like to go and where I see it going step by step is that you push a lot of data into it. You give it a certain framework to work off on. Like what makes for a successful customer, what makes for an unsuccessful customer and have the machine, so to say, tell me, hey, you might not have noticed this, but you should probably talk to that guy over there because they're having some pains that you didn't see. And that's where I can see that happening. So that rather than me having to create all kinds of workflows to tell, hey, George, here's a task for you. You should reach out to them because it's been 90 days since they're onboarding and you know, check in please. Never ever just check in. For the record, like I want to fire people just for that however, but where I want to go is make that much more fluid. And I see it going there. It's not there yet, but I see it going there. Have that fluidity and making sure that you put the right focus on the right customer based on the right data with the right information to make sure that they do the right actions to make them successful.

So good. In that last section you talked about like pushing data in like kind of, it took my brain to the data integration kind of question. And we've seen historically customer data integration seems to be a major pain point for many companies. So Peter, how can organizations better integrate their data to provide a more seamless customer experience as they move forward?

That's a, that's a dangerous one. It's been actually today it's been a big discussion because of course, you know, I can perfectly describe a beautiful framework for how AI can help distinguish the right customer to help. But if your data is dirty, doesn't really matter, right? I'm sure you, that's also where you were going with that question. I think a lot of it can be cleaned outside before even bringing in. And I think also, especially if you're not necessarily a big company yet, if you're starting off with HubSpot, start with basic information, just start adding on top of it. But I would say start from an early moment on already to keep it as clean as humanly possible because otherwise in a couple of years you're going to be spending a lot of time cleaning. That said, we're working on different ways to actually create cleaner data outside and only then bring it into HubSpot specifically for the sales reps. And I think there's a lot to do there both for sales and post sales to make sure that they have the right information to work from. It's a, it's an ongoing process and a never ending process. It's, that's the last part is very easy to forget.

Yeah. Data integration or clean data is always a journey. It's never a checklist that you're one and done for sure. So let's, let's back the bus up a little bit because I want to kind of address a question around those people who, well, they might just be getting started on building out what we're talking about. So Peter, what Advice would you give to customer success leaders who are just beginning to build out their post sales strategies?

All right, build a company view that makes sense to you. In our case, we work off the same view for everyone, but I think we can probably make a lot of changes there to make it more specific. What I love, for example, in the customer success workspace, I heard that it's coming, you can build a manager view, a rep view, which is fantastic as well because you don't necessarily always need to see the same thing. Right? But just very practical. Make sure that everybody's emails are in there, make sure that all the meetings are checked off, that they're booked, that they have the right outcomes attached, that every call has a mandatory like make sure that sort of these basics are in place to be able to track the input metrics. It will help you get to the output metric. Output metrics are super hard to measure anyway, except for the ultimate one, revenue. But start with having your input metrics sort of 100% worked out. That will make your life a lot easier. Just getting that set up in HubSpot will already bring you really far to get a feel for where Am I missing something?

I love that. And you mentioned revenue, which my mind immediately goes to the term rev ops, which I know you talked about in your presentation at Inbound 2024 and I want to kind of again double or triple click into a thing. I feel like we've been dancing around the entire time, but I want to dig deeper into it. So I'll just ask the question. How important is cross team collaboration? That's right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going there. Cross team collaboration between marketing, sales and customer success. Peter, when it comes to retaining customers.

Long term, I mean it's crucial. I mean every company works slightly differently, right? But in our case, the AES are also responsible for the actual renewal. But they can't do their job if the CSMs aren't doing their job. And the CSMs can't do their job if and for me, product falls under the revenue teams as well. If the product team doesn't deliver something that actually helps our customers, yeah, they might have built some cool graph or whatever it may be, but if it doesn't actually help somebody do their job, like it's just a cool graph, just as a wild example. So make sure that those processes are always cross collaborative. And it's a tough one. It's a tough one. But I think that's also why it's so important to as early as possible have ops People in your team, I don't care if you're a one man band. You can have an ops person next to you to take off sort of all these, these things off your table so you can focus on having the conversations to make sure that you work with these customers and then have somebody else kind of pull it all the threads to, you know, put them all together because, well, I tried to do it all by myself. I cannot recommend it. I burned out.

Yeah. And burnout is not a place that you want to go or a place you want to stay. It's no bueno. So earlier in the interview you said, but we can talk about those their KPIs later. My words, not yours. You kind of said it a little bit more profess. So I do want to circle back around to that question. And Peter, in your experience, what KPIs should organizations be tracking to measure the success of their post sale processes?

I mean, in short, track the metric that your product improves. So if you have, I mean, we have a lot of these we talked about anyway before, a lot of AI tools, right? They help write faster emails and do easier stuff faster. Okay. Time savings, are they really that important? Yeah, it's nice. But what actually does it influence? So does it influence the fact that maybe you don't have to hire that extra rep or does it mean you actually suddenly have money left over because you optimize something? You have money so you can buy another tool to help with another thing. Right. So it's. That influenced revenue. For me, that is a crucial one. I mean, product usage, yeah, great. If they click on something all the time, fantastic. But if it doesn't get them anywhere, it doesn't really matter. So translating time saved. Right. Everybody, everybody talks about, yeah, if you use our tool, you save time. But what does that actually mean? Can you translate that to you for yourself? And it's really hard. It's both the sales pitch, but it's also the renewal pitch. Right. If I have a vendor and they come to me like, okay, well Peter, because of all the things we worked on together over the past year, we managed to save your whole rev Ops team about 5 hours per person per week. I'm like, okay, that was money well spent. Because we could spend that time on other things. Right? Opportunity cost, that's what it is. But if it's just a matter of, you know, writing an email easier, I don't know how to translate that.

Yeah, I love this idea of being able to understand the language of business to actually get specific enough to them understanding the value of the things that you're actually talking about. I love that there's something that I've been wanting to ask you during this interview that you said or talked about during your inbound talk that I want you to just maybe discuss it at a little bit deeper level. And so could you maybe elaborate on the concept of CX operations? Like how does that relate to customer.

Success, Customer success operations or customer experience operations? For me, customer success is customer experience plus customers outcomes. So the wording there can be played with. But for me the operation side is the same or not the same. It's a similar importance as Sales Ops has, making sure that everything keeps running smoothly and making sure that you don't have to sit and think about all the process that you need to do to do the right onboarding or the right renewal process, whatever it may be. It's of course not just is not just the systems setup which is very easy to sink into, but it's also the process, the enablement, making sure that you have the right knowledge to work from it, making sure that all those things are tied together and feed also into the rest of the organization. So that my manager talks about like hey, rather give it to me. So I'll take that conversation than you having to fight the salesperson or the marketing person because there was some process that wasn't clear. So that's what an operations team can help you with is making sure that this cross collaboration has a stronger foundation to work from and make sure that the right information feeds to the right people rather than being dependent on personal relationships that you have across an org which you of course are always useful, but they're not sustainable.

So maybe hit the rewind point there, ladies and gentlemen, where you check that out again and jot some notes around your organization and what you might need to build or what you might want to put in place there. So Peter, as we land the plane, I have one more question for you and then we'll get the viewers and listeners back to the regular scheduled program and for you the rest of your evening because the entire interview I've been seeing how dark it is out that back window and I'm like, he's probably ready to go to bed since he's in Finland right now. So pretty much final question that I want to ask you is what's one piece, one piece of advice that you'd offer companies looking to transform their post sale operations. And some specificity here, using HubSpot today.

Okay, first part, everyone does support everyone CEO as well. I've been in a few organizations where we've done this. It's hard when you get bigger but feel that pain. I said it as well in the talk, but it's so important because it gives you a unique insight onto like what are people struggling with? Where are they blocked? Where do we need to make things easier? Where do we need to make things better? Because there's always that fine balance between pie in the sky, hoping this is what we want to develop versus what people want and finding a nice middle ground. And I get that it's tough, but start with everybody's support, even developers, product managers. It will help so much in learning where to do better. So that's that practical part. Apart from that, I absolutely love where the help Desk is in HelpSwap right now. It's gotten really, really good. We've used it since early beta. I think it's a great tool. Everybody can get in there, everybody can help each other out. And the fact that it's inside HubSpot and connects to all this other data in other places, deal company contact, you can actually connect all those dots. And then that's the support part. And then of course the customer success workspace as I'm seeing it develop, it will become a powerhouse for focusing on your customers. Looking forward to see that.

I love the idea that we're leaving this with focusing on your customers. In other words, have a human centric approach. Peter, thank you so much for sharing your insights today. If people want to thank you or connect with you, where do you want to send them?

LinkedIn is the best.

Awesome. So head over to LinkedIn and connect with Peter. Hub heroes I hope you agree, but for me it's been incredibly valuable to learn how Companies can leverage HubSpot and a seamless post sales strategy to boost customer retention and success. If you're looking to improve your customer success processes or explore HubSpot's full potential beyond marketing and sales, Peter's advice is a great place to start, maybe even priceless. That's a long hashtag. Anyway, as you implement that advice, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course do some happy hubspotting along the way.