Staying Out Of The 3rd Party Cookie Jar - Scott Brinker - Revenue Today - Episode # 011

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster. By injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com. Hey everybody, before we get started today, I want to take a quick second and thank our producers of our show, Ringmaster Conversational Marketing. They're a bunch of homies and have done an awesome job producing the show. They're so easy to work with, so cool to work with. In addition to us, they launched B2B Podcasts to create connections between companies or communities in our case and their future buyers and members. Go to their website at ringmaster.com, hit them up, tell them I sent you. If you end up producing a show, they'll hook you up with a microphone. Today's guest is somebody I hold in high regard. He writes the chiefmartech.com blog covering marketing technology management and is the author of the bestselling book, Hacking Marketing, published by Wiley. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of iN Interactive. He holds degrees in computer science from Columbia and Harvard and an MBA from MIT. Welcome Scott Brinker, who's the VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot.

Hey, well, great to be here with you, Jared.

It's so great to have you. Uh, I hope you didn't mind the intro.

You know, other, you know, the simple version is just, oh yeah, Scott, he's like a martech enthusiast, all things martech. Yeah, that's the shorthand.

I appreciate the humility, but I want everyone to understand the gravitas of the conversation.

So maybe the first time anyone has used the word gravitas in a sentence like connected with me, so I appreciate it. Thank you. I'll let my mom know.

That's— that is at the end of the day who we're trying to impress. But, you know, let's just jump right into it. Scott, debunk a myth about generating revenue today.

Oh, what a great question, because there are so many myths. Um, you know, the one that's been on my mind lately is the myth that third-party cookies going away is somehow a bad thing.

I

mean, seriously, right? I mean, like, you know, if you like read various, you know, trade press or whatnot on this, it's like the apocalypse. Like, oh my goodness, third-party cookies are going away. Marketing might as well just pack up its bags and like, yeah, go pick up another career. Like, I don't know, like, you know, washing windows, making wine, you know, something. And that's kind of crazy, right? Because You know, again, it's not to say that we didn't have certain patterns that we used with third-party cookies. You know what I mean? You know, some work better than others. You know, the retargeting thing, some didn't really work well at all. Like some of the stuff like people would like, you know, spread through these like DMP data management platforms was just total crap. It was like, it's not only that it's irrelevant data half the time, by the time it gets filtered down and connected with some profile. But because it's data that can actually be wrong, like, you're actually targeting people with stuff that, you know, isn't— it's not only not what they want, it might be actually stuff that they explosively don't want. You know, it just goes on. But like, we'd had this up on some pedestal because the technology had made it so easy to just like, oh, well, we'll just get these cookies, and then these systems will just do their targeting from those cookies, and, you know, we're done. But even if the efficacy of those cookies wasn't like particularly strong, it just felt like, oh, this is, this is the way. And it isn't, you know. And so actually, I've been one of the people who's like been like cheering, you know, for third-party cookies going away, because I think for the few benefits that it's offered, it's completely outweighed on the negative side by the fact that marketers have just been using this as a crutch. What we really want to do is we really want to understand authentically who our prospects and customers are, who our audience is. We want to start to build up a really accurate data profile. That data profile has probably very little to do with other websites that they visited out there in the world and a lot to do when they come to us, when they engage on our website, when they engage with us directly on social media, when they call up someone at our company and engage with us there? It's like all these really meaningful touchpoints. Are they replying to an email? What are they asking for? These things, we can collect data on all of them. In fact, a lot of cases, companies are already collecting that data, but they collect it and they throw it in some sort of bin that nobody ever goes to and nobody ever accesses. And I think this mode of like, oh my God, third-party cookies are going away. How the hell do we know who our customers are and what we can do with them? It's like once we start to like really open up and say like, well, wait a second, actually we've got these like really rich treasure troves of data and insight. With yet, you know, and now we have the impetus to, first of all, with the data we're already collecting, you know, first party, like start to put it to use, like start to do something meaningful with it. you know, in shaping how we do both internally the analysis of when we should be reaching to people about, you know, what particular offers, you know, but even more so like being able to leverage that data in helping to craft and personalize the experience that they're getting. You know, marketers have been talking about like personalization, holy grail for, you know, online marketing for like what, you know, 2, coming on 3 decades or something at this point, you know, but Third-party cookies were like this cheap and cheesy version of personalization. To really start to leverage first-party data for meaningful personalization, oh my God, right? I mean, we have got a lot we can leverage. And then that's just using the data we have today. If you're like, wait a second, now that we're able to start using this data and, oh my goodness, first-party data, this is where the real value is. This is where the real gold is. Now we can start to do things like, oh, well, how do we start to craft experiences and engagement points with customers that will collect more of the right kind of first-party data? What's more of the questions we want more insight to, to be able to understand how we leverage all the other machinery to better serve those customers? I mean, this— I think because in so many ways, it's like we're really very early in an industry, you know, is starting that journey of— the full scope of what we can do, both collect with first-party data and how we can actually harness it. And the sooner we get focused on really making progress in that journey rather than like, oh my goodness, is Google going to discontinue third-party cookies this year? I mean, like, to hell with the third-party cookies, man. Like, let's get on with the real mission.

Yeah, the irony is there's been a threat of this for some time, right? Like I came from the e-commerce world, and I remember like two years ago there was a serious, serious threat of this, and it came to fruition. And and the irony is, and it shouldn't be ironic. You know, we're talking about connecting more with the prospects internally. We're talking about creating like a really good CDP, like like to understand how folks are interacting with all of our properties and targeting them accordingly. Is this not the norm? Are people like— what have you seen before today preparing for this? Are marketers really caught off guard by this, or have they been preparing?

I think a lot are still caught off guard. It's like, I mean, I don't know if this is a valid analogy or whatnot, but it's, you know, I mean, like climate change stuff. It's like people can be aware that, hey, there's a problem. We're gonna have to do something about this someday. You know, and still, like, you know, when you're in this mode that you have certain, like, short-term, like, you know, well, what's my goal for this month or this quarter? It's just so easy to put off some of those longer-term investments because, yeah, I mean, you have to hit a number. Welcome to the age of marketing as a revenue source. But yeah, ultimately there comes a place where, yeah, you know, reality converges and you're like, okay, this is not a next year problem. This is not 2 years from now problem. This is a, yeah, coming up into like this cycle problem. And so, I mean, that was the same thing with GDPR. I mean, you know, marketers saw that coming from a mile away and still for a lot, like, boy, it wasn't really until that last like 6-month period where there was like this panic, like, oh, I suppose we should actually do something about this. But actually, that's another great example though of something like, you know, the data inside most marketing systems for customers has historically been, I think the technical term for it is crap. I mean, it would just be this mode of like, oh, we get all this data, we wouldn't maintain it well, it would go out of date, it would become irrelevant. But because, you know, there weren't any incentives, you know, to like, oh no, we have to really be clear about the origin and the accuracy of data, marketers basically felt like, well, we'll just make it up in volume, you know, like, yeah, a bunch of this data isn't good, but hey, it's cheap to just send all this stuff to everyone. So let's just keep batching it. GDPR really put an end to that. But it sort of actually forced marketers to say, like, okay, well, I guess we actually need to understand what is this data? How does it relate to a true individual? Is it up to date? Is it accurately representing their preferences, their contact mechanisms? And as a result, well, it was a lot of work to put these systems in place because marketing just hadn't made the investment. You know, when they put this investment in place, yes, it helped with compliance, which you had to do, but it also changed like the benefit of like the average quality of marketing databases. And in my opinion, it at least doubled. And I think it's a very similar thing here with this narrative with, you know, the move to more and more first-party data is it's about getting deeper and richer, more accurate data to leverage, you know, marketing programs on.

Yeah, spot on. And do you think it's required people to hire extra headcount like marketing ops to put this together, or is this falling to rev ops to help organize?

Oh, well, we could have—

That's a whole—

A whole debate around like marketing ops, rev ops. Are they the same? Are they different? What's the relationship there? But I think the key— Semantics. The common denominator there is the ops. You know, that I won't say that the move to first-party Data has been the thing that has triggered the need for people at marketing ops or RevOps. Boy, it has been an avalanche. I mean, like the past 2 decades of like everything moving to all these like digital systems. Like if you don't have like a good ops person, you know, in your universe of, you know, how you're structuring like, you know, marketing programs and capabilities, boy, you are at a serious disadvantage today.

Yeah, and I think that's important to bring up because the marketer that's relying on third party isn't always the same one that's setting up your systems to succeed in this new world. That, that could be, it could be, but that person, it's probably an ops person, right?

Yeah, I think having a great ops person is, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's like the keys to the key inside marketing. I mean, you know, the strategy of marketing, the creative of marketing, I mean, these things are as important now as they ever were. Just the difference is operating in this digital environment the way we are is if you don't have a great ops and tech person, like the greatest strategy and the greatest creative, it just has a hard time like actually getting deployed in the right ways to the right people at the right time. And so if you can get a team where you've got great strategy and creative and ops, oh my God.

Yeah, no. So The myth debunked. Third-party cookies leaving is a bad thing. And yeah, the people that have been on their ops game have been playing like it wasn't here already, right? Because you could optimize more, you could keep CAC lower theoretically, right? Like if you're optimizing on that, etc. So awesome, awesome insights. Now let's go towards KPIs. What KPIs are important to you today, Scott?

Well, you know, I live in a little bit of a unique bubble. So, you know, the role I have at HubSpot is helping create the ecosystem of all these apps, SaaS solutions that integrate into HubSpot. Again, with the goal, frankly, everything comes back to first-party data, right? Of making sure that we can share the right data between all these systems and like, you know, marketers can really leverage it effectively. So it's interesting, like, for managing an ecosystem for all these different solutions that can, you know, integrate with HubSpot CRM, you might think the metric would be like, oh well, what's the size? How many apps and integrations do you have? And, you know, it's kind of a, that's kind of a vanity metric. Don't get me wrong, it's nice to be able to say like, yeah, there's, you know, 1,000, 1,100, 1,200, you know, apps and integrations in the ecosystem. But that's a very like superficial layer to it. You know, what really matters is Oh, our marketers who are like, you know, taking advantage of these integrations, are they actually getting value out of it? And so that actually is the North Star that I'm just constantly paying attention to is not how many integrations are there in the ecosystem, but for any given customer, how many integrations are they actively using? You know, not that they tried once and figured like, yeah, nah, that doesn't really do what I need, but stuff like they got it, they tried it, they're like, Oh, this is actually helpful and they kept it. Yeah, that is actually where I celebrate.

Yeah. And is there an activation component around it? Because you have so many integrations, you know, you could be a discovery platform and you are for some of your—

Working on it.

Right? Like what else cool integrates here? Super interesting and something I always think of, especially because My brother-in-law is in this space. He's also in SaaS at, you know, senior level working for a big VC-funded company that was leading partnerships. And, you know, it isn't just the integrations, it's how many are activated. And then you could also talk revenue down the road and all of that. And I'm sure that you do, right?

Yeah, no, I mean, although it's interesting because with the HubSpot ecosystem, Like we don't charge partners for, you know, integrating. We don't, you know, impose any sort of fees, you know. Sure. For us, actually, yeah, the more integrations the customer leverages, it's a net win for everybody. So we don't measure direct revenue from the ecosystem. We do measure influenced revenue of like, okay, well, how does this impact everything from customer dollar retention to closing deals? And so All those numbers are good, but if you want to really simplify it, ultimately all those things then come back to saying like, okay, well, what's the active installs? How many of these different things are people using and continuing to use because they actually find value out of it?

Yeah, super important stuff. Now, what's keeping you up at night? What are some challenges you have?

You know, I think we're just still on, as an industry, we're on this very long arc of a journey of like adapting to a world of effectively infinite software, you know, I mean, like, so I've been keeping track, you know, in the martech world of, you know, like, oh, how many commercial martech solutions can I find out there? You know, and it went from like 150 or so like 10 years ago to like now 10,000 and growing. And that's crazy, but it's not just martech. I was talking to the folks at G2 Crowd the other day and You know, like they have this whole marketplace of reviews for B2B software and they've got something like 103,000 different B2B SaaS apps, you know, already today in their system. And they're adding something like, I don't know, 900 a month, you know. And then on top of that, you get all the people who are out there using these no-code tools and, you know, platforms like AWS and Google Cloud and Azure to like just build more, just like, The world is just exploding in software. And while at some level, this is a really great thing, there's just so much innovation, so many new things we're harnessing, we still haven't solved all the challenges of like, okay, well, how do we operate in this environment where I don't have like one software app or two software apps? I've got software coming out of, you know, every part of my body at this point. You know, how do we get these things talking to each other and working together better? Yeah, I think that's— it keeps me up at night because, A, I believe this is a mission that can be solved, but B, it is a big mission and we collectively as an industry, we've got a long way to go to get there.

So much so. You work for a company that's probably unarguably better than most, maybe the best at having aggregation, right? And yet there's still the need to stack another 50 to 100 tools on top.

Well, I mean, like, and even if they aren't like, you know, full-blown tools, it's like, it's fascinating. I mean, like, I don't know, I'll pick one example is like, yeah, if you're like creating a podcast, you know, okay, sure, you might be using HubSpot, you know, for like, you know, the distribution and the promotion and you're keeping track of subscribers and all this, but you probably aren't using HubSpot to like edit podcast, you know, you're probably gonna pick up a tool like Descript or something like this and you're like, oh yeah, this is great. I mean, it's just when you look throughout our day-to-day, all the work we do, there are just so many things where particularly this new generation of like increasingly more powerful AI-enabled software that's just, it's kind of magical in like these two. Yeah. I mean, like the stuff with Descript where you go and you start changing the transcript and it starts changing your video to like, I mean, you're like, Oh my goodness, this is pure wizardry. This isn't like it's somehow competing with like the core CRM product, but this is a complementary capability. And I'm not saying that there aren't competitive overlaps all over the SaaS landscape. Obviously there are, but there's a lot of complementary relationships here that, yeah, I don't think it's a bad thing.

Right. I mean, I might use ClickUp to project manage. I have a nice HubSpot integration. Thank you. I have a Slack integration.

Way to go,

Chris. Heck, our community is on Slack. Like, right off the bat, there's 5 tools I have to use, right? You know, in addition, and it does create, especially for you being in the ecosystem, plus being deep in the ecosystem, like running your blog and knowing the space well, like What piece of advice can you offer to others, like facing the same challenge? I guess other people in your role for other companies or similar.

Yeah, I mean, again, I think for people who are in my roles, you know, like as champions of, you know, platform ecosystems, again, keeping the value on the customer. What is it the customers want? What are the use cases? What are they trying to solve for? And how do we as multiple software companies working together make sure we can address those use cases better. I mean, everything else you do around that's great, but it's all trappings. It's basically, are we giving customers better, easier, more powerful experiences? So yeah, it sounds like, yeah, like, well, obviously you would focus on what the customers want, but yeah, I guess it's easy to sometimes lose track of that.

And then when you're like the earlier stage folks that are just building this out for their first time and they might just have Salesforce, HubSpot, Zapier, right? Like, how do they pick what's next in this ever-larging world? And I know there's a scientific or mathematic answer, but I'm curious to hear your point of view on that.

Yeah, well, I think this is my strategic long-term hope for HubSpot, but also, yeah, I mean, just for the industry is When you've got thousands of products, having to have every product build integrations to every other product is obviously physically impossible. It's untenable. You know, the only rational way to think of this is like a hub and spoke system, which is to basically say, okay, if we can converge on a small number of platforms that really become the dominant platforms in their industry and I make no bones, like, the aspiration is for HubSpot to be one of those platforms. I mean, you could certainly see obviously Salesforce as a platform, Microsoft Dynamics. I mean, there will be multiple platforms, but hopefully at scale there will be a relatively finite number of major platforms. And then for any app that's looking to create some complementary capability, some new specialization, you know, that basically depending on who they're trying to serve, they can look at the ecosystems of these different platforms. They can decide, oh, which one or the first 2 we want to focus on because a great integration into that ecosystem actually becomes a strong channel for us to do customer acquisition. Awesome. And then, yeah, once you've got that one and then you get the next one and, you know, you do 3 or 4 or 5 or whatever it is, maybe it's 6. But hopefully by the time you've then integrated with like 6 of the largest platforms that potentially then cover 95% of, you know, your core market, Yeah, then, then you start to get to a place where this just becomes a little bit more manageable for like the workload for both people developing apps, but also then for customers who, yeah, just know whichever platform they choose, this is the universe of things they can snap in like all Lego bricks.

Yeah, I love it. You know, being a company integrating, you know, from the other side, like we are a HubSpot customer and figuring out what we need to integrate natively. You know, there's a couple things. One, our point of truth is HubSpot. So like, that needs to be native when we're picking what tools to do, as I see you smile. Like, and, but also potentially into, you know, data platforms where we need— we can't be plugging in a Zapier or Workato, or like, you know, some better than others into that. It needs to be native, you know, any truth part, like what it needs to be native, and then everything else, like if it's just like a process, less so. But that's what I've been finding. So, or through an API.

Yeah,

API is even better, right?

I mean, I think, you know, I've actually looked at a model of, you know, how we think about integrations on these like 4 layers. And so one layer is just the data layer. I mean, at the end of the day, to your point exactly of, you know, like system of truth, you need to exchange the right data. You need to make sure that data is being normalized and standardized and then becomes available to everything else that's connected into that platform. There's a layer above that which gets you into workflow. And this is where you found things like, you know, Zapier and Workato and all these folks, which, I mean, in all fairness, you know, I mean, Tools like HubSpot also have their own built-in automation, but—

Piping.

There's certainly other tools out there that, you know, have even wider sets of automations. And so you think about like, oh, how do I get integrations in my workflow? Then there's a layer above that, which is actually about the user experience. It's like, you know, ideally you don't want to have every user in your company like have like 20 different browser tabs for different software. It's like you want to say like, okay, maybe for any given user, There's one or 2 apps that are their home apps where they're actually spending most of their time doing most of their work. And for a lot of the other things in the ecosystem, if we can bring elements of those other apps into the user experience, the user interface, you know, the platform, then again, it just sort of makes it easier for people doing their day-to-day work. And then the 4th layer on top of that isn't even really— it's kind of a little bit of a different beast, but I call it the governance layer. You know, which is to be able to say, I mean, Apple's a great example of this with like the App Store. Now you could argue maybe they're too heavy-handed on this or not, but the idea is like Apple works really hard to make sure that when a customer buys an app from the App Store, they can rest assured that, okay, yeah, it's not gonna break my iPhone, it's gonna work. It's not, you know, got some sort of like massive security hole to it. Or, you know, it's like basically trying to be able to assure customers that when you get apps and integrations from a given platform's ecosystem, that you actually can have a high degree of implied trust of like, oh, well, if they qualified and got certified in this ecosystem, then I know, like, okay, it will be compliant. It'll have the right feature set for what I'm doing with my platform. And that stuff's really important. And so if you look at those 4 layers of data, workflow, user experience, and governance, I mean, most integrations barely just cover like 1 or 2 like little pieces of that. The vision we have of where this can be over the next decade is like all 4 of those layers can have like really rich value that they deliver to customers.

Enter HubSpot. Like, I think it's spectacular. And that's one of the reasons why we switched to y'all because it just makes what we were using before It was like super early Airtable and it didn't really give us anything. I mean, not to the level clearly and certainly not scalable, but with all of this and the evolution of the space, what excites you about the future?

It's funny, I feel like for the past 20 years that I've been working at this intersection of marketing and technology, I would think for like, you know, the expectation would be like, oh, I'd be bored by now. Like, oh yeah, kind of seen this. Yeah, it's the same old stuff. We figured this out. And that couldn't be further from the truth. I mean, the pace at which this industry continues to evolve and change is— I legitimately wake up like, you know, every weekend I'm like, oh wow, yeah, there's a lot of new stuff we've got to figure out here. Like, you know, again, we're hopefully we're mastering and we're getting better at the playbooks of the things that you know, we've been developing over time. And there's, you know, purpose and passion in that. But the recognition that like, oh, well, consumers' expectations are changing, the channels they want to use, the way they want to use them, like all this stuff is continuing to evolve and evolve at a pretty rapid rate. Oh my goodness, for those of us who are in the field of marketing technology, this is, this is like nirvana because there is just so much opportunity to like have an impact, to create things that are going to change the way marketers are like writing the new playbooks. of how they find, engage, and delight customers. I mean, I don't know. The Chinese blessing curse, may you live in interesting times. I feel like anyone who's working in marketing in this era, and my goodness, particularly the subdiscipline of marketing technology, how could you ask for more interesting times?

Is there one thing that stands out above all else that's exciting you? I don't want to lead you on it. I'm curious.

Yeah. So you're asking the person whose, you know, title is, you know, platform ecosystem. I'm really passionate about the progress being made, not just at HubSpot, but in the industry in general on solving this integration challenge because I feel like once we get past a critical tipping point on the Standardization of how more of these products and platforms can work together. Oh my God, this has been such a huge pain point for so many marketers for so long. And it's been such a constraint, such a barrier to how people could— I mean, they see all these wonderful innovations, but like harnessing that value, you know, when the integration side of things have not been easy. Yeah, it's just been such a constraint. And I feel like we're making great progress towards solving that. And Once we get to the other side of that, I think, oh my goodness, it's like an order of magnitude ramp up in innovation and value people will be getting here.

How long do you think it'll be till we start seeing that?

I think we're already starting to tip. I think these next few years, it'll be dramatically different, noticeably dramatically different. I think if you take it out to the end of the decade, I think the seamlessness and the extent to which these integrations like really do wonderful things together. Yeah, I think it'll blow people's minds.

I couldn't agree more. I love that. So, you know, the first half of this show we learn from you and it was awesome hearing about, you know, your predictions or what gets you excited about the future, debunking myths on third-party cookies. Being whatever, not as important. And, and well, the myth is it's crazy that it's leaving. The true is it's not a problem. It's actually a good thing.

Begone, begone, third-party cookies.

Yeah, let's, let's, let's, let's make marketers great again. And, but the second half, let's learn more about you. Let's learn more about you. So who are you?

That sounds like a very deep question.

Take it any way you'd like to.

I don't know. I mean, I would say part of the reason why it's hard to answer that for me is, yeah, I've just had a very non-traditional, you know, career. I started as like a software engineer. Started my own gaming company. You know, I dropped out of school. I, you know, went and did stuff with the BBS company, the BBS industry, if anyone even knows what BBSs are. Like, they were sort of a precursor to the internet. Internet web came along, completely wiped them out. That was not fun as a, you know, 20-something, you know, but very important lessons about the dynamics of disruptive innovation. And I then started like this web development consultancy, you know, I was really focused on the tech side of it, but increasingly was getting hired by these marketing teams who had their vision for, you know, what they wanted marketing to be in the digital world. Really passionate about that, you know, many years later, it's like I returned to school. I finally like, yeah, completed a degree as you were listing out the various schools I'd been to. Clearly, I had a chip on my shoulder.

You have 3 degrees. Which one didn't work out?

I had none of those. I was technically a high school dropout before that stuff, you know. And so basically, yeah, I had a chip on my shoulder about it. I did what unfortunately people tend to do when they have chips on their shoulders is they overcompensate. So I'm like, okay, now we'll get every degree. That's fine. I don't regret it. But yeah, probably could have done a little less academics and a little more of the other things in the world. But yeah, then like getting back into like, you know, building a SaaS company that, you know, served marketers and starting that whole Chief Martech blog, it just, I don't know, I just really found my passion of feeling that my bizarre background of having like one foot in this sort of technical engineering world and one foot in a like, oh well, what is marketing all about and what are they trying to dream and achieve? And trying to synthesize those 2 things together. Man, I've just had the time of my life at that intersection. And it's like, I love the pure marketers I meet and learn from. I love the pure engineers, you know, and technologists I meet and learn from. Boy, do I have a great time like hanging out with other weird hybrids like myself that, you know, try and synthesize those 2 pieces together because As we were saying earlier, just this is, this is what's changing the world.

You know, it's so interesting hearing your seemingly eclectic background, but it's really like all things circling marketing from the development side to the other side. Is where you're at in your current role kind of like a geeked-out manifestation? Like you get to deal with all of these new tech and yes, they have to integrate with HubSpot, but like Kind of everybody does.

Yeah, it's definitely a dream job. And again, it's a dream job certainly at the level of just being able to like work with, you know, all these incredibly talented companies and see how they bring their realizations together and it helps customers. But again, like from a mission perspective, like, yeah, I've been so passionate about innovation in marketing technology. And it's been clear now for so long that the barrier to that really being harnessed is this integration problem. And so to be able to, yeah, work with the HubSpot team on like, let's— this problem can be solved. Like, this is, this is doable. It's not, it's not Mount Everest. Like, we can, we can tackle this one. It's gonna take time, it's gonna take effort, but we can tackle it. And Yeah, I think the other side of it is just gonna be so valuable to so many people that I'm— yeah, what do they say, like, you know, a life's mission? Yeah, this is my life's mission is like, let's make martech not just cool, but actually functionally working integrated together is like, you know, one seamless set of capabilities. Now that is pretty cool.

That's so fascinating. And what impresses me about HubSpot even more than that is You're becoming like a media company as well. I mean, you've always been, right? Like, drive from, from a traffic driving standpoint, like your core products were SEO-based day one, right? Like, and, and content-based. But now you all acquiring content companies. When does it end? Like, y'all are kind of taking over everything.

Well, everything is a big— the

universe is large. You'll be running climate control and In presidential elections next, but I digress.

I think the through line to it all, and this is something, yeah, just, you know, Brian and Dharmesh, the co-founders, were always very passionate about is there's a lot of software companies that start out trying to serve the enterprise, which I mean makes sense, right? If you're going to like go elephant hunting, you know, the Fortune 500 is the elephants you go hunting. But for a long time, there were relatively few companies that focused on the other half of the market, the SMB, even going up into the mid-market, you know, and with all the change that's been happening around the world going digital, you know, it's weird, like small businesses in many ways should be the best position to harness these disruptions because they have that, you know, sort of built-in agility that, you know, much larger enterprises, you know, struggle with. But they didn't have the tools and capabilities and education to really be able to harness that. And I think that's where, you know, the through line on all this stuff that HubSpot is doing is like, hey, can we like teach people how to do this? Can we give them the toolset to do it? You know, in my world, can we make sure like the tools we have integrate with any of the other tools that they need to be using? All of it sort of comes together and saying like, yeah, let's, you know, help millions of, you know, businesses grow better.

Yeah, and, and, you know, a point that your CTO, uh, makes quite frequently is community-led growth. And, and, you know, as, as I'm thinking through like the media company, all this, it all goes to a central thesis. Like your role, you're, you're essentially the community leader of, of integrations. Um, you know, you actually have community managers, you have, um, a phenomenal advisory board and third-party integrators, like agencies and the like, that are putting your solution in with your ecosystem solution simultaneously. You've created quite a network.

Well, it is definitely a very large collection of people who are all contributing to it. You know, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that, I mean, the nature of partnerships and integrations is it's a team sport. Like, you know, it's all the partners who, you know, are investing in this, who are buying into like this is a joint vision for how they grow their business. And so, yeah, I just, I'm always grateful like for everyone who's coming to the table and figures out like What can we do that will be really great for customers and, yeah, move marketing forward?

I hear it. Like, I see it. Like, you're excited to be here. Now, outside of work, and let's call like your blog an extension of— well, we can go in that direction if you choose. But what do you do for fun? Like, what are some of your passions?

Yes, this is the problem. Like, the blog is actually what I do is my, you know, like after hours like, oh, well, let me relax and have some fun researching martech. I mean, I'm an incredibly unidimensional person. So if you want to talk martech, boy, I can be a great dinner guest. But if you like pretty much any other subject on the planet you want to discuss, I'm like almost useless. So yeah, and you can check with friends and family on this. They're like, Yeah, no, whatever you do, don't ask Scott about martech over dinner.

I'm curious, with everything you know about martech, like, when does sales tech come in? And this opens up the bigger question of alignment. When, when do you start bringing these other tool directories in, especially in this world where the future might be all outbound reporting to marketing? Etc. Like, do you bring their tools in? Are they called— are they martech tools? Like, where does the line end?

Yeah, no, it's a great question. Actually, the boundaries of, yeah, martech have always been a challenge for me just because, yeah, I mean, the scope of marketing keeps expanding. I mean, the great thing about the HubSpot ecosystem work I do is like, yeah, that's not limited to martech. It's like, oh well, anything you plug into HubSpot. And so you really do take that higher level view of like, okay, it's not even about a particular department. It's like, how does a company as a whole leverage these tools to, yeah, do what they need to do? This certainly plays into the whole, you know, like RevOps, you know, unification of things. On the martech side though, I guess, yeah, you know, there's only so many hours in the day. And so this is one of the reasons why, like, I admire, like, you know, Nancy Narden, you know, on the sales tech side is She invests that kind of time with those tools that I invest, you know, in my hobby with, you know, all these martech tools. And yeah, it's actually great for me to basically be able to look to other experts in other domains, you know, and we can sort of cross-pollinate ideas because, yeah, at the end of the day, I do think it is about how all these things work together in harmony and not You know, MarTech is somehow a unique pillar.

Yeah, it's gonna be interesting because I'm looking at your diagram now and I'm like, some of those are on Nancy's list. The video selling, for instance. I mean, social media, now that you're in a world that the seller's morphing this, I mean, we could geek out till the end, but I see a future where Where you might grow, like, I don't want to say double, because martech is significantly bigger than sales tech today, and probably for the future. But increase all of that in there. Why not?

Yeah, well, and again, I mean, I think at some level, it's also like, okay, what's the, what's the point? You know, for me, like the martech landscape has long since gone past stage where like that graphic is actually useful. Sure. Or anything. I mean, right? It's like, I can't even read it. It's not like Reddit. Like tiny little dots on it at this point. You know, the primary thing it does is, and I think this is useful, but it's a limited utility, is it's basically a way of just like acknowledging the scale and scope of this industry and acknowledging in some real sense how much marketing has changed. I mean, it's like funny, like everybody knows marketing has changed in these huge cataclysmic ways. But if someone forced you to like quantify how it's changed, it'd actually be kind of hard because it's like, yeah, I know, like the things I'm doing are different than this. But you know, how do you put that into a number? And in some ways, I think that evolution of the martech landscape from like 150 to, you know, 2 orders of magnitude to 10,000. is actually a tangible artifact of like just how much marketing has changed. Not to say martech is everything that's changed, but it's like one sense of like, wow, if just the tech piece of this has changed this much in like 10 years, can you imagine like all the implications of everything else that's had to change to take advantage of those capabilities too?

Yeah, I'm just thinking like revenue tech, like you have Marketing tech fine over here, going all the way out to the other side of the building, and then building it like a funnel because it is. But no, this such a true point there. This has been awesome learning from you today, Scott. Like your your mind, I geez, I I we could geek out for some time over it. I'm sure you know companies' names I've I've never even heard of as well, and I've. I've looked at a lot, a lot, a lot, and you know what's going on. But want to understand how folks can get in touch with you. How best can people reach you if they want to learn more about you, about HubSpot, about marketing tech?

Sure. Yeah. So, you know, at HubSpot, I'm sbrinker@hubspot.com. You could probably have guessed that one. You know, on Twitter, I'm like @ChiefMartech. Without an H at the end, you know, always happy to engage with folks there, you know, my blog, chiefmartech.com. So yeah, no, reach out LinkedIn, Scott Brinker, you know, it's become so easy now to like find people. So yeah, let me know how I can help.

Scott, thank you so much for coming on today. It means the world.

Oh no, thank you for having me. I really love this conversation and Glad we could kick it off by, uh, busting a myth that's— yeah, sticks in my craw.

It's, uh, you know, when you put it like that, it's, it's literally a no-brainer. And it's, uh, so, so happy that you did that. But thank you everyone for listening. If you learned something today or laughed, tell someone about this podcast. Thank you again, Scott. Again, it means the absolute world to have you here.

Thank you so much. Take care, everyone.

All right, see you later. This has been another great episode of Revenue Today. See you next time. Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback. And ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side.