Easy, Fast, Unified Growth With Yamini Rangan | INBOUND 2024

Hello everybody. Welcome to Inbound 2024. I'm Yamini and I work for HubSpot, and this is my favorite week of the year. I just love seeing people connect. You know, the hugs, the high fives, all of those selfies we take. But more than anything, I just love seeing everybody leave this week. Inspired, fired. And we need that inspiration, especially when technology is changing everything around us. Now, in the last year, I don't think you could have got hit with any news without getting hit with AI hot takes, right? Look at these headlines from 2023. The Wall Street Journal said, Generative AI is promising an economic revolution. The Washington Post proudly announced the AI Gold Rush. Meanwhile, New York Times kept it super down to earth, asking questions like, how could AI destroy humanity? Really? Now look at where we are just one year later. The Journal says the AI revolution is losing steam. The Post says the AI bubble is deflating. And my favorite one from the New York magazine, whatever happened to the AI Apocalypse now? Do they sound a bit disappointed? So what is the truth? Is AI just false hype or a true revolution? Are we at the peak or at the trough? The fact is, these are not the most important questions to ask or answer. Now. Why? Because these headlines are not the lines in your head. When you or customers wake up in the morning, your first thought is not some big sweeping reflection about the state of AI. You're thinking about your job. You're thinking about your team, your next deadline. You're thinking about how you can get your kids out of bed and off to school so you can start your day already. Or maybe that is just me with my teenage boys. You know, the real question you're thinking is, how do I drive growth? Because lately, as we've all probably felt, it has just been harder to grow. So let's focus on the right questions. Why has it been so tough to grow? What is changing with your customer's journey? And most importantly, where do we grow from here? Now, to answer this question, you have to understand what changed and how we are going to fix it. The fact is, the growth formula is just broken. It is harder to attract customers to your website. It is harder to convert them when they engage, and it is harder to retain them even after you have won them. And we can all feel the shift and the numbers reflect it. You know, traffic is down. The number one challenge for marketers today is generating traffic and qualified leads. Conversion is down. Win rates have declined from 23% to 19% in just the past two years, and retention is also down. What does this mean. It means growth is down. Only 50% of reps are actually making their quota this year, compared to 66% just two years ago. The only thing that's up here is our anxiety. So what has changed? Well, three big things. Search, social and all our customer channels. You know search has fundamentally changed. It used to be that your customers would ask questions and search engines would serve up blue links and they would click on those blue links and they would get to your website. But now with AI overviews and soon search GPT, your customers are getting answers without leaving search. And the same thing is happening with social. Social platforms, they are holding on to your customers much longer. The fact is they just want to create a sticky user experience. That's why when your post includes an external link, it just gets way less reach. Now all of these social platforms, they used to be there just to distribute your content. Now they have become customer destinations themselves. And you know this is true. Just look at your screen time report every week. Or if you really dare, look at your kids screen time report. Now that is my scariest data for the week. You know what, this is what it looks like when my teens are playing Minecraft on the laptop, watching Shark Tank on the big screen and streaming. Dude, perfect. All at the same time. What does this really mean for you? It means fewer website visitors. Search and social used to be open, feeding you visitors. Now they are closed, keeping your visitors. And that is a huge change and it's only going to continue. Search volume is set to drop by 25% in the next two years. But that's not all the change. There is another big change that's coming and it's here. People want to talk to people, not brands. And in fact, seven in 10 customers just trust people over companies. They trust funny people, they trust relatable people, they trust aspirational people. They just don't trust you. And so your customers end up going to G2, they go to Reddit, they watch YouTube videos, they talk to peers, and by the time they do get to your website, your customers know more about you than you know about them. Just think about that. So now when your sales reps connect with your customer, the bar is incredibly high. That conversation needs to be so tailored and insightful. And if it's not, conversion will go down. The same thing is true with service. All of the easy questions are answered by chatbots and search results. And so your support rep also has a high bar to clear. And if they cannot clear it, well, retention is down. I mean there is no wonder why this growth formula is just completely broken. Now what? Well, we have seen time after time the technology is profound when it can solve over problems in new ways. And now we need new ways to access insights to be able to solve the age old problem of growth. And AI has the potential to do that. Well, how do we know? Because we went straight to the source. We surveyed thousands of customers who have embraced AI in some way, shape or form. We spend hours talking to them about their use cases, their mindsets, their fears, their hopes. You know, I just absolutely love this part of my job. I really love talking to customers and I just love learning from them. And here's what we learned today. Our customers are using AI for acceleration and soon they will be using it for transformation. So what's the difference? Acceleration is taking what is possible today and making it fast. It means you are just automating specific tasks, maybe summarizing a call or drafting an email. And AI is working with you to drive growth. And it's happening right now. When we spoke to customers, we found example after example of leading growth professionals who are already using AI to accelerate their work. But transformation, well, transformation is taking what is impossible today and making that possible. It means you are reimagining your goals and stringing together new tasks. It means AI is working for you to drive growth. And if acceleration is happening now, transformation will happen next. So the question is, how does this all apply to marketing, to sales, to service? Right, let's actually start with marketing. Fundamentally, marketing is just about attracting customers. Right? And we just need to have great content to be able to do that. And this is what we found. These are the three top use cases that our customers are using to accelerate content marketing with AI. They're creating content, they are personalizing content and they are distributing content. Now 65% of HubSpot AI users are already creating content with AI. So the question is, how do you do it? Well, it starts with understanding what AI is good at. AI is very good at researching topics. It is good at delivering decent first drafts and iterating for different audiences. But humans, we are much better at taking those drafts from good to great with original, authentic, creative insights. AI is also good at personalizing content. You know, this year our amazing marketing team, I want to shout out to our marketing team, they are awesome. Now our amazing marketing team got great at sending personal messages with AI and the conversion rate improved by 82%. So when a prospect came to our website and filled out a form, we didn't just send back a generic Email. We used AI to research that prospect's company, their role, and then we mapped the most relevant Academy content and then sent a personal message to them. How slick is that? That's why conversion went up by 82%. It's not surprising at all because everybody who got that message felt like it was written for them, and it was. Now that you have created and personalized content, the next step is you gotta distribute the content. You know? This year when we launched Content Hub, one AI feature saw incredibly fast adoption. Content Remix. This allows you to take a single piece of content, like a blog, and convert it into social posts, into short form videos, into emails. That's the way you can take great content and put it out there with your customers. So how does this all look like in practice? Well, let's actually hear from one of our customers, Emily from Sandler.

For marketers like us, we're always looking for ways to be more efficient, be more scalable, and AI has really been our ticket to do that. In terms of executing campaigns, we start with a landing page, and as we start to write the gist of the copy that we want to get out, HubSpot AI is able to step in and help us make it better. Kind of trickles down to all of the other pieces of the campaign. So whether we're writing the social copy, we're creating the LinkedIn ads, or the Google Ads, it's all using that same campaign and messaging that we've already built. Typically, our sales cycle was 90 days. And now with these experiences that HubSpot AI has helped us to build, that has gone down to 30 to 45 days. We had people spending a minute or less on our experiences and our pages. Now they're spending three to four days, minutes. And that is a huge return on the investment that we've made.

Wow. So their sales cycle went from 90 days to 30 to 45 days. That is what acceleration looks like. What's the transformation that's coming next? Well, it's all about agents. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not James Bond. Although Daniel Craig is welcome to attend Inbound whenever he wants to. You know, I'm just talking about AI agents. This is software that uses AI and tools to be able to really reimagine and accomplish multiple steps of the goals. And they can work for you. In the world of marketing, a content agent will work for you to create, personalize and distribute content. A social agent will analyze all your social posts and tell you when, where, and how you can share it. And a Campaign agent will analyze your campaigns and tell you how you can amplify it. That is what transformation looks like. So what lessons can marketers take from all, all of these different use cases? A few big ones AI creates and people curate. The counterintuitive insight here is that AI can help you with better content, not just more content. And that is exciting. So where are my sales people here? I know you're here. I want to hear some noise. Come on.

Yeah.

Look, I have worn so many different hats in the last 25 years in tech, but the one that I truly love is sales. Because sales is this beautiful art of engaging with customers. And for the longest time, you know, the one single metric that we have not been able to move as an industry, it is time in front of customers. You know, I spent years trying to move this single metric in sales. And if we can get just 5% improvement in productivity in one year, that is a winning year. But it's so difficult, right? My sales leaders here and my rev ops leaders here, you know that, you know, the average salesperson spends two hours a day selling two. What are they doing for the rest of the time? No, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that they're playing golf and sipping martinis. That's not true. They are buried in prep work or they're drowning in follow up. And nobody has been able to help them shrink that time until now. AI can help shrink that time spent in discovery and follow up. And that's exactly what our customers are doing. They're using AI to research prospects. And when they research it, they score the highest intent prospects and they're using AI to generate personal images and personal messages to connect with the reps across our customers. And HubSpot, we have found that using AI in discovery can shrink the time spent by by 30%. That is big. Next, they're streamlining the fast follow ups. They're using AI to summarize all of the calls and they're identifying new objections within those conversations and generating insightful responses. And that has resulted in 20% faster follow ups. Super exciting. Let's actually hear from another incredible, incredible customer, Tilman from Aerotech, who is doing all of this.

AI helping our sales team is really about making things more efficient, more cost effective. So without having to go into Google or LinkedIn, our sales team, they're able to add a company very quickly and start doing some preliminary research. They are able to understand a competitive analysis that HubSpot provides us. So when you think about having all this research Done with just a couple of clicks. You go into that first meeting with the prospect. You have a lot more information. And for a sales rep to be perceived as having done a ton of research, that bodes very well with customers because it shows that we are not only interested in who they are as a company, but the problems that they're trying to solve. We had a 15% win rate when it came to new business. We're now at 25%. One of out of every four new opportunity that comes in our pipeline, we're winning. And a lot of that is attributed to our adoption of these tools.

Wow. So their win rate improved from 15% to 25%. Anybody want that? Yeah, I do. That is what acceleration in sales looks like. So what's the transformation that's coming next? Well, prospecting agent, just imagine you are logging in on Monday, and your agent has already found promising leads for that week. And your agent asks you, do you want these leads? Do you want me to create a message for these leads? Do you want me to set up a meeting with these leads? And you say, yes, yes, and of course, yes. And then you use your time for great quality connection with your customers, because that is the fun part. So what have you learned in sales? AI offers context, and people offer connection. AI does all of that busy work so you can focus on your best work, and that is the way to improve your conversion and quota attainment. And who does not love that in sales? All right, let's finish up talking about customer service. I know you're here. I can see you. So customer service is this beautiful art of delighting customers. And the North Star here has always been the same. We want to be strategic thought partners to our customers, but guess what? We are stuck with being human band aids. You know, solving problems reactively. Too little, too late. And we all know how it feels like to be on the other side of that call. You know, for me, this happened last summer when we were on vacation. We went to Johannesburg, but our bags did not. And so I got on this phone with Kathy from customer care, and she's just lovely, but she cannot help me. Where are our bags? Don't know. When will we find them? Don't know. So Kathy and I are on the phone for what seems like half my vacation, and she's now my bff. And here I am, of course, feeling sorry for ourselves because we were wearing all these oversized clothes that we picked up from the airport gift shop. But, you know, as a CRM professional, I'm also feeling really sorry For Kathy, I mean, why does she not have all this information at her fingertips so she can help me? And I was also thinking, what CRM are they actually using there? Maybe, you know, I can do upsell, but you know, the question in it really is, and the most simple thing is we just want people to get our context and fix our problems. Right now that airline is off my list. And just like that, every single conversation can make or break you. So how can AI help? AI can help answer customer questions and fix your problems. Now one of our customers, Kaplan, has been doing exactly this with AI. They've used AI to manage their tickets and they're sending faster responses and sharing information with their customers. And they have been able to reduce the average response time by 30% and they're resolving 30% of their chats using AI. And when they need a human touch, they kind of like do a nice follow up. And all of this in just one year. That is acceleration. So what is the transformation that's coming next in service? By now you've already guessed it. It is another agent. You know, imagine a support agent and the support agent knows your context, knows your data, can answer your questions 24, 7 and pretty soon a knowledge base agent. A knowledge base agent can. AI can actually research and update your knowledge base articles, allowing your team to spend the rest of their time on customer experience. So what have we learned in service? AI handles simplicity and people handle subtlety. AI can handle all of those typical questions, so you and your team can focus on the tricky ones and that can help you increase your retention. So let's step back and put all of this together. The way to think about AI is not to underplay AI or to over hype AI. It is to understand AI and to co create with AI. Because co creation is what can catalyze growth across go to market functions. AI creates people curate, AI offers context, people offer connection, AI handles simplicity and people handle subtlety. The real way to think about AI is how it can power people and help us scale. That is the biggest unlock. Now if you want to reimagine that growth formula and raise it to the power of AI, just imagine the kind of growth that you can drive. AI provides all of that content to drive your traffic and it can provide the insights to drive your conversion and retention. And if we can be laser focused on just that, we might be able to fix that growth formula. And that brings us to our mission at HubSpot. Look, we exist as a company to help you grow and we are doubling down on that mission and reimagining CRM to help you grow. In order for you all to co create with AI, you'll need support not just for structured data, but for unstructured Data. Data in 10Ks, 10Qs, recordings, transcripts, conversations, just all of it. You will not only need support for text, you need multimodal support for text, audio, video, images. You will not only need your apps to work well together, you will need your apps and agents to work well together with the same same context. And you'll need the ability to control your data and decide when you want to share it or not share it. And that is exactly what we are building at HubSpot now. We don't just wonder what is going to change two, five, ten years from now. We also ask ourselves the question what is not going to change? You know, customers will always want things to be easy. Two years from now, nobody is going to wish for things to be harder. That's why we are working hard to make it easy. You will want fast time to value. Five years from now, no one is going to wish for things to take longer to realize value. That's why we are laser focused on immediate impact with every single use case. You'll always want unified data. Ten years from now, nobody is going to wish for data to be in silos. We already know how painful that is. That's why we're bringing together customer and context data to drive insights for you today and into the future. Our mission is to help you grow. Our passion is to make it easy, fast and unified. With that, let me close where we began. What gets you going first thing in the morning? I know it's not AI hot takes, but I hope you take away all the new ideas, the inspiration, the big transformation that's happening right now and that helps you get going. And as far as me, I am totally not a morning person, certainly not in the East Coast. I don't drink coffee. I don't just jump out of bed excited about some new AI hot take. Well, I'll tell you what. I wake up and I look at my calendar and if I get to have some conversations with customers about growth, that fires me up. I am excited. I know that will be a great day. Because the businesses that we support are the backbone of economies. The ones with fewer resources and not enough time are still finding a way to grow. And what is truly motivating for us is the promise that AI has to help businesses scale like never before. And with AI, we know that we can help all businesses play big.