INBOUND 2016: Jeff Valentine "Mischief Managed: 5 Lessons of Managing Remote Teams"

Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Hi, everybody. In addition to me, I'd also like to introduce Kristen Cruz, our senior director of digital marketing. Kristen's going to be coming up with me and we're going to sort of co present the session instead of doing it. Search for one. I like the variety. It's a little different. It keeps it interesting. And we also have a unique offer. Now, I will say I hate interactive presentations where I ask you to do stuff and everything. Everybody hates that. But we are going to give you some free stuff and you don't have to do anything except tweet. So Kristen, you want to come up and.

Good morning. So, yes, we are going to ask you to engage with us a little on Twitter, which most of you probably are doing anyway. So we have a question for you just to kind of kick things off. And that question is, what is your biggest fear of managing a remote team? And we ask you just to engage with us Finality on Twitter. Tell us what that is. We're going to have our team engaging back with you live, hopefully getting some good feedback. And at the end of the session, we'll give away some great fandango tickets to see a great movie. Hopefully you go to see the Fantastic.

Beasts, which just so happens to be related to Harry Potter, which is sort of the theme here.

And at the end of the session, we'll read aloud a couple of the responses. We won't call anyone by name, but we just want to hopefully engage you guys a little bit that way. So.

Yeah. And Kristin, how many tickets are we giving away? How many people are gonna win?

We gave two per winner and we're gonna give away five winners or five ticket bundles. So two tickets per winner. Five of you will win and we'll pick them at random. So it doesn't matter what you engage with. Just engage with us.

Okay, let me start with a story. This is, I think it's pronounced Uruk. It's important because about seven millennia ago, it was founded as one of the world's first cities. And for about a couple thousand years, up until 3000 BC, Uruk had 50,000 people living in it. It was the first time people moved from agrarian villages into a city. And they chose to do this for whatever reason. But humans since then seem to have been on this urbanization trend. I myself lived in Boston for six years. I sort of recognized the value, the excitement of being in a city environment. And it sort of led me to question, is this inevitable? Is this built in to human, the genome somehow that we should congregate in dense areas rather than rural. So then we looked at modern history rather than just early history. And you know, it sort of supports the same trend. We're looking at urban populations increasing and rural decreasing since the 60s. And it seems almost like we all take for granted that cities are going to continue to grow. Cities are the somewhat better solution for humans maybe. Maybe that's my thesis. In fact, I want to show you an alternative. In Rome, for hundreds of years it was growing, but for most of its history, except in modern times, it was actually shrinking rather than growing. So it's not a given that a particular city, maybe even all cities in aggregate continue to grow forever. Although it has happened recently. I wonder we have to click like this. I wonder what's going to happen if that continues. You sort of see an increasing rate here because the urban population is not only growing. People are moving to urban areas, but population's increasing. So you're sort of seeing the flattening of rural or non urban and an increase on urban. I think that's going to drive a few things. They're listed up there. I think you're going to see a cost of living increase. I think it's just like we're seeing in cities like San Francisco. It just costs more to live there. Therefore the cost of doing business increases, therefore inflation rises. And therefore, in my non professional opinion, non cities have this natural economic advantage for doing business if in fact you can do business there. So that's the question, right? Is there a technology, some solution that might help either aid this transition or support it? It could be that this is inevitable and economic forces are going to cause non cities to become more attractive. Or it could be that technology might be part of the cause rather than the answer if it does. If that's true, here's some business impact that I think you see. Imagine hiring the best and not the closest. There are people all over this world that just. Well, we don't hire them right now, we don't interview them, they don't become part of our company because they're not physically located where we happen to be. We can make activity, work an activity and not a place you go to work today. Maybe you don't have to go to work, maybe you just do your work. And maybe managing teams, whether they're remote, becomes a skill of a manager. And maybe we evaluate our teams, our business managers, on their ability to manage teams, whether they're physically located with them or not. So this is what we're going to run through today in The Spirit of Harry Potter, basically, because my daughter likes Harry Potter and I've read all the books with her and because I think it's kind of fun. We're going to show some analogies between managing remote teams and things in the Harry Potter world. Each section will start, and they're very quick. Each section will start with a little video clip from the movies. And then we'll show sort of in our company how we use technology to do something similar. Kristen, you want to get us started? I'll advance for you.

Oh, great. Okay. Training and.

Well, can we see that? Kind of. There should be volume on there. That's all right. We got the expert here. He's going to fix it for us. Why don't we proceed? You can fix the volume separately. It's okay. Go ahead.

Training and onboarding. So when you're thinking about building or managing remote teams, you're thinking primarily about how you're going to kick those teams off, whether you have partial remote teams. So you have some people in your office and you have some people out of your office. There has to be some synergy between how you bring them up to speed, how you onboard them, how you train them, how you get them running at full capacity. And for us, our application, our UC tools really help to guide that process. So I'm going to kick it off by talking about one of the very specific features that we utilize in our UC tool, which is our Barge Monitor Whisper tool. So Barge Monitor Whisper is typically something that we use on a training or an onboarding process for someone who's customer facing. So this tool allows us to listen in on phone calls, barge in on phone calls. If we feel like the person being trained or the employee really needs a little guidance on that conversation or kind of the next direction, we can whisper to that employee without the other person on the line ever knowing that we're there or that we're speaking to that person, giving them a little guidance at the same time they're in a live setting, they're talking to their customers or talking to their clients. They're. They're in that real. We're kind of throwing them in but also guiding them at the same time. So you're really doing two things at once. And a UC tool, our UC tool that we utilize helps us to do that.

Yeah. And this UC stuff, how many of you have a phone system that you think can do this today? Sort of let you listen in on phone calls and then. So a few do. And this is eventually what's going to Happen. I think in the Next, you know, 10 years or so, everybody's going to happen. Everybody. This is sort of table stakes for unified communications. And you know, the Harry Potter analogy that you'll see that we just passed the extendable ears right in the movie. Allowing you to listen in is sort of how we use our system here. We use our sales managers. In fact, our head of sales is here today, will listen in on his reps calls and help guide them with the next answer. Go ahead.

So I'll talk specifically to some of the tactics that we utilize on our marketing team. We have a lot of marketers in the room, probably a lot of managers of those teams. Specifically, when we onboard a new hire on the marketing team, we allow them to dig in, do their homework. When you're hiring remote, you're really focusing on those people that are highly self motivated. So prior to even becoming a new hire, while they're in the candidate phase, they're doing their homework, they're online, they're digging in, they're understanding the buyer's perspective, they're understanding the customer's perspective, they're understanding how we're marketing. And especially for a remote employee, it's really crucial because they don't have that face to face interaction. A lot of times they might even be interviewing in a remote setting. So doing a video collab interview, being hired in that fashion. So we really really focus in on getting them up to speed by allowing them to really dig in, doing their homework. The other two use technology to conduct virtual training. Virtual training for us is really important because we don't have, and most of you probably don't, a really formal onboarding and training process. So about 75% of our onboarding process is really a virtual training. You know, really kind of getting them up to speed using the UC tools, having those face to face, you know, conversations whenever possible, but all virtually right. So a virtual face to face and also allowing them to really talk and interact on a virtual capacity with all the employees within the business. So from a marketing standpoint, we work with pretty much every team within finality, the product team, a lot of our sales teams, really focusing in and digging in on that buying process and understanding that process is really important for us. So instead of assigning them to a trainer or onboarding them in a more formal fashion, we want them to have those conversations and really get a view from that employee's perspective. Our UC tool for our remote teams is really the only way we do that. That's video collab. That's being able to chat whenever necessary. That's really allowing that virtual connection. We also want them to be connected to marketing and our customer training team utilize a lot of documentation now a lot of times for things that are constantly evolving, that documentation is not necessarily the end all, be all. You really have to have those interactions, you really have to have those conversations with those teams to understand what's really in present time happening within the business, to really understand how to do a great job and also reinforcing your company culture through virtual trainings and, and onboarding those teams through that interaction. A lot of times these guys in a remote setting, they never get a chance to really interact with the teams that they're working most with. So by allowing them to get involved on virtual video collabs and doing meetings in a virtual capacity, they're engaging with the people they work with every day, although they're not face to face, so keeping them highly motivated. We don't want our remote employees to feel like they're on an island. And I think that's one of our biggest fears, which I think we'll hear a lot about, is those employees feeling deserted, like they don't have a real connection to the team, whether it's back at a home headquarter office or it's two other remote teams. But a UC tool, Unified Communications, really allows those guys to feel like they're all one virtual team and they have instant connection to every person they work with and they can get to those people very easily.

Thank you, Kristen. The next one. Let's watch this video.

Messrs. Mooney, Wormtail.

Remember this.

Hadfoot and Prongs are proud to present the Marauders map.

We earned so much. Hang on.

This is Hogwarts. And that. No. Is that really Dumbledore?

Any studied pacing does that a lot.

So you mean this map shows everyone? Everyone.

Everyone where they are, what they're doing every minute of every day.

Brilliant.

So I wonder if there is a Marauders map for business. If there is, it might be something that we have as part of our product. So I'm. I'm a use case of this. This is a treehouse that I had built. We actually submitted this Treehouse video with a and everything to try to land this presentation slot. Thank you HubSpot, for having us. But I sometimes work from this treehouse. It doesn't have wifi. It has a cell phone that has a WI fi signal on it. And I have a laptop sitting at a desk and I can actually get stuff done. But I'm not the only one. Our CEO is in Seattle. Our CFO is in dc, Our VP of Sales is in Oklahoma. Our CTO is in Los Angeles. We are truly a distributed executive team. And although there are a few company locations, we have increasingly a lot of remote employees. About 280 employees total. About 80 of those are not in a physical office location. So what would be the Marauder's map? I just covered that. It's all about presence. Not this, sorry, not this presence or the ghost presence, but this sort of presence where you're working in a work environment. It's where you're sitting at that time, where you're doing your work. And I avoided the golf course shot. I hope you're grateful because everybody has this sort of golf course working on the golf course video. But no, this is all about doing work wherever you happen to be. This is what the unified communications tool that we sell and use looks like. And I won't go through a full demo or anything, but I would like to just sort of point out on the left hand side you can see your company directory and you'll see there's little icons next to each person's name. Whether they're available. There might be an EQ or Not in a queue. This is that Marauder's map for finality. This allows us to see where everybody is and to instantly communicate with them. Internal communications. Morning, Arthur. Morning, Bob. Interdepartmental memos. We used to use owls mess was unbelievable. So how do companies communicate today? Used to be email. It used to be. Before the Internet, it used to be something other than email. Now we're seeing increasing use of unified communications tools not just among our customers, but among everybody. You might be using other chat tools. You might be using Microsoft Lync or one of their products. You might be using finality. But the ability to communicate with people without sending an email and waiting for a response. Or that dreaded sort of CC list where everybody gets distracted by one particular email. I don't think it's very effective. Instead, this is a little video showing how it might work in a UC tool. You just sort of click on somebody, you can type the chat to them, they can respond. This makes it more efficient. In our case, for example, we saw in our customers, we did a little survey. Email use internally goes down by about 30%. When you start using a tool like this, you start wasting time. The quick questions get answered quickly. You don't have to blast it out to the company or to a larger group. Kristin, you want to walk through this. Sure.

In 2015, we did a survey to find out how much time workers are really wasting because of the inability to communicate using uc, using unified communications. So we connect with people from every industry, from all locations to kind of get a real broad grasp of what it is that they're spending their time on, and more importantly, how much of that time is truly wasted. In that study, we found that on average, about 40 minutes per day was wasted reaching people who weren't available, not knowing that they were available or unavailable, walking. Let's say you're in an office and you're spending time walking back and forth between your office and the person you're trying to reach. Let's say you're picking up the phone, dialing their extension, and realizing they're not.

There.

Only to find out later on they've been in a meeting for two hours, and you just wasted 15 minutes of your morning trying to locate them. 35.4 minutes trying to find key business information. You're on a call, you need that report. You need to know some specific contact information. You need a specific data point. You need something very specific, specific to move ahead in whatever specific task you're working on. You know the key person to get to to get it. But you're wasting time trying to find that 27 minutes wasted on duplicating communication. So you have multiple people needing multiple things. You have multiple people needing the same thing. You might be asking for something very specific that your colleague down the hall or your colleague across country is also asking for. Being able to not just communicate one on one, but to communicate in a group very quickly and easily and efficiently. Using UC saves these guys about half an hour of their day every single day. This survey was really important for us because it kind of branched off a lot of content that we were able to share. We wrote a couple of white papers, we did some ebooks. We really kind of honed in on what people were wasting their time on. And because of that, we're able to develop additional functionality, additional features, additional things within our own tool that we use every day to do a better job of hopefully minimizing that wasted time.

Yeah. Thank you, Kristen. Managing inbound queues. Here's an example from Harry Potter. The only phone call example I could find, by the way. Way should be fun. Good, good. I'll just get my mother money. This is the visitor's entrance, the Ministry of Magic. So in the business world, phone calls, inbound phone calls are still the most important lead source for us. They're not the most numerous, they just happen to be the most highly qualified ones. When a customer decides to go to our website, read some information, come back, read an email, come back and then call us and ask for a salesperson, it's highly qualified and we love, especially our sales team loves getting those phone calls. So every time one comes in, it's really important. We can't drop it, we can't let it go into that infinite loop. The ivr, the press this for this and that for that we have to get it to the right person quickly. And if that person's not available, we have to get to somebody else. And the way you do that is with a call center software program called an Automatic Call Distributor, an acd. Traditionally, call center software was really expensive. It was like $100 per user per month or maybe a couple thousand dollars one time plus a maintenance fee. And so sales teams and non professional call centers just couldn't afford it. Today we've commoditized a lot of that call center functionality by building it into our product. And so the queue functionality of being able to send a phone call into something and not hunt around for the right person, but find the right person that's available because we know their presence, we know their skill level, we know what they should be doing, whether or not they're available, we can go send that call to them right then. And if they aren't there, if they choose not to answer, we're finding somebody else. This is how it looks inside of hud. Sort of a zoomed in view of our heads up display. And you can kind of see that it's not only a tool for chatting with employees, it's also a tool for managing your business. If you're the sales manager, you want to know how many calls are waiting, how long has it taken to answer those calls today? You can reset those stats at any time you'd like. You can have different queues for different reasons. You might be running a queue for a particular campaign and then you can see how many calls you got from that campaign into your system. Mobility.

Guardium Leviosa. Stop, stop, stop. You're going to take someone's eye out. Besides, you're saying it wrong. It's Levio Sar, not Leviosar. You do it then if you're so clever.

So is there a magic wand for business users? I think the magic wand for me anyway is of course that it's that cell phone that I'm using right there for notes. That mobile phone, that mobile device ends up Being the tool you use to run your business and whether or not you're making phone calls or you're receiving phone calls or maybe you're chatting with your employees, you need the same tools regardless. And so we use that tool extensively, of course, and our customers use it to work wherever they happen to be. There's some examples on the screen. Let's go into some more. There was a day not too long ago as a technology company that we dreaded. We had a big outage and when you're the phone company and you have an outage, your customers get really anxious because they have an outage. We were all distributed around the country in this particular location at the time, everybody was in different places and we were reacting to an emergency. Kristen Right.

For the marketing team specifically, we not only are handling our normal day to day job of marketing to prospects and pulling all of those potential new customers to the sales team, but we're also responsible for the communication to our customers and understanding what's happening in real time is crucial to keeping those customers updated. We were flooded. Like this example you see here with what's going on, why is my phone not working? Why is our heads up display lay down, I can't access your website. It was a pivotal time for us because in part of this time frame we weren't able to use our own tool. We are, I think, the biggest users of our own software. And when we can't collaborate amongst all of the teams that are dispersed across the U.S. it was really difficult for us to figure out how we were going to communicate to those customers in real time and keep them updated. So we had to go to the backup, to the backup. We had to. Because we couldn't use our own tool. We were going back to getting on our phones, getting on our cell phones, texting, utilizing email as best as possible, chatting with each other on Facebook. Your normal day to day communication that if you don't have a UC tool you use. And that was very frustrating for us because we're so used to being able to about talk, hop on HUD and say amongst all the teams, here's what's happening, here's what we're doing. Everybody go and they run very quickly. Not being able to do that was very frustrating. This was a three and a half hour ordeal where we were trying to in real time tell customers the ETA on this issue. When were they going to be back up? We're talking thousands of customers, hundreds of messages in Facebook, hundreds of tweets, emails, calls into our sales queue. Chats on our website. There were so many things that we had to do to communicate back to them and it was a real wake up call to the tool that we rely on every day. When we don't have that available to us, it's a huge difference in the way that we communicate.

What's interesting about it also is that this particular outage was more of an Internet outage. It brought down DNS, which brings down everything, not just for us, but, but for our customers. So our own website ended up going down at some point. Our main phone numbers went down, everything ended up going down. And so you sort of realize, I think at the time, when we look back at it, we became very dependent on our own technology to run the business. Of course we fixed DNS. Let's talk about how we've used HubSpot and what the results have been for our team.

We use HubSpot obviously more so than anyone within our business, to measure, to track, to understand what it is that we're doing well and what it is that we're not doing well. An example might be how we track our grade, our HubSpot grade, amongst our competitors. We have competitors with various budgets, with various teams, with various resources. It's really important for us to know what they're doing in the marketplace and how well they're doing it. We are up against these guys on a daily basis. Our sales team is up against these guys on a daily basis, closing deals. We have to be able to communicate with them in real time how well they're doing things, what they're doing and how we're up against the competition. This helps us to understand primarily how well our website is doing. When we see fluctuations amongst our competitors with regard to rankings in search engines and, you know, social influence. We know whether or not they're running paid campaigns, we know whether or not they are doing their job, their inbound focused SEO job. And it helps us to just to get a leg up just to understand that competitive intelligence is really important for us. We also utilize, you know, a couple of various add ons. So our, so the ads add on is really important for us. We monitor all of our paid performance through that ads add on, that reporting add on is really important for us. That collectively allows us to all be within HubSpot and understand what it is that we're doing collectively. Not one on one, but as a unit, as a team of seven, eight marketers, what it is that we're doing well and what it is that we're falling short on these Particular measurements across various aspects of HubSpot is something we rely on on a daily basis. And it's part of our success as marketers to utilize a tool like HubSpot because we are dispersed in a number of ways. Our dashboards across the team, across the exec team are all pretty much the same. Amongst HubSpot, NetSuite, which is our CRM, and how we track and monitor leads and close deals, it is really important to utilize this on top of a UC tool for us to know whether or not that we're doing the job that we're. That we really should be doing right. ROI is extremely important for us. We track things based on leads, so it's not so much impressions for us. It's not even really clicks for us. It's not shares, it's not that engagement. It really boils down to a cost, cost per lead. Every tactic that we run with boils down to a cost per lead and the ad. This is an example of the ads add on and something that we're running through AdWords. Being able to hop in HubSpot for us is important to track that in real time. We have a lot of marketers on our team who aren't in AdWords every day. They don't necessarily run that part of the marketing, but it's important for them to see how these ads are doing, what it is that we're drawing in terms of leads and how we can do more of that. This is an example of the social component. So with a small team, especially if you've got a remote team, you might have those guys in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn on a daily basis. This ads add on for us is really important because again, it allows the team to see what we're doing from a social perspective as well, without having to jump into those various platforms.

There's another tool that we use besides our own stuff I think, sort of worth pointing out a neat little service we use called 15 5. Has anybody used 155 before? Have you heard of it? Cool. This is great. It's not that popular. I think it's a shame that it's not. Let me just sort of explain it. 155 is a tool that our own internal employees use to answer some basic questions about their business and their prior week that you would otherwise waste time with during one on ones. One on ones to me, should be more important than what you do last week and what did you accomplish? 155 is this tool that sort of automates that stuff and allows an employee and their manager to have an Interesting conversation prior to having a one on one and then allows that manager to escalate the employee's comments maybe to their own report, which goes to their manager, which goes to their manager and allows them, the executive team to see the whole organization sort of measure it.

Kristin and what I really like about this tool, this goes back to the tactics that we use in managing remote teams and using UC to do that. It's that building that morale amongst the teams. We have a high five section in 15 five. It's very basic, it's very simple, it's nothing elaborate. But we can virtually high five our co workers, other team members that we not necessarily talk to on a daily basis. This is one of the things I think that helps us to recognize specific things that you wouldn't normally be able to do unless you're face to face with someone or you or you're really, you're picking up that phone and you're making an effort to say great job on this. I really appreciated the effort. But because we do our 15 fives every week, we know we're going to have that opportunity to give that person a high five again. This is UC helping that virtual morale.

The whole concept behind 15.5. And I'm not, we're not affiliated with the company, but it's kind of interesting that employees will take about 15 minutes per week to answer these questions where managers can spend five minutes to read consume them and then you can of course escalate throughout the organization that travels up the ladder. It's a really cool tool. It's about five bucks per user per month. All right, let's bring it back to cities. This is two houses that seemed comparable in C size. One's in San Francisco, one's in Iowa and you can kind of see the price difference. I think there might be a natural limit here. There might be a natural limit where you can't continue to see exponential growth in urban areas. I think there might be economic forces in the future, especially supported by unified communications tools and tools like 50 and 5 that help you hire the best and not the closest. And I think that using those tools might create an economic advantage for companies that choose to do so. I think we're at the beginning of that right now and over the next several years we're going to see whether or not this holds true. That's my prediction. So Tara, do you want to read some. Tara's been on Twitter and we've got some stuff to give away.

So we're going to go back to that Question. What is your biggest fear or frustration for managing those remote teams?

So we'll actually be choosing winners of the tickets and we'll be connecting with you through Twitter. So we don't actually have hard cards to give you because, you know, it's 2016. So one of the most popular fears that I probably have about 10 different.

Tweets is can you get right into the mic? Sorry, go ahead.

Is the fear of really trying to build and maintain a company culture with people who you don't know, you don't interact with on a day to day basis.

It's an interesting one. At finality, I think it's a challenge. We are a 10 year old company, 11 years old now. And so we've gone through a couple of changes of management. I came about four years ago. There was a CEO that originally founded the company that left a long time ago and that culture has evolved over time. Today I think the fact that the executive team team is remote helps that culture, helps us sort of instill that value that we're not requiring people to be there. To tell you the truth, the people that are remote miss out on things like the Halloween decorating contest and other things within the company that is a natural consequence of not having people in one physical location. It's the trade off we make to be able to advantage hire different people that we otherwise wouldn't get.

So kind of a follow up for that one is the fear of team members. One not being productive and another great one was team members going rogue, losing consistency and visibility to positive developments.

Chris, you want to talk to that?

Yeah.

Oh, you're wrong.

There we go. I think that presence we talked a bit about presence is really important. We did. I don't feel like we have that fear with the, with the tool we use.

I think it's how we hire too though. We hire people that are professionals.

It really is. You know, there are several virtual hiring, you know, where you can interview and do that face to face virtually. So it's, it's. I can't remember the name of it. Hire something, but it's one of the ways that you can initiate something that will allow you to hire from wherever. But utilizing a tool, I think that gives you that presence. It's not so much that you're always paying attention to it, it's that peace of mind where if you can't for some reason get a hold of someone, you instantly know whether they're available, they're busy, they're away, what their status is. If they're Offline, so they're not available to chat with you or have that dialogue. It does really, I think, help knowing that you have that backup. Therefore, the fear is it's really tucked away. It's that peace of mind that I think you get with having a display like we have to show you across the entire company where everybody is at all times.

One of the things I think that helps us in this regard is that. Thanks. Ten minutes. One of the things that I think helps us in this regard is that we measure everybody on a KPI and so it's a very numbers driven organization. And if you run a business like that, I don't know that it matters whether or not somebody's at their desk at 2pm on a Tuesday. They might not be. And that's okay. I think you get better employees when you offer that flexibility.

All right, one more. And I think we can open it up to questions. But Nikki says her biggest fear of managing remote team is that she won't be able to provide them with enough mentorship and leadership.

Mm. Yep, I hear it. It's one of those things I think you have to try, try and get used to because I don't know, there's no training class for this as a manager. It's something we all learned on the job. It did work for us. We are going to give away the whole series of Harry Potter books to anybody that's. Well, to one person that subscribes to our blog today. If you do happen to subscribe to our. We're good inbound citizens and so we'd love to get more subscribers to our blog. So please go ahead and subscribe and we'll select somebody random from today to go give you a set of books. But thank you very much for coming. Appreciate the questions and subscribe to our blog. Thank you.