INBOUND 2021 - Live with Yamini Rangan & Brian Halligan

Wow.

Hearing all those amazing product announcements gets me so fired. Hey, everyone, I'm Andrew Lindsey. I lead business and corporate development at HubSpot. And I'm really pleased to be here with Yamini and Brian to chat with you all today. Good to see you both.

Great. Great to see you.

Good to be here.

Great.

And I wish we could be in person with all of you, but live From Boston, it's inbound 2021. Now, Brian.

Yes.

Let's get right into it. I got a question. It's actually for you first, Brian, and it's something that has been top of mind for me. And I know I'm not the only one wondering about this. Many people are wondering about this. You had a snowmobile accident. 13 broken bones.

Yes.

Many surgeries.

Yes.

Long recovery time. What did you binge watch during all that time?

You started off with a hardball. There was one show that I get into during my healing period. It wasn't a super popular show and it was a little heady. You probably didn't see it. Andrew.

Try me.

Ted Lasso.

Ted Lasso. I know Ted Lasso. I know Ted Lasso. But you know who really loves Ted Lasso?

No.

Dharmesh. Dharmesh loves Ted Lasso.

Geeky minds think alike.

Well, now that we've given people and myself what I really wanted to know, I'd love to hear about some of the changes, some of the transitions. Right. And Yamini, I'd love to hear about what that was like when you first got the call and learned that you're going to be the CEO of HubSpot.

Well, first off, Brian, so glad that you're back and you are stronger than ever and you're back in full force. So that's great. And by the way, I love Ted Lasso. I haven't watched the season finale of the last season, so no spoilers this week from anybody. I just want to keep it clean. And I think it's a requirement to be a Ted Lasso fan to be on HubSpot's leadership team. But Andrew, the call that Brian and I had, it was surreal. Brian calls me up one evening and we start chit chatting. We're going back and forth and then he says, we need to talk about our relationship. The dreaded words. You know, I was like, oh no, where's this going? And you know what he does? He actually like whips out a presentation and starts walking me through his decision making process. And this is the first time that my boss has ever actually presented to me. So, you know I was very emotional, I have to say. I think first of all, there is the enormity of stepping into a role right after Brian as the CEO. Brian's a legend and I have tremendous amount of respect for what Brian and Dharmesh have built here at HubSpot. And then second, I got really emotional thinking about my journey to this point. You know, I grew up in a super small town in rural south India, did not have a high school, but don't worry, I did complete my high school. We moved towns from there to being an engineer to a salesperson to a customer focused executive. My life has been through a lot of twists and turns and so it was especially emotional and very thrilling at the same time. And I can tell you I'm like so excited to be here at HubSpot leading the next chapter of growth. And I'm very committed. I'm very committed to being the kind of leader that HubSpot's customers, partners, employees and all of you deserve.

I got a little, got a little dusty on my side of the zoom too.

I can imagine that was an emotional call.

That was nice. That was a really nice moment.

Yeah, that's quite a transition. And you transitioned as well, Brian, to hear about some of the thinking that went into that.

Yeah, so I started. It sort of crossed my mind literally back when I was in the hospital seven months ago. And the thing that was in my mind was I'm a starter. You know, I started HubSpot 15 years ago with HubSpot and I've been CEO. It's going great, but it's a different animal. I mean, we have thousands of employees, hundreds of thousands of customers, billions in revenue. Like this is a much larger scale company and I've never seen that movie before. So that was sort of one side of my head. And then I was thinking a little bit about Yamini sort of on the other side of my head and I was like, well, one of the reasons I hired her, she worked in companies at much bigger scale than HubSpot. So she had seen that movie. And then I watched over the next seven months while I was on leave and she was running company, running the company for me. Not only didn't she miss a beat, I think she picked up a couple beats while I was out. She just did a fantastic job. She's so super focused on the customer, super focused on scale. She's not just a culture fit, she's a culture ad. So at some point it just became a no brainer. Like this is going to be great for Our customers, Great for our partners, Great for our employees, Great for the community. Yamini is going to be CEO. I'm going to be able to work on the stuff I'm passionate about. We work great together. And so I'm super excited and super confident in Yamini in the next phase and up spot.

Thank you so much. Brian means a lot.

Yeah.

And I know I speak for the whole company. Yeah. Many I say we're really excited to have you as our CEO.

Thank you.

Really excited.

Thank you.

And your experience scaling companies, combined with Brian's experience and Dharmesh's experience, founding the business, growing the business to the stages today, it's just an incredible win for the entire HubSpot community. Really awesome. One thing I want to switch gears for a moment. We as a company spend a lot of time thinking about customer expectations.

Right.

How it's changing, how it's evolving. And Bryant, I'd love to hear from you to start what you see changing with customer expectations.

Yeah, I think you know this about me, but I have a very odd hobby. I consider myself like an amateur anthropologist, like an armchair anthropologist. Now most armchair anthropologists, Andrew, they study like the migratory patterns of birds. I'm a little different. I like to study the migratory patterns of buyers. And I'm really obsessed about this. And from my new job as chairman, I have a whole new purse to study this kind of thing. Going forward, I'm really excited. And we're, you know, we're the. We're right at the beginning of a major migratory change for buyers. And I think what's like the way I kind of think about it in my head is B2B buyers, business buyers are starting to look a lot more like B2C buyers. And I think about B2C buyers. And 25 years ago, it was a big deal if you went and spent 25 bucks on a book online. And now people are spending 25 grand on cars online like this. Like Dharmesh bought his Volvo online, the whole thing. And business to business buyers are turning more into business. Consumer buyers, they expect a delightful end to end gorgeous, delicious experience buying that product from their vendors. And so that's a huge, huge change that that's underfoot right now. And you know, the funny thing about Dharmesh's presentation that I love and, you know, I know him very well, is he's not a big fan of carbon based life forms. I actually like carbon based life forms. But I think if I had advice for our customers and partners is how do we get a little Bit of that carbon based life form out of that buying process, how do we lower the friction in the buying process, how do we use technology to accelerate it and how do we enable them to create those delicious buying experiences for their customers? And I think everyone's got to move from this old school way of thinking that it's a very linear funnel based, go to market model to a very circular flywheel based, not go to market model, but, you know, customer experience model. So I think we're at the beginning of that shift and companies that are forward looking that can take advantage of that, I think will thrive in the next five, ten years. Got it.

Very interesting. And I gotta tell you, I love carbon based life forms and the fact that we can be sitting here together as carbon based lifeforms, it's really awesome.

He knows Dharmesh isn't here.

I know I'm a surprise for a reason. And now, Yamin, I want to ask you because I know you talk about customer expectations and you're customer obsessed, right? I've seen this and we've talked about it. Could you share a little about what you see changing with customer expectations as well, what you've observed over the last year as part of your looking at customer experiences?

Absolutely. I mean, look, I'm a lifelong learner and I think I learn as much from great experiences as I learned from not so good experiences. And in fact, in many ways, I think not so good experiences teach you, they teach you what not to do. So I have an example, a less than stellar example for you, Andrew. A dream turned nightmare situation. It started with a dream, and the dream was to convert our home into solar. And I was very excited about this. We started working with this company whose name I shall not name, okay? They have a fantastic product. We were excited, we were happy to be going on this sustainable journey with them. It's turned into a nightmare now, 12 months after we started this project, we still don't have solar going back into the grid. And here I was trying really hard to give them my business and they're trying really hard to give me the experience of talking to every single person within this company. You know what I call it? I call it the deluxe transfer package. You know it, right? I have now been transferred and connected to more people within this company than the number of people I had in my small town back in India. And it's quite painful. And what is ironic about this is that I am trying to lean into the future with solar, yet I'm dealing with a customer experience that's stuck in the past. And what I have observed and learned from this is that companies that grow very rapidly, they end up in silos. They end up in very disconnected places where they therefore expect me, the customer, to become the bridge across their systems, the departments and the people. And that lends to a really poor customer experience. And so for all of you customers out there, as you're thinking about this, the one thing I would share is that always look at it from the customer perspective, not from a function or department perspective. And that's certainly something that we think about deeply here at HubSpot.

Yeah, that sounds like a real abuse of power, Yami.

Okay, that's funny.

Brian, if I may, you mentioned being a anthropologist.

Right. Amateur by the way.

Amateur anthropologist, but an anthropologist nonetheless. If you could put that hat back on for just a moment and discuss about some of those patterns that you mentioned and Yami kind of mentioned and extrapolate from that into the future of HubSpot and future of HubSpot CRM.

Yeah. You know, I think of HubSpot, Andrew, and it's really two chapters in HubSpot. Chapter one, the Aha Dharmesh and I had was that humans were sick and tired of being marketed to and really good at blocking it out.

Yep.

And we created a new methodology for them inbound and then we created a marketing app to help them match the way they market to the way people buy. A couple years ago we had really our second Aha. And it's just like Yamini's story. People are sick and tired of cringeworthy customer experiences. It's not just limited to marketing. It's the entire end to end experience. And so we created a new flywheel methodology and we moved from a marketing app to a CRM platform. I mean that's ongoing, it's going extremely well. But that's what HubSpot's up to. We are building a very modern customer in legit CRM platform for scaling companies. And we're just getting started. It's going to be really good. Got it.

And clearly CRM is the space in which we play and we think a lot about. Can you share a little bit, Yamini, about HubSpot's approach to CRM and how that might be evolving?

Look, I think Brian put this very eloquently. There is a whole massive shift that's happening towards the buyer. Buyers want low friction. They want consumer like experiences that are end to end. And therefore the way we are approaching CRM is changing. It's much more about buyer empowerment. Not about seller enablement. I started in CRM a couple decades ago and at that time, if I needed to call a customer, I actually pulled out a contact card, that's what it was called back then. And I would dial. And that was. It was back then. And so that is what customer relationship management meant. And it was for me, the seller way back then. I think CRM has changed so dramatically. Right now you don't have a customer that is calling you. They visit your website and that could be the front door into your company. Or they could, without even talking to any human within the company, they could download a free trial of your product and they can actually experience your company and your product through that. Or pretty late in their buyer's journey, they may do the more traditional thing and call a rep. It is about making that journey great. So CRM is now all about providing something that is connected, that can delight the customer in the journey that they take with you. And as Brian mentioned, that's been our chapter two. That's what we've been focused on. We're really laser focused on that buyer empowerment, not seller enablement. And we're really focused on having that magic, creating that magic companies can provide for their customers.

I love that. The magic, that's what we're focused on.

I like our message. Customer relationship magic system. I might stick.

I might stick. I like that. I like that. And speaking about some of the magic, we heard a series of really exciting new product announcements.

Yes, right.

I'd love to hear about your thoughts on those. And what particularly excites you about HubSpot's product feature?

Well, Andrew, as a parent I always get asked, who's my favorite son? And I never fall into the trap. So I am not going to fall into that trap. And I think we have had some amazing product announcements and launches today. They're all very exciting. But I will highlight three which I think are going to have the most impact for our customers. The first one is HubSpot Payments. This is big. B2B buyers have a long way to actually catch up to providing a very customer centric buying experience. Think about your latest Amazon purchase or my chewy purchase, your Warby Parker purchase. So our vision is to help B2B companies sell touchlessly to their customers and we want to be able to do that. And we also want to make that rep assisted selling motion, the last leg, the last mile of that sales process just smoother. And so HubSpot payments that we launched today, it's an open beta that's going to be the first step in helping our customers sell to their customers online. And so that's pretty exciting. I think the second I have to talk about is Ops Hub Enterprise. That's another huge one. Now this Ops Persona, we call it the revenue Ops Persona, they are really critical in go to market organizations and they are like the unsung heroes with capes because they're asked to do so much. Their job is to provide great insights to the VP of Marketing, to the VP of Sales, to the VP of customer success. And we want to empower them with the right tools and the right insights. And earlier this year we launched Operations Hub Starter and Pro and that allowed these operations professionals to get all of the data from their entire tech stack right into HubSpot and also automate the workflow. So in November, when we launch Operations Hub Enterprise, it's going to be all about reporting. What do you do when you have the data and when you have the workflows, you start driving insights out of it. And so we're squarely focused on reporting and squarely focused on data. And I'll tell you, as a former operations professional, I'm just like giddy with excitement. It is going to be so powerful for these folks. The last quick one, I'll make it really quick is Service Hub Customer Portal. This is going to streamline the communication between companies and their customers. Customers are now going to be able to look at all of the interactions that they're having with the company. Simple, powerful, streamline. So I'm very excited about all of these announcements that we made today. And it really takes a massive leap forward in terms of offering a connected, customizable, customer centric CRM that's going to help scaling companies a lot.

I love it.

I agree with all that. HubSpot's product organization is on fire these days and we're just getting started. It's. There's much more coming. It's really impressive what they're doing.

Yeah, clear path to customer magic, right?

Excited.

You're talking about the product organization being on fire and this just getting started. Can you share a little bit more as you think about what the future of HubSpot CRM may look like?

Yeah, I've been watching the CRM industry literally since 1990. I remember my first sales job out of school installing with floppy disk, a contact management system to track contact. So that was my first use of it. But I purchased CRM many times. I've implemented CRM. I've used them all. And you know, there's a Tried and true playbook for how you build a CRM company. And it basically goes like this, Andrew. Like, you start with sfa, you get a little bit of traction, and then you start acquiring and cobbling and cramming and gluing and taping together tens of acquisitions. And that's how you build out your CRM suite. And that's how the industry has gone. That's how a lot of people think we should go. And I get a lot of advice, like, why aren't you just buying your way to a CRM suite and the whole industry zigging? We're zagging. We're not going to follow what this big CRM vendors are going to do. We're going to follow a little. There's a little company in California. I'm not sure if you've heard of them. They're called Apple. Yeah. And we're going to follow Apple. What I love about Apple is certainly scales, Internet scale, but it's just such a gorgeous customer experience and such a gorgeous user interface. You unpack it and then you just feel something different. You connect it to the other devices. Feels different. You use it, it feels different. And so we are crafters. Apple crafts those products with love. That's what we're doing. We're crafting a CRM product in house would love from the ground up. And I think our customers are going to love it. Our partners are going to love it. I think it matches the time. And if you're a normal company, I think you should buy it. Now, I will say this, I'll caveat it. If you're Walmart or you're like Delta Airlines, maybe you should buy one of those Franken systems. If you have 100 developers sitting around with nothing else to do and you have millions of dollars, a pile of money with nothing left to do it, feel free, go and use one of those. But if you're a growth company and you want to get after it and build a modern customer experience, I feel like we're building exactly what those companies need. I'm really excited about it.

Yeah, we're building it by being Ziggy Craftspeople. Ziggy Craftspeople.

I like that.

Now, before we come to a close, I just want to acknowledge the difficult time that it's been for a lot of people. It's been a difficult year, a difficult couple of years. I know each of you has had your own challenges. I've had my challenges. And with those come lessons and life lessons. And I want to ask, is there Any life lessons that you'd want to share with folks listening start with you, Brian?

Sure. Mine's very personal. Back in February, as you mentioned, I had this terrible snowmobile crash and I was lying in the snow, not confident that I was going to live. And I in running through my head was a Dalai Lama quote. And I'll probably get the quote wrong, but it goes something like, live a good and honorable life so you can enjoy it when you're an old person. And as I was running the tape of my life sort of through my head or the movie, you know, HubSpot's a relatively large part of my movie and I feel like we've built a good and honorable company. I'm proud of it. So I look back favorably on it. I think the Dalai Lama would have liked what I saw. But now that there's seven months apart from that, or I guess it's eight months and I'm healthy now, I just look at it as like there's so much more work to do to achieve our mission. Our mission is we want to enable millions of companies to grow better. Our mission isn't to enable thousands of companies to grow, it's millions to grow better in a modern, awesome way. So lots more work left to do. The second thing I would say, and a lot of people at HubSpot know this about me, but I have my own personal mission and you two are sick of me talking about this, but my own personal mission is I hope to build a company that my eventual grandkids decades from now will be so proud about, that they're bragging about it to all their friends. And that underlies a lot of my decisions. It underlies a lot of the long term perspective we take on things. It underlines the zagging instead of zigging. It's an important part of sort of my DNA when I think about the company. And so I hope when I'm an old cranky anthropologist in my rocking chair that my grandkids are crowing about HubSpot. And I'm looking back at my life and feeling like I had an honorable and good life and that HubSpot's a big part of it. And I hope that for all of you out there watching, I hope that you can look back at your life and your career and feel like you had an honorable and good career that you're proud of and your grandkids are proud of. And my hope is that HubSpot can maybe play a little or even a big role in helping you do that to Your career. So thank you to all of you who are HubSpot customers and users.

Thank you for sharing that, Brian. Really appreciate that. And yami, I'll ask the same question to you. Lessons learned.

Look, mine's personal too. I've had kind of a roller coaster ride. You know, from the time I started in my dream job at HubSpot, January 2020, I think we hit the pandemic crisis mode literally two months in. Yeah, two months into my new job. And that was a pivot that we had to make. And then this spring, Brian obviously called me to take care of HubSpot so that he can recover from a life altering accident. And then six months later he came back in and asked me to be CEO. And two weeks after that I suffered a personal loss. My. My dad passed away and it was exceptionally emotional and he's been a huge supporter and life has been full of ups and downs. Well, the only way I get through tough times, and there will always be tough times mixed with great times, is to care deeply and persevere relentlessly. That's been my life lesson. Now as soon as we got into the pandemic, there was a ocean of uncertainty. People worried about jobs, their health, lives, livelihood. So my job at that time was to remain calm and provide clarity to HubSpot's customers, partners, employees, and do it quickly, decisively, but more importantly, do it from a place of deep empathy and care. And that's what I did. And when Brian, you called, it was super emotional. And my first thought was, my God, I hope you're okay. I hope we give you all of the space for you to recover and you've built this wonderful organization. We'll take care of HubSpot for you. And that's exactly what we did. We focused and I have been relentless in terms of execution and driving HubSpot forward from there. And that's been my life lesson. And I will also say that's my commitment, that I will relentlessly pursue the vision that Brian and Dharmesh have for HubSpot. Relentlessly focus on delighting our customers and building an organization that people are just excited and proud to work and get their best work done.

Thank you.

I really appreciate that. That was good. Good. Close.

I just want to say thank you both.

Right.

Thank you for spending time with us. Really appreciate the honesty, the candor and hearing about both personal learnings and also thinking about the business as well and all of our customers and the entire HubSpot community. And for all of you out there, thank you for spending time with us. Really excited about inbound 2021 and hope to see you in person soon. Thank you. And enjoy the next couple days.

Thanks, everybody.

Thank you, everybody.