INBOUND2020: How Companies Can Thrive in the New Normal

Wow, what an unusual time. I never anticipated a year ago we would be sitting in an empty Fenway park kicking off inbound.

Yeah, I think it's going to be fun. It feels a little bit surreal sitting here at Fenway park instead of being amidst all the inbound goers.

It's not the same as other years. We miss all the humans. But great, great opportunities for attendees to connect with each other. I think that's going to be the best part.

Online events are actually great for antisocial people like me. It's like I get to connect. I live on social media, so this is going to be great.

What's truly unique about what's going on right now is there's three major crises at the same time. And all three crises are impacting businesses in a major way. Impacting HubSpot, impacting your business. You know, certainly a health crisis going on, there's an economic crisis, and there's a crisis of conscience happening right now. And I went to Business School 15 years ago. They didn't have any classes on W shaped economic recoveries. They didn't have any classes on worldwide pandemics. They didn't have any classes on woke leadership. So I'm trying to figure out as I go along here, and it's honestly, it's been really challenging and in some ways really interesting. Certainly been an interesting six months. More changes happened in this last six months and the last 16 years. You know, there's no training for this, there's no playbooks.

And it's different than when we were all in the office together relating face to face.

I think what's important for folks to realize is that this is not yet the new normal.

Right.

There's nothing normal about us sitting here in Fenway park in an MT stadium. There's nothing normal about millions of people being in quarantine. There's nothing normal about our kids spending more time on Zoom than we are.

Right.

It's not normal yet. That's something that's hard for me personally.

I bet there's kind of two dials I have that have changed quite a bit. I have peacetime mode and I have wartime mode. And holy crap, has it been wartime the last six months. I mean, it's impacting everything we're doing. Yep.

I think the role of technology is really changing and that's something my team's really thinking about. Everybody from my first grader kids to my retiree parents are relying on technology, not just for productivity, but for every kind of human connection right now.

So feel Like a heavier responsibility.

I feel like there is a responsibility on product teams. We're reaching out to each other to work, but also just to connect on a human level.

I think one of the skills that forward looking companies need to lean into is they need to be able to think about how do we run our office on Zoom, how do we run our company on Zoom, how do we run it on Slack? I don't think like the amount of collaboration that happened over time was going up. It's gone through the roof in the last couple years. I don't think we're going back to 2019. I think 2022, 2023 looks a lot more like today. And great managers and great leaders figure out how to lead through Zoom and lead through Slack. I just think back to when I was a kid and my dad, every morning, you know, he'd get up and put his start shirt on, his Brooks Brothers suit, his hard sole shoes and drive to General Electric every day. And I do it again on Saturday morning. He had to go to the office to get anything done and dress up with, with myself. You know, I wake up every morning and I put a nice shirt on, but I wear my pajama bottoms and I don't wear any shoes. I'm in front of Zoom all day. Big, big changes for me. I'm kind of hardwired to think of change equals opportunity. So I'm cautiously optimistic. For forward looking companies that lean into this change and come out the other side in a better place, there's an.

Opportunity to kind of really leverage the change, to kind of survive in the new normal, if you will.

Yeah.

And thrive in the new normal.

Yeah. You know, I have a strange hobby. I kind of fashion myself as like a social anthropologist. I look at the way human behavior is changing and try to think how, how can companies change the way they work to match that? And it's that odd little hobby that I have that led to, you know, the idea of inbound marketing that Dharmesh and I came up with in HubSpot in the first place, that humans were changing the way they shopped and the way they learn and the way they made purchase decisions. And marketers need to change the way they go to market to match it. Today feels similar to me where employees are really changing. They're really changing their expectations of their employers, of their leaders and companies. Well, modern companies need to change the way they think about all that stuff and match it up with a modern employee. It's a very interesting time. And I think forward looking Companies that take advantage of these changes and lean into them or really benefit Post Covid.

You talk a lot about this change that's happening, and companies are adjusting, some better than others. But some companies are kind of making the minimal changes, kind of holding on, like, oh, we're just gonna do these little things and we're gonna hope that the world goes back to the way it was. This is not a fad. This is the future. Right? We see too many companies sometimes hugging the past too hard. It's like, okay, I'm just waiting for it to kind of go back to.

The way it was.

And it's not as it makes me feel. It's. The reality is you can't turn the clock back and party like it's 1999. I'm still an optimist. I think we'll be able to party in 2029. But we need to get these changes in place, and they're gonna be long, endearing.

One of the most interesting things that's gone on in my industry, really all our industries, the front office industry, the tech industry, marketing and selling is boy, supply and demand have really gotten out of whack. Most companies now, if they were very office centric, they're gonna be on some sort of a spectrum where they encourage diversity. So you're going in your company from competing with a couple of local companies that, you know you're competing for talent with. So you're competing for talent with everybody across the country. You're competing with HubSpot, with Google, with every company out there. So supply and demand is going to get tougher. The market for great employees is going to get harder. I think great companies are going to have to step up their culture game to attract and retain great people.

Brian and I have been obsessed with culture, HubSpot since the early days. And we think of culture as a product. We build a product for our customers, and culture is the product that we build for our people, for our team. Now, there are three features that have always been in demand since the early years of HubSpot. Number one is people want an aligned mission. They want a mission that they can kind of get behind. Number two is they want remarkable autonomy. They want the ability to make decisions, even wrong ones sometimes, and that's the best way for them to learn. And three is they want brilliant peers. They want colleagues that they respect, admire, and enjoy. Now, since COVID we still have all those three features. They're still very much in demand. But there are three new ones that have kind of popped up and have an upward sloping curve. Number one, people are looking for flexibility, flexibility in terms of where they work from and what hours they work. Number two is they want transparency from the culture. They want to know what's going on inside the companies and inside the leaders heads. And number three, they want diversity. And the reason they want diversity is the best people want to work on the best teams and the best teams are diverse teams. So if you want to thrive in the new normal, the way to do it is to build a culture that meets the demands of the best people. You have to put those features in.

At HubSpot, we've been leaning in hard on diversity inclusion for a while now and made really good progress. I'm proud of the progress we've made. And our diversity and inclusion initiatives have been really internally focused and, and we've tried to walk the walk and talk the talk. We're starting to talk a lot more externally about it. We feel like it's our responsibility to try to move the needle. Here's the thing about history, whether it's the history of racial injustice or the history of business, people think it marches and there's this march of history. It doesn't. It crawls. And then once in a while it leaps. We're mid leap right now. When I think of racial injustice, it's really crawled. There was a big leap in the 1960s. There's another big leap happening right now in 2020. And what's different about the late 60s and today is I think corporations like HubSpot and others can play a role in it that can speak out about it and can help move that needle. And I think in 2030, when people look back at today, at least for myself, I want to be proud of the part we played in trying to move that needle and being part of proud of that leap that's going on in society today.

I have a renewed empathy for our customers. We've been talking to our customers a lot and you hear these stories of, you know, how they're dealing with change and how they're just trying to kind of push through it and survive. It's, you know, I've always thought of HubSpot as a relatively empathetic company and really understanding our customers. This has really brought to light how important that is. Yeah, you don't just treat customers with remarkable respect, but with exceptional empathy. And one of the things I love is kind of what we've been doing kind of to get in the minds of customers and really understand them.

I kind of think of HubSpot as for a long time we were obsessed with that relationship between ourselves and the prospect. Over time we shifted that and we're obsessed with our relationship with ourselves and our customers. I think that's been healthy. And we've done a whole series of things that have brought us closer to our customers and increased that empathy. Like some of the stuff I like that we're doing is we do that monthly staff meeting that's all about the customers. We have the customers.

I love that meeting by the way. It's not just that we get to hear from customers, we get to do it together as a group. We have this kind of experience hearing.

Hearing that pain together is useful. Every time we have a company meeting, we have a customer present at the company meeting. Like we've really become much more customer centric. I think there's going to be two types of companies that come out of this. There will be companies that are leaning into the changes that are happening now or leaning into online marketing, inside selling. And there's companies that are just trying to get back to 2019. I think the future 2022 looks a lot more like today than it does like 2019. So I'm very optimistic for companies leaning into the future. Right now a lot of companies are relying on outside selling. A lot of companies are relying on offline marketing. But beyond that I think there's a lot more people have to do. And I kind of think it's almost like a food chain where you got companies that are very human centric, go to markets where most of the interaction is human to human companies. Like all the way on the other end that you only can deal with computers. Like if you're dealing with Google, it's computer to computer. I think people need to kind of slide in between where those humans need to rely on computers more to make them more effective, to give them leverage. So that's one step down, another step down is more. Gosh. Much of that interaction is online. Much of that interaction is self service with humans really helping those computers and accelerating that. So what I think we're seeing happen is forward looking companies are starting to slide down that food chain. A lot of HubSpot customers I kind of think are here and are sliding here.

That makes sense.

What do you think?

Here's how I think about it and I promise there's no math involved. Good. Actually there's a little math involved. I think trust is more important than ever. Likely because it's scarcer than ever and trust is this abstract thing. So what I like to do is like to think about trust like an engineer thinks about trust. Well, I have to think about everything like an engineer thinks about things. So simple math promise, it's not too heavy. The way I think about it, trust is this kind of prediction score. So the trust score for a company is the probability that they're going to do something good, the thing you expect, minus the probability they're going to do something evil, the thing you don't expect. Right. So we've been focused on this. It's like, okay, are they gonna deliver on the thing that I want? But there's also this side that's shown up a lot more lately in terms of doing the things I didn't want them to do. And it's that kind of interplay that's important. So how does this help companies thrive in the new normal? Realize that your customers are looking at you with much more scrutiny now than they ever have, which is actually good news. You have the ability to stand out, to recognize that trust is going to be important for the long term and recognize that every decision you make, every action you take will either improve your trust score or it will decrease it and act accordingly.

I like that. Dharmesh. Here's how I kind of think About Trust. Since 2006 we started HubSpot, the importance of trust has been going up and to the right. I think the reason that's been going up and to the right is that people don't trust anybody anymore. They don't trust the media, they don't trust the government. Just like there's a major trust deficit going on, they certainly don't trust marketers and sellers. This importance of establishing trust me going up, I think Covid has pushed it up like this. So if you want to thrive in the new normal, you've got to maximize that trust score. Kind of how we came up with inbound in the first place, kind of how we came up with HubSpot is looking the way people shop and learn and buy and helping companies adjust to that. Holy cow, is there a lot of change going on these days? The early adopters of inbound marketing, wow, did really great. I think the people who were early, early adopters of the best practices going on today, they're gonna do great coming out of this. So whether you're a marketer or a seller or chief revenue officer, ops person, I don't think you want a band aid. I kind of think you want to lean into these changes.

I have a nine year old son, Brian, as you know, and just the other day he was like, daddy, no, you don't have to worry about telling me where babies come from. I have a friend in his late elevens. I'll figure that out. What I really want to know is how have buyers changed? What should companies be doing to kind of thrive in the new normal? And so my response to that is buyers are human, you're human. I'm mostly human. So the question is, if you want to know how buyers change, ask yourself, how have I changed? So chances are, Brian, you're not taking a whole lot of in person meetings. You're not allowing yourself to be wined and dined by some salesperson. Chances are your time is even more scarce than it used to be. And chances are you have like zero patience for someone else's sales process. You're just like, just let me friggin buy the thing. And so for companies to thrive in the new normal, what they need to do is deliver a purchasing experience that matches the customer's new normal, not their old normal. That's how you thrive.

Yeah. One of the things that I think companies need to do to thrive in the new normal is it's kind of sand down the rough edges in their products, of course, but also their go to market.

Exactly, yeah. So we, you know.