Shifting from Agency to Revenue Performance (and Planning for the Future)

Hi folks. Welcome to agency unfiltered, the HubSpot Solutions Partner Podcast.

I'm your host, Kevin Dunn and Agency.

Unfiltered is a weekly web series and podcast that interviews the owners, founders and executives of agencies and services providers from around the world about whatever it takes to grow and scale. This week we have on Patrick Bidiscom, CEO of New Breed, who was just recently announced as HubSpot's North American partner of the Year. Patrick joins the show to talk about New Breed's shift from a traditional marketing agency to to a revenue performance management firm. He offers his perspective and definition of revenue performance management, what led to New Breed Shift and how it has impacted their service offerings, ideal client profiles, prospecting and pipeline management processes, and his team's overall go to market strategy. Patrick then discusses how his team has interpreted and pivoted alongside the shifts within the HubSpot ecosystem over the last decade and how others can plan to do the same. He revisits some of the most impactful changes he's seen in years past, how his team adapted, and how others can codify a means for keeping pace as well.

We then look ahead and discuss his.

Expectations and predictions for the future of the HubSpot ecosystem and how he and others can prepare themselves to survive and thrive.

We wrap with big bets Patrick has.

In mind and what HubSpot's NAMM Partner of the Year has their sights on next. You're listening to another episode of of Agency Unfiltered.

Kevin, thanks for having me. You got Patrick from New Breed. I've been doing today.

Yeah. Patrick, thanks so much for, for coming on to the podcast. Excited to have you, Excited to have New Breed on the show. Excited for the conversation at hand. So how you doing?

I'm doing well at the moment on a little bit of holiday, so sitting in sunny Florida, so can't complain. Escaping the negative six that's at headquarters, Burlington, Vermont.

So yeah, man, I don't know how, how far in advance this trip may have been planned, but timing wise, you couldn't have nailed it any better. Yeah, it's gonna be 10 out in my part of Massachusetts, so Florida sounds pretty nice at this moment in time, so I'm very jealous. So Patrick, first and foremost, I want to say this. Congrats to New Breed on becoming the North American Partner of the Year. Huge accolade, impressive accolade and so many kudos. Many congratulations to you and the New Breed team.

Thanks, Kevin. Yeah, it's been, you know, it's, it's something we're Going for every year we've been North American partner several years before they had global, we were the top partner before that was officially announced and it was a great team effort this year. It was really, really fun to watch how the team stepped up and competed and did a great job. We solved for the customer, we solved for the partnership and we came out on top. So it was, it was really exciting to be able to do that in this year. And HubSpot with New Breed's been up to again, impressive.

Such an accomplishment. So again, yes, congrats. Probably the result of a lot of hard work for, for you and the team. As, as you kind of mentioned there, let me start with this because I think, you know, that's, that's great framing, right? If any other partner out there is, is circling Nam Partner of the Year as their own on their vision boards or, or aspirations, their goals would love to pick your brain and learn some of the things you've done to, to help New Breed get there. Let me start here though. Sounds like this was a very intentional decision. But New Breed has moved away from I think the traditional marketing agency kind of positioning and branding to be what you all call like revenue performance management. And so what is revenue performance management and how does that stack up to that traditional marketing agency positioning? You know what I mean?

Yeah, that's a great, great question. And so it's a new category, right? And like many of the partners, we started out in the marketing category and as HubSpot evolved and our vision has evolved over the years, we really wanted to take a much more holistic approach around the revenue and customer acquisition as well as expansion and renewals. So our customer base we're able to serve not only from helping them acquire new customers, but we can help them renew new customers, we can help them expand those relationships. So it really comes holistic around the whole revenue revenue line item inside of a business. And if you think about it, it's an interesting time to be a partner, right? Because you've got, you got a group of. Most of us grew up as marketing partners, right. And the products evolved are you have a great time to make a choice and you can go really deep in one category. You can go broad. There's going to be implementation partners, there's going to be migration partners, there's going to be integration technical partners and then there's going to be partners like New Breed that are going to be able to go broad across everything. And I think it's just a really interesting time to enter into the partner Ecosystem and you really get to choose your own destiny. Right now there's a lot of room for growth and there's a lot of room for category creation for folks. So we decided to go holistic and so we can go across the entire platform. We are reaching a size that we can go deep on every component and we can really help our customers drive revenue through every facet of their business.

I love that the holistic approach is what stands out to me, but I like your point in that. Well, sure, revenue, like net new revenue generation, but there's equal emphasis on retention and potential expansion. Right, Love that. And then really, really neat point about the. I think the ecosystem in that it's choose your own adventure, choose your own destiny. There's so much space for a really diverse set of partner types and focus areas. You said, you know, implementation or migration. So it's, it's great positioning and it's a great thought overall about the ecosystem that move to revenue performance management. What does that mean for the team? Did you have to rethink or, you know, did you have to operationally operationalize it in a way that you hadn't previously?

Yeah, I mean, couple things. I mean, right, we had to, internally had to say the word agency was dead, right? Like, that's not a word we talk about inside of New Breed. You know, agencies have like a, you know, people have a preconceived notion of what, what that means to a customer and then to an employee, right? And we think about it, New Breed, we've got two types of customers. You've got an internal customer and an external customer, right? And so when we're talking about our vision and mission, right, we need to make it understood by both, both parties. And so first and foremost was a communication strategy around, you know, why we've evolved away from an agency. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But this is just, we're much broader than that. And these are the types of services that we offer that make it much broader than that. So that was our, our first step. And then additionally, it took us hiring different types of talents. You know, we have software engineers on staff now. We've got data analysts on staff. These are folks that aren't traditionally at a marketing agency. And you know, Kevin, I'm not even sure if I mentioned this to you, but New Breed's both solution partner, but also an app partner, right? So now around this side of a revenue firm, right, we're really thinking about not only can we solve that problem with managed services, but can we Solve that problem with technology for our customers as well.

You know, I think that's on the top of mind of a lot of partners is how do I expand my managed services business into the technology, the app side of the business? I think that is a whole other episode in and of itself. I can imagine how you bring that to market and the team that you have to build and hire to allow that to happen. Let me ask you this though, about the shift away from agency into again revenue performance management is, is I'll keep using that label. What was the hardest part of that switch for you, for your clients, for the team? Like what, what were the biggest pains that you felt?

I think the hardest part of the switch is the confidence to make the switch. Right. It's really easy, especially when you've built an existing business that the business tries to pull you back in to your existing form. So. So I think the hardest switch was one just putting that stake in the ground. I remember it was about a year and a half, almost two years ago now that we came out with that messaging and we came out with the messaging and I'm a big believer of this is you need to act like the company you want to be. Right. And so that means the messaging is going to be forward leaning and we need to lean a little bit further out than where we are today. So I remember we bought the domain, switched the website, launched a new website around it and I emailed Brian Halligan. I just said hey, just so you know, like here's the next evolution of new breed and him and I are close. And it was like a one and a half sentence email. Well, he leaned into it and he forwarded it to HubSpot and sent it to the entire org, you know and that was like the. Okay, great. We put the stake in the ground, it's resonating in the market and now the world knows about it. Now we need to make sure we can deliver on this right.

So yeah, I love it's like, hey, our, our framing of it. Our vision needs to be a little forward looking and then we'll close the gap to our current state to get there. Also good CTA for me. Maybe I got to send Brian Halligan more emails directly so I can get him to, you know, circulate.

Yeah, I think you should the trick, keep them to two sentences.

So yeah, yeah, brevity is king in that. Yes, love that. Patrick, what about the types of businesses that you were seeking out or hoping to work with? Did like the customer profile change, you.

Know, the Customer profile didn't change too much. What changed for us is the amount of folks that we can serve within that customer or amount of departments. Right. So if you looked at it, we were really focused on just the cmo, director of Demand gen and their teams pre two years ago. Right. This allowed us to get into the CRO VP of sales. This led us to get into operations. Right. So RevOps became a big component for us and working closer more with their CFO and analyst teams. Right. So often with our data products we're able to put together board level reporting and so that has a different set of eyes on it. And then additionally the integrations team gets you involved with their technology teams. Right. So it quickly broadened who we had to work with and that was. Go back to your earlier challenges. I think just it happened very quickly for us. So getting the team to feel comfortable. Right. They went from only working with marketers to now working with head of sales, head of operations, head of technology, engineers. Right. So you know I think the, I don't think we overlooked it but the what I would caveat is if other folks want to go down that journey, you can't over invest in the change management side of things. Right. And the training and enablement for your teams. It's a big shift for us. It happened fast. Fast was good from a revenue standpoint but they also that they didn't have as much time to make that transformation and the business transformed faster than they did.

Yeah, that's a helpful caveat. It's a helpful note. It's like hey, lesson learned, maybe a pitfall or two or you know, don't scrape your knees here because we did. Right. So I think creating the space and time and allowing for the transformation to also happen amongst the team, that's a great call. So Patrick, you actually bring up an interesting point about the expansion of who you talk to departmentally, the decision makers, the breadth of folks that are now involved in these decisions. What did that change for your sales process? Any recommendations for other partners? Like hey yeah, I talked to the CMO and those in charge of demand gen. I'm comfortable there. How do I talk to sales leaders, the CFO, IT directors, etc. Any, any lessons learned? Any recommendations on that front from like a sales process?

It's interesting. We're, we're right at the size. We're in that awkward size right now. Right. Which is the. We're not big enough to specialize. Right. Where you could have dedicated teams. So newborns just around 150 people and so it's not quite big enough to say great. Like we're like HubSpot size where you can say great. We'll have a team that just does this, right? So the sales team right now we ask, we ask a lot, right? They need to be comfortable selling to multiple stakeholders, multiple Personas there. And so a couple things that we launched that enabled it. One, we from a process standpoint, we launched our own sales engineering team. So one thing we said, great, if we're going to ask them to go wider on who they sell to, we can't have them go as deep on product knowledge. So previously up until this point a New Breed account executive would need to know all of New Breed solutions and all of HubSpot products, right? And they were the ones making the core recommendations. So we killed that component off of them and said great, we want you to know how to sell to more buyer types but we're going to ask when you need to go actually sell technology you have a counterpoint and you'll get assigned an SE that you can bring in to help sell that. So that was one thing we did to help create some bandwidth because as I think everyone on this call and the listeners know that HubSpot's product evolved a lot. So trying to know all of new breed SKUs and all of HubSpot SKUs and INS and Ounces was getting quite, you know, eating up a lot of their bandwidth to be able to do that. So that was one component. The other thing that we did is we enabled team selling. So folks are, some folks are better at selling to sales leaders, some folks are better at selling to operations, some understand integrations better. They're able to tag each other into deals. And we built a culture around team selling. So there is our, we have a process so deals can get split so that way there's not like a, hey, Kevin's gonna come in this deal and take too much of the deal from a commission standpoint. So there's kind of pre negotiated splits that happen. So that way they can say great, hey you know what, I got this awesome deal. I'm Patrick, I'm really good at selling to marketers but Kevin's awesome at selling to the CRO. I wonder if he wants to co sell this deal with me and let's go close this together. He know the he or she knows what they're going to do from a direct rep, knows what they're going to give up from a commission standpoint. And, and then there's some double comp scenarios to help incentivize that. So that's great.

Yeah. So it's really, it's like a strengths based sales culture creating the space to allow team selling to happen. But to your point, sounds like a lot of the, the processes around commission splits and like what the ramifications are from a compensation perspective that's all defined. So the friction, the potential friction that that could cause is removed. It enables folks to want too many.

Orgs that the it was really left to the individual sellers to decide what the split was and then they just arm wrestle over the deal. Right. And, and then it creates a culture of lone wolves. It creates a culture of folks not wanting to co sell and we sell a B2B complex product and to me co selling is at the heart of it because you can't be an expert on everything. So we leaned into it and asked and built a culture around team selling and it's been really effective for us.

No, that's great. No, thanks for sharing. I think too the other note about splitting out the product knowledge requirement of that sales rep plate and so all right, let's enable them to understand and know and learn how to sell into more buyer types, more business types and have that now exclusively with a sales engineering team. I mean obviously easier said than done but it feels like a really great way to balance all the things your team must know. Any recommendations on how to establish the depth of knowledge a sales engineer would need? You know what I mean? Around the HubSpot product man, one of.

The hardest roles to hire for, if you want my honest opinion. Where we were fortunate, a few of the folks on that team came from the HubSpot ecosystem and or from HubSpot. So we had, we were fortunate that they were trained and had grown up with the product because if you, if you try to go get a, someone a sales engineer from another, you know, that's been in let's say the salesforce ecosystem. Right. Let's just use that as an example. You could bring them over to the HubSpot ecosystem. They've got a lot of skews to memorize and understand now versus I found a lot of success finding people that grew up inside the ecosystem because their knowledge gained over time and so they were able to get competency across a lot of product knowledge and understand how the product evolved. So that was our approach. I'd said there's not that many of those folks out there but my recommendation is there's a great HubSpot alumni group. Reach out to the alumni group and there's some really talented folks in that that might be able to join your company.

Yep, that's a really great call. But I think the, the important note that you've seen work is target folks that have grown up in the ecosystem versus finding folks that have excelled in these types of engineering roles previously in another ecosystem and bring them over. Right. Because the, just the, the understanding of our, the HubSpot product, the Skews, the depth, the breadth, it's, it's quite a lot.

It can be for someone that's new to it. For most solution partners, these people live in your services org right now. Right. And find one that likes to, you know, may not want to be a account executive but enjoys being in the sales process and you know, make it a, make them feel an inch taller. Promote them to sales engineer. Give them some autonomy and help them build that. Help them, let them build that department for you.

Yeah, I love that it's similar. It's. I want to keep on the theme. I almost want to pull it out a little more broadly. I would imagine that to achieve awards like NAM Partner of the Year to achieve the success that we've seen New Breed have, it oftentimes relies on, you know, synthesizing the shifts of HubSpot and the HubSpot ecosystem overall and then, you know, keeping pace or understanding what the ramifications are of those shifts. Right. What are other changes that you've seen happen to the ecosystem and what has New Breed kind of, you know, institutionalized to keep pace? You know what I mean?

Probably the most current one, right. Is the shift to, you know, HubSpot's got a big shift on, focused on get the customer implemented. Right. And then let's figure out the long term play with the customer as the secondary sale. That was even a comp switch that we had to make, right. So our CAT executives were had sold and then that deal went over to a CSM for us that didn't work anymore. Right. Because they were trying to sell as much up front as they could because that was their one time to make commission and hit their quota. Right. Which is what New Breed was asking them to do by the comp plan that we put in place. So I would take a hard look at your comp plans. My recommendation is make sure that they're in line with the, with the motions HubSpot's asking in the market. And the more tighter you can get that comp plan, the better it needs to be complementary. Not, not a straight copy of HubSpot's Comp plan. Right. We're not, we're not building a corporate enterprise software company. We're building solution partners. Right. And we're somewhere between, you know, a couple hundred people. Right. So make sure you design a plan that works for your business but is complementary to how HubSpot's asking their motion to happen inside their org.

So, yeah, no, I mean, I think that makes a ton of sense. I think that the highlight there from what the initial point of sale is to your point is the emphasis is the initial implementation.

Right.

Of HubSpot. Is that also connecting some dots? Is that what drove something like revenue performance management? Where do those things overlap? Is it CRM implementation informed, tangential? You know what I mean? Where and how do those things overlap.

Or issues for us? Right. We just, we saw the writing on the wall that, you know, and we leaned in really early that HubSpot was going to become a CRM company. New Breed's always had CRM experience, but that meant CRM is not purchased by the marketer. Right. They're in the buying group, but they're not the lead. And that opened up the door for us to say, okay, great, let's lean into that versus be scared of it and let's build services around that versus trying to say, great, go do the CRM purchase. Let us know when you're going to do marketization. You know, I grew up inside the Salesforce ecosystem early on in my career. New Breed had been a Salesforce partner already doing CRM limitations. So when HubSpot made that shift, we were well suited to just lean into it. So that's great.

And so to your point, being able to see the writing on the wall, okay, HubSpot's position as a CRM company, therefore, that's going to fundamentally change what we sell, how we sell it, who we sell it to, and obviously the, the ripple effect of all that. What is the, what's the next writing on the wall? Do you have any projections or what are your expectations for the future of the ecosystem? Either not so distant future or more long tail?

No, I mean, honestly, I think right now I feel like we've all really just scratched the surface on HubSpot being a CRM company. CRM, so such a big category, we're just doubling down there and making sure that we can really be the best in class inside the ecosystem around CRM. And that's going to be a big push for us. And then to me, CRM and integrations are complementary of each other. You can't be in the CRM basis without being in the integration business. So building that integration side as well is really important to us.

And I think integrations could go a couple different ways. Obviously we know that New Breed has kind of the app side as well, but integrations could also refer to tech, stack, consulting and those types of connectivity versus solving the problem with Stack. Is that fair?

If you still think about it, the native apps inside the ecosystem are pretty small. So most businesses have some app that doesn't have something already Pre built. With HubSpot, that team is dedicated to saying great, we need HubSpot to be the 1 endpoint and we need Endpoint X and that could be some system you've never heard of to enterprise level software. Right. And there's still a lot of those that haven't been built and even the ones that have been built only can do so much right. So you know, it's Dynamics or it's Salesforce. There's still plenty of room for an integration partner to come in and say great, well we can customize this and build it out even further. Further.

It does that, does New Breed play in there at all?

Yeah, so that, that so the integrations team separate actually from the apps team. So and we're playing, we're playing there quite a bit and I, I still think that's going to be a nice growing market for New Breed. Again I put that under the CRM umbrella because when someone's making a CRM decision, they have to make an integration decision as well. So especially we serve the mid market corporate and enterprise. So they already have other technology might be a little bit different. I can't speak to on the startup for very small business side if there's less integrations I would assume just based on scale but at our size companies, they're anywhere from 10 to 15 integrations into whatever their existing CRMs. If you're going to get them to switch to HubSpot, you're going to have to know how to switch those integrations as well.

Now Patrick, I don't know your, your risk tolerance in general, but a question that, that I floated out in a couple episodes recently has just been about big bets and what are some big swings that you're hoping to make this year or a big swing maybe you took last year that that paid off for the business. Any, anything from that big bet, innovative kind of, you know, experimental side of the house that you're hoping to, to see how it pans out.

Making a big bet on data. I think data is going to be at the hub of all businesses. And so I joined a company on the board of a company called sasworks. It's Jim o' Neill for the folks in the ecosystem for a long time, former CIO and chief people officer at HubSpot. And it's a revenue analytics platform. So think about business intelligence, revenue analytics, about sales analytics, which often gets confused. It's not the, you know, it's not a dashboarding tool. It is private equity growth equity, business operator, operator level reporting. And we're really bullish and not only do we ingest the data on that side, we we also stream it back to our customers so they can consume it in their CRM as well as we have a tech enabled services team that also can then put that into board level presentations for you as well. So we just think like the systems are there now so we can connect all the systems. We built the data hygiene engine. So we ingest that data and then we can, we're able to put that back into the customer CRM. It takes billing data, product data, marketing automation data and enriches it and, and then we can stream it back to them and they can consume it any way they want. Most people still consume it in a format that the services team at sasworks presents back to them. But we're seeing a growing demand for people saying great, just stream this back into my system so my Revops team can consume this and present to the CRO, present to the cfo. So it's a big bet for us. It's something that's been consumed at unicorn level SaaS companies for years. It hasn't been brought to the mid market before and we're very bullish on bringing it to the mid market so.

Well, sounds exciting. Incredibly valuable obviously for, for Newbree but for the, the clients on the receiving end of a lot of this data. Also I enjoyed the distinction between like sales data, you know, versus like true business intelligence. What do we find to be the most valuable enriching data that gets into the hands of these customers?

A couple core metrics that we really help folks get to and it's interesting how many companies I talk to that actually can't get to this metric and it's lifetime expectancy and lifetime value in being able to segment that against different industries, be able to segment that against different businesses. The other ones we look at are revenue per head is a, is a, is another big metric that we can get to. But we slice and dice that. I mean you get 18 level, 18 different pivots and you get about 60 different dashboards when on the SAS virtual product. So but those are some core ones that I'm always surprised to at the size of the organization that it's. It just as a piping and plumbing problem they can't get all the systems and data connect to be able to answer that question. And we built the, we built an engine that can do that for them.

That's great. Now Patrick, we've highlighted a couple of the accolades of New Breed. Obviously early days of being into entry, early entry into the partner program, the elite tiered partner, you know, the first NAM partner of the year. What's next? Is there. What's the additional rung on this ladder that you're hoping to climb?

Yeah, you know we're, I mean in for the long haul, you know fairly still fairly young in my career. So we're going to go, you'll see New Breed in the next couple of years really make a significant play in the global space. So you know we want to expand our footprint into different geographies. So I know there's lots of other partners that listen to, listen to this. You know, if you're interested in, you know, partnership with New Breed or thinking about what's the next stage for you and maybe having your company join and merge with another organization. We're, we're interested in the global space.

A teeing up of the future but also a potential call to arms for any of those interested.

We're in it for the long haul and we want to build the want to build a great business around HubSpot.

Well, I have a final question. It's the question I ask. I wrap every episode with this. I'm going to hold on that for one moment. You also had mentioned, you know, team wise up to 150 individuals for those tuning in not with a team of 150 are looking to grow to the place that New breed is at today. Any, any lessons learned? Where should I think about growing my team that maybe I wouldn't had had thought about or anything I should put into practice earlier than, than, you know, I'm thinking about it. You know, what are the, what are the takeaways? What are the lessons learned? Any, any knowledge to share in that regard?

So I'd say for an early stage partner and I'll say early stage, let's say under 50 employees.

Yeah.

And you want to move into growth mode. I would hire your head of sales sooner than you thought. I've at least noticed a lot of partners in the ecosystem. The CEO is the CRO and candidly that that was how Newbreed was structured for a long time. We've brought on an amazing head of sales and it was a, oh man, I wish I did that sooner. So moment. The second, second component I would say is if you're in that 50 to 100, it's a really interesting time to say do we need someone in people or HR culture? Right. And typically the kind of the business metric you hear is, you know, right around 100 people. And we did that early and I was really happy we did that early. We did that around 70 people. So I would, you know, it's a, it's a complex talent world. If you want to build a great culture, invest in your people and have a people leader that can dedicate that time. It's different than being a CEO. You need that partner with you. So I, I would really recommend go find some great people leader HR talent and bring that into your organization sooner if you want. If you're in growth mode.

Yep, that's super helpful. So it sounds like interest and entry into growth mode head of sales earlier than you think. Offload as owner or CEO, offload the sales ownership and then obviously to your point too there, people leader. Invest in your people, invest in your culture. Super helpful. Hi Patrick, last question again. This is kind of how we wrap every episode. What's the. And I know agency is dead. So just take, we'll. I'll ask a question the show here.

Kevin.

I know any ideas?

Any ideas?

But what's the strangest part of agency life?

Strangest part. So it's a great question. I think it's just the, it's the diversity and pace, right? It's, it's. I think we're, I think being a solution partner in the HubSpot ecosystem. You're in sales and marketing and service technology. You're working with some of the fastest growing companies. It's the world of digital transformation and technology and automation and now AI, right? Is the. Is just happening at such an exponential rate. If you enjoy and thrive and fast pace, I think it's a great environment. If you don't, it's going to chew you up and spit you out real quick. You live this world to Kevin, like just moving at mach speed. I enjoy that. I love that it changes every year. I love that there's. The technology is getting better, the automation is getting better. We've got AI now that's just making it take off like light speed. And if, if you, if you enjoy that pace, which I do, I don't sit still. Well, I don't know if it's the strangest thing but it sure is fun.

Yeah. No, good answer. Yeah, hyper speed. Comfortability with that pace. Comfortability with change. Yeah, spot on. Definitely agree. Thanks for the answer.

No problem.

Well, Patrick, out of time. I think we just hit time. So again thanks for coming on sharing some of the history, some of the things that you have going on with New breed and again congrats on NAMM partner of the year but much appreciated.

Yeah, thanks for having us Kevin. Really enjoyed it and look forward to being back on the show again.

Yeah, we'll have to hear how the business intelligence and big bet on data lands. So maybe there's a sequel but that's it for the show. For everyone that's tuned in today, this has been another episode of Age Can See Unfiltered.

Sam.