The Power Of Unified Data, Product-Led Growth, And Revenue | INBOUND 2024

You want to build a campaign as unique as each customer, and to do that, you need to know who they are and how they're using your product. That's exactly what Amplitude's powerful behavioral insights can do for you. Now available within HubSpot's customer platform. With the updated Amplitude app for HubSpot, your marketing team can use product behaviors to identify the best leads to nurture easily pass more qualified leads to sales better. Welcome customers at sign up. See how email campaigns are performing. We work with service to reignite at risk customers, all using Amplitude's curated targeted data in the hubs you already love. Install the amplitude app for HubSpot to get started today.

Here we are.

Hi everyone. Welcome to the session. What we just showed. Hey, my name is Karen Ng. I'm here with two incredible product leaders. Francois, who's the CPO of Amplitude, also the ex CPO of Tableau, and Andy Petrie, EVP of UX and product at HubSpot.

Hi, everybody.

Today we're excited to talk about unified data plg, how that drives growth and how that drives revenue. What you just saw with that video that played is Andy. The keynote yesterday announced that we have a deeper partnership with Amplitude. Andy, why is it so important that we have this partnership now? And what are companies looking at for. For driving growth?

So for me, the answer to that question is when we think about HubSpot, we think about what we're trying to build at HubSpot and the product roadmap. We want to provide our customers, businesses, with the most unified source of information about everything that their customers are doing. We want to make it easy to have all that information in one place to make sense of that information all inside of HubSpot. And amplitude obviously has incredible analytics data. We use it at HubSpot for product analytics. But I know it does more than just product analytics. But I always, you know, think about it through that lens. And so there's like incredible information that you're tracking about your customer behaviors inside of Amplitude. And it just makes sense to have that incorporated with all of the other customer data that you're tracking in HubSpot Smart CRM about your customers.

And if I can add, I mean, today being customer centric is more critical than ever before. And so the more you know about your customers, the faster you can grow. And I think it's important to know, to think about the entire customer journey. And in this new world, customer data comes from everywhere. Obviously, you bring customers into your website, but then they go into your product and that's a rich source of information. And without that knowledge, it really creates a big gap. Think about it from a marketing perspective. Are you driving the right campaigns to the right users? By being able to unlock that product data or that website data, you're going to be able to better target your users based on who they are and what they're doing. Or think about it. For sales, you know, being able to do better lead scoring by using the product signals to help you target those most powerful leads that can be converted. Same thing for customer success. The product usage data can help you know which customers are at risk and where you should have proactive action. And that combination that we have between the data that we have in HubSpot, the ability to take action in HubSpot, plus all the behavioral data that you have in amplitude, those two things really enable you to get deeper insights about your customers and ultimately drive that faster growth that's required in this highly competitive environment.

Cool. So they both mentioned unified or we've been talking a lot about unified data and the importance of that. And you talked about a couple things in marketing, sales and service, you know, really good data helps you drive action, whether it's a marketer trying to understand how do you segment a cohort of users to sales? Understanding how do I bring value and personalize? Almost talk to me a little bit about how do you know when you have missing data? How do you identify what's missing and how do you go from there? How do you get it?

Well, I mean, I think you said it right. Data without action to me is a missed opportunity.

Right.

You have all of these rich signals from your customers that are coming from a variety of sources. Your website, campaign data, social data, e commerce data, product data. It's everywhere. And the more you have a complete picture of your customer, the better you can serve them, better you can target them, the better you can engage with them to drive value. And oftentimes, what we've seen, especially in the B2B world, where you have only half of the data, aka you have some data about how you're targeting your users, but when they're landing in your product that you're trying to sell to them, well, is that converting or not? And in many cases, one of the challenges that exist is that there is a breakdown between the various disciplines. Marketing is not connected to product, that's not connected to sales. And the opportunities to really connect the dots with everybody, to make sure that every single person is operating off of the same data, the same view of the customer, and doing that in this unified experience, that's really what becomes so critical. And again, unifying that data is the missing link that makes all of this possible.

And I think everybody has missing data. Unfortunately, that's a problem that I think we're trying to solve together is to solve that problem. But even HubSpot has missing data. I'm in meetings and I'm looking at hubspotters, like, sitting in the front. I'm in meetings on a regular basis with people about, oh, we need to be able to track this. We need to be able to track this. We need to be able to track this. And I think that as a business, it makes a lot of sense to work backwards when you think about where you need to capture data. So what do you actually want your customer experience to be? How's your customer going to find you? How are they going to sign up for your product? How are they going to activate on your product? How are they going to use your product? And then how do you think about tracking those different events in the customer life cycle? And one of the things that we love about amplitude is it's so easy to create those new events where you say, like, oh, we just changed something about the signup flow, we just changed something about the activation event. We just changed something in the product. And it becomes really easy to just add those events in, to be able to understand, like, who's completing those events. And then with things like replay, you know, it's easy to actually watch customers and see, like, what they're doing inside the product and like, where they're stumbling. And then that brings. Then. Then you go full circle and you're basically like, okay, if this is where customers are stumbling, this is where we need to be able to track in order to understand, like, the completion event of all of these different things.

You know, it's interesting you say it that way because really, this combination, it gives you the power to know. It gives you the power to know whether your investments are driving the dividends that you want, the outcomes you're trying to drive. It gives you the power to know where there's frustration, where the customers are not succeeding at whatever it is you're building. Are they, you know, adding their product to carts or not? Are they, you know, signing up for the product? Are they sharing whatever that activation moment is? You need to know whether or not it's. You're. You're getting that value. But you also need to be able to experiment quickly and try out different things and test out hypotheses so that you can, you know, in classic HubSpot terms, zig and zag along where, where your customers are going.

Yeah, totally. And I think it's like, sorry, I'm just going to say one more thing. Go for it. You know, I think, I think that, you know, especially for product people, but also for, for marketers, you know, we're big consumers of data. I think that you want to think about it through the customer lens. I think you want to think about how you're, how, you know, take your, start with your best idea of how your customers are finding your products and discover and signing up for your products and activating on your products and using your products and upgrading your products. And then no matter what, you're going to be wrong like that, you know, don't feel bad about it, like you're just going to be wrong. But then once you have that set up, you can learn where you're wrong and then you can continue to iterate and get better and better at tracking the actual customer experience. But I think, you know, everything should be customer focused and everything should be in service of helping your customers discover your products and use your products better.

Yeah.

One thing the three of us share as product builders is we all have a deep belief in a concept called product led growth. I spend a lot of my time advising startups about when's the right time to think about a product led growth motion versus potentially a sales motion and how to balance the two. Francois, can you describe to kind of all of us like, what does PLG mean? What does it mean to you and how do you think about using it in a growth of a product?

Well, plg, product led growth is definitely a buzzy term these days. Everybody's talking about PLG and how can the product help sell essentially the product for you? Think of it in the standpoint of what if your product was your best salesperson, wouldn't that be pretty amazing? What if the product could actually help convert and drive the experience that you're trying to drive? And so PLG is not just a marketing channel. It's not a product product, you know, innovation thing. It's a whole new way of thinking about the role that product can play within your customer journey, within your sales journey. Because if you think about, let's just talk about the buyer journey, for instance, you know, the typical buyer journey looks like more like a funnel, right? Top of the funnel, all the way down to activation. But the reality is that in this new world, customers want more self service. They want to be able to try before they buy, the experience that you deliver will actually enable them to decide whether or not this is the right product for them. But every time they're engaging with you, that is a signal, that is an intent. And knowing how to optimize that for the outcomes you're trying to drive is so critical. And so plg, again, it's about shifting that mindset to making your product the best salesperson at the company and using that to also activate your sellers as well, because they understand now all the facets are there. So it's everything around activation, usage, monetization, retention are all the key facets around plg.

I love that it's making product your best salesperson. Andy, PLG is incredibly important for us at HubSpot with our free CRM and how we can trust Tribe before, how do you think about how would you kind of explain how it drives product growth for us?

Let me take a step back for a second and touch on some of the stuff that you were just talking about. So, you know, I think obviously we're at a conference called inbound and HubSpot has been a big advocate of inbound marketing for a very long time. And, you know, to me, PLG and Inbound are very similar because the idea of inbound is this idea that the power has shifted from the seller to the buyer. Right? It's like the classic HubSpot story was like in the old days. The sellers had all the information about their products, about their services, and the only way you could get that information was to engage with the salesperson or get some sort of outbound messaging to you. And in the age of the Internet, everything changed. And suddenly buyers had all this information. They could research things for themselves, they could try things for themselves, they could do things for themselves. And so they could get all of this information without having to go through a salesperson. And I think that product led growth is an extension of that. Right. I think, you know, for all of us, I think, you know, how many people here would rather just try a product, you know, themselves rather than, you know, get a demo of the product? I think that's just, yeah, most hands are going up. That's just the way that I think people, you know, want to experience products. So when you think about HubSpot, we have the free version of HubSpot, we get over 200,000 signups to the free version of HubSpot, you know, every single month. And for those buyers coming or those, you know, users and, you know, future HubSpot customers coming into HubSpot, they want to be able to just, you know, don't just tell me about the product. Like, let me use the product, let me see, let me test out different use cases. Let me see if it works for these different parts of my business. And so that's the way that we think about PLG and other salespeople here. Or is this all like, you know, product and marketing people? There's like two salespeople here, three salespeople here. You know, I think for salespeople, you know, there's this idea sometimes that PLG is going to like replace salespeople, that salespeople are not necessary. And I think that that's not true because the way we think About PLG at HubSpot is we want to be product led, but it's not like exclusively product growth, right? So once you have people, you know, who come into HubSpot who start using HubSpot for themselves, some of them do completely get set up entirely by themselves by HubSpot, entirely by themselves, you know, and they're able to do that. But a lot of people, after they use it for a little while, they want to talk to somebody, they want to get more information, they want to get some help getting something set up inside the product. And so for us, we have this concept of product qualified leads. And those are the leads that our sales team. That, that's the ones that they want. If it were up to them, that's the only leads we would give our sales team is the product qualified leads. And that's somebody who's basically signed up for the product, started using the product, now wants to, you know, engage with a salesperson and they're much, much deeper in the sales funnel than another lead that they would get. So that's the way that we think about plg@HubSpot.

And I think what Andy is saying is really important, which is not, it's not PLG self serve all monetization. It's different handoffs at that moment and it works in balance with the sales team. He mentioned PQLs. So product qualified leads. I'll have you. How would both of you describe how to think about a pql, which is a product qualified lead, and how does it relate to other qualified leads?

Who's going to. I'm going to, I'm going to start.

Either one of you?

I guess I'll start, I'll start. So like I was just saying, a product qualified lead, you know. So, okay, so the evolution of like different leads, right? So I'll say this through the HubSpot lens. But I think this is true for a lot of different companies. You know, in the early days of HubSpot, we just had leads, right? And it was marketing's job to generate inbound leads for our sales team. And the inbound leads would come to HubSpot, they would download an ebook about social media or about SEO or about marketing in general. And then we would take that lead and we would give it to the sales team. And that was great. And sales, sales reps loved it. I remember when I joined HubSpot, which was back in like 2009, you know, you talk to sales reps at HubSpot and they're like, I'm never going to work at another company because every other company I've worked at I had to go find my own leads. And at HubSpot I show up every day and I get leads. And then over time, we started generating so many leads that sales reps were like, I can't, I don't have time to reach out to all these leads. Who are the ones who are most qualified? So we came up with this idea of a qualified lead. And so a qualified lead was somebody who was basically deeper in the funnel, right? So there's like a lead of someone who just downloads an ebook and then there's a lead of somebody who like requests a demo of HubSpot, right? So it's obviously like get back to the people who want demos, you know, the soonest, right? Those are the people who actually want to talk to a salesperson. And, and then a product qualified lead is like the next version of that, right? So now a product qualified lead is somebody who, you know, has not only, you know, downloaded an ebook, not only requested a demo from sales, but there's somebody who's actually used the product, had been set up on the product in some way, and now is looking for more information about how to get started, how to be successful with the product. So it's the, you know, and then I don't know what the next lead lead will be like after a product qualified lead. But it's just, you know, you're going further and further down the funnel to get more and more qualified leads.

He starts touching upon marketing qualified leads with this.

Yeah, marketing qualified. That's what we call the marketing qualified leads.

Yeah, the marketing qualified lead amplitude is incredible. At behavior and product analytics, you know, you talk about PQLs. How do you think about a PQL? Well, product signal.

What's that?

You need that product signal.

You do need the product signal. I mean it is kind of.

If only there was a tool that would let you track product usage data so that you could get those products signals, marketing service.

The answer is make it really easy for you. Look, if I told you that I could give you a lead that converts eight times better than another lead, would you want it? Yeah, pretty much. So if I told you PQLs convert 8 times better than an MQL, that's a hot lead, right? That is that opportunity because the customer is giving you that buyer intent directly in the product. They're telling you what those moments, those value moments are in the product that will then give them the intent to purchase upsell cross sells. But I think it's really important as all of you are getting into this journey to know what are those value moments? What are those trigger opportunities to move up? Do you have a value moment? Hold on. If there's a mic for the audience, that would be great. Otherwise it's going to be hard to hear it all. So let me just finish that thought. Let's get you a mic and then we'll do that. So they're going to bring that out. So I was just going to say one thing that's really important is understanding what are those value moments that drive the next behaviors? A classic example is Facebook. Back in the old days of the social world.