HubSpot's founders explain why they stopped chasing new customers and started obsessing over making existing ones happy. They moved money from sales and marketing into product and engineering after realizing most new business came from word-of-mouth anyway.
Marco Bears.
There's one HubSpot's Live Many Lives and we've gone through many transformations and pivots within HubSpot but one of them was HubSpot initially was obsessed with the relationship between our company and a prospect and converting that prospect to a customer. And we got really good at it and kept our CAC flow. We could really sell. Marco Bears was our head of sales and at some point we just woke up. It's like started asking customers why they bought and largely the reason they bought was word of mouth. And so we switched our focus to register between HubSpot and a customer and turning that customer into a delighted customer with word of mouth. And you can see that change in our P and L. We started moving money from sales and marketing into product. We started hiring heavily in engineering and product and in design and got quite, quite serious about just we're in the customer delight business, not in the customer acquisition business. And that was a massive shift for us. It was sort of we flipped it overnight on it.
