Since the beginning of our podcast journey here at RevPartners, we have had the opportunity to interview close to 40 guests now from companies who have "competed and won", successfully transitioning from high growth to high scale.
But, in September, we did something a little different and the lessons learned and insights shared were extraordinary! We decided to interview some of the top leaders from one company about their experience in this transition and how their areas of the organization have adapted while staying true to the core of their mission.
So we invited the best use case we could find to join us on Pit Stops to Podium: HubSpot! 🚀
They truly are THE use case. HubSpot has over 6,000 employees, a $33 billion market cap, over 100,000 customers and are disrupting and redefining the market that they serve. So what better example from which to learn?
You'll find that each leader, each department, and each conversation keep leading back to the idea that is foundational at HubSpot - the Flywheel. Listen to learn why that model is so key for their growth!
Check out this quick recap of some highlights from the series and the top takeaways from each conversation below!
NOTE: All episodes available for streaming on our YouTube Channel, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts
Yamini Rangan, CEO
Bottom Line: Stay laser-focused on serving customers in a delightful manner. Advocacy is what makes the flywheel spin
"A funnel model focuses on winning new customers, whereas in the flywheel model, winning the customer isn’t the end of the customer journey, it’s the beginning."
What is a Flywheel?
Flywheel is NOT funnel
It illustrates how customers play an active role in growing a business at every stage - through referrals, upgrades, advocacy and more.
Why does alignment of teams matter?
Your customers will feel the pain if there is no internal alignment. Without it, there are more “sharp edges” within a company, which creates friction.
What does alignment look like?
"Marketing, Sales, Customer Success pointed in exactly the same direction. That’s what we mean by the vectors are aligned. And that direction is serving our customers in a delightful manner. That is our winning aspiration."
Practical Steps to Break Silos to Scale
Identify the Need for Alignment
Understand the Why
Create a Decision Making Group
The folks that are responsible for decisions around the customer experience
Identify the Winning Aspiration
Ask: “What does winning look like for our entire organization?”
Have a Decision Making Cadence
Should be quick/fast/focused
Scott Wilder, Head of Communities
Bottom Line: Community must be part of culture and the broader organization, not just a silo.
Breaking the Siloed Group
Notice: A good indicator for the role community plays in an organization's structure is how “Community” is highlighted on the website.
Community reflects a culture's:
Transparency
Autonomy
Flexibility
Breaking the Siloed Journey
Breaking the Siloed Data
Engaging with Scott - Check out his books!
Brian Garvey, VP of Worldwide Solutions Partners
Bottom Line: The partner ecosystem generates a domino effect impacting the company’s ability to scale, their customer success management, and the product roadmap.
Managing Customer SupportProblem: support that moves in seconds, recruiting cycles move in months or quarters
Very similar to on-demand compute capacity and the elasticity of computing only we’re talking about the elasticity of help.
Question: How do we reinvent and rethink our work and its mechanisms to ensure that the demand for help can find the supply of help?
Answer: Partners!
Transition quick fixes in isolation to high leverage enhancements
Rethinking methods and leveraging HubSpot IP (intellectual property) through expert partners
Goal: Become the Amazon (“one stop shop”) to curate products and services and solve issues for scaling companies
Scott Brinker, VP of Platform Ecosystem
Drivers to Ecosystem Approach
Supply: There are almost no barriers to entry to software in the cloud
Demand: Steadily growing because every single digital business is still a bit of a snowflake leading to a proliferation of tools
The Tension Between Innovation and Integration
The single biggest barrier for marketers is integration! Marketers commonly have to stitch together software, which should not be a worry of theirs. This is something that can be solved. Not rocket science.
The Long Tail for Opportunity
Much of the Martech landscape is still “Developers in the garage” that want to play with the big players.
“What excites me about ecosystems is that entire spectrum from both ends - the huge 100 billion dollar public companies down to the two developers in the garage - there’s just so many opportunities for them!"
Alison Elworthy, Executive VP of Revenue Operations
How RevOps Impacts the Flywheel
RevOps is moving from reactively fighting fires caused by friction just to keep the flywheel spinning to proactively removing friction and fueling the flywheel with new, innovative ideas to help accelerate growth.
How do you scale this methodology?
Scale occurs when business growth exceeds investment growth.
It’s when users, partners, customers and revenue grow faster than the investment made in those areas.
Achieving Scale in Customer Experience
Don't let your customer take a back seat! RevOps helps you build your go-to-market strategy around the way people really want to buy.
Teams need to be aligned to enable a successful customer experience - when every person on the team fully understands the overarching strategy and aligns their process in the same way.
Scaling with Speed
When companies grow, they naturally slow down because of complexity - there is a greater distance to connect the dots.
Establishing more cross-functional teams helps shorten those distances
Having the right data can help teams make decisions faster.
Scaling with Efficiency
Break linear growth, and double down on investments like sales acceleration and enablement, for example.
Eliminate band-aid solutions by establishing strong fundamentals early and avoiding future debt
Channing Ferrer, VP of Sales Ops and Strategy
Bottom Line: Focus on leveraging data across the entire customer journey
Founding Stage (<2m)
Starting point: What is my value proposition?
Positions to hire at the early stage
Ops! The hidden gem to establish a consistent system of record and data
Reps! Hire athletes capable of getting out into the field and doing a lot of different things
Overlooked often: Customer Support plan
HubSpot principles - stay customer centric and think about everything through the lens of the customer
Retention is critical
Early Stage (2-10m)
Build out the Team
You need leaders to give direction around your GTM Strategy
Continue to build out RevOps function
Data Strategist - someone who speaks that language
Strategy analyst - Someone with business acumen
Operational role
Have your Ops team develop a repeatable sales process
"Smarketing" = Sales and Marketing Aligned
Understand the mix of leadflow - What is the % of sales closed coming from each source?
Product Led
Marketing Led
Sales Led
Partner Led
Growth Stage (10-100m)
Focus: Data-driven decisions
Build out a data-driven compass and align all decisions around data
"You can’t track what you can’t measure.”
Create a combined data-view between sales and marketing
Use same data sets when measuring success
Maniacally focus on Revenue Retention
Sustaining growth
Much easier path to growth than trying to acquire new customer
Often Overlooked: Hiring element
Let data drive these decisions, as well
Scaling Stage (>100m)
Key Piece: Ops
Non-linear growth = core measure of success for ops team
Linear growth is aligning cost basis to revenue basis
Non-linear: how grow revenue faster than my cost basis
KPIs
“Tighten the KPIs” = what are leading indicators and what are the results
Hindsight, Insight, and Foresight
Often Ops teams live in hindsight and insight... (reporting + analysis)
But, moving to foresight is critical (what will happen next? How do we get ahead of that?)
“Use hindsight and insight to create foresight...that’s where non-linear growth comes from and where ops teams are super critical.”
Identifying Inefficiencies
Stop of solve
Automation is one of the best ways to solve inefficiencies
“ABE” = always be experimenting
Helps stay in the foresight mindset
Majority of experimentations fail. But, the ones that land and work are the ones that drive the business forward to the future
Mark Roberge, Advisor and Former CRO
Bottom Line: Every company needs to get good at consistently finding new growth avenues
Main Areas of Growth = Market, Product, and Channel
CRM case study with HubSpot (“Scaling the Known and Learning the New”)
Develop an overarching Strategy
Company vision that justifies both the company’s core business and an ambitious innovation program
Hold Tension at the Top
The CEO needs to look at their organizational design, not based on P&L size, but on strategic value
Structure so that Emerging and Core Units report directly to C-Suite, regardless of P&L Size
Embrace Inconsistency
Measure the success of the two teams (Emerging and Core) differently
Core units measured on profits and growth
Emerging Units measured on pace of experimentation and learning
Investing in Enablement to Fuel the Revenue Engine
Cody Normand, Senior Manager for Sales Productivity and Enablement
Structure of an Enablement TeamSole Focus: Thinking about the seller
Medium: Content Creation and Instructional Design
Leadership Enablement
“Managers/Directors play just as much of a role in enablement as the enablement team does. You need a way to support them so that they can support the enablement initiatives, pass them down and coach their reps. Crucial, crucial part to enablement.”
Field Enablement - dedicated segment in geo type support
Training - The enablement team should be responsible for onboarding and ramping your new hires
Sales Strategy piece
Example: Product launches - Making sure the sales team is 100% prepared to sell this product.
Communication Channels/Change Management/Behavior Change
Enact change in a way that is not forceful and is a top-down driven approach
"They need a team to create very streamlined communication channels so that it is as calm waters as possible and the sales team can stay focused on selling and they’re not having to be bombarded with comms.”
Measurement of Enablement Efforts
Macro - Hyper focus
PPR “Productivity per rep”
Total revenue divided by # of reps you have
TTR “Time to rep”
Want to ramp our sellers as productive as possible, as fast as possible
The faster you do that, the closer you get to breaking non-linear growth (hiring x amount of sellers to reach a revenue goal)
Micro
Project by project basis
Build up a library of success metrics
Kyle Jepson, HubSpot Academy Sales Professor
Bottom Line: YES.
Define CRM at its base definition
If you are talking about managing your customer relationships and mapping their journey from their first interactions through closed/won and they are a happy customer - then, yes. HubSpot can do that!
If you are asking, is HubSpot SalesForce? Then we get a lot of No’s
What HubSpot Team and SalesForce.com teams are building are really divergent
SalesForce Vs HubSpot, Simply Put
SalesForce = infinite customizability
HubSpot = “open the box and it works”
What makes HubSpot different?
The way it was built.
All in house. Not cobbled together, but crafted from the beginning. Seamlessly connected and designed that way from the start
Single system; single contacts database that everything else is built on top of, rather than multiple systems brought together
HubSpot is a highly opinionated product. They think there is a right and wrong way to grow and build that into the product.
Max Cohen, Solutions Engineer and Tik Tok Influencer
Get Gud Content
But, here's the million dollar question: What is "Good Content?"Creation > Optimization
Don’t let optimization be a barrier to you in creating content. Analysis paralysis is real.
If you’re going to do SEO, what are you going to optimize if you don’t have any content?
Get good at creating content first, before you optimize it. You can always optimize it down the line.
Buyer Personas are NOT dead, they just need to be defined
Max's Definition: A Persona is a list of goals and challengesThe End Zone: Bottom of Funnel Info (The Decision Stage)
Start here. This should be easy to knock out quickly! You need to have a way to capture anyone coming to your site and showing interest.
The Front: Think About Goals/Challenges (The Awareness Stage)
Ask Yourself: What does success look like for my ideal buyer? What would they be googling to get there?
Don’t let your product/service pigeon hole you into what content you can/can’t create
More people on site = more people find their way to bottom of funnel
The Middle: Meeting with Solutions (The Consideration Stage)
Continue to add value. Don't just communicate “buy my stuff."
Bringing it Home: Max then ends with an awesome personal example of what simply creating good content can do for your search optimization + visibility.