Ask Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, and Andy Pitre anything!

Data Hub đź’¬ RevOps Discussions
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We’re thrilled to be joined today, January 22, by HubSpot cofounders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah as well as VP of Product Andy Pitre for an exclusive AMA.

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EDIT: This AMA has now closed. You’re welcome to peruse the comments for insights from Brian, Dharmesh, Andy, and your peers!

Keep in mind that we’ll be hosting a number of exclusive AMAs with leaders of specific HubSpot tools over the coming months - so if you have a very specific question about tool functionality, it may be best to ask your peers for now.

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Hi Brian, Dharmesh & Andy! You’ve built a platform that is revolutionizing the way we work. French tech startups are leading the way here in Paris, and I’m thrilled to see HubSpot accelerating its expansion this side of the pond. What is your vision for HubSpot in Europe over the next 1/3/5 years, and how will you tackle this market differently than the US?

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Hi @SkylerSchmanski , I’m excited to hear that. From the product side, we’re thinking a lot about ways we can make the product work really well well for our customers in Europe. We have a lot of HubSpot customers who service customers in multiple countries, multiple languages, currencies, etc. Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time making the product easier to use for those customers by adding support for different languages, adding multiple currencies, making it easier to translate content. We still have a lot of work to do, but it’s something we’re focused on and investing in. On the product side, what are some of the top things you’d like to see?

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Hey @AndyPitre, thanks for the reply and the constant improvements you and the product team have been making. HubSpot is the cornerstone of our marketing department, and I wouldn’t critique something I didn’t care about. With that said, here are the pain points I discussed during my last conversation with Nataly Kelly:

  • Inability to adapt center-on-a-date workflows according to each contact’s time zone
  • Inability to routinely send workflow emails on specific days of the week
  • Unclear that API settings adjustment required on Zoom’s end to add contacts to webinar via workflows
  • Inability to fully export massive workflows for backup
  • Inability to bulk unenroll contacts from workflows
  • Barebones app: can’t manage on the go + can never fully from Salesforce till HubSpot has an equivalent app

That last point is as strategic as it is technical. I believe HubSpot can overtake Salesforce in many of these markets yet unsaturated by “sales tech” (e.g. France). But it’ll take a mobile solution to do so.

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Hey @AndyPitre, thanks for the reply and the constant improvements you and the product team have been making. HubSpot is the cornerstone of our marketing department,

and I wouldn’t critique something I didn’t care about. With that said, here are the pain points I discussed during my last conversation with Nataly Kelly:

  • Inability to adapt center-on-a-date workflows according to each contact’s time zone
  • Inability to routinely send workflow emails on specific days of the week
  • Unclear that API settings adjustment required on Zoom’s end to add contacts to webinar via workflows
  • Inability to fully export massive workflows for backup
  • Inability to bulk unenroll contacts from workflows
  • Barebones app: can’t manage on the go + can never fully transition away from Salesforce till HubSpot has an equivalent app

That last point is as strategic as it is technical. I believe HubSpot can overtake Salesforce in many of these markets yet unsaturated by “sales tech” (e.g. France). But it’ll take a mobile solution to do so.

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@SkylerSchmanski thanks for sharing. For the 4 related to workflows, I know the automation team is thinking about them. Same with our mobile app. You’re going to continue to see improvements there.

Tracking contact time zones is a personal pet rock of mine. I’m curious, how do you keep track of a contact’s time zone today.

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As long as the points are on your team’s radar, I’m confident the solutions are on their way.

Regarding time zones, it admittedly requires an antiquated a manual touch. With offices in Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, UK, US, France, and Sweden, we simply estimate the contact’s time zone per their associated country prior to programming a workflow, then adapt the send time accordingly (e.g. send at 16h00 our time here in Paris to ensure you receive the email 10h00 in Boston). It gets the job done.

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The expansion in Europe has happened in a few waves.

We started in Europe about 5 years ago by sending a team of 10 HubSpotters from Cambridge over in Dublin. That crew did a nice job of getting customer flywheel spinning and getting a great culture built. That office has expanded rapidly. I’m not sure how many folks are there, but I"m pretty sure its north of 500.

The first markets we went into were ones where English was very prevalent. In particular, the UK and Ireland, but shortly after that our business started growing in Scandanavia and Benelux where English skills are strong.

We then dug in to some languages -- French, Spanish, German, and Portugeese. We initially translated the product into those languages, but then built the entire flywheel (sales, service, marketing, etc) in those languages.

More recently, we’ve started opening offices on the continent. We have a fast growing office in Berlin and a new, but also fast-growing office in Paris. I suspect these will get much bigger.

Around the same time, we started making changes (improvements!) to our product to adapt to the European data requirements, GDPR. We want to be fully compliant and enable our customers to be fully compliant.

More recently, we PieSync. They are based in Ghent, Belgium. That team remains there and is building some awesome stuff for y’all that I think you’re going to love.

Even more recently, we have spun up some teams in Eastern Europe to do some development for us. Specifically, they are working on two cool projects. The first is they are building more integrations to HubSpot. Going back to ones we built a long time ago and updating them as well as building new ones. The second project is they are going to be the biggest consumers of our external API’s building cool stuff that will test our software and that will be leverage-able for our customers.

In the fullness of time, I suspect our European business will be as big as our US business. We are continuing to invest and hire aggressively. In the fullness of time, I suspect there will be more technology/data investments and there will be additional languages.

Europe is a major area of focus for HubSpot.

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Thank you for your thorough answers, @Bhalligan2 and @dharmesh. You’ve proven your ability to expand, and I like the groundwork we’re seeing for the rest of the continent.

As for INBOUND, a more fiscally and logistically reasonable model for Europe might be country-specific alternatives. For example, I’ll be joining HubSpot on stage at Inbound Marketing France in Rennes next week. Co-opting events respected among the target communities may provide the inroads you’re seeking.

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We are excited about the opportunities in Europe (and have seen great growth there).

* Our second largest global office is in Dublin, Ireland.

* We have offices now in Paris and Berlin.

* We just acquired PieSync -- a startup based in Belgium.

* Some of our most successful solutions partners are based in Europe.

I’m particularly excited about all the startup activity we are seeing in Europe.

Our plan is to continue to grow in Europe (more customers and partners). If there’s something specific you’d love to see from us, let us know. Except for having an INBOUND in Europe. Holding an event like that is a major undertaking, so plans to expand that outside of Boston.

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Hello Hubspot heroes, first of all thank you for taking the time - wanted to ask you something rather specific. But let me give context first - I work in b2b with longer sales cycles, and the potential to recycle the same prospects - whether they churn, we lose a deal, or simply they were unqualified at the time for us, we need to be able to spot and process them. This behavior results in the simple idea that marketing should be able to monitor, process and tag these prospects multiple times throughout the automation (where applicable of course). From what I’ve seen and worked with it seems HubSpot was originally built with a linear, one time process idea - ie native lifecycles can only move forward, not backwards and workflows are meant to process once unless you are using one of the few fields that allow reenrollmemt when a value is set or updated. I’ve recently built our marketing setup to reflect this nature, working around some of the limitations of the “only once” idea - now since b2b has these scenarios a lot more than b2c I am wondering:
- how important do you see the b2b segment to be for Hubspot’s growth
- how will you tackle the nature of b2b in terms of automation and the “needs” of b2b marketers
Thank you :folded_hands:

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Hi @thesnappingdog, awesome questions. I’ll answer the easiest question first, the B2B segment is critical to HubSpot’s growth.

Now for your second question, I’m going to say something somewhat controversial, I actually don’t like the lifecycle stage property anymore, I think we (HubSpot, our customers, the world in general) have outgrown it. The lifecycle property goes back to our days before a CRM, when the HubSpot marketing database was only one object, Contacts. lifecycle stage was a way to track where that contact was in their lifecycle. The problem was, our customers outgrew and ran into issues with that property pretty quickly. For example, the first time you sell someone something, great, change their stage from lead to customer. Done. But what about if that person wants to buy a second thing from you? They’re a customer, but aren’t they also a lead? Now my head hurts.

We live in a world with a multi-object relational database, and this opens up a whole new world of possibilities. We have contacts, companies, deals, tickets, tasks, and we should be putting them all to work. I should also mention that every HubSpot customer has access to all of those objects, no matter what version of HubSpot they have.

I don’t know all the details about your exact setup, but let me suggest an example. If you’re B2B, the most important object for you is probably the company. At the end of the day, companies don’t read blog posts, fill out forms, and open emails, people do, but within HubSpot you can roll those contacts up into companies, HubSpot even helps do that automagically. When you’re selling something to a company, there are probably several stakeholders involved. What I personally would do is create a deal, then associate that deal with the company, and the relevant contacts at the company. Instead of moving the lifecycle stage, move the deal stage.

If the deal closes, that company and those contacts are now customers, which you can tell because they have a closed won-deal associated with them. If you wanted to do customer marketing, you could segment for all the contacts and/or companies with closed-won deals associated with them. In reporting, you can segment for when a deal closed, what products they bought, etc.

If you lose the deal, you now have contacts and companies associated with a closed lost deal. You can segment just like above, you can also create workflows that set tasks to follow up with those closed lost companies/contacts at different intervals. For example, create a task to follow up in 6 months. If a contact from one of those companies visits your website, you can set up a task for their salesperson to follow up. Maybe they’re not happy with the provider they chose.

That was a longer answer than I expect to write, but I guess my basic advice would be, think outside the lifecycle stage.

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You make a compelling argument, @AndyPitre. I’m excited to see how this philosophy evolves the platform itself.

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Thank you for the long answer Andy! I’m fully with you there - All the way to utilising multi-level objects in relation (and in sync to corresponding actions in Salesforce) to companies do not fill forms - but equally, we do not close people, we close companies. Marketing software in most cases deals with interacting with people, and tracking their actions. Those actions then need to be consolidated on the company level based on some logic.

We’ve now moved to managing most through account-contacts associations, soon likely hooking up deals and opps together as well.

The really interesting part however is - how to make workflows re-usable more intuitive. For me personally, I think of workflows as simple functions that can be called upon with a parameter i choose - whether contact, company or deal level. So when setting up most of our company level workflows to track progression from stage to stage, first we had to figure out:

- What type of fields can be used for re-enrollment (contact, company)

- How can we abstract the actual function from using a specific parameter (think filled form X vs. yes/no checkbox: promote to mql where the latter can be triggered by multiple form fills).

- How to ensure there is workflow hierarchy - i.e ensure that your enrollment criterias do not overlap and thus youd have a company be processed by two workflows with a similar function but different output.

However, figuring out the above took a little time, but has now proved to be very very useful.

And what goes for lifecycles, luckily there is an easy workaround for that - clear and set new one based on account level rules :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi Brian, Dharmesh and Andy, I have a general question about the speed of the platform. One of the key pieces of feedback I receive from my team here is that the system is often extremely slow to load pages, filter contacts/companies, pull up task lists etc. This despite the guys having superfast internet connections. It’s a drag on their ability complete their work.

Based in the UK, I notice a reduction in speed from lunchtime onwards, presumably linked to the US coming online.

Have you got plans to improve this through infrastructure changes?

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Hi @ikb5 the short answer is yes. You’re not the only one who notices those slow load times, we have extensive monitoring tracking load speed and time outs. I’m happy to say that we’ve made a lot of improvements over the past year, especially in the CRM on records, but we’re not yet as fast as we want to be, so we’re still working on it. We’re also looking into options for how to make the product faster outside the US too. This is a big area of focus for us, it’s critical for the success of our customers like you, and it makes a huge difference in product usability. I’m sorry we’re not yet as fast as you deserve, but I promise that you’ve going to continue to see improvements.

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Hi Brian, Dharmesh, Andy,

thanks for taking the time to answer our questions.

One of the biggest advantages we see in using hubspot is the unlimited number of users, this allowed us to rapidly deploy hubspot across our teams: from marketing, it expanded to sales, from sales to services. But also from EU to US, China and JP offices without any further investment required. Now we even use it to manage and track applicants to jobs via forms and workflows.

So first question really is, do you see the unlimited (basic) user model while adding function or department specific modules on top as a scalable option in the long term or is there a branch out of specific modules planned.

Second question, as the user base expands from single marketing function, to sales and now services, we need to have specific information at hand, I believe you have recently released or bet launched, a tool for user specific information in the cards, but I remember it seemed a good but very limited idea.

How do you plan to keep providing user function based information at the top of a contact/company record? Let’s call them “not-views”..

Last question, sorry if this is slightly critical, we are heavily international, in our offices, communications, and sales. I think there are some very serious limitations to the current currency system and internationalisation that really limit our confidence in the reporting tools. (single currency value, goal is currency-less, no dashboards with multiple currencies) How do you plan to tackle these issues in the coming months?

Many thanks for your time

L.

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Will take the first part of your question regarding free users. Note: Please keep this confidential (within this community).

In terms of HubSpot Free, and how we handle free vs. paid users, we’re going through some internal discussion on that. There are a couple of challenges with the current approach:

1) It can get confusing as to which functionality is available to free users -- vs. which require a paid user seat. This will likely only get more challenging over time.

2) Our per-user price doesn’t accruately reflect the price customers are paying (as compared to other alternatives). The *average* price per user (considering free+paid) is lower, but that’s not always clear to customers that are evaluating HubSpot.

No decisions have been made regarding how best to position HubSpot long-term. We want to remain generous, but also want to invest aggressively in our platform and want to make sure we’re being fair to both sides.

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Thank you, I appreciate it is hard to discuss pricing with the community so thank you for your transparence.

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For question 2 about customizing records: The feature we just released to custom “about cards” on records is part of a larger initiative for customizing CRM for different users, departments, teams, job functions, etc. We totally hear you. The feature we just launched lets you customize the properties on records based on team, user role and things like pipeline (for deals or tickets). I’m curious, what are the other things you’d like to customize?

For question 3 about currencies, we are making a lot of improvements to our reporting framework that will add a lot more flexibility and power to reporting, including reporting on currencies. We’re also expanding our integrations with accounting and financial solutions, which will also help.