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

[lalexander]

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.

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.

[KelseyVia]

Hi Hubspot team! I have a question that's more general about Hubspot's culture rather than the products.  From working with Hubspot employees and attending the Inbound Conference it seems as though Hubspot puts a lot of value in their culture. Whether it's resources, training, remote opportunities, PTO - how do you guys measure the value that you see culture as having?

As I'm sure you know - a lot of companies talk the talk but don't walk the way and I have a hypothesis that it's because it's hard to measure the ROI of good company culture. Any KPI's, or tips that you guys are willing to share?

[dharmesh]

It's hard to measure the impact of investments in culture directly.

A few things you *can* measure:

1) Employee happiness (HubSpot does a quarterly survey of our entire team to see if they are happy, and what we can do to make our company/culture better).

2) Employee retention/attrition

3) Recruiting funnel 

4) Employee referrals 

The reason we invest so much in culture is that we have a strong belief that in order to attract, retain and engage the best people, culture is important. It's highly unlikely a company will deliver a delightful experience to customers of the people working at the company aren't happy themselves.

In our minds, the value of culture is immeasurably high. I don't think HubSpot would be where it is had we not invested in culture and taken it seriously.

[gil1001]

As a company the drank almost the complete cool-aid - using marketing automation, CMS and Enterprise CRM, we're wondering about few things:

1. How do you see the company developing the CRM? do you see it as a complete replacment to the like of Salesforce?

2. Reporting has always been a weeker spot for Hubspot, and while we see improvement, it can be better and more flexible solution. Is there a roadmap in this area that you can share?

3. Sales processes especially in B2B keeps evolving and include more people, is Hubspot the accommodate it in things like - roles in deals, sales velocity KPIs, tieing content to role etc.
4. Playbooks have been introduced last year and since only limited progress been made there, is it something you planning to evolve it?

One thing I wanted to mention: beyond the product, the support organization you've built is amazing. This is one of the best things about Hubspot

[AndyPitre]

Hi @gil1001, thanks for the note about support, you are 1000% correct. One of the things I love most about working on the product at HubSpot is how good our support team is. Knowing that the product that build and the customers that we build it for are being supported by a world-class team is an amazing feeling. 

As for your questions, you are totally on point.

1) CRM is critical for the success of our customers. It's the foundation of the flywheel (or the center depending on the visualization). We want HubSpot CRM to be the source of truth for everything about the customer. Right now, we're working on making HubSpot CRM more flexible and able to handle every type of data that you would want to keep about your customers. At the same time, we're thinking about how we can make HubSpot CRM easier to use and basically more invisible. Both are pretty big tasks, but I'm excited about what the teams are working on. It's related, so I should also mention that we're doing a lot of work on permissions and access management inside CRM as well. We know that's really important, especially for larger organizations.

2) Yes. I'm glad to hear that you've noticed the improvement. We're currently making some major changes to our underlying reporting framework, and the core technologies we use. This is specifically so that we can unlock the data that's hard to report on in HubSpot today and add more power and flexibility to reporting. This is going to be a multi-year initiative, but you're going to see a lot of progress along the way.

3) We're currently working on roles for deals (actually, roles between any object), that's part of the work I mentioned above to make CRM more flexible for representing your customer data. Also related to question 2, sales reporting is a big focus for us in 2020, the work that we're doing on the reporting framework is going to open up a lot of new possibilities. I totally hear you on velocity, we want that too.

4) Playbooks is one of my favorite features of our sales product, it's such an amazing tool with a lot of game-changing potential. I don't want to say that we're not going to do any work on it, but I'll be honest, we have strategically slowed down there so we can focus on some of the things I mentioned above.

Thanks again for the questions, you're clearly really thoughtful about the product and you've really identified some core things that we're working on.

[DanielaFonseca]

Also - one other question my team has been asking me for some time. Are there any plans to improve the list filtering features? For example, in Salesforce, you can add in one line of criteria that lets you add logic (for example, 1 AND (2 OR 3)). In HubSpot, we have to build two sections in the list criteria. This might seem small, but can be time consuming for a list with extensive criteria.

Thanks!

[gil1001]

I know this was not meant to be a discussion, and I agree with your request.

With that said the workaround we use today is the reports for more elaborated and cross object filtering.

[AndyPitre]

Hello again @DanielaFonseca, we have another team that's thinking about making list filters easier too. We're still doing some research on it so I can't say for certain that it will look like the example you described, but we have definitely discussed the pros and cons of that approach. If it's okay with you, I can put you in touch with the team that's working on it, you're feedback would be really valuable.

[DanielaFonseca]

@AndyPitre I would love to provide some feedback! Feel free to let them know I am open to connecting. Thank you!

[DanielaFonseca]

Hi there! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Currently, I am the sole HubSpot admin for our platform. I'm also our Salesforce admin, which often makes me compare the features of the two platforms. Often, I struggle with security and access privileges that users have within HubSpot. If I give access to a user to edit a field, that access allows them to edit all fields. This is very concerning because we have certain fields that should not be edited by users, but we cannot block them if they need to edit other fields. In Salesforce, each field has its own security level based on profiles. We've enabled roles in HubSpot, but it still doesn't change this.

What I've found is that if users are unable to edit a field in Salesforce, they just log into HubSpot and make the change there. I would love to know if there's anything on the roadmap to make user- or role-specific changes to individual field permissions, and anything else of this nature.

[AndyPitre]

Hi @DanielaFonseca, I'm happy to report that we are currently working on field level permissions in HubSpot, there should be a beta out soon.

[DanielaFonseca]

So good to know! Thank you!!

[Rolf]

Hi guys - First of all: Thanks for launching this aweseme new community!

I've used HubSpot for quite a few years already and have seen it grow from this tool that was laser-focused on marketing to a complete  business application that caters to the whole organization. In fact, today all of our departments work with HubSpot in some way or another.

I love the one solution fits all approach because it makes things simple and efficient.

But I do wonder what this means going forward.

For example: If I think about Salesforce I see a monstrosity of disconnected joints that only barely functions cohesively - This is from personal experience. Whereas HubSpot is not only more pleasing to the eye, it also feels totally cohesive - One seemless experience for all marketing, sales, service, CRM, etc. stuff.

How do you make sure that this will still be true in the future? Or might there be a future where things become separated into difference environments?

[dharmesh]

This is something that Brian, the team and I talk about all the time.

One of the distinguishing features of HubSpot is not that the apps within the suite are "well integrated" -- it's that there's no "integration" at all. It's all on the same common database and uses the same application framework, UI component library, etc. 

In terms of how we continue to maintain that level of cohesion, the answer is simple (but not easy):  Keep investing in our framework and database and over time, open more and more of it up to our partners as well, so things they build can share in that cohesion too.

Rest-assured, we're going to be very, very mindful of not screwing up that easy, cohesive user experience. It's a big part of what makes HubSpot, HubSpot.

[Rolf]

Thank you for easing my angst @dharmesh! It was a briliant move to build HubSpot like this from the onset. It does force you to really think through any addition to the suite. Though I did not expect differently, it is something else to hear it from the leadership directly.

[c-Pingboard]

We use HubSpot to run our SaaS business. We love using the website analytics that HubSpot has to offer across our website and our app. We often refer to HubSpot over tools like Google Analytics our internal data warehouse because of how beautiful/easy reporting is in HubSpot.

The problem is that our app is using the same HubSpot analytics tracking code as our website. We can filter some of this data in HubSpot using the sub-domain filtering, but not in all aspects of HubSpot.

My dream would be to see a single HubSpot account have the ability to create multiple tracking codes, so we could tell HubSpot that these are different parts of the customer journey that we want to view differently inside HubSpot reporting.

[dharmesh]

That's actually a really good idea.

Will see if there's a way to do it that doesn't involve modifying the Javascript itself (that's running on thousands of website).  

One possible thought that comes to mind is creating a "mapping" of URLs to tracking IDs.  So, we can then piggy back on existing segmenting features in our analytics already.

Example:

AcmeWidgets.com/app/* => utm=app

No promises -- it's likely that this is non-trivial, but will chat with the team about it.

Thanks.

[Lorenzo_Bossi]

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.

[AndyPitre]

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.

[Lorenzo_Bossi]

Thanks Andy, that's encouraging news!

Seems you have already a good idea of how to customise records based on the actual hubspot user, one suggestion would be to also consider the other side, are all contacts / companies the same?  For example a company record can be a customer, or a reseller / channel partner or a distributor, the information that we would display on a reseler record is not the same as a direct customer record.    

Great news for the currencies, looking forwrd to it.  

[dharmesh]

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.