20Sales: Scaling Hubspot from $3M to $1BN in ARR | How to Hire and Ramp Sales Teams | How to Scale Customer Success Successfully | How and When to Go International and Crush It with Jeetu Mahtani

28:03There was revenue coming from every country. And it got really hard from an investment standpoint to prioritize like, hey, how do we like keep growing when we have MRR and demands from all these countries? So what we decided to do over time is like, we're going to take a portfolio strategy, which is like, there are 150 countries, but which other countries we want to be number one or number two, not number three, number one or number two. So we called them like, Accelerated Growth Countries. And there were only seven countries that made up that accelerated growth. And then there was a second bucket that we called steady growth that would get what we would call run rate investments.

28:42And then a third bucket that was like more like partner led efficient growth. So we did that in a later stage where we were like, we can't keep operating like this. We only have finite budgets and we need to think of it as a portfolio where there is a small group of stocks and countries that we got at like when and the number one or number two. So that happened all the time. Which country did you think you'd be a success in and it was way harder than you thought and which were you like, that's going to be shit and it was way better than you thought? Japan, it was really hard. Germany was hard but we knew what we had to do which is what I mentioned earlier.

29:18Like if you're thinking about a non -English country, think about your demand even before you go in open and office. like I would almost hire a marketer before you actually hire your first sales rep maybe 18 to 24 months in advance so they can get the award. As interesting, why would you do that and how would you search for that? The way I would think about it is like why would you have sales reps showing up in an expensive office with no leads and purely coal -colleying? Like that's not the most efficient way to set up your team for success. Is it a ease responsibility to acquire their own leads?

29:52I would say in today's world it's a mix of if you're investing in marketing well let's get an ROI on marketing but we also have to appreciate that marketing can be responsible for like the full number. There's a percent of that number that needs to come from AES own activities working with BDRs through other non -marketing type by F. Everyone says BDRs and STRs is dead now. The cold outbound the Coal email, CodeLength10, so 2015. Do you agree what you think that's a glib statement? I would not fully agree with it. I would partly agree with it, with it's not the most efficient go -to -market when you have pure coal -calling with BDR.

30:38But when you get much more sophisticated, you think about your target market, you think about your target lists, you think about first party and third party signals that you can get today when buyers are researching solutions like yours. So you're not doing a pure outbound, pure cocoa. What we would call almost like allbound, Harry, it's a mix of inbound and outbound, whereby you're knocking on doors, but it's the right doors. When you speak with them, you know they have some pain and this is where it comes back to like how do you enable your BDRs and AEs to be able to have those type of conversations when they don't know your brand, but we know there's a pain that they're trying to solve.

31:20In the early days, the founders need to create the playbook, the sales playbook. I do strongly believe that founders need to play an active role in the creation or the co -creation of the sales playbook. And I would also encourage all founders early stages, I don't know, until you get to 100 or more customers, you need to be on every sales call. One is you're not filled with dozens of sales reps. You have maybe in the early days, a couple, maybe two, three sales reps. And there's some magic in the early days when a prospect hears from a founder on why they built the product. What is the vision of the product?

31:57Prospects know like you are a no brand company. You're in the early days, speaking directly with the founder. So I think it helps, you know, win in those early days. The other is, I don't think founders get everything right on day one, HubSpot didn't get everything right on day one. We made several tweaks, edits all the time. You do need to create that feedback loop. And founders, what better way than to be on a live call hearing about prospects and what challenges they're dealing with so you can create that feedback loop back into the product of one. Speaking of creating feedback loops, I always think about momentum and building momentum in teams.

32:31To what extent would you advise early sales teams to focus on amazing, amazing marquee logos or just getting a load of customers in the door, high velocity, flood it with customers, which approach would you focus on? It's a good question and I'm sure many or some will not agree with me. My school will be stop chasing elephants. If you are a mid -market company, you have a big addressable market, sure the large marquee logo is expressing interest, engage with them but don't count on them as your answer to hitting your target. You want to still be prospecting into good fit companies who have a reasonable sales cycle which will help you build a predictable pipeline to get to your target.

33:18I think the risk is with Markey logos is people just get attracted to the sexiness of a Markey logo and then you show up in the last day of the quarter only to realize the marquee logo sailed or buying process and buying cycle doesn't match with your sales process. Don't go all into marquee logos if you're a mid -market company, figure out how to diversify your prices. I also find that actually people do it because they think it will lead to subsequent immense customer acquisition and actually it has a much smaller impact than you think working with a large name company. People are generally like, well, it's only one or two of their divisions, well, they've just got a new CEO who doesn't know what they're doing.

33:58Well, they just raised a big round of funding, so they're spending a load on tools. And so often people always reduce the importance of it anyway. I always say like revenue and customer acquisition, customer delight, solds most problems. Like you just got to figure out like how to create the moment. Do you think it's unfair to say sales reps are coin -opposed? You do need to be money -motivated if you want to be in sales or in any revenue -producing team, the reality of the role. You also need to figure out, like, at the end of the day, the coins only keep coming and keep growing when your customers are succeeding.

34:33If you are coin -operated and you're just acquiring customers for the sake of acquisition and they don't stick around and you have a leaky foot, that's not going to work for your long term, Mr. or Miss Saleswoman. Speaking of coin -operated and now coins keep coming, any big lessons on sales, comp plans for sales teams. Big lessons would be at the end of the day, I would say a sales comp plan just drives behaviors at the end of the day. If you don't get the comp plan right, you're just going to end up with bad customers, bad behavior, bad culture. I would also add, when you think about sales comp plan, think about what phase of growth you are in as a business.

35:10If you're an early -stage founder, early -stage company, velocity matters like you might have a sales comp plan that is a bit more indexed towards like simply raw acquisition. But as you grow bigger, you're going to start like thinking about like retention, cross -selling, upselling. So think about how does your comp plan also evolve as a company and its phase of growth up all to its walls? Should customer success not also share in the financial incentive structure have an upsell or a retention. I believe issue. If you have the sales team that is getting rewarded for acquiring customers and you have the CS team that's only being recognized for like driving usage but not getting any recognition in the expansion of the customer or retying, you're gonna get CS reps who are like, well, I was the one who helped the customer get the next product or expand into the platform.

36:12So I do think when you think about comp plans, you want to be clear about like what role do you want your CS team to play. If your CS team is a pure account management team, maybe there isn't something on the recognition like sales. But if your CS team is a revenue producing team, which is I believe every CS team should be a revenue producing team, you want to structure their comp plan in the form of some kind of a basic variable. When you say a revenue -producing team, you mean they are responsible for the upsell and the retention, correct? That is correct. Now, some teams will generate what we would call SQLs and the sales team would close it.

36:50If incentives drive behaviors, which I think we both agree they do, and you incentivize me a CS rap with economics on upsell, G2, my dear customer, my dear customer, I think you could do with RCRM. I know you've got another CRM, but you could do with ours. It's much better for your needs. I promise you, it may not be better for that needs, but the economic incentive alignment is to me, not to the benefit of the customer. In all cases, there will sometimes be misalignments. How do you prevent misalignments between provider and customer when the economic alignment is between the CS and the upsell?

37:26The way you would do that is having an incentive structure that measures on whether the customer is successful. If they buy a second or third product, are they actually using the product and getting usage out of it? And if they don't, then you know that it was oversold or the CS web did not do a great job of positioning the right product to the customer. Do you see now CFO's bundling spend moving towards much fewer providers than we used to? Do you see that? I do see a wave of consolidation customers are looking to simplify their tech stack and I just think Yeah, there was some research done by HubSpot not too long ago where SMBs had a tech stack of about two or And 50 apps it was nuts and we're seeing a wave of consolidation or at least while I was at HubSpot is like how do we simplify?

38:18How do I connect the dots because companies and CFOs naturally are like well? Well, we need our investment to lead to efficient growth. It needs to be more durable and sustainable growth. And you can do it when you have 10 different solutions disconnected, cobbled together. So they're like, well, how do we bring it all together so we can create alignment between our go -to -market teams? So we can find out like the work marketing did, did a result in an ROI on that marketing investment. The customer sales acquired, did they get the right usage and expansion? So I do think having like a unified tech stack makes a difference.

38:55I think brand marketing is largely BS. I know that's unfair of me. So I'm probably going to get pushback on that. How would you push back on that? Because I just see it and I'm like turn it off for a month and see how revenue goes and everyone does that and then the revenue was not impacted. And they're like, but it could be in years time. Am I wrong to be rude about brand marketing? I think you're partly right and partly wrong, Harry. Very charming, GT. You can tell me I'm wrong. I sometimes provoke for, for, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get where you're coming from. And I would say in the early days, I would be like, yeah, Harry's right.

39:31Like, forget spending on brand, like put more content out there and prospects will find the content. It's a lot more predictable. We can attribute it better. But I think with brand marketing, it gets harder with attribution on what that investment is actually resulting in. But I think it does make a difference depending on where you are as a company and what your graph is, you are going into what segments you're trying to break into. Because I do think like if you're an enterprise large company CIO looking to a solution, I just don't think you're always going to find the product through content.

40:06You're going to probably pay attention to the presence of that brand in different places. I'll give you a simple example. Do you watch Wimbledon? Do you watch Tennis? Of course I watched tennis, I'm a bread. Yeah, I love Wimbledon. Perfect. Excellent. So I'm a tennis buff too and the woman's semi -final, one of the players had a HubSpot logo on her sleeve that's brand marketing. I don't know how much was paid over there, but I got so many pains like, wow, like, you know, you guys are all over the place at Wimbledon. I mean, it makes a difference. Like, I think it helps like create awareness and you could still get there, but it will take Thank you so much more effort.

40:44So it's so funny when I said that, I was thinking the one example that I disagree with actually is I don't know if you've seen but Expansify, sponsor some form of race car. I don't know if it's F1 or whatever race car it is. And basically for two hours you see the driver and then Expansify like on their helmet. And I'm like, that is great brand marketing. Two hours flat of just in your face, Expansify. or same with HubSpot in this respect with the tennis player who's got it on their arm. What are the biggest ways that startups mess up CS? By not investing in CS. By getting a team going on an acquisition, but not thinking of retention.

41:27When is the right time to invest in CS? Just like founders are going to play a role in selling a do -thing founders player role in the really early days with like CS type activities. like they need to learn what it's going to take for a customer to see results and stick around for a long haul. In terms of the actual hiring of your first, second CS, I will think about it in two ways. One is like, how many customers do you have right now? And think about to provide engagement to those customers like, do you need a CS rep or not? The other is like, at what speed are you acquiring customers? because if you see customer account getting to a certain point, you should start planning in advance that you do need a CSR.

42:13What I will add that I think is changing now quite dramatically is like you don't need CS type human engagements all the time. You can do that through cell service. You can do that through digital scale demotions, whether it's a chatbot, it could be an academy, it could be health content. So do a lot of that. I would probably as founder, you know, like try and get your first CS rep so you can get the structure in the process and right? But then don't keep investing in CS reps until you get a foundation of like Self -help and knowledge and content. Two elements I have to discuss before you do a quick fire.

42:52Number one is I often sit on boards and you know team say to me Oh, you know what that big customer they slipped to next quarter and that's why we missed our are cordially gold. And I'm always like, what's the right way to respond to that G2? When we walkly, Harry. Okay. Sales rep and I'm your manager or the other way around. Sure. Sure. So like G2, I'm sorry. Like honestly, I thought they were gonna land and they just, they didn't. And so I moved into next quarter. Really sorry. Oh, that's too bad, Harry. Were you counting on that deal to hit your quarterly target? Yeah, it was. Okay, well sorry to hear they got pushed up to the next quarter.

43:37What deal stage did you have it sitting in? Honestly, I was actually just waiting for their approvals. They took it back to the group, the founding team, and I was waiting for them to confirm it. Well, let's just pause for a moment, Harry. What made me through your sales qualification that led you to putting this deal in almost like closeable for the quarter? Yeah, I met them and they said that they were enough of a champion to get it done on their own and they said that they had budget. We went through the use cases. It all seemed pretty good and you know, honestly it was a really good fit with our core market.

44:14And then suddenly they just went a little bit more quiet and a little bit more quiet. And then he said, listen, you know, I need to speak to the team and see where we're at. And it's really stalled from that. What did you uncover in the sales process that got you to determine urgency? Or they really needed the solution versus something that would be nice to have a lot? That's a hard one. I don't think that's the thing that's missing from so many sales processes. And that's the art of the great salesperson, which is how do you create synthetic urgency? Because if we were honest, very few people need HubSpot this month or they're going to die.

44:55They can have it next month. Yeah, I love HubSpot, but it's not like, oh my god, the world will end. CrowdStrike could happen to maybe too soon. But yeah, there's no catastrophe. Yeah, there isn't. I think many leaders will maybe disagree with me, but I don't think you can talk about create urgency. You can create fake urgency. If you have urgency to hit your number, that's not the urgency your prospect has. This is where I would be as the sales manager is like, well, in your sales process, Harry, got pushed to next quarter and you said they have a need for it. Tell me what was the need. I needed more leads.

45:39Why do you need more leads? We need to hit our sales targets. Why do you need to hit your sales targets? Because we committed to the board, 30 % growth and hitting our sales targets helps us get to 30 % growth. Okay, great, Harry. What would happen if you don't hit your sales target? They take me outside and shoot me. That or they would put you on a performance improvement plan. Right? Like what would happen if you're on a performance improvement plan, Harry? When you're speaking to a customer, I just think sales reps just shy away from asking the tough questions. Why can't you ask personal goals?

46:16Why can't you ask about what would life look like? Mr. customer, if you did not have the solution? Because I think this is where like a lot of sales rep just sit on the surface that I call level one. You got to get to level two, level three, and of course you don't die right into level three. Like you build rapport, you're an advisor, you're trusted as a sales rep, and you got to be in a situation where it's not like a game talking tennis, one player against the other player. It's a doubles match. You and your team are together. You're a prospect and you are together. And if you are together, you should be comfortable challenging each other because you want each other to win at the end of the day.

46:55Do you ever do discounting? One way to get people to move faster is say, hey, you know what G2, and you can be honest. G2, I need to hit my plan, you know what it's like. Let's not give you 25 % off if you sign in the next week. Yeah, I hate that. I hate that. And I do not like discounting. I do not like to lead with discounting. And it is a disservice to the customer and to the company and to you as a rep to lead with discounting. There is a place for discounting, but it should not be so prominent in your sales process unless you have gotten to a point where clearly there's a need. They need to solve that need, but they have a gap in their budget and you structure the discount to help them get Maybe the first year, but the discount goes away in the second.

47:43Maybe other sales leaders believe in discounting But I am very opposed to discount. Great. I like opinions fantastic good customer testimonials G2 really help me if you could you know their customer testimonial for us. You're at HubSpot GC getting on our website mean a lot. Is it okay to ask them what are the biggest lessons for startups and how to get customer testimonials and do them right? I don't believe in it and I just think like you are mixing too many variables when your focus should be on what does the customer really need like what is their pain? Connect their pain to a solution. Why are you diluting your value as a saleswoman by throwing in testimonials and discounting?

48:27And again you can get to to discount down the road if you do need it to close a gap in budget. But don't play games is a way I think about it. Like if your buyers don't value you as an advisor and value the solution you're recommending through a family exhaustive sales process, then I would question whether that buyer is a good fit customer and whether they will do everything they need to do to succeed with your platform. As I said, strong opinions are great. So always love that. This is G2. I can talk to you all day. So I do want to move into a quick far -around. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts.

49:03Does that sound okay? What do you believe that most around you disbelieve? I believe sales experience is overrated. When you are a highly tenured rep, I think some people believe that it should be weighted the most when hiring a sales rep. I don't think that is true. There are other characteristics that I would weigh over sales experience. I totally agree. I also always think about you Jason Lamkin, who's like, you'll never get a truly great second sales leader, like second time sales leader to do it again. They know how freaking hard it is. G2 is not going to be like, yeah, going to go and do another one millionaire or company and go through that shit again.

49:40So I totally agree with you. Tell me, how were the first walls in the Dublin office built? Well, I told you that it was like we brought five expats, we hired five in Dublin. We were sitting in an office that had a little wall kind of like in the center, Harry. And culture is really important to me and I was like, we need to make sure everyone's learning from each other. It's an open layout. So I call Ken Papa, our facilities guy. And he was like, what do you want me to do? Like, can you bring the wall down? So he sent someone with the drill and the guys like drilling the wall and I have a picture of all of us with yellow hats on calls.

50:16While this person behind us is like drilling on walls. So that's maybe I think, why do you were asked to bring up that question? Tell me, was the most contrarian or unorthodox advice for founders listening? Founders often are math and science driven. They weigh data heavily in their decision making. So if I was a founder, I would not see it as someone else's responsibility to be selling or hoping your product is going to find revenue on its own when it's just not. You need to get on calls with a sales rep or on your own. make that call, send that email, and believe that customers or prospects will love talking to founders and founders will be great at selling.

50:56What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? You know, I had some doubts here on the AI thing and whether AI can truly replace a large part of selling. And from what I'm seeing in the last six to 12 months, oh boy, I think that a large part of selling is going to get automated with the AI type bots or AI type. engines and I don't think it's going to completely replace salespeople but it's going to race the bar. So you as a salespeople need to be even better with the way you're advising your customers. Which duties or responsibilities will get automated first, do you think? I think some form of discovery where you would spend like two hours of discovery.

51:38Part of the discovery can actually happen through some form of AI engine where customers are going to be able to like almost like self -discover their challenges and also almost like get pointed to like this is the direction you need to go with this solution but you will have a direction but you still need someone at the other end to help you dig further to make sure you're making the right choice. What sales tactic has died a death do you think? There are so many I would say besides the discounting that we talked about earlier is no one gives a crap about your product or its features, like start talking about your product and its features when you connect with the prospect.

52:16Spend your time understanding the customer, understanding the buyer, what matters to them, their industry, what are they trying to get to, and you will get to your product, but too many sales reps out there still spend way too much time just like spitting a lot of their product and their features out very early in the sales process. Is that the fault of founders for not teaching them a more efficient sales playbook of customer a discovery and qualification. It's partly the founders and I think this is where like founders have it and then they don't know what they don't know and this is where like if I'm a founder, I mean they're great resources to go and learn like you know how do you run like a reasonable sales process like it's not rocket science.

52:58I think the challenge founders will have is just simply like how will prospects react when we ask them all these questions. It's just like hesitant to ask these deeper, harder questions. I think they do need to work with whether it's their board or mentors and help them get some confidence that they can do this. You know, at the end of the day, like, customers want to work with salespeople that they like. What they want to do is like you because you care. You want to learn about them and their business and you want to help them succeed. That's what matters at the end of the day in sales. Final one for you, because I could talk all day.

53:32Is what one company sells strategy, if you've been most impressed by recently? It's not a perfect example, Harry, but I do think with the way digital and AI are going, I think Amazon's a great example of how selling is going to evolve. Like for example, I had a problem with the product the other day. I went to my account and I was like, I have a problem with this product. Like they gave me a list of resources based on my problem. Very next action was like, did it solve your problem? No, all right. We're launching a chatbot so you can speak with a human. had a chat with an AI chat box, it got me pretty far, but it didn't give me the actual answer.

54:07They're like, all right, whole tight, we're calling you. So someone called me and I spoke with the human on the phone. I just think that customer experience, which is like almost like digital lead human in the Lou sales rep in the Lou is where the world is going. And I think AI is just going to make it possible and actually accelerate that customer experience. G2, listen, I've loved doing this. It was very off script as you saw, but you've been fantastic. So thank you so much for being such a great guest. My pleasure, Harry. Love the conversation and I appreciated the back -and -forth we went and hopefully no one's too upset with me.

54:45I so love doing these vertical shows, so many incredible lessons to unpack there. If you want to watch the full episode you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC, that's 20VC. But before we leave you today, my sales enablement platform is a waste of money. Ever thought that, you're not alone. Most revenue leaders feel this way watching their sales team struggle to keep up with market, product and competitive changes. Reps burn hours each day, searching, digging, slacking, desperately trying to get the answers they need out of their clunky tech stack. That's why Spekits' AI -powered enablement platform was purpose -built to cut through the noise and meet reps in their moment of need.

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56:42As always I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Monday with the executive chairman of Shee in for his first ever podcast episode.